Lovell Chen
Profile
For four decades, Lovell Chen has not only shaped Melbourne’s collective memory, but acted as a custodian of its fabric.
And in its work around
Australia, the firm has been visionary in breaking down the old–new binary to create “a poetry based in ethical practice.”
Melbourne-based architecture practice Lovell Chen is home to one of the most extensive archives of architectural, heritage and conservation knowledge in Australia. Even so, it would be wrong to characterize the firm’s work over the past four decades in these terms alone. Lovell Chen has been playing the long game, eschewing the limelight of design heroics in favour of rigorous research and design and collaborative processes. While many architects appear to espouse alternative practice models, Lovell Chen has actually realized one. Under the seemingly polite guise of heritage architecture, this firm has, over time, developed a compelling and radical practice model: the result of a complex interaction between ever-evolving expertise in design, masterplanning, heritage, conservation, construction and sustainability. It is a remarkable story.
The firm began as Allom Lovell and Associates in 1981. Peter Lovell had graduated from the University of Melbourne with a Bachelor of Building degree and an interest in best-practice building conservation. Kai Chen joined in 1991, having meticulously crafted a number of residential commissions in his own practice, Robinson Chen. That body of work avoided the easy clichés of the modern bourgeois house in favour of exploring space, colour and light. The firm became Lovell Chen in 2005.
Since then, the firm has grown to include five more principals: Kate Gray, Adam Mornement, Anne-Marie Treweeke, Milica Tumbas and Katherine White. Together, the seven principals attest to the firm’s singular diversity, combined expertise and no-nonsense principles of governance. As a result, the firm is able to deploy its embedded knowledge to resolve strategic issues, hard-nosed negotiations and intractable trade-offs. It is almost as if Lovell Chen has knowingly designed itself to confront the wicked problems and ethical quagmires inherent to contemporary practice.
But there is more to it than this. Lovell Chen has not only been instrumental in shaping Melbourne’s collective memory as a city, it has also been its custodian. There are few heritage buildings in the city that have not at some point had the involvement of Lovell Chen, be it in masterplanning, the preparation of conservation management plans or intricate conservation work. Nor are the firm’s interests merely bound to Melbourne’s nineteenth-century fabric. Lovell Chen is acutely aware of the circumstances of Australia’s other cities and regional centres, the country’s modernist heritage as well as its histories of Indigenous and colonial landscapes. As would be expected of a firm of this intellectual depth, Lovell Chen is wary that adaptive re-use has become a fashionable label, acknowledging that not all buildings deserve adaptive re-use, nor is everything valuable; sometimes, what is removed is as important as what is kept for the future.
All of this is brought together in design outcomes that surprise through their grace.
This is not the work of cookie cutters, nor of stylists who deploy a sly language regardless of the program, nor the results of a larger-than-life formalism of irony. The practice’s approach is characterized by a process of research, design iteration and a search for detailed constructional solutions, depending on the project context. This is a group of architects who still know how to detail.
The firm’s conservation skills are evident in the work to Trades Hall in Carlton, a significant site in the histories of trade unions in Victoria and the Australian Labor Party. The council chamber, built in 1891, had been destroyed by fire in 1960 and refurbished in what might be described as a kind of utilitarian moderne style of that time: a flat white ceiling, brownish timber panels and some green modern textures. Lovell Chen has reversed the 1960s work and highlighted the hall’s original configuration. The result includes a new three-sided balcony and arcaded side galleries. It is a subtle, surgical and even joyful intervention.
The practice’s design skill is evident in its work at the Bendigo Soldiers Memorial Institute.
This project involved conservation work to a 1921 Renaissance revival-style building and the addition of a new pavilion. The new addition employs various exterior devices: Corten steel as a single material, tapered massing and laser-cut decorative openings