Peter Besley
After 20 years based in the United Kingdom (with stints in the Middle East), Peter Besley has brought his extensive experience in architecture and urban design, his teaching practice and his inclination to challenge convention back to Brisbane.
World events and big ideas have marked transitions in architect Peter Besley’s practice since he left Australia for the United Kingdom 20 years ago.
Employed in 1999 in London by Razorfish (“Everything that can be digital will be”), Besley led the design team for the agency’s new studios and met his future partner, architect Hannah Corlett. When Razorfish’s projects collapsed in 2001’s dot-com crash, both architects sought work elsewhere. Besley joined Allies and Morrison, where he was offered opportunities that inspired his emerging urban design practice. In 2003, Besley and Corlett became partners and co-founded Assemblage, merging their strengths in architectural and urban design. Assemblage grew to include small residential projects and feasibility studies for planners.
Four years later, the global financial crisis wiped out work in London for smaller practices like Assemblage. Whilst looking for work, Besley taught part-time in Colin Fournier’s Urban Design Studio at the Bartlett, UCL’s faculty of the built environment. Here, he heard about the international urban design competition for the holy city of Kadhimiya, Baghdad. Assemblage entered the competition, and Besley, with Bartlett graduate Yana Golubeva, produced a comprehensive scheme for the regeneration of Kadhimiya in 2009. However, whilst much of Assemblage’s scheme was adopted by the city, local contractors were subsequently awarded the building contracts.
Encouraged by potential opportunities in the Middle East, Besley based himself in Doha for six months. In early 2011, UN-Habitat and the Iraqi government announced an international competition for a new urban settlement, economic housing and infrastructure. Assemblage won with its design for a 5,000-person settlement, with generic housing adaptable to specific contexts; however, the practice was not awarded the building contracts, which were reserved for local companies.
Later in 2011, Assemblage entered the international competition for a new Iraqi parliament complex and masterplan. In early 2013, the practice’s compelling design was pronounced the winning scheme, selected from more than 130 entries. Representing the jury, Sunand Prasad, RIBA pastpresident, wrote: “We selected as winner the entry that held the best promise to house the future parliament of a country with an ambition to create a genuinely open and participative democracy, in a city with one of the oldest urban civilisations. Clearly that is the one we hope emerges as the concept to take forward.”1 In late 2013, the media announced that the thirdplaced scheme, by Iraqi-born architect Zaha Hadid, had been commissioned. Assemblage’s winning scheme came, unfortunately, with a “no obligation to build” clause. Hadid’s scheme remains unbuilt.
With two competition wins, Assemblage had demonstrated its design capability and gained professional recognition. However, with little or no work in Iraq or in London during its slow economic recovery, Besley returned to Allies and Morrison on secondment from Assemblage. During 2014 to 2016, he worked on the Greenwich Peninsula development – then one of the UK’s largest regeneration projects. Within the overall development, Besley saw the opportunity to initiate a new conceptual idea for a key site. Marked for two towers, the site could instead be transformed
into a Design District to accommodate creative industries within 12,000 square metres of workspace, with facilities for more than 1,500 makers in the arts and design sectors. What Besley envisaged was a lively “medina” at the heart of the Greenwich Peninsula to contrast with its big-gesture surroundings.
With architect Diego Grinberg, a colleague at Allies and Morrison, Besley tested multiple site layouts for their diversity, permeability and flexibility. Their final report was presented to Allies and Morrison mid-2016.
Persuaded by the concept, the client,
Knight Dragon, commissioned Assemblage in 2016 to further develop the Design District scheme through to planning consent and subsequent design and construction stages.
The Design District site is a one-hectare lot next to the O2 Arena, overlooking “central park” and providing access to bus, tube and ferry services. Located in the middle of the Greenwich development and surrounded by towering apartment buildings, the scheme comprises 16 relatively small buildings arranged in four quadrants to form laneways and intimate courtyards. To offer diversity whilst intensifying the idea of “a place of and for” makers, Besley proposed that the 16 buildings be designed by eight architectural practices, with each practice responsible for two buildings. In addition to Assemblage, the architects nominated for buildings were Barozzi Veiga, Mole Architects, Selgas Cano, Architecture 00, 6A Architects, Adam Khan Architects and David Kohn Architects, with Schulze and Grassov as landscape architect and Assemblage as masterplanner/masterarchitect. Excitement is building around the Design District as the project is promoted and, although the pandemic is causing delays, it is planned to open in early 2021.
Having completed the design for Greenwich Design District and resigned from Assemblage, Besley returned to Australia in 2019 to establish his architectural and urban design practice in Brisbane, where his projects to date include competition submissions, materials research and residential designs. Amongst his first tasks has been the completion of a project with Assemblage (now HNNA): a house for his brother in the suburb of Bardon, at the foothills of Mount Coot-tha. In architecture,
“the house” has long served as a testbed of ideas for a bigger project. Besley’s belief that Brisbane’s subtropical climate will become hotter and drier in the near future has led him to explore, in Couldrey House, the fit between this “new” climate and heavyweight construction, seeking increased performance and testing its expressive potential. The primary formal expression of the house derives from exposing sheer walls to sunlight and suppressing the roof, which confers it an air of worldliness in the local scene’s big roofs and shaded verandahs.
Built on a corner site, the two-level house presents distinctly different street elevations.
Main Avenue’s elevation faces north-east for views and breezes through large, sliding-folding windows that use “smart” glass for solar gain in winter and shade in summer. The low-angle winter sunlight heats the exposed concrete within the insulated interior