Architect's Statement:

To design splendid architecture.

To look after our client's interests.

To provide honest, impartial, open, transparent service.

To   provide buildings which are good value for money, within the limits of the client's affordability.

To design fine architecture, that fulfils the expectations of our clients and offers them even more by way of experiencing their buildings.

To design buildings that captivate the demands of living - which deal with the necessary matters of space, place, sustainability, value for money, solidness, workability and fine details. Buildings built to last.

To work with full collaboration between ourselves and our clients we enjoy the challenge of working together to achieve the best result.

 

General Approach

We consider the built environment as a smudge of elements - a collage of the platonic forms of antiquity, the cylinders, blocks, pyramids, spheres and cones of pure mass - which are composed sometimes by plan, most times by accident to form the mass of architecture that we know as our city and our suburbs.

We have a concern with the human condition - which is lived in our world predominantly in a world of cities and suburbs. Our architecture offers a critique of those places using an ordinary aesthetic, made wondrous so it redefines the environment with assurance and delight.

Buildings adapt iconoclastic traditions using regional and local materials which represent what is known for reconsideration, and endow them with new meaning and life.

We wish to place buildings in a defined time and space with evident references to the past and other architecture. To achieve that end, we uncover history by interpretation, so the past becomes understandable through intervention.  

History is investigated through experiments rather than known solutions, which allows for a challenge of pre-conceived notions and historicism , without making literal quotations from the past. The work is to be considered both in isolation (as a finished piece), and as part of a larger composition.

Forms are chosen as recognisable symbols which people understand from their earliest experiences. We like to represent them by inversion of the standard   (such as upside down pyramid roofs), or as elements mediating , or as structure made into form and used as a clue to the function of a building. Internal elements also are designed in terms of primary forms, with stairs as rectangular boxes, cupboards as cubes, poles as cylinders and wall units as sculpture.

These symbols and icons which compose the buildings are enhanced through the use of colour and daylight and artificial lighting , where structure is adapted for light control and   daylight is drawn into the buildings - defining three-dimensional expression as a form giver.

On the other hand, we know that within this mire of built things - underneath the collisions of forms and materiials of structure -   is the space of human experience where the play of life is staged and the senses are at work. Basic symbols are redefined and the experiences of sense (sight, touch, smell and taste, sound) are enhanced as part of an unexpected journey in the architecture.

This is architecture which seeks to explain the senses and to express architecture using platonic forms, color and light for enhancement. It is made using coded elements of form recognition and materials as a critique of the place, thereby providing fresh definitions of an   architecture which is appropriate in time and space for this date in history.  

Norman Day Melbourne