Phoenix Central Park
This multifaceted project, initiated by a passionate private patron, captures the vision of an integrated performance space, garden and art gallery.
The performance space and gallery are entered though and linked by a central garden. A collaborative project, each element is authored by a different hand – Wardle designed the gallery and Durbach Block Jaggers designed the performance space. The buildings and gardens are linked at many levels, above and below ground, allowing for an intense interlocking of performance, nature and art.
Within the gallery a minimal material palette of concrete and timber provides a setting that art works can engage with. Large flexible spaces are paired with small, intimate and idiosyncratic spaces.
- Traditional Custodians Gadigal people of the Eora Nation
- Location Chippendale NSW
- Collaborators Wardle (gallery) and Durbach Block Jaggers (performance space)
- Client Judith Neilson
- Year 2014–2019
- Status Complete
- Levels 5 floors
- Floor area 1,185m2
- Selected awards
- Harry Seidler Award for Commercial Architecture, AIA National Architecture Awards, 2020
- Emil Sodersten Award for Interior Architecture, AIA National Architecture Awards, 2020
- NSW Architecture Medallion, AIA New South Wales Architecture Awards, 2020
- Bibliography
- Artichoke
- ArchitectureAU
- Architectural Record
What is certain has been imagined. More importantly, ‘what is uncertain’ has also been allowed to emerge, and in this space alone, exists enormous architectural potential and the possibility for real design excellence.
Jury Citation - Sir Arthur G. Stephenson Award for Commercial Architecture
Phoenix is a project that confers on our profession a certain hope; that latent in our culture is something important to the human condition and architecture might be the medium to express it.
Jury Citation - NSW Architecture Medallion
