Finding the right architectural language to leverage potential
Dennis Prior is a Lecturer in Architectural Design at the Melbourne School of Design. His architectural practice Prior Barraclough, which he leads with University of Melbourne alumnus Michael Barraclough, received the Emerging Architects and Graduate Network (EMaGN) Project Award in the Victorian Architecture Awards 2022 for their project Greeves Street Townhouses.
His architectural interests lie in the pursuit of formal, spatial, and material coherence and in encouraging the next generation of architects to engage in a critical and ambitious creative practice. We caught up with Dennis to discuss his award-winning project and to explore how his work as a practicing architect informs his teaching.
Can you tell me in a little bit about the Greeves Street Townhouses project?
The Greeves Street Townhouses is a series of seven dwellings on a tight site in Fitzroy, which before our intervention contained a dilapidated warehouse. The site occupies a transition point typical of Melbourne’s inner suburbs, effectively sandwiched between a row of historic and modestly scaled dwellings on the one side and the much denser and both morphologically and programmatically more diverse commercial strip of Brunswick Street on the other.
The project needed to balance the demands of these complex site conditions, which bring both constraints and opportunities, with the client’s desire to maximise density, a familiar equation for those working on privately funded housing projects. It was really important to us that we were able to find an architectural language that could resolve these two potentially conflicting imperatives, that is, to respond to and respect the existing built fabric, whilst achieving a housing yield that would both satisfy the commercial logic of the project and our ambitions to sensibly and sensitively add density to Melbourne’s inner suburban ring. In many ways I think the project outcome can be understood as direct engagement with this negotiation.
How did you remain in-keeping with the surrounding heritage Edwardian streetscape?
Working closely with a heritage and planning consultant, we landed on a proposition to retain the street facing section of the existing warehouse, clearing the rest of the site which was occupied by a rambling series of ad hoc extensions to the original building and generally in poor condition, not to mention being full of asbestos. Importantly we retained volume and not just the façade, so there is meaningful sense of the existing fabric holding the streetscape.
While the original building was only single story, its oversized proportions allowed us to manipulate the section in such a way that once we added a contemporary roof form there was an opportunity to hide the visual bulk of the new development. In other words, what reads to the street as a single-storey heritage building with a new roof form sitting above, in fact accommodates a series of three level (+ roof terrace) townhouses.
Speaking in more detail, the architectural expression and material palette of the intervention work together to deliberately respond to the heritage fabric. A robust and heavy base formed in brick grounds the project and reestablishes the total occupation of the site footprint to suit the prevailing urban pattern. A new roof form which sits above is unashamedly contemporary but was conceived in response to the morphology of the existing streetscape. Registering to the primary elevation as an asymmetrical gable it then shifts and folds into a sheer façade when viewed from the laneway. A singular material strategy for the lightweight upper form enhancing this geometric ambiguity whereby roof becomes wall and vice versa.
Part of the client brief was to activate and “rehabilitate” Exhibition Lane to one side of the site. How did you go about this?
In its existing state, the laneway which runs the full depth of the site was pretty dark and dingy, and aside from being characteristic of the urban pattern of this part of Melbourne, it wasn't doing a lot to contribute to the public domain. One of our ambitions from very early in the project was to leverage the potential of the lane as a new street. To achieve this we organised the plan in such a way that the laneway provides both vehicular and pedestrian access to the townhouses, so somewhat uniquely for a multi residential project, each of the dwellings gets its own front door to a public street.
Orienting all of the dwellings which sit deeper into the site externally rather than into private circulation was a key move to animate the laneway, and this is further supported by the passive surveillance resulting from the living rooms having their primary glazing arranged to look over the lane, with privacy for residents facilitated by folding perforated screens which disappear into the facade.
I think this transformation is one of the things we are most proud of on this project, a once disused and unsafe laneway defined by a blank wall now an active civic space, it’s really rewarding to walk past in the evenings and see the lights glowing inside and residents coming and going into the street.
Greeves Street Townhouses. Image by Ben Hosking.
You have previously taught Master of Architecture Studio B and you’re now coordinating the Bachelor of Design’s Design Studio Delta and working on the reorganization of the Master of Architecture studio program. How does your work in architectural practice feed into your teaching at the Melbourne School of Design?
I think my role in the faculty is as a practitioner academic. This weighs heavily on me when I think about my teaching and my responsibilities as an educator. One of the things that I am always trying hard to do in my teaching is to make sure that our students are engaged with the realities of contemporary architectural design practice. To achieve this, I seek to set up my studios in such a way that students, regardless of the projects that they're working on, have an opportunity to engage with the questions that they'll see when they get into practice themselves. This is not so much an exercise in preparedness for the workforce as it is in recognizing the particularities of the architectural design process. I am deeply interested in this disciplinarity, and the fact that both students and practitioners grapple with the uncertain nature of design and the balancing of the speculative and the pragmatic.
In Studio B, for example, which I have taught for many years, often with colleagues from my office, this manifests in a very particular way where we focus on housing and challenge students to work on sites of a similar scale to the projects we engage with in practice. As a result, there is a really exciting flow of information in both directions, where students are exposed to the constraints and exigences that face these kinds of projects in reality, and we are refreshed and inspired by the creative ambition of our students tackling these same questions from a different perspective.
Over the years everyone in my office has been involved in studio teaching at the MSD in one way or another, so there is certainly a strong connection there. A few of our staff are alum from the faculty so they deeply understand both sides of practice and teaching at MSD, and we do have a current student in the faculty working with us from time to time too.
How would you summarise your approach to architectural teaching?
Our attitude in the office is that great architecture emerges from a careful balance between pragmatic exigency and conceptual and aesthetic ambition, where ideas meet resistance and form into something solid, and I think this attitude describes my teaching too. I’m always interested in encouraging students to undertake a meaningful interrogation of site, context, programme etc., whilst making sure that their work is underscored by critical thinking and creative ambition, and with a real concern for engaging with the history and potential of the discipline itself. Ultimately, I seek to create supportive, critical, and explorative studio environments, where the next generation of architects can engage with the complexities of the design process as they prepare to shape our future.