The Icon – St Kilda

This 17-storey apartment building design by JCB is located in a prominent position at St Kilda Junction Melbourne, at a busy intersection. Skirted by an eclectic mix of medium and high-rise buildings, street signs and billboards, the site is best described as an area to “drive through”, a gateway to St Kilda and Melbourne’s bayside suburbs.

While the formal composition of The Icon recalls a child playing with building blocks for the first time, it is in fact a highly considered assemblage of irregularly stacked boxes. The varied heights of the boxes provide an abstract connection between the building and its surrounding built context within this highly urbanised setting.

The expanded mesh façade, a collaboration between JCB and artist Matthew Johnson, comprises 40 different colours. Conceived as a “living skin”, the façade creates a moving dynamic when activated by the occupants while its translucent veil reveals the building envelope and living spaces behind.

The resulting pattern suggests a collection of communities, a stack of color-coded individual ‘neighborhoods’, each being identifiable from a distance. This sense of urban community is also fostered through the inclusion of a generous communal space which breaks out to an open deck overlooking the parks and bay beyond.

The apartments have a 6-star energy rating with environmental features including operable shutters to filter the sunlight and individual waste chutes for recycled and general waste.