Amid the recent flurry of often unremarkable architecture at various stages of construction in Melbourne, it is unusual that a project shows signs of becoming a unique design statement.

According to Ashton Raggatt Mcdougall’s (ARM) website, since 1986 the firm has produced design and analytical projects in architecture, urbanism, landscape and interior design. Designed in 2005, the 1001 seat Melbourne Recital Centre and 500 seat MTC Theatre is a project to be co-located within Melbourne’s Southbank Arts Precinct. The two buildings have been designed to have separate yet complimentary identities, together creating a distinctive new civic space (whatever that statement is supposed to mean).

ARM is a firm that polarises the community – some love their work while others don’t.
What attracts one to ARM’s enterprizes is that it makes an individual design statement. Their buildings just don’t anonymously grow behind a street construction hoarding. Underneath the cover of scaffold and protective coatings, strange shapes, objects, finishes and even girders protrude, bubble and bulge. One observing an ARM site feels like they are observing a new type of cake rising in a metaphorical oven.

Over the months one has keenly watched this site. One has no idea what this structure will mean to the precinct until it is real, until it is completed. All one can say is that it will either thrill or it will disappoint. The studio has been keen to capture this project during it’s construction, as once it is completed the memory of the construction phase will be long forgotten. These images were captured on way to the NGV International with a mobile telephone camera – apologies for the image quality never-the-less they document the site.