Magazines by J.AR Office
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Magazines by J.AR Office

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I spent a lot of time spent driving the highway between Brisbane and the Northern Rivers. Large swaths of the route are dotted with industrial estates, including a diverse array of large retail stores and retail outlets whose designers clearly took their cues from Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour’s groundbreaking 1972 book Learning from Las Vegas. In these spaceless places, shacks adorned with supergraphics screaming trade names outnumber the “ducks,” which include huts with faux Balinese roofs and a surf shop topped with a wave.

On one such estate in Currumbin, just north of the New South Wales/Queensland border, The Warehouses sits quietly and confidently amidst a visual onslaught of eclectic context. It is the first major work to be completed by J.A.R. Office, the Brisbane-based practice founded by Jared Webb in 2021. The project is a combination and significant redevelopment of five existing warehouse buildings on the site, which differed in age, floor levels and structural integrity. J.A.R. Office has brought together these buildings, once united only by their total lack of architectural ambition, into a carefully planned composition. You have to look very closely to find traces of their previous lives, which have housed everything from a hardware store to a community recovery centre following the area’s severe floods in 2022.

Although The Warehouses has used materials from surrounding buildings, there is no excessive graphic design or unnecessary embellishment.

There is no formal gymnastics in the design, no supergraphic; in a sense the mute facade is so quiet that it looks out of place. But while there is no postmodern pop, there is plenty of “ornament.” Here I do not mean representational references, but compositional details that simply add interest – an endeavor that is far from criminal.

Above a gentle block foundation, an elegantly detailed undulating metal facade subtly emerges as it rises. This, along with a playful arrangement of window boxes, elevates the project from what could have been a silly shell around existing structures to a well-mannered – almost Mannerist – contribution to the streetscape.

While the façade is imaginative, the interior is compelling – particularly the spacious internal street. For a commercial enterprise, the net-to-gross floor area ratio is quite low. The owner-developer explained to me that what is lost in quantity is regained in quality, attracting high-end tenants who “get” what the project is all about. The naturally ventilated, double-height space provides access to eight commercial tenancies that are more like boutique retail outlets than industrial warehouses (remember, they don’t sell tools to tradesmen or DIY crews). Strategies and details from Italy and Sweden have come to Currumbin via Brisbane from the projects Webb started on. References to Scarpa are obvious in the concrete details and, to a lesser extent, in the playful blockwork, while the frameless window details hark back to the church of St Peter Lewerentz in Klippan. The minimalist palette of concrete, blocks and plywood is balanced by extensive greenery, with pots of various sizes housing a variety of plant species.

Eight commercial units are located on a naturally ventilated, double-height internal street that provides green spaces conducive to social interaction.

The Warehouses is a private commercial building – disappointingly for the general public, the space is not technically open to the public, as the area is lightly industrial. The interior is very public and, with built-in furniture and nooks and crannies for meetings on many scales, it makes for a great retail and hospitality space. Webb describes the space in terms of the homely feel of a shared house, with tenants similar to private bedrooms and a public street to the living room. Perhaps the coffee roastery/cafe will become a ‘family’ dining room.

Unlike other adaptive reuse projects, The Warehouses contains few direct references to the buildings’ histories. At first glance, it’s hard to tell old from new; the existing wooden trusses are painted white, as is the new steel structure. In an era where, as a profession, we are exploring concepts of circularity through ideas like adaptive reuse, design for dismantling, and end-of-life considerations, The Warehouses takes a slightly different tack. Reimagining five different buildings as one extended the life of at least part of their original structure.

What the project loses in space (the ratio of net to gross leasable area is relatively low), it makes up for in quality and community feel.

While other speculative projects might opt ​​for flexible configurations with plasterboard partitions that can be easily demolished without a second thought, the new work here is solid, and the configuration relatively static. Tenant fit-outs and further adaptations will need to be carefully considered; here, if the space is difficult to change, it may not change at all, avoiding waste altogether. This approach suggests that there is no one size fits all approach when it comes to sustainability, and quality, durability and resilience play a key role in this conversation.

Resilience is a particularly hot topic at the moment, especially in areas with a high risk of fire or flooding. Located just 450 metres from Currumbin Creek, The Warehouses site is below the local council’s maximum flood level and although it has not flooded during recent events, the risk of flooding played a part in the selection of materials and their detailing. After witnessing tens of thousands of tonnes of plasterboard and carpet being dumped on the street and into landfill following the 2022 Lismore floods, I found it incredibly refreshing to see a space so resilient yet so comfortable. We never want to imagine a flood, but it’s easy to imagine this space being hosed down and ready to go in a relatively short space of time should such an event occur. All of this, combined with other bells and whistles – including an extensive solar power system – makes The Warehouses a great model not only for high-quality commercial development, but also for resilient, sustainable architecture.

Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour wrote Learning from Las Vegas in 1972, as the oil crisis was unfolding and climate change was creeping into our consciousness. They called for a critical understanding of context through the lens of theory. In the same era, Stewart Brand was publishing Whole Earth Catalog, a critique of capitalist consumption focused on self-sufficiency, DIY, and ecology. Half a century later, in a time of social upheaval and a much greater awareness of the effects of climate change, both publications remain essential texts for our discipline. As we collectively strive to minimize the impact of our work on this fragile planet, let us approach this task critically and scientifically. Hopefully, in another 50 years, people will look back and learn from The Warehouses.

— John de Manincor is an architect and writer based in the Northern Rivers of New South Wales. He is a founding partner of Possible Studio, a firm currently involved in several public and community projects focused on flood recovery and environmental protection.

Website https://www.ceath.fr/

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