Rockwall Bar And Grill
ROCKWALL BAR & GRILL
Dock4 Architecture
ARCHITECTS
Dock4 Architecture
BUILDER
Moxy
COLLABORATOR
Richard Loney
ENGINEERING
Aldanmark Consulting Engineers
PRINCIPLE
Stephen Geason
PHOTOGRAPHS
Jonathan Wherrett
PROJECT BUDGET
$200,000
LOCATION
Salamanca Pl, Hobart TAS 7000, Australia
CATEGORY
Restaurant
Text description provided by architect.
Many of the restaurants at Salamanca project their clientele onto the promenade, utilizing them as a vital façade (through generous glazing and street tables).
Rockwall inverts this process. With a small street presence, its entrance compresses space, with projecting bar, kitchen and services.
Accepting its long, narrow proportions, it excavates haven like spaces from the depths of the building, animating space through percolative natural and synthesised light and sculpted acoustics.
These unearth space from the rich narratives of its historic materiality.
Riveted iron columns and beams, insertions of the Machine Age, frame original, eroded, un-renovated sandstone walls.
Blue natural light filters through a glazed light well, spilling through primeval ferns, onto fresh ground sandstone flags.
This paving arrived as ships ballast, from some mysterious foreign source, in an era when the front door and the dock coincided.
The hard surfaces of this space reflect a bright and vital soundscape that expands social ambience.
