Gadi people
New South Wales
The 119 Redfern St project, the accessibility upgrade of an 1880s Victorian Italianate building, posed the challenge of enabling not only physical but psychological accessibility: a space for an engaged and proud First Nations community.
Re-read through the lens of Country, this place is celebrated and honoured. Once prevalent turpentine forest is remembered, and the powerful owl recognised as a symbol of resilience.
A dedicated entry space, lift tower and lobbies refocus the building. A new script is written onto the site as this new way of entering and inhabiting colonial spaces within reclaims them for Aboriginal communities. Accessibility becomes celebratory, expanding into new shared yet protected spaces.
The response celebrates existing building materials wrought from Country while reclaimed materials make use of what has already been taken.
In our work together we seek better ways of understanding and living with Country and to acknowledge what is enough.
Award for Public Architectre
The transformation of 119 Redfern Street into a First Nations community hub by the City of Sydney with Aileen Sage, Djinjama, Jean Rice and Dr Noni Boyd is an extraordinary example of the power of collaborative design. The program is restrained and functional but executed with thoughtful detailing. The building has been sensitively stripped back to reveal and celebrate its original state, being true the indigenous economic “theory of enoughness” that has driven all design and planning decisions.
This project and its process should be studied as a demonstration project for how we as architects respond to briefs in today’s context with the hugely significant climate and wellbeing stressors we are facing. This project demonstrates how a design problem is answered through the filter of Country, with all voices in the collaboration heard and with the benchmark of not needing to add anything for the sake of adding something.
Creative Adaption Award for Heritage Architecture
119 Redfern St proposes a sequence of deftly restrained interventions of an 1883 Victorian Italianate former Post Office Building. Located at a prominent Redfern intersection, this is a truly collaborative approach between community, Indigenous designer, client, heritage architect, and lead architect.
The project practices a fine grain re-reading through the lens of Country which honours and respects place, and sensitively introduces an architectural strategy of ‘enoughness’, that is: utilising existing resources and only taking more if necessary. This is demonstrated through the extensive reuse of onsite materials, the careful nomination of locations for new works to have the least impact on the existing building fabric, and the skillful blending of existing structure alongside new cultural themes.
The result of this approach has enabled the embedding of deep memory into a building that will live and grow with the community.
119 Redfern is the City of Sydney’s raison detre perfectly embodied, to listen to community, to learn, to respond with opportunity, and steward better community and better places. The former postoffice restoration returns purpose to a civic icon and imbues it with a Gadigal connection to country and to community.
Deftly restrained interventions and recycled, local material choices reconnect building to street and people to place. Our community’s new Aboriginal Cultural Space is optimistic and warmly nostalgic, a culturally safe space to belong in the fourth pillar of our Eora Journey.
