District Docklands Entertainment Complex

The new entertainment complex in the District Docklands precinct is a multi-cinema, mixed-use structure on a spatially challenging prawn-figured site. The project, adjacent to Costco and beneath the Melbourne Star Wheel, exists within a nebula of vertical infrastructure, elevated walkways and neighbouring structures.

An important component of the brief was that the project should rejuvenate the existing commercial complex. The challenge became ensuring that a building of this scale, programme and modest budget became transformative within its environment whilst meeting its developer’s ambitions.

Client

Ashe Morgan

Location

The District Docklands

Completed

2018

Value

$40m

Traditional Country

Wurundjeri/Boon Wurrung

Inspired by Melnikov’s 1928 Rusakov Workers Club, the expression of the auditorium was designed as an elevational event, whilst simultaneously, the project’s largest cinemas express their function. Similarly, the northern metal façade recalls Gunnar Birkert’s 1978 Calvary Baptist Church in its ribbed form and muscular scale.

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Customisation and prototyping were tested extensively in the preconstruction phase, to ensure that budget and building requirements were both met. The building is also a reference to large-scale customisation.

Within this context of variously scaled structures, the project attempts to become a distinct urban element, on a site dominated vertically by the Melbourne Star and the Footscray Road and horizontally by Costco – few other structures can compete with their scalar dominance. Using both the colour and material schemes of Costco and the wheel, the project seeks to enter chromatic and material dialogue with these two structures.

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Along this elevation and curling into its western façade, a series of custom red 210 x 305mm Zincalume triangular folds act as a kind of pleated house curtain, reiterating the building’s function whilst reconnecting it to former cinematic experience: an anticipation of the screening and illusion. Clad entirely in metal, from roof sheeting to panel to extrusion, the building also reflects upon the bricolage of Depression Era metal shelters.