Ecca collection

Crown Metropol Hotel

Dark aluminium fins on the facade of the Crown Metropol Hotel in Melbourne, Australia play a vital but subtle role in giving a sense of excitement to a building that has to fit in a complex environment and also help define that environment. The sinuous 28-storey hotel is one of three on the city’s relatively new Crown Entertainment Complex. Sitting to one side of the complex, and linking to the entertainment facility and also to a congress centre, on one side it overlooks a relatively rundown area of small industry, ripe for regeneration.

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School Het Perron

Educational theories seem to be one of the fastest changing areas of modern life, as educators struggle to help young people fit themselves to our evolving and challenging world. How then can an architect design a building that will stand for at least 30 years, and accommodate change of which we have not even dreamed?

Images courtesy of ZEEP architecten Amersfoort, Sigrid Schaap, Mark van den Boorn

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ROC Carolus School

The first impression of the ROC Carolus building is deceptive, and deliberately so. Passers-by and visitors see a ‘crazy’ building, a fractured and playful facade, with irregularly polygonal windows breaking up the variety of shades of grey in the prepainted metal cladding that floats above a glazed ground floor. This cladding in turn has ‘fault lines’ along it, as if the whole could shatter in an instant. It takes a moment to realise that this is disguising the fact that the building in fact consists of relatively regular blocks joined by glazing. The overall assembly is largely rectilinear, but with one end curving to a point like the prow of a ship. Far from this being an example of unexplained exuberance, careful consideration has gone into making the facade, like the rest of the building, hard working and affordable.

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