Miya II

Miya  is a mixed use development in Fitzroy incorporating apartments, townhouses, office space and a café.  The principle achievements of this project are a high level of individual amenity to the apartments and a disciplined approach to the building as a collection of large forms.  The building is arranged as barbell in plan to maximize surface area and provide generous garden areas to the west and east of the site thus every habitable room has good access to natural light, ventilation and an aspect to either garden or street.  The long site has two street frontages with distinct heritage characters, therefore the building must be responsive to disparate contexts whilst maintaining a cohesive singular expression.  

The building is arranged as barbell in plan to maximize surface area and provide generous garden areas to the west and east of the site thus every habitable room has good access to natural light, ventilation and an aspect to either garden or street.  The long site has two street frontages with distinct heritage characters, therefore the building must be responsive to disparate contexts whilst maintaining a cohesive singular expression.

Beyond the requirement to meet yield targets and respond to planning and heritage constraints, our interest has been to make a building which manages scale and the repetitive program in such a way that the forms remain strong and handsome.  This is managed through composing the external elements of the building – balconies, windows and walls – within an overall compositional logic.  The approach effectively de-scales the forms so that the building can be experienced as a series of elegant entities rather than a hectic agglomeration of individual dwellings.