Tall & Urban News

The City of Melbourne has voted in favor of a Bates Smart-designed proposal for a student accommodation tower, 407-409 King Street, to be built atop a modernist office building by Yuncken Freeman.

Flagstaff House, at the corner of King and Batman Streets in central Melbourne, is a two-story International Style building that was built in 1955 and served as the office for Yuncken Freeman. The building faces Flagstaff Gardens on King Street, and opposite the site on Batman Street is the St James Old Cathedral. The design was inspired by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, among others. The property was sold to investors in 2016 for AU$14.6 million (US$9.9 million).

The design calls for the retention of the façade of the building, with some alteration and demolition of the interior. The student accommodation tower would sprout from the existing roof, with the tower forms distinguished by a setback and an intermediary level with a roof terrace.

The 20-story tower would be clad in dark, copper-colored aluminum panels and sunshades that relate to the black frame of the Freeman Yuncken offices. The building would be operated by the Iglu Student Accommodation.

The current design is the latest of several proposals for the site. A prior one was for a hotel, designed by Fender Katsalidis, which was also approved by the Future Melbourne Committee in October 2018. The current application approved by the Future Melbourne Committee switched the proposed use to student accommodation. The design does not change the building envelope or proposed built form significantly.

An even earlier proposal, designed by Push Architecture, was rebuffed by the council and the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal in April 2017.

For more on this story, go to ArchitectureAU.