Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Camilla Block, Neil Durbach, and John Wardle of Durbach Block Jaggers and John Wardle respectively design a new Sydney gallery and performance space, cooperating to define its impressive neo-Baroque envelope.
Phoenix Central Park recently won a 2021 International Architecture Award from The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies and The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design.
This unique project, which is comprised of two distinct art spaces, is gathered around a central courtyard, involving two different firms, virtually leaving them in complete formal and linguistic freedom.
The gallery, designed by John Wardle Architects, is made of an alternate sequence of decidedly enclosed and suddenly oversized spaces.
Amongst the others are a small underground room, whose ceiling is perforated by a single skylight, bringing in light from the internal court, and an open space on the top floor, crowned by a continuous surface of deep, almost monumental skylights, flooding the interior with diffused natural light.
Meanwhile, Durbach Block Jaggers’s performance space is a single bell-shaped clearing, made by stepped and countered timber ribs and conceived as an Elizabethan theatre, with the scene visible from different vantage points.
Distribution spaces break into the auditorium, just to become themselves observation platform
Designed jointly by both offices, the building’s skin is entirely made of flat, elongated brick, with a thin veil of mortar washed over them to emphasize their continuity.
Their solid mass, though, is relentlessly warped, twisted, pierced.
This envelope under tension, which reacts to the conformation of its interiors and stresses it, “staging” it as a spectacle offered to the city, is probably the most interesting element of Phoenix Central Park’s design.
Project: Phoenix Central Park
Architects: Durbach Block Jaggers
Architects: John Wardle Architects
Design Team: Camilla Block, Neil Durbach, and John Wardle
Client: JN Projects
General Contractor: FDC contractors
Photographers: Martin Mischkulnig, Trevor Mein, Tom Ferguson, Julia Charles, and Gavin Green Co., Ltd.
