Winning scheme for a new permanent civic pavilion on Sydney Harbour, Australia.
2020
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The pavilion is designed as a democratic gathering space under a landscape canopy and acts as a meeting place, a site for events, a memorable part of the city, and an oasis of tranquility.
The complex play of colonnades which comprise the building are formed from white concrete with integral Sydney rock oyster shells.
Completion: 2024
Credits, Images
© Besley Spresser
New national memorial in Canberra, Australia.
Completion: 2024
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The commission is the result of a national design competition win.
The Memorial is dedicated to Victims and Survivors of Institutional Child Sexual Abuse. It is one of a number of recommendations of an Australian Royal Commission. The Commission follows a pattern of revelations and reforms occuring worldwide about the abuse of children in institutions.
The Memorial is located next to the National Museum of Australia on Lake Burley Griffin, at the centre of Canberra.
The scheme consists of a series of catenary arches made of large pieces of solid cast glass with a meandering path encircling a meadow of perennial grasses and wildflowers. Rather than an object-monument, the Memorial is designed as a landscape to move through as well as a composition to behold from afar.
Thematically, the design seeks to hold in balance an acknowledgement of strength and vitality on the one hand, and recognition of trauma and loss on the other. The individual pieces of cast glass carry immense loads yet together create forms of grace and lightness. The memorial is designed to have a haunting beauty, to give emotional force to its purpose of institutional reform.
Credits, Images
© Besley Spresser
New house in Brisbane, Australia.
2020
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This is a house I designed for a member of my family in the foothills of Mount Coot-tha (“Honey Mountain”) in Australia. I became fascinated with the beautiful topography and wanted the house to spring directly from the rock of the old mountain.
The brickwork is monolithic, and speaks of solidity and permanence. Together with the concrete superstructure, the house is immensely heavy and cools by thermal mass.
A thin, long off-white brick was chosen and a matching mortar which spills from the horizontal joint giving a “corduroy” effect. The mortar catches the light and forms allegiances with landscape qualities. Some people have likened the surface to tree bark, or sedimentary rock.
Winner
Highly Commended
“The luscious oozing mortar of the masonry facades is delightful, as is the simple interior palette of concrete, ‘white’ and ‘timber’. The house is perfectly adapted to the ‘ancient and enigmatic landscape’ heavy from the outside and surprisingly light when you enter the living room situated in the canopy of the trees”
The Architectural Review, UK
Credits, Copyright
© Peter Besley
Photography
Rory Gardiner
Thanks to
Jessica Spresser, Andrew Furzeland, Max Blake
Winning competition entry for the new Iraqi parliamentary complex and related 50 Ha masterplan.
2013
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Winning international competition entry for new $1Bn Iraqi parliamentary complex and masterplan.
The scheme is approached as urban design and not as one architectural object, with the majority of the complex formed as a pattern of streets (indoor and outdoor), green courtyards, key landmark buildings, and plazas.
The Council of Representatives and Federal Council buildings use the hemicycle geometric form, allowing multi-party coalitions as well as point address by visiting heads of state. The proposed main circular building addresses its surroundings equally, with generous terraces behind monumental brise soleil where the public may look simultaneously down into the debating chambers and out across the city of Baghdad.
“A brave new vision for the country.”
The Guardian
"We selected as winner the entry that held the best promise to house the future parliament of a country with an ambition to create a genuinely open and participative democracy, in a city with one of the oldest urban civilisations."
Jury Chair and RIBA president
New purpose-built commercial building for the creative industries in London, UK.
Completed: 2021
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Designed in 2016-2018 along with the wider Design District masterplan. The building provides 1265 sqm of naturally lit and vented low-cost floor space for the creative industries at the heart of the District. A simple plan belies an architecturally complex relationship between the undulating walls, inclined roof, and rectilinear core. Wall undulations add internal bays to the open plan, with their openings cut as precise rectangles in the vertically reeded white facades. The meeting of the wall and roof geometries produces a playful eave line to the sky. The overall irregular form of the building expresses as a found object.
“Nicely designed, crisply detailed and very accomplished”
Architectural Review
Photography
Ståle Eriksen
© Peter Besley
House in Brisbane, Australia
2024 Under Construction
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The house takes the form of a string of objects and volumes, which emerge from the steep terrain. Moving between the various parts reveals different aspects of the spaces and the light.
A large volume to the rear is wrapped in tall reclaimed clay lattice-work, variously frayed and edited to allow a complex play of light to the interior. A double-height space houses a suspended personal library.
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Model
Kento Nagao, Jessica Spresser
Thanks to
Jessica Spresser, Elvis and Rose
Competition entry for a hilltop chapel in rural Rukomo, Rwanda.
2019
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Design for a pilgrimage chapel in a remote rural location in Rwanda. The proposal includes a thin radio tower which broadcasts services to the community and provides a guiding light to travelling pilgrims. The chapel is formed of local granite and rammed earth walls. A boat-like roof floats above on colonnades of flayed trunks of the local cedar species.
Credits, Copyright
© Besley Spresser
Masterplan for 16 buildings and associated public space for the creative industries in London UK.
2021
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Work first began on this project in 2014 as part of a much larger urban design for Greenwich Peninsula in London by Allies and Morrison. In that work was proposed a central cluster of 16 buildings for the creative industries which would be set-piece works by quality architects. The district was designed to be a cluster of new London courtyards and lanes where people might find themselves “enjoyably lost”. It would also be a place of production not consumption, be public, and have many voices - not just single-origin design.
I led the design from inception onwards through the many years and stages such complex urban work entails. Part of this was nominating and coordinating the work of eight other architects, as well as designing one of the buildings, “Building C3”.
Construction of the district was completed in 2021.
© Peter Besley
Credits
Knight Dragon, Allies and Morrison
Barozzi Veiga, Mole, Selgas Cano, Architecture 00, Shultze+Grassov, 6a, Assemblage, Adam Khan, David Kohn
Urban plan and new institutional buildings for the Holy City of Kadhimiya, Iraq.
2009
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This is a masterplan for Kadhimiya which I designed in the first of a series of works in Iraq from 2008 to 2013. I was fortunate to journey to Kadhimiya several times, including during the great pilgrimage.
The scheme proposes a long list of architectural, infrastructure and landscape interventions, and has now been adopted. Some are large, involving a new rail station, theological college, a large new mosque, and dining hall for 10,000 people. However others are small at the level of the courtyard, house and pocket-park. One urban element, sometimes a wall, sometimes a complex building, encircles and filters movement to the shrine. The scheme carefully protects and supports the existing ancient medina.
© Peter Besley
New urban plan for Mayfair, London.
2020
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This project included a detailed urban survey and set of proposals for the area of Mayfair in London. The proposals include a new pedestrian route on the course of the Tyburn stream, and realignment of Park Lane to create a generous pedestrian boulevard to Hyde Park (courtesy also to Liam Hennessy’s work on this). I led the project at Assemblage to submission to Westminster Council where it has been duly adopted. Like all urban design, it will now embark on a longer journey of implementation, and the further refinements and development which comes with this.
© Peter Besley
Thanks to
Oliver Wright, Lachlan Mctaggart
Montages
© Liam Hennessy Architect
Four new 2-bed townhouses in London, UK.
2019
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This is a scheme for a sequence of four townhouses in Greenwich. The houses form a small family of buildings tucked away in the middle of a leafy urban block. The bases of the houses are expressed as heavy masonry plinth, which also “unwinds” to create garden walls. The bedrooms with intimate private terraces appear as dark timber roof forms above.
© Peter Besley
Photography
© Ståle Eriksen
New house on a river-front site in Brisbane, Australia.
2020
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This house contrasts a sense of solidity on the exterior with a light and lofty interior. The white masonry skin is built up in layers like sediment, with alternate offset courses which catch the strong sunlight and create lines of deep shadows beneath.
Projecting planters provide unexpected and enjoyable moments of landscape at high level.
Credits, Copyright
© Peter Besley, Jessica Spresser
House in Seven Hills, Brisbane, Australia
1993
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This house was originally designed as a communal dwelling for students of a local art college, but has also been been cherished and lived in by friends and relatives of the owning family for many years.
A steep site allows a position high up in the tree canopy, with the four bedrooms occupying different positions and aspect. Circulation is external via generous common areas. The house is almost invisible from the street and has the feel of a hidden oasis, like a beach house or a dwelling in a forest.
Construction is of Red Ironbark eucalypt hardwood with solid copper detailing.
Construction
Steven Godstone, Tony Eichmann, Peter Besley, Glenn Thompson
Photography
© Rory Gardiner
Winning UN competition entry new 5000 person settlements in Iraq.
2011
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Winning entry for an international competition by the United Nations for new 5000 person settlements in Iraq. The competition aimed to radically raise the quality of new housing districts for Iraq’s relatively young and growing population.
This project is related to other projects in Iraq such as Kadhimiya, as well as comparative studies with proposals by others and their progress in Qatar.
This scheme inverts the standard “estate” layout, keeping vehicles to the perimeter and provides a generous pedestrian landscaped spine connecting all sub-districts and social infrastructure such as schools, souq, administration, playing fields and mosque. Dwellings are typically apartments with generous plans and ceiling heights in three and four storey buildings with dark cool lightwells and shaded external spaces. Cost of construction was kept low by using limited plan types (which we designed) and rotating and combining these to create a great variety of narrow lanes, streets, and common courtyards. We experimented with ICF construction and proposed a system of producing wall forms in situ, greatly reducing cost.
Further to the UN’s intention, the scheme struck a balance between being particular yet also general to enable significant mutation and adaptation to service other sites in central and southern Iraq.
© Peter Besley
Urban study and proposals for Thamesmead, London UK.
2009
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This project was for an urban study and set of policy proposals for the district of Thamesmead in London UK. The site is large and neglected, containing the social housing, prisons, sewerage works, power plants, and waste stations which cities the world over put in places “where the eye does not see”. A stalled concrete modernist housing project on the site was used by Kubrick in A Clockwork Orange.
I led the project at Assemblage along with dozens of such projects focussing on urban repair and renewal. It is often thankless work with many stakeholders and unclear outcomes. Gains are also fragile, and can be vulnerable to political expediency and short-term developer gain. When breakthroughs do occur however and change propagates widely and deeply the work feels justified.
This particular project was another reminder of the power of connectivity. Areas of Thamesmead had some of the lowest levels of transport accessibility in London. The proposal brought new multi-modal connectivity deep into the heart of the district allowing investment and movement of people to flow. From there, other projects became possible and sustainable (buildings, landscape, social infrastructure) re-radiating in turn to the surrounding community and the localised urban grain that supports them.
I was fascinated to discover on the site an extensive canal and lake system little known outside the district. These water courses had become overgrown and picturesque over time. They provided the springboard for a proposed new pedestrian and landscape network covering the entire district.
Thanks to
Tom Smith
Credits
Assemblage
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