The Ian Potter Southbank Centre
The new home of the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music is a sensuous architectural vessel that supports musical learning as it mediates between performer, audience and city.
John Wardle Architects has composed an architectural vessel that supports musical learning as it mediates between performer, audience and city. Review by Maryam Gusheh.
In Melbourne’s Southbank, passers-by heading south on Sturt Street might wander beneath the discreet canopy of the Melbourne Recital Centre’s monolithic bluestone western wall (ARM Architecture, 2008) and immediately past a narrow-shaded lane, and find their gaze attracted by a low archway framing a buzzing new interior. A glazed screen recessed within this gentle yet grand gateway exposes those inside the building, some mingling in conversation, others moving through and around a curving passage before disappearing from sight. A little further along the street, a sequence of deep, bell-shaped portals perforate the building’s envelope, first one and then, after a pause, three others in closer proximity. Bespoke in size and placement relative to the ground plane, these mysterious apertures invite a variety of audiences, small and tall, alone or as a cluster, to lean into the depth of the wall, focus, and peer inside the building. The material condition is now intimately felt. Hands instinctively fold over smooth curved frames and then extend out to trace the undulating skin. Oval figures, perfectly pressed into the concrete surface, pattern the facade, many of them crowned with domed ceramic discs – reddish, glistening and impossibly tactile. The experience intimates a warm, spontaneous exchange between the inner life of this architecture and those that surround it.
What is the remit of architecture in activating the city? How can the urban realm enrich the architecture? What is the interface between one and the other? John Wardle Architects’ (JWA) Ian
Potter Southbank Centre, new home to the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music (MCM) at the University of Melbourne’s Southbank campus, invokes a vital reciprocity between the institution and its location. In this latest addition to Melbourne’s arts precinct, a sensuous architectural vessel supports musical learning as it mediates between the performer, her fellowship, her audience and the city. Camaraderie and dialogue, intrigue and curiosity, are here endorsed as vital to the acquisition of knowledge; to taking part in culture and society.
JWA’s early considerations of the site were in light of urban priorities. As a participant in the Victorian state government’s 2013 strategic planning process for the precinct, the practice prepared the Melbourne Arts Precinct Urban Design Framework, a methodical guide for the ongoing development of Southbank as a distinct yet connected urban entity. The study accepted and affirmed the remarkable concentration of arts infrastructure in Southbank and advocated for a radically enhanced integration between architectural nodes and their settings.
Presented as a toolkit for coordinated policy and design, the document is distinctive for its balance of the guiding principle and fine-grain action. From the clarification and reuse of the existing environment to alterations and new built works, a catalogue of “one hundred small projects” endorsed incremental tactics as a powerful tool for urban transformation. Looking across and between the proposed initiatives, three core ideas resonate: that material texture and expression are critical to local character; that in-between thresholds are potent sites of civic generosity; and that the functional fluidity of the urban realm can positively disrupt the predictability of planned institutions. The claim here is not for an equivalence between architecture and the city but rather a porous and tactile entity in which architecture and city are entangled.