Victorian Pride Centre

This short-listed entry for the Victorian Pride Centre competition, designed in collaboration with BKK Architects, gives form to individuals and groups within a LGBTI+ community building. The building form reflects this solidarity: it presents as a solid exterior, but on closer inspection, is composed of a range of materials and opacities: concrete, perforated mesh, mirror and dichroic sheens. This project makes metaphors around light work hard — ideas around transparency, truth, multi-dimensionality, rainbows and its associated metaphors — which are revealed through moving through the building.

The filtering of light is emphasised and accentuated by the language of pleats in elevation and section. This rhythm, sometimes with mirrored surface, magnifies and reflects light. Seeing oneself in this spectrum, even if only for a moment, should be a proud moment, in seeing oneself as part of the building, and of the community. A grandstand (a return of the pleats) further accentuates the Fitzroy Street elevation by creating an elevated public space, which amplifies the performative aspects of the LGBTI+ community and connects to the civic theatre of Fitzroy Street. One can watch the street or watch each other with a sense of safety and celebration when the sun sets.

The discipline of architecture can be complicit in the essentialisation of space, in giving space fixed properties. This proposal is a material and spatial exploration of how architecture can thwart the exclusion, containment and division of identities and bodies.