Arkadia
DKO Architecture with Breathe Architecture Review by Lee Hillam
A community-minded apartment block for Defence Housing Australia in an inner-Sydney suburb plays with the boundaries between public and private space, salutes the site’s industrial past and anticipates a fossil-fuel-free future.
The city, the suburb, the street, the front gate, the living room, your bedroom, the bathroom: this list of places and spaces represents a kind of spectrum between public and private in a suburb like Alexandria, Sydney. As a spectrum, there exists a gradient between each and the rules of engagement are both fluid and complex. Can I go into your bedroom? Well, probably not. We hardly know each other. But we might exchange pleasantries as we pass on the street, remind each other it’s bin night or choose to ignore each other for 20 years despite living side by side. At what point do we know we’re part of the same community?
Architects often take on the task of making community through our buildings. Community, we say, is a good thing: it’s the glue, it’s resilience, it’s sunny autumnal days with all the children eating organic fruit popsicles. Community is a motherhood statement. But, like motherhood, in reality it can be a tricky thing. When we design for community, what we really mean is that we are designing for the good bits. For the neighbour who notices you’ve got a cold and leaves lemons on your doorstep or looks after your dog when you’re away. But not for the neighbour who complains about the way your visitors left at 10 pm last Saturday night. The line between these things is finely drawn and ever shifting. Some days, the last thing you want is a neighbour who notices you’ve got a cold.
The newly finished and already partly inhabited Arkadia building in the ex-industrial part of Alexandria is a Defence Housing Australia (DHA) development. Of the apartments in the building 45 percent have been sold on the private market and the other 55 percent are being retained by DHA as accommodation for defence force personnel. This retention of ownership is important. It creates an emphasis on longevity and allows for design that is specific to the inhabitants’ needs. This is a build-to-rent model but with the added benefit of knowing the future tenants in terms of demographics, habitation patterns, tenancy length and employment. DHA knows, for example, that the young families living here will likely have one parent away (deployed) for months at a time, meaning they could effectively have a cohort of single-parent families. They know that they’ll also need to accommodate young singles, some of whom might have come straight from basic training at Kapooka with the buzz cut only just grown out.
DKO Architecture in collaboration with
Breathe Architecture has produced this City of Sydney competition-winning design to address all of these challenges and more. The architects have designed with a generous attitude to the people who live around the building by opening a part of the north-facing site as a publicly accessible park and by carving out two wonderfully sculptural “mouse holes” that provide double-height, through-site access from Huntley Street to Sydney Park Road. One of the mouse holes picks up the line of Lawrence Street opposite, seemingly presenting the end of that street with a ceremonial arch. Sydney Park, which is on the southern side of busy Sydney Park Road, is a fantastic ramble of sports ovals, grassy hills and wetlands that was created out of the old brickworks that existed here for many years. The site of Arkadia was part of that brickworks, and imagery of the site from 1943 – available through the New South Wales government’s SIX Maps – shows a number of large sheds on the edge of a gaping hole in the ground the size of three cricket pitches. The new building nods to that history through its recycled bricks, the arched mouse holes, which are reminiscent of brick kilns, the public art, which resemble the chimneys that still stand on the other side of the park, and the subtle use of different brick bonds, which also give the buildings their names.
Locals are invited to walk through the building and to sit on the north-facing grassy knoll, drinking coffee or eating food purchased from the yet-tobe-opened corner cafe. It feels genuinely public and I wonder whether this might grate slightly if you were living there. On the public–private spectrum, could it feel like the front gate has disappeared and strangers are taking a short cut through your yard? The city needs great public spaces, but don’t we all need our own territory before we confidently go forth into those public spaces? Perhaps what you see here is one
of the side effects of the City of Sydney’s competition policy. Public generosity is looked on very favourably in that environment, but can it sometimes come with a private cost?
Having said that, the grassy knoll also creates a shield to the front doors of the ground-floor terrace houses, so the “front gate” is there, just not at the boundary. These terrace houses have stoops, which seem to be optimistically waiting for some Sesame Street characters to appear and share the day’s news. The stoops, the public-facing park and the through-site links are just the beginning of the long list of community-building moves that have been incorporated into this building. There are also rooftop vegie gardens and a chook palace, numerous rooftop social spaces interspersed with thriving plants, a communal music room and a diversity of dwelling types that go beyond the requirements of one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments, including the two-storey terrace houses. The decision to organize the development into four sets, each with a lift core serving a relatively small number of apartments, also means residents are more likely to recognize each other, creating a sense of belonging within a smaller community.
The way the architects are thinking about community is integral to their ideas about sustainability. A vegie garden is probably better at growing a community than it is at growing tomatoes, if we’re honest. The tomatoes, if there are any, are a delicious side benefit. The sustainability initiatives range from the commitment to a low-carbon facade, achieved by using half a million recycled bricks, and moving to a fossil-free operations model by not providing a gas connection, to the tomatoes growing in the communal gardens and the zero-embodied-energy eggs provided by the rooftop chooks. Materials that have gone into the fire stairs are not single-use: rather, these stairs are open and airy, and useable on a day-to-day basis. There are photovoltaic solar panels on the roof that supply electricity to all communal lighting. You get the feeling that while the architects may not have won every battle for sustainability, they did question every choice and analyze and vet every material.
Arkadia does a lot to try to facilitate its residents to become a resilient and joyful community. It pushes forward into a 2040 future where people cooperatively grow food and are no longer reliant on fossil fuels. It is a pretty and fashionable-looking building that also makes authentic and clear-tounderstand references to the history of the place and acknowledges the lives of the humans that interact with it, either as residents or neighbours. I look forward to a time when this building is truly unremarkable.
— Lee Hillam is a co-director of Dunn and Hillam Architects, which was founded in 2001 with Ashley Dunn. The practice has established expertise in heritage, regional towns, arts and culture, and sustainability. From 2016 to 2019, Hillam also worked in a variety of roles centred on design excellence at the Government Architect New South Wales.
Architect DKO Architecture with Breathe Architecture; DKO Architecture project team Koos de Keijzer, David Randerson, Nick Byrne, Raymond Mah, Choong Lin, Morteza Khorsand; Breathe Architecture project team Jeremy McLeod, Madeline Sewall, Dan McKenna, Dan Moore, Rob Kolak, Mark Ng, Bettina Robinson, Bonnie Herring; Landscape architect Oculus; Engineer Wood and Grieve Engineers; Structural engineers Webber Design, Cundall Johnston and Partners; Project management Impact Group; Planning consultant Mecone; Fire engineer Innova Services; Certification consultant Blackett Maguire and Goldsmith