All tagged 2017

Knutsford Precinct

The Knutsford Precinct is a four-stage multi-residential development to a former industrial area. The formal industrial area still bears its presence with a mixed use of industrial yards, fabrication shops, stores, and lunch bars, and an old lime stone quarry, in an area of low-rise worker’s cottages.

 

The entrepreneurial nature of this project is unlike any other contemporary developer-led residential projects. Here, the Kuntsford precinct arose from a design-led bidding involving a syndicate developer-client that manifest in a recognition in its residential architectural achievements.

 

What is striking is how such a medium-density scale residential development employs its distinctive spatiality. The Kuntsford Precinct, (in its final stage of completion) speculates on a village typology within a Mediterranean-medieval setting in its scale, intimacy and climatic responsiveness, (by threading native landscaping upon the existing dune) resembles a cohesive whole. This is achieved in its spatial pragmatism grounded in a local sense of rustic modernist formality.

 

A mixture of private and shared outdoor spaces permits a sense of community, while an example of its successful pragmatic outcomes is demonstrated in the narrowing of laneway that runs through the North-South axis of the site. By challenging the States planning right-of-way requirements, this laneway has resulted in an intimate engagement with the first level balconies to encroach into the right of way, constituting a village-like a proportion of scale.  What emerges here is a safe and imaginative play area for children of the area.

 

 

For the future of densifying Perth’s domestic living, The Kuntsford Precinct advances the model that can also assist as a case study for future developer-led in Perth suburbs. 

 

For more information see review “Knutsford Stage 1” by Simon Pendal in Architecture Australia May/June 2017 vol.106 no.3.

 

image source:

https://images.thewest.com.au/publication/YA-300110/5754fa707214c_cs_jr_2016060508_knutsfordstage1_spaceagency.etal_robertfrith_0_1bl9uje-1bl9ujg.jpg