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Media House, Melbourne
Media House
Docklands, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Fairfax’s head office is located on the edge of Melbourne’s Docklands. The project accommodates all of The Age editorial staff in a single state-of-the-art facility; the building is home to an expanding group of Fairfax media holdings in print, broadcast and on-line formats. The site, on the corner of Collins and Spencer Streets, is the 'hinge' between historic Melbourne—the City grid—and emerging Melbourne, the rapidly expanding Docklands district. Sited directly opposite Southern Cross Station, Media House occupies a similar Collins Street frontage.
The building’s low-rise linear form is accentuated by a generous north-facing colonnade that provides a covered public walkway along its length, allowing the buildings interior to be experienced from outside. At street level, the transparent ground floor is designed to work as an extension of the street, where the public can access The Age Gallery, The Age Shop and a café and plaza. The inclined plaza provides generously landscaped areas watered from underground tanks which use water recovered from the building’s roof. It ends in generous steps and ramps providing direct access to an indoor-outdoor café.
The building is an assembly of long, horizontal forms which reflect the linear flows of information within, as well as the dynamism of new media and even the familiar rolled form of the home-delivered newspaper, The Age.
Client
Fairfax Media Holdings
Area
16,600 sqm
Completion
2009
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