Iconic?

During my years working with Archidiom I had the pleasure of doing a project for Surfers Paradise Surf Lifesaving Club, at the time the Gold Coast had tremendous architecture in the form of highrise buildings but it lacked a purely iconic, sculptural, here I am type of building.

High Rise buildings are amazing, they are a testament of engineering and design conquering the heights of a city; However the true form of a highrise can only be perceived from a far, is only at podium level where the human scale can be tangible against a building without going out of frame. That’s why Sydney’s opera house is so successful, is isolated with no taller buildings around, you can walk to it, around it and touch it!, then you have the sculptural shape of the sails, brilliant then, still brilliant today.

This Jetsonian design is by no means to be compared with SOH, but it is an intent, a message to the planners and local government that a city needs identity, something to put on a postcard, a place to be remembered by, something iconic.

This was our response at the time, a surf lifesaving tower inspired by Calatrava and Niemeyer right here in the centre of our beloved Gold Coast.