ARCHITECTURE
SJB architect Adam Haddow’s bag is to keep the human need for intimacy and connection top of mind as he breaks new ground in the design of multi-use developments.
Karen McCartney in conversation with SJB’s Adam Haddow.
IN THESE DAYS of sheltering-in-place, architect Adam Haddow has it pretty good. During our phone interview he is in the bath on his rooftop garden (it is a Saturday) in Sydney’s inner-city suburb of Redfern. His Cleveland Street rooftop apartment is something of a built manifesto, proving that an urban living space can be set in a lush garden and he is making the most of it.
Growing up in rural Victoria, his plumber father built their family house. “I don’t think it is still quite finished,” says Adam, principal director of architects SJB. An early influence was atypical. The American architect responsible for the original master planning of Canberra, Walter Burley Griffin, also designed Newman College at the University of Melbourne where Adam studied architecture. “Jeffrey Turnbull, a world-renowned expert [on Griffin], was head of our first year and so we learnt about [his] philosophy around space, materials and community,” explains Adam.
Managing to secure a graduate architect position at SJB Melbourne during a recession was an achievement (the rate was 50 cents an hour) that he built on with an early success in winning a competition for the redevelopment of the former St Margaret’s Hospital site in Surry Hills, Sydney. This residential apartment development completely reinvented the genre, not only architecturally but also in terms of how it was marketed. “As a project, it pulled a group of people together who were able to think differently and shift the dial,” says the architect.
While a job in London was in the offing, Sydney had captured his heart and an offer some years later to become a partner at SJB in 2002 cemented his stay. “I had the caveat that I wanted to have six months off in the first five years to travel as I had previously missed out on that opportunity,” he says.
It took seven years for that break to come and he combined it with a prestigious Churchill Fellowship looking at global approaches to urbanisation, from Prince Charles’s vision at Poundbury in England to Celebration in Orlando, Florida, a community originally seeded by The Disney Company, by way of Bogotá and Berlin. The result was a paper titled “Shall we dense?” which has informed his belief that “architecture should provide an armature for community life; that the activities buildings facilitate are just as important as the physicality of the buildings themselves”.
He seized the opportunity to exercise these principles with the multi-award-winning mixed-use development, Casba, in Sydney’s Danks Street in Waterloo. “With St Margaret’s, the public spaces were left over from the design of the buildings whereas at Casba the public spaces came first, with the building as a background to the life that surrounds it,” says Adam. The complex houses a restaurant and cafe, retail businesses, and a landscaped courtyard with a generous pond and shady trees providing places to sit and chat. Rather like his own apartment, it is an oasis in an urban part of the city.
This philosophy plays out in AMP Capital’s ambitious development at Sydney’s Circular Quay. SJB’s contribution to the Quay Quarter Precinct at Loftus and Young Streets focuses on an intimate street experience with a public arcade and smallscale retail and dining, topped by eight levels of apartment living. “This kind of layering of land use makes it probably one of the most complex buildings to work on,” says Adam.
Ramping up the scale of work even further is the in-progress master plan for the Newcastle CBD to rework 80,000 square metres for retail, residential, commercial and community use. The appealing thing about Adam’s approach is that he practices what he preaches alongside an ability to tackle the sweeping demands of urban planning while embracing the detailing of small-scale projects. Taking on a ground-floor terrace space in Sydney’s Surry Hills, he designed a flexible timber interior for retail, talks, events and book launches in setting up a self-funded project, The Architect’s Bookshop. “The site in Crown Street has become a cultural hub, not only for architects but for the interested public. We want the space to have a spirit of openness and generosity so all types of people will feel welcome,” he says.
Two upcoming projects define something of this duality. One is the re-imagining of what is affectionately known as ‘Murder Mall’, the former Surry Hills Shopping Village, into the kind of multi-use development that has become his signature. He admits to pressure. “It is my local and I will be there every other day, so it needs to work,” he says. The other is a personal project to show how a tiny terrace can adopt mixed-use principles – a space for a small restaurant, a self-contained area for when friends come to stay, plus enough living space for himself and his husband. “I am trying to think about the future of space, about multi-uses, about what we actually need and what can be used for other purposes.”
Again, he’s practising what he preaches. sjb.com.au