Architect Michael Angus decided Austral Bricks' Terracade was the best option for the façade of two townhouses fronting onto the Elwood Canal in Melbourne, despite not previously using the product.
The project was set on a tight triangular site and the upper levels of the townhouses were set back due to a prominent location.
The buildings are both three-stories high, with the garage on the ground floor, living areas on the first and bed rooms on the second floor. The struc ture is predominantly steel, with a slab on the ground, suspended slab at the first floor level and a timber floor above.
Angus considered a number of other products for the project — zinc panels were too expensive, corrugated steel seemed too industrial and lower-grade alternatives such as rendered foam or blueboard were “too cheap looking”. He eventually decided Terracade — a terracotta façade system — would be the most suitable, considering the shape of the façade and his desire to add geometry and texture to it.
“We were looking for quite a good quality, lightweight product on the façade,” Angus says. “The difficulty we had was that the building steps back progressively at each level and we couldn't use masonry construction on the upper levels because it would have been too costly to build and to set the walls back, so we wanted to use a product that was lightweight and which we could build to a curve.”
One of the key difficulties faced by Angus and the builders was the triangular shape of the site, which made optimising space difficult. Rather than having acute, abrupt angles in the corners, Angus designed curves into the design to increase the amount of space inside the townhouses.
“We've got a curved roof meeting a curved wall, which was interesting geometry. So what actually started as a bit of a constraint on the site, with the difficult nature of the triangle, actually became a bit of a design opportunity for us,” he says.
The buildings’ curved shapes are a series of straight faceted sections of wall. Two or three Terracade tiles were laid on a flat surface and then the angle of the building was changed and more tiles laid, creating the curved effect.
According to builder Jim Oosterweghel, who also hadn't used Terracade before, around 300 sqm of Terracade TN in Gibson was used on the upper levels of the townhouses.
To install the product in the project, the tiles were located on rails fastened to timber frames and ‘clicked’ into place rather than glued.
“The product is a bit like a roof tile in effect ... Instead of having grooves or a profile like a roof tile, it's flat on the surface and it's meant to be butted together and hang on from horizontal battens,” Angus says. “It has some grooves on the back which clip onto furring channels and it is held in place by its own weight and gravity, so it doesn't need any gluing or mechanical fixing.”
Suited to projects with strict, regular grids, Terracade gave Angus’ more texture to the façade. It also minimised the number of tiles that needed to be cut, with cuttings only required where the façade met the angled roof.
“I think it would be quite difficult to use if you didn't have a regular grid to put it on. If you were cutting tiles everywhere and cutting around lots of openings it would be quite messy,” he says. “It does require a fairly rigid grid or module to plan on, but when you get it right it really works well.”
However, Angus warns you must be prepared to design the façade, the spacing, windows and openings according to the tile grid — otherwise “you're going to create something that's going to be quite messy visually”.
Danielle Bowling
