If you enjoy architecture and don’t mind twenty-four hours of travel, we’d suggest a trip to Melbourne sometime soon. Right now, Australia’s second largest city is experiencing a huge wave of large-scale development, with a new skyscraper seemingly under construction on every block in the CBD. We saw a bunch of cool new buildings on our trip, but our favorite was located in Saint Kilda, a suburb about five kilometers from downtown.
We first noticed this building from a distance, only getting a partial view but immediately recognizing it as something different.
Later that day, we got a complete look at this building, which is located at 6 St Kilda Rd. and called the Icon St Kilda. As you can see, it’s like nothing we have in Philadelphia.
The eighteen-story residential building was developed last year by Pace Development Group, with design work by Jackson Clements Burrows Architects. Artist Matthew Johnson was also involved in the project, providing input into the building’s unique color palette. The property includes 1, 2, and 3 bedroom units, with prices ranging from $350K for a one-bedroom unit to $660K for a three-bedroom unit. Amenities include parking, an onsite gym, a lounge, a building dining room, and a cafe on the first floor. Also, people who live here will be able to brag that they live in the coolest looking building, like ever.
Regarding the design, the architect Tim Jackson said that they “saw the opportunity for each different box to represent a different neighborhood within the building, and each box has its own color representation… that’s really about giving identity to what we imagine could be different communities within the building, so it was a way of thinking about an apartment building not just as a single entity but as a collection of communities.” We were more thinking legos or colorful stacked storage containers, but that sounds good too.
What do you think about this building? Love it? Hate it? Could something like it ever appear on the Philadelphia skyline? Or are we too conservative to see something like this get built ’round these parts?