Chadstone Fulfils Gandel's Vision

The Sunday Age

Sunday May 14, 2000

CHADSTONE'S architecture sets new standards for shopping centre design in Australia.

Recent expansions, the work of the Melbourne-based Buchan Group in collaboration with RTKL, one of the most influential architectural firms in the US, carry retail into the computer age.

Complicated computer modelling was employed even for some of the floor tiling, and concept planning of the project occupied the designers for four years, with detailed planning taking two and a half years.

Commissioned by the centre's owner, the Gandel Group, at a cost of $150 million, the updating adds 28,000 square metres to Melbourne's original multi-tenant shopping centre.

Developer and owner John Gandel sees his Chadstone as a world leader. Within two years he expects it will become Australia's highest retail turnover centre.

Much of the Gandel team's confidence is based on Chadstone's user-friendly architecture, which starts in the car parks. Gandel travelled overseas on more than one occasion just to investigate car-park design.

He chose long-span design, more expensive than conventional, but, at Chadstone, it works the way he intended, increasing traffic flow in and out and placing customers closer to the entrances.

The idea, he has said, is to enable shoppers to identify the entrance the moment they drive in. Car parks are built within the landscaping, which has been deliberately understated by the design team. But each level provides both a way in and a way out, this multiple ingress and egress, reducing parking frustration.

Bruce Sharp, a director of the Buchan Group, and the architect in charge of overseeing the Chadstone redevelopment, says the work ``takes shopping-centre design to the highest levels in the country".

The curved, vaulted steel and glass ceiling over the centre's retail fashion galleria illustrates his confidence. But without current computer-aided design technology, it would have hardly been possible to build it.

The roof's fabricated parts of glass and tubular steel needed to be manufactured to the tightest of tolerances due to the curving sweep of the mall's shape. The galleria roof is built without supporting trusses and without columns. Complicated floor tiling patterns also called for extreme precision, again assisted by computer, and almost by accident. Paving in the courts follows a radial pattern of black, red and amber granite. When RTKL modelled the patterning on computer, it was found that when sunlight came through the spiral glass structure above it, a desirable basketweave design emerged from the shadows cast.

Interior elements throughout the centre's expanded areas, although minimalist in many respects, brought a classic elegance to the retail areas. Store facades were clad with French limestone, and two 14-metre high sculptures of bronze, stone, and cascading water were commissioned.

Other design features shoppers will have noticed include ``knuckle" courts at either end of the glass wave-form roof. Each features five columns supporting a spiral of glass.

``The Gandel Trust was very specific about the requirement to set Chadstone, apart from other shopping centres," Bruce Sharp said. ``The objective produced an incredible design challenge for all architects working on the project. The unique shapes and the differing levels of the site created enormous headaches. But we are proud to have overcome them." Stages 20 and 21 of the centre's redevelopment were completed in November, and included a new Myer store, new David Jones store, a nine-cinema complex, a new ten-pin bowling rink, and 200 extra car parking spaces.

The scale of the works required excavation of 650,000 cubic metres of ground, 65,000 cubic metres of concrete placed, 4000 tonnes of structural steel, 1500 individual pieces of glass to the main barrel vault ceiling alone, and more than 2000 precast concrete panels.

The result is a centre of about 120,000 square metres, including a three-level Myer store of 21,000 square metres, David Jones with 26,500, plus a Coles supermarket, Bilo, Target, Country Road, Lincraft, Toys R Us and Priceline alongside some 400 smaller retailers.