Expressing Movement – Phoenix Central Park by Dubach Block Jaggers Architects and John Wardle Architects

Through a binding of minds and creative gestures, Phoenix Central Park is the exploration of space, materiality and light, manifested in form. Durbach Block Jaggers and John Wardle Architects join forces to propose this unique performance space and gallery as it captures notions of movement and expression.

Located in Sydney’s Chippendale, Phoenix Central Park presents as a uniquely identifiable public building, reflective of the creative output and vigour that occurs within its walls. In the same way as artists come together on stage, through strategic collaborations across disciplines, the building captures this spirit in its essence. From the combining of Durbach Block Jaggers designing the performance space and John Wardle Architects designing the gallery, the resulting building embodies its function, while sculpturally engaging with the surrounding streetscape. While each space takes its own interpretation, which is intentional, the underlying principle is one of heightened energy and a connection to the natural.

In the same way as artists come together on stage, and through strategic collaborations across disciplines, the building captures this spirit in its essence.

The central courtyard space links both the gallery and performance spaces and is designed by both Durbach Block Jaggers and John Wardle Architects. Their shared approach represents the ideas behind each separate space diffusing into one, as they meet. The very nature of the buildings needing to be distinctly segregated from outside light and sound led the brief that informed their separate and subsequent approaches. In shutting the building off from the street, the façade becomes an opportunity for both teams to manipulate the materiality and form, where the skin becomes its own veil to the happenings behind and is interactive in its own way. Openings and an unfolding rhythm offer glimpses of the activity happening beyond, while distinctly shielding the internal spaces from the outside.

The sense of the monumental is felt both from the outside and also while inside, befitting of the public nature of the building. Bold gestures are supported by equally bold uses of materiality that wraps, dances and intercepts the inner and outer volumes, peeling to invite guests inward. The combined use of precast concrete, long linear bricks and timber form the primary palette of the spaces, and although utilised in varying percentages, both the gallery and performance space feel connected. Curated openings allow natural light to enter the spaces, with the central courtyard key as the reminder of the natural and the organic, in amongst such a constructed environment.

Openings and an unfolding rhythm offer glimpses of the activity happening beyond, while distinctly shielding the internal spaces from the outside.

Phoenix Central Park is a welcomed insertion within its streetscape, becoming its own destination, where Durbach Block Jaggers and John Wardle Architects have combined a curious and refined approach in adding such an urban sculptural within its context.