44A Foveaux Street
By treating an existing, undistinguished building as raw material, the architect has recognized the structure’s inherent value and acted with an ethos of sustainability and “a deliberate and joyful irreverence” in equipping it for the city’s changing need
Hill Thalis Architecture and Urban Projects Review by Lee Hillam
Hill Thalis Architecture and Urban Projects is a Sydneybased practice known as well for its advocacy as its architecture. Its team members, who are outspoken on urban issues, are some of the researchers, drafters and writers behind the important and beautiful book Public Sydney: Drawing the city (Philip Thalis and
Peter John Cantrill). They collaborated with Jane Irwin Landscape Architecture and Paul Berkemeier Architect on the sensitive and sensible competition-winning scheme for Barangaroo, which, although never built, has undoubtedly influenced the work of countless urban planners and architects. This is a team of people who obviously share a commitment to the wider issues of community, sustainability, culture and the city. Despite Philip Thalis, Laura Harding,
Kerry Hunter, Sheila Tawalo, Benjamin Driver and other staff appearing variously in the public sphere on design review panels, as conference organizers and as writers, their built work doesn’t ever claim to be the final word. Their buildings, whose authorship remains anonymous and multifarious, take their place quietly in the fabric of the place.
44A Foveaux Street is a repurposed, rejuvenated commercial building at the lower end of Foveaux Street in Sydney’s Surry Hills. The project was guided through to completion by another longstanding Hill Thalis employee, Alexander Rink. Foveaux Street is a gully of mostly four-storey commercial buildings from various eras that flows down the hill to Central Station. To the north of the site, the scale drops down to two-storey terrace houses and laneways with converted garages. This part of town is a diverse mix of hole-in-the-wall cafes, slick restaurants, gentrified terraces as offices, crumbling terraces as share houses, boarding houses, residential warehouse conversions and tired commercial offices.
When Hill Thalis’s client brought in this project, the team was presented with an existing three-storey dark-brown painted brick building with curious upside-down arches and virtually no relationship to the street. There was a late-seventies vibe to the aesthetic and no heritage listing. Given that the current planning controls would allow another two storeys, it may have seemed logical to knock it down. Hill Thalis and the client opted to keep it, retaining the embodied energy and speeding up the construction process, even though it meant inserting new structure through the existing floor plates to support the new floors.
The design modifies the building without romanticism. Arches were cut out to widen openings and small chunks of brick – the tail ends of the arches – were left behind. The paint was sandblasted off, revealing fashionably light bricks, but the mission brown paint remains in the mortar. A void was cut along the eastern edge of the long plan and the rough exposed brick, hacked-off slabs and various paints and finishes were all retained. The concrete structure punches through the older slabs alongside the brick outer skin. The original building was merely the raw material and was treated with a deliberate and joyful irreverence. The result is like the great-grandchild of a Gordon Matta-Clark project, albeit one that is structurally sound. It reminds me of a house I once visited that had been built by boatbuilders who’d left every cut line and scribbled calculation on the interior timber lining – a series of maker’s marks that told the story of the construction.
It is thought that there was an even earlier building here that was encased by the three-storey seventies structure. So, the Hill Thalis-designed commercial development at this address is actually in its third generation: a continual evolution of modifications, authors and designers, uses, tenants, fashions and economic pressures that mimics the life of a city, in miniature. At each point in time, the building has been retained because it has had ongoing usefulness. It made me ponder this thing that we call “heritage” and the way a building can acquire this status simply by age or by the loss of other buildings like it. And, having had that status bestowed upon it,
its evolution then gets put on pause, while the city around it keeps adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing. But 44A Foveaux Street, and others like it that are consumed and reborn, are just as much a part of our living heritage. To choose to retain and modify, rather than to demolish, is an act of sustainability and economy but also an acknowledgement of heritage.
It is a strange, adolescent idea to think that we ever have a blank slate when creating architecture. There is always context, there is always landscape, there is always memory, there is always value; we shouldn’t need a heritage listing to tell us that.
In this case, the existing building provides a template for the new one, using the value inherent in the materials and the construction. The two new floors are treated differently to the older base, using large, vertical, aluminium sun-shading devices and off-form concrete, while modifications to the original three floors use fine, horizontal, external blades that pick up the proportions of the brickwork. The original building has chamfered corners in plan, which were modified in the Hill Thalis design. The chamfer is retained in plan at the ground floor, where a couple of steps lead up from street level. The slab above extends out to cover the entrance while the walls cut in to create space at the top of the stairs. The levels above do a similar thing, making small, square verandahs where workers can be not quite in the street but also not quite in their offices. Hill Thalis has worked the plan and the section differently and, in doing so, has created these elegant spaces in which occupants can escape for a few minutes.
Some other aspects of the way the building interacts with the city are indicative of the negotiated space between councils, architects and owners – who are each, in their own way, trying to provide a good outcome for the public while exercising their professional duties. The City of Sydney’s planning department required the building to be stepped down at the rear to acknowledge the lower scale of the terrace houses to the north. This design move produced these wonderful northern terraces, with clear views to the CBD. I disagree that a transition in scale was best for the city here; however, the building benefits (I can imagine these terraces, and the open-air meeting room on the top floor, being well used). The adjacent buildings do not step down and so the building line to the lane is inconsistent.
Hill Thalis has cleverly designed concrete pergolas to maintain the built form line, but it seems a lost opportunity to consider what stepping down in other parts of the building might have done to benefit the street. Would more sunlight have penetrated the street level to the west or the south if the building had been shaved back on those elevations instead? In the tight laneway system of Surry Hills, with all the wondrous variety of built form that already exists, does this stepping down do anything to protect the amenity of the terrace houses across the lane? It seems that the sometimes-blunt tool of planning might have been sharpened here by a more sitespecific design approach.
Hill Thalis seems to be one of those practices that can zoom in and out like the Eameses’ film Power of Ten – from thinking about a stair and a threshold, to your desk, the facade and, eventually, all the way out to the scale of the city. The thoughtful and subtly clever architecture shows a practice that is always interested in city-making at the scale of the single project.
Architect Hill Thalis Architecture and Urban Projects; Project team Philip Thalis, Sheila Tawalo,
Alexander Rink; Construction Laoutaris Constructions; Structure Alba and Associates Consulting Engineers, Alpha Civil and Structural; Mechanical engineer Central Engineers; Hydraulic engineer Scott Collis Consulting; Electrical NGC Electrical; Interior design Space Control; Energy consultant BCA Energy; Landscape architect Jane Irwin Landscape Architecture; Level four fitout Valdis Macens Architects