Melbourne's best new architecture is in Broadmeadows and its female designer was just awarded the industry's Victoria Medal
The supper room no longer doubles as a hot-rod venue. In the voluminous main hall above, the whistle has blown on basketball competitions. The squeak of sneakers is a distant echo.
"It was about bringing back that promise of suburban civic grandeur," says Thompson, whose $25 million refurbishment won both the heritage award category and the best overall competition prize, the Victoria Medal, at the Australian Institute of Architects' Victorian awards on July 10. The AIA jury called it an "outstanding" example of adaptive reuse and "a beacon for the community".
Thompson matches the monumentality of the building with a series of dramatic contrapuntal gestures. An enormous Louis Kahn-inspired circle cut out of the giant blank rectangular northern facade reveals and frames a three-storey glass box within. It's a window on a window. Like a shot fired through the bull's eye, the glass box explodes out the other side of the building.
"Adaptive reuse is the way of the future," Thompson says. The cost of crafting and building in these "heritage" materials today would be prohibitive, she says. It's also wasteful to demolish. What's more, these buildings not only carry embodied energy but embodied memories. Phillip Island's penguins may not need a building to encourage visitors, but the new $58 million Terroir design of the Penguin Parade Visitor Centre certainly acknowledges their importance as one of the state's most popular tourist attractions. The star-shaped centre won both the regional and public architecture prizes.
Private schools also appreciate that design can be a drawcard. Like Thompson's dramatic cut-out circle in the Town Hall Broadmeadows envelope, McBride Charles Ryan's Swift Science and Technology Centre at Toorak College plays with simple geometries – a sliced cylinder – to achieve its striking tilted-arc facade."It's an exuberant display of geometry," says Rob McBride.
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