FLORENCE STREET STUDIO
Located within the ground floor of one of Melbourne`s most socially & environmentally sustainable multi-residential buildings - Nightingale 1 in Brunswick, Victoria, Our Florence Street Studio is a new space for our growing studio in a compact 45m2 shell.
The space currently caters for two directors, an associate and two full time staff. However, the studio is capable of expanding to practically cater for 8-10 staff if necessary.
Programmatically the studio also contains a meeting room, kitchenette, modelling area, pin-up spaces and ample storage space for physical models and books.
Organisation of space is fairly non-hierarchical with entry, meeting room and kitchenette at the northern end or the space and the staff workstations closest to the southern [natural light] end of the space. East and West boundaries of the space host primary storage, models and pin-up space so the studio is encompassed in the previous experiments and work-in-progress to reflect on daily.
Raw finishes such as concrete and steel contrast with the warmth of natural Australian timbers, soft wall finishes & finely tuned detailing. Desks and joinery are clad in a combination of utilitarian form-ply and naturally textured, feature grade blackbutt veneer. Raw black steel is celebrated throughout and refined pragmatically to create splash backs, removable shelving for books & models and also can be removed to accommodate additional work stations should there be a growth in staff numbers in the future.
Light is carefully subdued and controlled to create an atmospheric sensibility & hierarchical narrative to the space yet still is enough for the day-to-day pragmatic operations of the studio. Similarly a textural and tonal material narrative creates a rich series of contrasts throughout.
The meeting room or ‘Chapel of ideas’ externally clad in textured, natural steel sheet and internally treated in black stained plywood, is an intervention inserted into the space to create discussion into architectural history through the use of reference. Specifically derived from the chapel within Carlo Scarpas Brion Tomb of 1969-1977 in San Vito dAltivole near Treviso, Italy. The meeting room is a window into the rich history of architecture, which we regularly find ourselves immersing in and as a result our ideas through discussions with our clients & collaborators.
The studio is a laboratory not only to test our ideas through each project we undertake, but also acts as a constructed precedent on our position as a practice towards the possibilities of light, materials and modest scale architectural space.
