Brunswick Power Terminal Station/ Beca

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Text description provided by the designers. Brunswick Power Terminal Station lies around 5 km north east of Melbourne’s CBD within the residential area of Brunswick East Whilst the facility has been in operation on King Street since 1939, an upgrade was required to provide an alternate energy source to secure electrical power flow to the CBD and inner residential areas. Secret to the procedure was delivering a practical electrical setup whilst managing community expectation, incorporating into the adjacent sensitive Merri Creek corridor and improving visual amenity for the residential area.

Surrounding the site is a strong grid pattern street network of fine grain domestic developments bounded on the south by Alister Street and coarser grain larger built forms to the west on King Street.

The upgrade involved the installation of cutting edge electrical devices housed in architecturally treated structures. The twelve-metre domestic street frontages affected the new structures to reduce in scale by grading the exteriors into modules within the website. To reduce building bulk, visual mess and improve views through and around the website, the electrical infrastructure is housed indoors within the brand-new buildings which have been treated with screens, textured precast concrete panels and products designed to integrate them into the site landscaping and fencing treatments.

The rich palate of close-by materials, grid network and densely inhabited greenery supply an exceptional context affecting the style.