An apartment building in Adelaide designed for global student accommodation provider Yugo has been designed with flexibility in mind for other potential uses in the future.
Architect Rothlowman has utilised prefabrication, 3D printing, and passive sustainability in the design.
The $110 million, 34 storey tower at North Terrace, was built using 700 precast load-bearing precast columns, making the building one of the tallest of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere.
It will provide accommodation for more than 700 students, with several communal spaces including a cinema, multi-media rooms, lounges, kitchens and social dining spaces.
To achieve the flexibility the building was prefabricated off site to allow for adaptation for future use.
Future use in mind
Principal of Rothlowman Ben Pomroy told The Fifth Estate that 589 individual bathrooms were pre-constructed as pods in NSW and craned into place, a decision that was made with the building’s future in mind.
A building “needs to have a life potentially beyond their current use,” Mr Pomroy said.
It’s what he calls the “long life, loose fit” that the design allows the building to be easily adapted, if a change of use is deemed necessary in the future.
“Over the life of the building it can be reconfigured as many times as possible and structural columns aren’t going to get in the way.”
Passive sustainability
The building known as North Terrace uses a traditional hot and dry climatic device, the Brise Soleil, an architectural feature that reduces heat gain within that building by deflecting sunlight. This facade was produced using an innovative 3D printing technique.
The imposing external columns serve the building in several ways. As well as load bearing, they also provide a shading benefit. The vertical columns create an armature and protection for the glazing which reduces heat created by the sun hitting the windows directly, Mr Pomroy said. The depth of the floor slabs also helps to provide full sun protection in mid-summer.
“So in the afternoon and morning, the effective heat load on the building is reduced quite significantly without having to put mechanical systems in.”
It’s all part of a push for passive sustainability.
One of the biggest carbon emitters on the planet is construction and as architects we have a huge control over how much material goes into the buildings we design
“Sustainability in my mind isn’t about sticking things on the building,” Mr Pomroy said.
“Being sustainable is also about using less materials to do what we do because one of the biggest carbon emitters on the planet is construction and as architects we have a huge control over how much material goes into the buildings we design.
“The structure and how the building is made can be a beautiful object in itself, rather than having to put things on it.”
Wind downdrafts
One of the challenges of the site was to restrict wind downdrafts to the surrounding environment without compromising the aesthetics of the surrounding heritage precinct.
The columns and floor slabs were designed to do the job, so that no lower-level awnings or canopies were required.
This formed an “active damping” system to reduce swaying.
But the damping is “probably half [the] size of what you’d typically get as with that external structure on the tower it slows the wind velocity as it hits the tower and moves up and down the building.”
These external elements would have significantly altered the look and feel of the immediately surrounding historical precinct – which the architects wanted to retain.
Informed by the surrounding heritage
The building’s location on historic North Terrace was an important point of reference for the architects.
“It’s on a pretty sensitive location in Adelaide in terms of the heritage listed buildings,” Mr Pomroy said.
The external structure was designed to hark back to classical columns with entasis.
English architect and archeologist Francis Penrose defined “entasis” as: “swelling given to a column in the middle parts of the shaft for the purpose of correcting a disagreeable optical illusion, which is found to cause their outlines to seem concave instead of straight” in his analysis of the Parthenon in Greece.
Mr Pomory defined it as “the way the columns used to be designed to reflect how a tree grows”.
“The building bellows out… and then tapers back in the midsection, that is a deliberate reflection of taller heritage buildings to our West.”
The architects also integrated bronze coloured window treatments to try to “talk” to the surrounding heritage buildings in a contemporary way.
Work began on the project in 2019 and while the client’s brief, surrounding buildings and site requirements were all taken into account, the world almost completely shutting down to combat a highly transmissible virus was not part of the plan.
Mr Pomroy said while he and his team occasionally made it over the border, site visits were usually conducted by a video conference call with a partner member walking around the site filming with their phone.
Yugo North Terrace was designed and built with architects Rothelowman and Intro Architecture, structural engineers Wallbridge Gilbert Aztec (WGA), services engineering Lucid Consulting, and project management by Neoscap.
