PROSPECT ROAD 168

The apartment building is at 168 Prospect Road in Adelaide, South Australia. As usual, at the beginning of the project, we work out different options for landing the building on the site and study all the pros and cons of each solution. As a result, we choose the most suitable one for the brief of the client, urban conditions, and the future architecture of the house.

With such a high-density building, it is important to capture enough light. Most of the apartments are oriented to the sunny north side, and a couple - to the west and east, due to the high density, part of the premises in the back of the building remained without natural light, so we arranged several light wells on 3 floors with landscaping. Thus, we let light into the bedrooms, hallways and the inter-apartment corridor, in addition, the wells create a vertical draft for passive ventilation of the apartments.

The house has to work with context. Since the whole environment is a low-rise building, our mission was to visually hide the size of the house, for this we highlighted the last floor of the house with a contrasting color to the base, now the building is perceived as a 3-storey building with a superstructure. The second floor is functionally separated from the first one by an air slot into the parking area, the floors are also made in different materials, so we avoided the feeling of the massiveness of the house.

All the surrounding houses are built from traditional stone materials with pitched roofs, so we chose brick for the walls and a rhythmic replica for the pitched roofs. It also allowed us to effectively place rows of solar collectors facing west and north. The result is a modern residential building with warm elements of traditional architecture that will become an accent on Prospect Road.