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Architects: Loucas Zahos Architects
- Area: 600 m²
- Year: 2015
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Photographs:Christopher Frederick Jones
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Manufacturers: Grasscrete, Helio Screen, Modinex, Refresh Interiors, Silent Gliss, Update Cabinets
Text description provided by the architects. The building has been conceptualized around a series of courtyards, giving private outlook and amenity to staff and patients, whilst creating calm and tranquility in an otherwise busy and high volume practice.
A colonnade representative of a “steel forest” defines the edge of the building providing an architectural veil separating the predominant glass façade and interiors from the urban fabric. Structurally, the roof form consists of simple “A” frame trusses inverted to form a flat roof, each truss individually supported by a steel column. The combination of the column repetition together with the inverted trusses, forming a metal clad raked soffit, generate the main facades of the building. The exterior contrasts with the glazed curtain wall and interiors which consist of cedar and ply.
Sited behind the town’s main street and bound by Ormuz Avenue on the North, and a lane (Lampkin Lane) to the West and South boundaries. The western boundary has an industrious outlook, as well as an angular alignment triangulating the alignment in relation to all other boundaries.
The building is sited hard on the western boundary treated with a highly articulated boundary wall occasionally interrupted by courtyards screened from the adjacent building fabric.
The practice of eye care requires a consultation that is extensive in time together with a procession of consultative engagements in any given visit. The building functions to accommodate this procession of events simplifying the movement and workflow in a logical sequence from arrival to completion of the consultation. Fundamental to this workflow for patients, is to provide a non-institutional caring environment, with privacy and intimacy. This is achieved by creating a number of smaller waiting areas adjacent to the relevant function. These waiting areas form the core of the internal spaces, with outlook to the landscaped courtyards, and featuring an abundance of natural light through the roof light well that occupies the entire space.
The brief required additional commercial space and this has been generated along the main street frontage for maximum exposure and viability, with the specialist Clinic accessed via a cloister revealing the quantum of the “inverted truss”.
