17-21 Wills Street

This project modifies and adds to the existing heritage-listed art deco print work for student accommodation with 659 student beds. The project achieves affordable student accommodation that balances design excellence, amenities, and pastoral care. 17-21 Wills Street is highly propositional responding intelligently and responsibly to the building environs and the proximity and orientation of the surrounding commercial and residential towers.

The main tower sits atop a concrete table top that delineates the tower from the podium. The platonic tower form draws inspiration from traditional housing and a fresnel lens as an homage to the existing building on site, which has the quality of hierarchy and order, material honesty, texture, reflection, refraction, obscurity, and screening.

Principally motivated by the quality of the environment for the resident, the tower facade is an exploration of the complexities of light penetration and privacy that references both the traditional Asian principle of co-habitation, the subtlety of the silhouette, and the light effect created by a fresnel lens on the refraction and reflection of light, and creating a sophisticated illuminated building, a dynamic crystalline ‘lantern’, in constant flux with the weather and through the influence of human activity within.