This restoration project is an International Research Centre for the Philosophy of Time located in the clock tower of the Main Quadrangle at the University of Sydney. Unsympathetic alterations meant that much of the original clarity of the late perpendicular gothic architecture by Edmund Blackett had been lost.
Contemporary elements, in the spirit of Blackett, become evident in time. Timber at a dais was replaced and extended to form a continuous seat/step, making newly perspicuous the structural relationship between a stone plinth and its timber skin or carpet. Structural sophistication is in tension with a feeling that the element had always been that way New glass elements extend the structural relationship between glass and stone in the neo gothic vertical bay window. A horizontal bookcase is a hovering crystalline beam and solid counterpoint. A hung glass ceiling acts (like the window) as a source of light and continues a dialogue between fine metal structure and just held panels. Its geometry makes clear the rooms dynamic spatial quality in spite of its classical organization.
The most contemporary addition is the moveable furniture, allowing various simultaneous or sequenced accommodations for one or 2 scholars and small, medium or larger conferences. Whiteboards set flush with the plaster allow for writing directly on the wall. The furniture material is cast resin the colour of coke, and initially appears as old lacquered timber, perhaps expected in a room of this character. But on closer inspection, each piece is a single cast, partial transparency revealing a computer, storage for books and papers, all necessary cabling, a drawer for pencils. As these spaces are inhabited, the appearance is affected. These objects of inhabitation are as if items caught in amber, lost or preserved in time.
Technology was employed for its ability to selectively remove its own presence. There was an ambition to make something temporally ambiguous, which could be seen as from time past or time future.
Sydney Architect Catherine Lassen received her BArch from Sydney University in 1991 and a Master of Architecture from Harvard University in 1995. The following year she worked for Rem Koolhaas at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam and then in Boston, returning to Australia in 2000. Since then she has taught architectural design at the University of Sydney in the final 2 years and in the Masters Program. The office was formed in Sydney in 2002. It imagines an architecture that is intelligent and not afraid of beauty, one that can almost disappear into the background but which invites, and rewards, repeated attention. Urbanism and a non-romantic conception of nature are crucial points of departure.
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