Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) School of Drama

The completion of Edmond & Corrigan's design for the Victorian College of the Arts new Drama Centre marked an important contribution to the cultural fabric of Melbourne. The project extends upon Peter Corrigan's pursuit of an 'architecture of ideas' and is intended to inspire hope and possibility for a good society. The façade of the building is loaded with social, ideological and political symbolism and through its imagery; the VCA talks of theatre - its circumstances, transgressive social role, processes and making. The expressive motifs of this design can be seen through its resistance to the closure of form and the complexity of its arrangement; all constructed upon an engagement with American pluralist post-modernism which forms an ongoing reference for the practice's research. The project also continues Corrigan's preoccupation with the notion of Brechtian street theatre and an engagement to Australian Rules football with reference to the areas historical sporting grandstands. The building's balcony deck use, denied in RMIT's Building 8 but possible at the VCA, is celebrated in the front elevation. The Grant Street front has six balconies, entered on separate floors and with different entries. These balconies are for resting, viewing and calling out into the street, behind balustrades in perforated steel, parti-coloured and shaped like clusters of clouds. The project was critically assessed by Anna Johnson in Monument magazine (June/July 2003) and featured in the RAIA Gold Medal citation Award: National RAIA Gold Medal Award Winner in 2003, the Australian architecture profession's highest accolade.