The Coppel & Piekarski Family Disability Respite Centre
The Coppel & Piekarski Family Disability Respite Centre is a community care facility located in Caulfield Victoria. Completed in Feb 2016 the Respite Centre provides short term accommodation and care for children and adults with varying disabilities.
The brief called for two facilities (children and adult) to be housed concurrently on a single residential block, with each facility being equipped to accommodate up to 5 users, including individual bedrooms, communal living and cooking spaces, passive and active outdoor space, a community hub for larger social functions and supporting staff offices and meeting spaces. The client welcomed and encouraged an architectural approach which re-imagined a care facility typology, and sought a domesticity that was seen as an extension of a guest’s home.
In approaching the brief the architecture carefully considered the relationships between private space, public space and operational space. A central spine runs through the middle of the building providing a division between the adult and children’s wings and the main conduit to the community hub, staff office and entry to the building. Service pods are located adjacent the central spine serving to indentify the separate facilities through colour and texture.
Towards the periphery each accommodation wing is carved around landscape areas with primary access from the living and cooking spaces to both passive and active courtyards. Each courtyard is designed to maximise northern aspect and the interrelationship between internal and external space, acknowledging sustainability that is both social and environmental. The resultant form is fluid and non-linear, invoking a sense of discovery and whimsy, while also serving to de-institutionalise space.
The scale, mass and composition of the project reflect the surrounding neighbourhood context, with rectilinear apertures that dance along the facade playing on the residential brick construction which is prevalent in the street context. The use of standard module brick re-enforces this position while also providing a cost effective material that serves to construct the fluid formal language of the project.
The arrangement of spaces and carved courtyards facilitate passive sustainable principles such as cross-flow ventilation and thermal mass while landscaping elements provide shading during summer months through the east and west. Window awnings protect glazing from summer sun and solar hot water is provided throughout the facility.
The overall material selection is robust, durable and hardwearing. A selection of different bricks, glazed, coarse and colourfully are both a pragmatic response to the longevity of the facility while providing texture and colour to define the different spaces and sensory experiences. Polished concrete floor, coloured carpet and acoustic plasterboard ceilings provide an internal environment that has high acoustic performance and durability.
The project was a highly collaborative process with both the operational clients and the families of the users involved in discussions from early in the design phase. The new project provides something that is purpose-built and joyous, while providing engagement for the user at an early age, becoming over time, an extension of a home.
The arrangement of spaces and carved courtyards facilitate passive sustainable principles such as cross-flow ventilation and thermal mass while landscaping elements provide shading during summer months through the east and west. Window awnings protect glazing from summer sun and solar hot water is provided throughout the facility. The overall material selection is robust, durable and hardwearing.
A selection of different bricks, glazed, coarse and colourfully are both a pragmatic response to the longevity of the facility while providing texture and colour to define the different spaces and sensory experiences. Polished concrete floor, coloured carpet and acoustic plasterboard ceilings provide an internal environment that has high acoustic performance and durability.
