Project Overview
R-TOD [Rockdale- Transit Oriented Development] is our second major commission within the Rockdale town centre. The aim was for the creation of a well-designed, human-scale vessel for building community and an architecture that would help to deliver the future vision for a developing town centre.
The building form is chiseled from the allowable development controls and then layered with an expression derived from the social and physical context of its rich urban fabric. It is an architecture shaped practically for light and air and programmatically for an appropriate contextual fit.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
Fuse is a Sydney based architecture, urban design and interior design studio, founded in 2016. We are a young and innovative practice built on a culture of collaboration, creativity and critique.
Fuse believes that design is distilled from process, and explore with rigor the depth of a projects potential for the creation of quality architecture regardless of type or scale. We are committed to delivering socially, environmentally and economically sustainable architecture, that is a product of its context and client ambitions. Our projects are elegantly conceived, delightful to use and detailed with technical refinement.
We aim to exceed expectations and to have fun whilst doing it.
Project Brief
The project is a hybrid use building featuring a mix of Private and Serviced Apartments. It delivers 100 new homes over 10 storeys through an articulated street wall parallel to the existing Princes Highway and provides an amenity beyond that expected of its immediate environs.
Project Innovation/Need
The mix of serviced and private apartments provided a unique opportunity to explore their potential synergies and divergences with a goal to facilitate both simultaneously without compromise.
The result is a sharing of resources and amenity for the benefit of both where possible and a sleeving and blurring of the same when not.
Proximity to existing transport hubs made it the perfect place to deliver both transient and long term resident homes with excellent amenity for both. The architecture leverages the inherit TOD connections of the site but filters those down to the fine grain considerations of arrival, circulation and habitation.
Communal Open Space is designed as a shared ground floor where cultivation and use is strengthened through shared ownership.
Councils required podium provided an opportunity for an articulated glass screen to protect the lowest and most exposed balconies from the noisy highway.
R-TOD is an exploration of an architecture beyond aesthetics. It embeds opportunities to make physical activity and social interaction an ongoing and intrinsic part of the lives of those who live and work in the building to help them live longer, happier and healthier lives.
Apartment layouts have been developed with a “family hub” at their core. The hub is borne from extensive research and international best practice for better accommodating families in highrise and as a flexible space that can be adapted to the needs of residents in all life stages regardless of the household composition.
Design Challenge
The Princes Highway is Rockdale’s main shopping strip, a vibrant urban setting with a varied streetscape, unified exclusively through a continuous active retail frontage and a wonderful example of how an urbandesign principle and fine grain resolution can mitigate compromised context. The project extended those qualities into the architecture, notwithstanding the increased density and balanced the irregular sloping site with the programme specific requirements for serviced and private apartments into a beautiful cohesive expressive form.
The result is a simple street wall podium form with a taller tower setback within councils allowable controls. The tower is articulated through the addition of 3 strong playful and dynamic bays that mimic the existing varied architectural forms along the length of the highway. These articulated bays are then layered with modulated and coloured vertical blinds as a direct reference to the awning blinds identified along the existing Princes Highway.
The blind and bay combination serve to animate the building façade and by allowing users control of the blinds, it creates a dynamic and ever changing façade that also serves a practical purpose of sun shading an otherwise exposed western façade.
The bay and blinds become a cascading expression of colour and delight into the public domain and that colour and form is then extended and folded up onto the roof to create a framework and expression for the private and communal open space, crowning the architecture appropriately.
Sustainability
The genesis of the project as a TOD means at its core the design is inherently sustainable. It sits close to transport hubs with very high local amenity, mobility and access.
The project continues Fuse’s research into what it is to be human and how that can be accommodated and nurtured through architecture, with an ambition for holistic sustainability. An architecture beyond aesthetics.
The project imposes socially sustainable considerations to nurture and promote wellbeing to allow future occupants a deeper experience of the design. It embeds Active Living principles to facilitate healthier lives and minds with a simple theory of layering the elements we must provide for compliance, with actual design, to improve their use.
The private corridors and stairs are designed as transparent spaces that allow light and air in as well as views out. The crafting and layering of these utilitarian spaces allows for a richer experience to encourage active daily use and elevate the ritual of arrival and circulation from the prosaic to the ceremonial.
The principle of opening up corridors also improves the environmental sustainability of the development by allowing the building to breathe. By opening corridors, the proposal doubles the building frontage and every apartments exposure to light and air. This in turn maximises the capacity for natural ventilation and solar access into all the apartments fronting the now open space.
Architecture - Proposed
This award celebrates the design process and product of planning, designing and constructing form, space and ambience that reflect functional, technical, social, and aesthetic considerations. Consideration given for material selection, technology, light and shadow. The project can be a concept, tender or personal project, i.e. proposed space.
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