“ and so, within a production limited by the fact of economic scarcity, architectural creation has an everyday character”
LLUIS DOMENECH relating to CODERCH’S “La Barceloneta”
Adjacent this central site in Marrickville, there was created a piazza that has been given the nick-name ‘Greek Parliament’ by locals. Many old retired men, migrants from Greece at their youth in the 50’s and 60’s, now stand around or sit on benches to articulate their views, wise or not, about the world; a humble place of reflections; a loud place; a civic place ensues.
A former Victorian Italianate Post Office opposite the piazza has been re-fitted as a café and this site, formerly the ANZ Bank, is poised to now engage in the cacophony of sounds that makes this vibrant place.
The lack of affluence is welcome; the now familiar effects of ‘merchandising architecture’ with an ‘over-polished’ and the ‘over-manufactured’ disposition will not be available to this building; a building which will have an element of repravity that gives rawness to its composition.
At the ground level, all the building is open to the piazza and the street; and this activation of the street is also welcome in this place where in the past there was no activity or engagement.
In the residential levels, raw concrete structure is expressed as a beam and a balcony enclosure at once; this way privacy is achieved. Further layers of privacy are graded in the use of timber screens that are intense at the corner where they are more needed and are less so in the parts of the building where they are less needed.
All units’ public areas are cross-ventilated and face a central sunlit northern courtyard which is not seen from the public domain. The negative pressures borne out of the displacement of warm and cool surfaces affords the movement of air fluids in a natural way to create an instrument of variable cross-ventilation.
“Lamia” was a shop adjacent the bank that our clients’ father owned; a delicatessen in Marrickville. It is the name of an unforgotten hero, that little shop out of which much produce was delivered to many migrants’ tables; many luncheons later; many dinners enjoyed.
Angelo Candalepas
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