| The following text and images are courtesy Cassandra Complex for their Chameleon project, "an inner-city residential warehouse conversion over three levels for a couple." Click
on images for larger color views.
This project was indelibly influenced by its constrained context (physically, an internal space) conceptually (a private home) – it has restricted potential in a public sense. The site is a turn of the century industrial warehouse in a homogenous strip of six. It is located just north of the Queen Victoria Market, in a mixed use area. There is a Lexus Showroom, “a Junk Shop”, many developer driven menageries, and on market days the carparks are bread for the seagulls. There seems to be a lot of rubbish lying around often. Even the warehouse appears as a kind of “discarded object” and is only salvaged and transformed due to current market trends. It sits hard up against the street metaphorically interpreting Walter Benjamin’s suggestion of culture being most dynamic when the veil is thinnest. There is no threshold here, no front yard. Thus a secondary internal veil was installed by way of a perforated gold door. It was formerly Davies Auto electrical and originally the “Allens Sweet Factory”. The new door suggests the beginning of a reimagined history embedded within the discarded object. The glowing core too, is visible from the street.
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