Building 13, Dairy Road Industrious Neighbourhood

2022–

Building 13 is the first building to be constructed as part of the Industrious Neighbourhood at Dairy Road – a strategic plan for an area on the industrial fringe of Canberra, Australia that Assemble is working on.

Model by Assemble and JAM

Building 13 will enable a range of work and types of occupation over its lifetime. Public uses on the ground and first floors will take advantage of the views out onto the on-site wetland and the wider wetland landscape beyond.

Image by Assemble and EllEll Architects

Above that, five storeys of workspace with generous floor to ceiling heights will allow space for creative and cultural tenants alongside more conventional office users.

The building is significantly more dense than its light industrial neighbours in adjacent Fyshwick, providing both the practical access that working buildings need whilst making large parts of the site available for public, planted spaces that support a mix of activities and create more varied, tempered environments.

Model by JAM, image ©JAM

The approach to the building, as with the Industrious Neighbourhood as a whole, is to make it economical and robust. Prioritising affordability and adaptability for tenants in order to enable a mix of uses within the building and across the site.

Model by JAM, image ©JAM

The building is an 8 storey concrete frame structure with precast concrete wall panels, strip glazing and a system of lightweight steel awnings configured differently depending on orientation.

Constructed from simple, standardised elements the awnings act as shading devices for the large-scale facades. The combination of expressive steel substructure, colourful oversized fixing plates and small variations in the projection of the awnings on the buildings different facades create an impression of lightness and variety and give a strong character to a simply constructed building.

©Ritchie Daffin

Drawing by JAM

Working with local precast concrete fabricators Precast Projects and the client, Molonglo, we are developing ways of manufacturing precast panels on site that use site spoil to reduce virgin aggregate use and use natural fibre reinforcement to reduce the quantities of steel reinforcement in the structure.

The mass of the concrete structure is employed as part of a more passive approach to the building's heating and cooling, while enabling a level of economy in the construction that is critical to creating a genuinely mixed group of tenants and businesses.

It will be situated at the North-West corner of the site, facing onto the Jerrabomberra Wetlands to the west and the rest of the development to its east. Along with buildings 12 and 11 it comprises the 'Wetland' plot of the Industrious Neighbourhood that are organised around a new constructed wetland that functions as both a cool, densely planted new public space and haven for wildlife whilst performing a practical function, filtering surface water before it is released back into Jerrabomberra Wetlands.