Artist Studio Flemington / Open Studio

Architects: Open Studio Pty Ltd.
Location: Flemington, Melbourne, Australia
Project Team: Britta Klingspohn & Heribert Alucha
Building Area: 72 sqm
Project year: 2009
Photographs: Open Studio Pty Ltd.

situation plan

This small project is located at the rear of two houses in Flemington – a suburb of Melbourne. The two properties’ owners decided some time ago to remove the boundary fence to create a shared backyard. The resulting garden is unusually wide and surprisingly large – space enough for a broad range of activities…

The main question for this project was how to place the new building to maintain the open quality of the site while defining three landscape areas in the garden (playground, vegetable garden, outdoor sitting). A pragmatic rectangular shape was deformed to follow the site specific conditions. The angular geometry helps to define the landscape zones.

floor plan

The project’s brief was a combination of four different functions: a painting studio, a large store room, a garden shed and a garage. These four functions require to be independently used and need a strong “internal” quality. Like four inner rooms protected from the outside these spaces are somehow hidden and disengaged from the exterior, their functions become indistinguishable from the outside.

The result is a strong distinction between interior and exterior. The interior is a white neutral space with various gradations of natural light. In contrast, the exterior acquires an object-like artificial quality. Its material expression is abstracted by the careful location of the openings, the reduction of materials and the concealment of construction requirements. Contact with the ground is accentuated by exposing the edge of the concrete slab.