Victorian Archives - Page 11 of 31 - Australian Institute of Architects

Aboriginal Housing Victoria | Breathe

Aboriginal Housing Victoria (AHV) , a communityled organisation managing over 1,500 rental properties for Aboriginal and Torres Strait people in Victoria, embodies the strength and resilience of First Nations People. This strength exists despite inadequate access to affordable and appropriate housing. An issue which is complex and multifaceted, rooted in dispossession and dislocation, one that requires action beyond architecture alone.

Recognising the need to significantly increase the amount of available housing stock, AHV engaged Breathe to design their first multiresidential social housing project.

A guide throughout this process, AHV tasked Breathe with challenging the traditional typology of single dwellings; recognising its social and sustainability limitations in an urban context. The brief was, instead, to design a sustainable and culturally sensitive three storey multiresidential development in the heart of Reservoir. A development that would serve the large First Nations population in the area and offer them a medium density community focused home.

Adelaide Street House | Robert Simeoni Architects

This house at 27 Adelaide Street was imagined as an occupied ruin, allowing it to parallel and frame the internal life and graceful aging of a young family in place.

The house is expressed externally as a series of concrete forms aligning with the proportions and scale of the street, and is broken by lightweight infill that expresses its internal occupation, together achieving a balanced composition of solidity and transparency.

The concrete continues internally, framing views that are orientated inwards between spaces and onto the central courtyard which is used to bring northern light deep into the linear plan, moderate the scale of the building from the surrounding context, and minimise reliance on outward openings that reduces overlooking and solar heat gain. Highlevel windows at the upper storey gesture to the sky, further reducing views outward in favour of upward.