YARDMASTERS
the railway yards.
McBride Charles Ryan's
Yardmasters building.
frame 1
Melbourne's •
rail yards and -^
city skyline. .
Ë.HûIÛQBMbL_aat|
7fi M itii v/fiiir,ii?T
H°Z Viewotthe
north-wcslem
comer of the
building, with
a glimpse of
Southern Cross
Station at right.
N''3 The building
is constrained on all
sides by rail tracks,
with primary access
via a stair from the
service tunnels
below.
N^i rhe utilitarian
spaces within are
conventionally
partitioned and
can be reconfigured
as required.
A large black rectangle looms beyond the end of platform
n five at Melbourne's Southern Cross Station, From inside tbe
station on a dull grey afternoon, it looked as if the light-sucking
monolith from 2ooí.'>lSpaceOííj)ssev had landed. There is an
alien in the rail yards.
Moored in a sea of railway tracks, the Yardmasters building
shares a few of tbe traits of Victorian-era railway signal boxes
- it is tall and skinny with elevated wraparound windows. But
that's about it. Architects McBride Charles Ryan (MCR) wanted
commuters to ask, "What tbe bell is it?" and by my small
sampling of opinions, they're successful.
What is it? It is a four-storey building used by signal people,
train drivers, train cleaners and repairers. They share a gym, an
eating area and a need to be close to tbe tracks. The Yardmasters
is constrained on all sides by track and can only be entered from
a stair emerging from tbe service tunnels beneath.
MCR was approached after someone at Southern Cross saw
its striped Templestowe school, a building tbat provides mucb
external bang for buck. Tbey were expecting a "glorious" tin sbed
at Southern Cross, but MCR gave them something more. They
argued for tilt-up Tbermomass panels, which can be assembled
very quickly, are robust and include insulation within tbe concrete
sandwich. Ultrafloor prestressed beams were used for tbe floors.
Ease and speed of erection were critically important to the cost
of the building, due to the high-risk location and the four-hour,
late-night construction timeslots. This job c¿dled project arcbitect
Drew Williamson out of bed regularly for 2 AM site inspections.
The panel design was parametrically aided so that the
dimensions, weights and patterns could be adjusted to the
optimum configuration. Trucks from the precaster in Adelaide
could carry up to twenty-five tonnes, so to get two adjacent panels
onto each truck, their weights had to be coordinated by altering
the thickness of tbe external relief. The fabrication was made
more efficient through the use of a template that could be used
for all panels, but it was still trickier than anyone imagined.
The spaces inside are utilitarian and conventionally
partitioned. The building will no doubt be carved up differently
as people and needs change. MCR took this as a given and
treated tbe building as a simple shell for ever-changing uses.
They have provided each space with at least one treat that will
remain, an "amazing aperture". The royal purple corridor walls
should also survive any replanning. "We wanted to give it some
richness even though we knew there was a lot we couldn't
touch," Colour restrictions were stringent inside and out, as
railway workers could not confuse a colourful glimpse of the
building with a track signal. The entire building uses a palette
of white, dark charcoal and purple. Given the predominance of
blokes in the building, and about.com's rating of purple as the
least favourite colour of blokes, they may have taken a cheeky
risk here. But there has been no negative feedback to date.
The purple-lined innards reinforce the building's intended
likeness to an exotic jewellery box. The architects entertained
many forms before arriving at the box. Early versions were far
less simple and attempted to connect over tracks to the platforms.
This wasn't working for Southern Cross so the building was
detached and adopted a more traditional signal box form. The
resulting shape and proportion of the Yardmasters is quite close
to the Basel Signal Box by Herzog and de Meuron (i 997). The
two buildings had a similar set of constraints, resulting in a
similar, unusual proportion made more obvious by the exposure
of both buildings. "You get the proportion and maybe the strategy
for dealing with the outside. It becomes not just building, not just
box, it's a kind of anti-building in a way. If they hadn't done that,
whether we could have done this, I don't know."
The dense horizontal window fins of the Basel box confuse
the scale of the building and trigger a moiré pattern from certain
angles, at least when photographed, Yardmasters has a pattern
too - imprinted onto the precast tilt-up slabs. Rather than moiré,
this is Moorish. So how did an old Moroccan tile pattern come to
land in a Melbourne rail yard?
MCR chose the ten-pointed star because tbey liked it, it would
use a minimum number of moulds and it satisfied their search for
a regular relief pattern that would accommodate irregular window
shapes. Some quick research uneartbs that the ten-pointed star
does not tessellate well due to the pentagon at its core. It produces
some awkward shapes at its boundaries, either double pentagons or
mutant stars. Perhaps this irregular regularity appealed. The pattern
may have fitted the brief, but it brings witb it a cultural load which
can't be ignored. I asked MCR how they felt about borrowing a
pattern from another culture, and whether it carries any meaning,
"We did it at the height of the Iraq war, so it's inevitably
political, although that's not the prime motivation for us. We're
an inclusive country, and we can explore these patterns. But, the
reason is primarily aesthetic, we love the geometry and the play
of the random versus the ordered. But also I think we wanted that
sense of mystery, that sense of foreignness. There is a tiny Moorish
tradition which we are happy to be a part of. You can't do it and not
look like it's political, but we were comfortable enough doing it,"
The tiny Moorish tradition referred to is the flourish of
exotic Melbourne buildings in the early twentieth century, most
notably the recently demolished Eastern Arcade and the Forum
Theatre (John Eberson in association with Bohringer, Taylor
and Johnson, t928). The Forum apparently includes the same
tessellation within its Spanish fantasy land.
Whether the pattern used by MCR was sourced from Owen
[ones' Grammar of Ornament, a precast forms book, or 1920s
atmospheric theatres, I have some difficulty with the way it is
being incorporated at the Yardmasters. The architects are using
the design for its beauty and geometric qualities, but also for its
frisson, its contribution to tbe building's moody foreignness.
The latter is problematic - is it really being culturally inclusive
to borrow an Islamic pattern to heighten a building's otherness?
Maybe tbis is a discussion tbat is irrelevant to most on the
ground. It is an unapproachable building fleetingly visible to
train users and people milling around Etibad Stadium. While
I was writing this I received a text from a friend at a game. "Al
docklands footy, half-time looking at the yardmasters huilding
... It's a cracker I reckon." A hidden cracker of a jewellery box it
is. Or a tissue box, if you listen to the workers there.
I^terjohnsis director of Antarctica and Butterpaper.com.
79
1 Entry
2 Sljndbyroom
3 Maintenance
workshup and
store room
i Lockers
5 Laundry
6 Train cleaning
store
7 Office
8 Drivers store
9 Commsroom
ID Gym
11 Maietockers
12 Female lockers
13 Conference
room
U Lobby
15 Drivers roster
sign on area
16 Meals
H°^ The north
elevation, with
wraparound
windows on the
third floor and
access to the
maintenance
workshop and store
at ground level.
N^ B The stairwell
seen from the third
lloor landing.
N°7 View north
from office space
on the third floor.
The angularity of
the windows is
determined by the
patterning of the
exterior walls.
FLOOR
1:400
Ary
AMY
1 <
X
: :S
>^V
ii
{i
Ir
i T :
Ai]
WEST ELEVATION
1:400
SOUTH ELEVATION
SECOND FLOOR
1:400
THIRO FLOOR
1:400
PANEL OETAILS
80 AA 3IJLVAUGUST ?Oin
THE ïflRDMAETERS
BUILDING
Architect
McBride Charles
Ryan—project team
Roben McBride,
Debbie Ryan, Drew
Williamson. Andrew
Hayne. Michelle
[ames, Fang Cheah,
Angela Wüda. David
Fraser, Scot I Crowe,
lohanna Brun ne r.
Strurtmal rnn.