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Adrian Lahoud
Sydney-based architect Adrian Lahoud proposes to transform a pre-war building in the light industrial suburb of Alexandria into a creative hub centred on film.
His scheme comprises a new building that contains theatres, a café/bookstore, a bar and restaurant and film archive facilities, which is grafted on to an original brick ‘shed’, now divided into studio spaces for creative tenants. “The challenge for this scheme was how to mediate between the large-scale availability of existing sheds in a city like Sydney with the demand for small-scale spaces by creative industries and the knowledge economy,” Adrian Lahoud said.
The new structure features a striking brick bonding method, where bricks are threaded on to steel rods and appear as though suspended in the air. “We inverted some of the common associations with brick,” Lahoud explains. “Brick has a lot of weight to bear, both metaphorically and physically, and we wanted to try and have some fun and do something a little bit lighter, as opposed to something heavy, which is the typical association with brick.”
Lahoud was inspired by architects who have used similar construction methods combining post-tensioned rods and bricks in London and Zurich, although he is not aware of any such application in Australia.
For his scheme, Lahoud chose a selection of brick finishes and colours to set different moods inside and out. On the façade, the interspersion of differently orientated blue-black and black glazed bricks creates a speckled effect as the light bounces off those surfaces. Internally, the threaded bricks give the impression of sitting under a tree, by creating dappled light on the off-white and glazed white brick floors and walls, Lahoud says.
“Instead of a brick wall being solid with window openings, we’ve broken down the size of the openings to a smaller scale to allow the light to be broken up,” he explains. “Imagine sitting under a willow tree: in this building, the bricks are the leaves. As the sun moves across the building, the light enters and creates different colours and strengths on the floor inside.”
As well as their aesthetic appeal, bricks offered sustainability advantages in this project. “When you don’t use a mortar and have a standard brick that is mechanically fixed, the system can be pulled apart – without damage to the elements – to be reused,” Lahoud says.
The architect also used sophisticated solar mapping technology to ascertain the amount of sunlight falling on every brick on the building’s facade, to determine the rotation of each brick and thereby control the heat load within the building.
Most importantly though, bricks gave Lahoud the opportunity to create and manipulate atmosphere within the building, in a way that other materials couldn’t necessarily achieve. “Because this building is about the presentation of images, it was important that the building itself should also have a very strong image: at night it becomes lantern,” Lahoud explains. “Using the technology we proposed, brick is much more customisable, almost like a couture garment.”
