QPAC New Performing Arts Venue

1. Enhance and Celebrate the Robin Gibson buildings through a quiet, dignified and sophisticated response.
2. Define an International Standard for theatre in Australia.
3. Poetic Simplicity – create a consistent, cohesive and distinctive design response.
4. Present a rational approach to budget, area and program.
5. Create an Urban Marker – a performance space of the city, transforming the idea of how culture is experienced + celebrated.
6. Create the Robin Gibson Plaza to ‘complete the vision’ for the QPAC precinct – a new city space for the city.

City Context

An urban marker located at the QLD Cultural Precinct & Southbank Parklands junction - a nexus between culture and recreation.

A Significant Corner

Grey Street is a principle city spine and address. The corner of Grey and Russell Streets signify a broader precinct, which forms a door to South Bank Parklands and within walking distance of the future Metro and new plaza on Melbourne Street. The urban grid establishes an order over the precinct.

Urban Grid & Regulating Lines

The urban grid and QPAC regulating lines order the form and define its urban setting. The resultant cantilever for the extended foyer defines a unique gateway to the Cultural Precinct.

Apertures Between Fly-Towers

The Cultural Centre complex is an important urban element within the city. The landscaped low-rise urban form punctuates and marks out the river edge within the city Centre creating a unique legibility within the city as a whole. Building apertures created by the separation of the QPAC fly towers, are recognised and maintained.

Extension of the Cultural Forecourt

Russell Street is pedestrianised and footpaths on Grey Street are widened. Plaza width is maximised to create a 'street foyer' - a key city space. Russell Street Plaza extends the Cultural Forecourt - completing the Gibson vision of a building in the landscape.

The new theatre will belong to the family of Gibson buildings that occupy this important precinct and will complete the QPAC building with a sensitive and surgical intervention that reinterprets the Gibson building language in detail at varying scales.

The public realm that foregrounds the new theatre is an essential element to knit the theatre into the city to make an engaging and welcoming place that is permeable, porous and connected.

The entire Cultural Centre precinct has such a profound sense of order in material, form, and detail, that demonstrates a desire to make a distinctive and memorable place within the city. The scale and ambition of this architectural idea are enhanced and celebrated in our proposition.

Our desire was not to replicate the Gibson building language; but to playfully reinterpret it and make spaces specifically attuned to their place in the street.

The regularly rhythm is shifted to a musical rhythm informed by the quality of the spaces and also the unique structural demands of the cantilevers predicated by the use of the air space over public spaces.

The materiality and language of the KIRK+KHA+NPAV proposal is informed and guided by the QPAC Gibson buildings, with a contemporary understanding of technology and climate. We propose a singularity of material that enables the building to be seen as an object in the round, and also used through the exterior and interior - further reinforcing the idea there is no hierarchy between inside and outside.

Subtropical buildings prefer deeply articulated, self-shading forms and non-reflective materials that rely upon thermal mass for cooling and high-density shading systems to reject the solar radiation. The use of materials such as stone, bronze and ceramic in their natural state provides a palette that will heavily inform the new building’s materiality while referencing the material and spatial quality of Gibson's vision. We propose to use these materials in a contemporary manner, challenging preconceptions around their utilisation.