Reconnecting Brisbane | Jacopo Famularo

If at the bigger scale Brisbane could look pretty coherent, when one goes down to a lower scale, the city starts to lose continuity and coherency between buildings and spaces. That is what exactly happens to the Cultural Centre in South Brisbane, where the site of the project is what we could call a "non-place".

Being just a pass through area, the site really needs to be requalified and to find a new position. That's why I worked on creating a new strategy by shaping a "C" hotel. The idea is to create a barrier from Grey St, which is really crowdy and noisy, in a way to have an inner area, a piazza, which could be a quiet place where to have temporary art espositions and markets.

The hotel is designed in a way to be really simple and to gather three rules from the city: the first one is about the streetscape, the hotel in fact wants to be a low profile piece of architecture, which doesn't change the landscape of the area; the second one is about colour and texture and the hotel is made of the exact same concrete as the Gibsonian buildings that surround it; the third one is about shading elements, which are pretty strict and close one to another and these become the principal structure in the hotel.

The ground floor is characterized by the presence of some shops as well as a restaurant and the lobby of the hotel. Going up we find a mezzanine which still hosts shops and the second floor of the restaurant. From here above we just have the hotel, which presents a great variety of rooms, from cheep rooms to suites.

The roof is reachable through stairs and lifts, that allow people to enjoy a grea view on Brisbane's skyline.

The third part of the project focused on the exterior parts and on creating a light object. In my case I decided that if in the first part I gathered all the information and the ideas from the area, now that they had been elaborated, it was my turn to spread them out in the area itself. That's why I extended the grid of the columns, which are the greatest elements of the project and create a light which becomes part of the landscape and gives form to a place which was just an in-between.

The lights come in different hights and this let people interact with them in different ways. The elements are casted with the same concrete as the building, the old part of the Library and QAG. The light is openable in a way to permit maintainance when needed and it has the predisposition for Wi-Fi hotspots inside, in a way to keep people connected on the go.

For the connection of the two elements (the C-shaped one and the closing panel) I've chosen magnets, in a way to keep the element as pure as possible from the outside.