2010
Competition Proposal
Category: Parasite
1998
Union Hotel North Sydney
The parasite forms a room and a balcony area over the restaurant extension below. As a form it bites into the 30s structure of the Union Hotel and clings to the ground inside the courtyard. Growing from this position it surges toward the north, splintering the light with glass, shade cloth panels and zincalume clad wings. These materials combine the flesh like fragility of cloth with the idea of exoskeleton in the shells and steel. The “parasite” is working on a public / private building to further open it to the public space. Viewed from the street it appears to turn the building inside-out revealing social information to public realm.
2003
Shellhabour, NSW
Winner of the Blacket Award AIA, 2004
In association with Caroline Pidcock Architects
2004
Regent St, Sydney
1993
concrete steel, stainless steel
Penfold’s Building, Sydney
2002
Watermark Building, Pyrmont Sydney
steel, stainless steel, cable
1500cm x 300cm x 400cm
2002
Castle Hill, Sydney
In association with Terroir
2013
Druitt St., Town Hall, Sydney
2004
Cope St., Alexandria, Sydney
Today 2/6/09 it was reported that the oceans are becoming more acidic. This is yet another in a series of markers on the road to irreversible damage of our environment.
So do we raise the bar?
Do we build a parasite bar in a laneway?
The bar being a reading of the depth of water as the ice-caps melt.
At 7m meters Underwood Street will be flooded with tidal surges and the flotsam and jetsam of our civilisation. As a collaboration the work combines the landscape of weather with the physicality of the architecture of catastrophe and the technology of games.
The bar responds to visiting crowds and their collective inaction with the force of virtual weather. This weather projected through digital beamers and broadcast through sound speakers in the installation builds in its ferocity as a response to increasing numbers.
Wing House plays on wing as a metaphor both as aeroplane and as eagle, perched on the cliff’s edge with wings outstretched.
The topographical extremes of the Table Cape site meant that Wing House was to hover, with only its claws penetrating deep into the ground.
“I like the idea of attaching things… Here was a situation where the site was so extreme the building becomes a little bit like a parasite, clinging for survival to this edge. And it didn’t take long for the metaphor of flight to come up. You stand there in the wind with your arms out and you’re almost doing the building.”