Australian architecture firm Edition Office has designed Fenwick, a building with a raw silhouette that blends into the surrounding vegetation.
Edition Office has installed its latest project, Fenwick, on one of the banks of the Yarra River, known as Birrarung, not far from Yarra Bend Park in Melbourne's Kew suburb. Perched on an escarpment overlooking the river's banks, it was conceived as a "broken mass of three distinct forms" straddling a space between residential street and cliff. All volumes were shaped and dimensioned so that the whole appears as a small, coherent series of buildings in the landscape.
Using a language of curves, the project is a meeting place between the three entities, creating pockets of entry and invitation. Meanders that allow daylight and shade to drift and sculpt the built forms as the sun moves over the site. Still between the three volumes, vegetated corridors open up, allowing plants and vines to grow and drown out the outer walls, while the treetops filter light and views of the river and the landscape beyond.
Living spaces are open to the north, the river and the valley, and organized so that circulation paths link to these areas, while bedrooms and ancillary spaces are open to the green spaces between the pavilions, glimpsed through copper mesh sails.
In terms of materials, the architectural project echoes its cliff-top location, as well as the sobriety of the surrounding modernist houses in the region. Textured concrete in shaped panels, raw copper and galvanized steel allow the project to age gracefully over time, gaining in character, while slowly reflecting the country in which it is set.
