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Specifier Magazine Issue 79

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  Karool House

  Hugh Gordon Architect

  Michelago, ACT

  
  

  Straw. It has covered the roofs of mediaeval cottages and quintessential Dutch windmills. Livestock eat it. Van Gogh painted stacks of it. One of the three little pigs chose it as a building material, albeit with disappointing results. It certainly doesn’t come to mind as the building material of the future. But for this home, nestled in the hills near Michelago in the Australian Capital Territory, straw is the key to ecosuccess, or at least one of them.

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  Tugun Residence

  Fairweather Proberts Architects

  Tugun, Gold Coast

  
  

  Fairweather Proberts’ Tugun Residence, recently commended by RAIA, was designed for a deadline. The client was involved in the construction industry and had resources on hand to build.

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  St Canice Residence

  Preston Lane Architects, Hobart
  
  This story begins in the 1920s, with an unassuming house on St Canice Avenue in Sandy Bay, five minutes from the heart of Hobart. When this modest home needed an extra room, an extra room was tacked on; until, like so many interwar homes, the St Canice Residence was entombed by decades of ad hoc alterations, transformed into a unplanned collection of disjointed rooms and convoluted spaces. Enter Preston Lane Architects. read more »
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  Mosque for Many Cultures

  Singapore is famous for its cultural, ethnic and religious diversity. It is home to Singaporeans of Malay, Chinese, Indian and Eurasion backgrounds, and is one of the world's truly multi-faith countries, encompassing Islam and Christianity, Taoism and Buddhism, Sikhism, Hinduism and Baha'i. The design of the Assyafaah mosque is imbued with this sense of complexity. read more »
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  Carriage Works

  The Eveleigh Rail Workshop was a glamour project of the 1880s. Tonkin Zulaikha Greer's acclaimed rebirthing of the old carriage workshop makes a few modern insertions while retaining sweeping perspectives of its massive industrial volume. read more »
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  The Commune

  THE "Commune by the Great Wall" signalled a resurgence of confidence in Chinese and Asian architecture at a time when Western names (Koolhaas, Holl, Foster, Andreu, Herzog & de Meuron) were being awarded control over many of Beijing's status projects. It won a Silver Lion at the 2002 architectural Biennale in Venice, and cemented the careers of two unlikely Chinese architectural heroes. read more »
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  The Great Indoors Awards

  The Great Indoors Awards aspire to shape their discipline. At once promotion and pedagogy, they aim to combat a certain listlessness in interior design, a sense that the discipline is not yet "mature" and that its glamour and influence fall short of the neighbouring disciplines of architecture and product design. read more »
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  Explosive Talent

  Chinese-American artist Cai Guo-Qiang wants to "fill museums with the power of an explosion". read more »
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  Design DNA

  Lyons' award-winning John Curtin School of Medical Research at ANU is inscribed with scientific symbolism and twists like a DNA molecule. read more »