Boys' toys

As reported by a number of architectural news sites, a 388-metre-high hotel and apartment building, which will be the tallest building in the southern hemisphere when completed, has been granted planning approval in Melbourne, Australia.  'Australia 108', designed by local architects Fender Katsaladis is to be built in the Southbank area just a few streets away from another iconic residential skyscraper by the same team, the 297-metre-high Eureka Tower (seen in the foreground of the image at left).

Predictably, the relevant details are scanty.  The proposed accommodation is predominantly residential apartments, but with a few floors dedicated to a six-star hotel.  The different program of the hotel, and an apparent requirement for an easily grasped simile to describe its form, gives the architects the excuse to burst the skin of the otherwise extruded tower, with cantilevered triangular forms that would be legible as the 'Commonwealth Star' of the Australian flag - if they hand out building plans to those who stay there, I assume.

Piecing together diverse sources, most of which report the same press release, does yield a few relevant additional pieces of information.  The construction is intended to be a proprietary prefabricated system developed by Nonda Katsilides, who has also been involved as the developer on many of his previous key projects, as he is here.  It will be interesting to watch if the construction achieves the efficiencies and accelerated completion predicted.  The overshadowing issues with such a large building have been generally discussed only in terms of whether the long finger of darkness will reach as far as the local war memorial, but they are brought together with predicted adverse wind effects by a local academic critic, questioning whether the approval of a number of skyscrapers in Melbourne will be good for that city's urban environment.

From my perspective, as usual, the available information doesn't address core concerns.  So, for instance in relation to the likely environmental outcomes at street level, I am not so much interested in lining up with the critics in predicting disaster, as with the fact that nobody seems to consider it appropriate to conduct good wind tunnel and CFD studies - or if they have been done, to make them available to answer such questions.  Nor is there any mention of energy efficiency, or any other sustainability considerations in relation to the proposal; in this day and age, that alone is almost unforgivable.

To be honest, no single news item deserves to be privileged with a final link here.  To read more, and to see more images, one might as well google 'Australia 108'.  To go to the project's vacuous web site, click here.