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Cloning Centre

Part 1 Project 2004
Alana Cooke
Marie-Henriette Desmourès
University of Melbourne | Australia
The Cloning Centre – a controversial building by nature referenced its function through implication and suggestion. Mediation between the inside and outside spaces was also carefully considered in an endeavour to meet the social and practical needs of the inhabitants while allowing a degree of communication and interaction with the public realm. Arrangement of the layered panels created a hierarchy of public and private spaces and allowed for varying degrees of transparency and concealment in relation to the screening of particular activities. At street level the façade folds inside the building envelope and thus delineates the public space.
Alana Cooke
Marie-Henriette Desmourès


This project is an elegant and sensitive response to the tensions inherent in the project. At ground level, a wall used as a register if local events invites people deep into the building as it folds in and around the exhibition space. The solidity of the wall is then contrasted with the upper level treatment, where layers of glass and timber screening to façade and atrium spaces give ambiguity to the private/public nature of the laboratories above.

Tutor(s)

2004
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