The Strand

Rainbow light wraps Melbourne’s central retail core in a singular gesture that explores rhythm and sequence; colour and light.

Custom fabricated glass fins form a sequential facade that extends across Lonsdale Street, Elizabeth Street, Little Bourke Street and Drivers Lane. Neighboured by the iconic GPO retail complex, the Myer and David Jones’ CBD flagship stores, and the Emporium retail development; the brief sought a design solution that would enliven and enrich the existing public realm while creating and establishing a recognisable identity for the site and the city.

Fostering studio505’s fascination with geometry, colour and rhythm; the visible light spectrum is split into individual component hues that smoothly shift from red to deep violet and back again, colouring bespoke vertical glass fins. The duality between object and void was tantamount as the facade can be viewed not just as a sequence of actual fins but a sequence of ‘empty’ spaces between. The colour of each fin effectively fills the empty space between each fin as light passes through it. The pure white backing wall behind the fins acts as a canvas; filled by ‘coloured shadows’ during the day, and illuminated at night by strips of white LED lights.

studio505 designed the new façade to create a visual counter rhythm to the towering presence of the building above. The materiality and geometry employed endows the refurbished façade with a rhythmic relationship to the converted office tower above, creating a new vertical cadence to counter the towers horizontal bands, whilst providing a diametrically opposed explosion of unencumbered colour against the rather banal black and white painted articulation of the modernist façade spandrels above.