Our approach to architectural practice is summed up simply.
Making things better | Making better things
If you are passionate about generating positive social and environmental impacts, we’re a great match.
We’re known for our ability to develop imaginative and pragmatic solutions to our clients’ and society’s real problems. We bring agility, responsiveness and genuine expertise.
When you work with us, you get highly experienced architects who seek to understand your business objectives and respond with meaningful, thought-provoking and commercially astute design solutions.
We are passionate about connecting design more directly with construction – this is a continuing area of learning and development. We’re also proactive researchers. We have strong in house R&D capabilities and aren’t afraid of forming innovative partnerships that enhance our problem-solving capabilities.
We have played pivotal roles in high profile projects like Melbourne’s Federation Square and Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art (MONA). Equally, we’ve designed award winning shop fitouts and single residential homes.
We’ve set our sights on democratising access to great architecture. The future lies with the collective, with working… in TANDEM.
TANDEM is located in Melbourne, Australia. We have worked on both interstate and international projects and have successfully delivered projects through Joint Venture Partnerships.
TANDEM has actively sought to develop new and strategic expertise in prefabrication, community focussed outcomes and social housing through research internally and alliances with external specialists.
167 Kensington Road
$15M office building for a family company completed in July 2020. This project involves re-housing the existing workforce into a modern facility reflecting the family’s ongoing interest in architecture, urban art and creating healthy workplaces. The new facility will be the company HQ, includes kitchen laboratories, training rooms, meeting places, open work places, kitchens and company cafeteria.
Ferrars Flex
$15M 7 level flexible living for a new community of travelling professionals housed in short and medium stay accommodation. Part hotel, part gym, part cinema, part café, part workspace – a place where you can borrow bikes, scooters and share cars, live in or drop in.
Lennon Street
15,000 M2 post industrial urban regeneration site on the boundary between Kensington and the Dynon Renewal Precinct. Formerly a sugar mill, with Australia’s first concrete silos the complex will be re-developed into a mixed mode distribution centre, offices, short stay accommodation, large offices and small studios. An integrated village distributed across medium and high rise towers, renovated silos and old mill and large span warehouses, this development is located alongside South Kensington Station, this key piece of city infrastructure and investments will house emerging enterprise businesses focussed on IT, technology, advanced manufacturing and design.
Paga Hill
A 35 hectare detailed masterplan for a PNG’s emerging national institutions, offices and tourism infrastructure. Located on a prominent peninsula jutting into Fairfax Harbour, alongside Port Moresby’s CBD, Paga Hill will be home to PNG’s Cultural Centre, War Museum, Government Offices and a hotel precinct. Located along the shoreline, these iconic new buildings will gather PNG’s 23 provinces in a tourism gateway, commemorate the country’s contribution to WW2, and house foreign companies and government offices in a modern campus style development.
Mt. Atkinson
$5M 2 level sales centre providing early amenity for residents of Mt Atkinson, one of Melbourne’s emerging inner city western suburbs. Showcasing large format pre-fabricated construction, the building will be precisely produced in a factory environment and then assembled on site. Site time will be no more than 6 weeks, from site establishment to handover. Building on many of the concepts behind RAPID_AS, Mt. Atkinson is a glimpse into the future of Australian construction.
Lionsville West Footscray
$20M 3 level courtyard building for the Lions club of West Footscray, this new facility will re-house the existing villages’ 19 elderly occupants in new facilities that meet modern standards. Organised around an internal courtyard creating dual aspect studio, 1 bed and 2 bed apartments with common spaces, this community housing project will more than double the existing capacity on the site, bringing affordable housing and aged care to benefit a wider group than ever before.
MONA
The Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, David Walsh’s temple to the secular. We worked with Nonda Katsilidis from FK, who brought the project to TANDEM because of our experience working on Federation Square. We worked with large scale models to deliver a building fitted around David’s rapidly growing art and antiquities collection, carved into Moorilla’s hillside, below Roy Ground’s courtyard house built originally for Tasmanian arts patron, Claudio Al Corso. FK went on to document our schematic design to realise this incredible building, while went on to win the Sir Zelman Cowan architecture award.
Federation Square
Our foundation, working for Lab Architecture Studio under Peter Davidson and Don Bates, where we were intimately involved in the conception and realisation of Melbourne’s new heart, Federation Square.
Kensington Lighthouse
Widely recognised through peer awards and mainstream press, this project re-conceptualised the sun starved Melbourne terrace as a sunlit, naturally ventilated house positioned around an internal courtyard. Revelling in a level of timber detailing and craftmanship created by a natural partnership between design and builder, this project has come to define our pre-occupation with timber construction, passive thermal design, locality and context, re-thinking traditional forms and innovation.
Creeds Farm Living and Learning Centre
A benchmark building for community and sustainability, the Creeds Farm Living and Learning Centre was designed for Places Victoria to provide early amenity for their sustainable community at Aurora. A long delivery path for a complex assembly of stakeholders that included Places Victoria, Melbourne City Mission, the City of Whittlesea, the Salvation Army and the North East Neighbourhood Housing Network, this project survived budget cuts and extended timelines to realise a community building that is a demonstration centre of domestic construction.
The NGV.I Shop
Working with Roy Grounds iconic St Kilda Gallery, this work involved a range of new commercial facilities. Culminating in the shop, which utilised low cost repetitive modular units to create shelving, seating, display and point of sale pods. The modular units defined a reading room and product track. The serrated edge of the display unit re-defined the ‘shop front’. The modern, practical approach a new take on Grounds’ modernity.
Yellow Earth Flagship
A flagship shop for sheepskin products, the project re-imagined the traditional shopfront to create a woven, warping screen from tensioned ‘yarn’ threads, creating an interactive, engaging shopfront that is by turns an illuminated screen, projection surface, large scale instrument (it is often ‘strummed’ by visitors) and display mechanism.
City of Melbourne
Queen Victoria Market
Stockland
Perri Projects
City of Port Phillip
Lions Club of West Footscray
Paddy’s Market
National Gallery of Victoria
National Trust, Victorian Chapter
Museum of Old and New Art
Melbourne Museum
Fridcorp
Aurecon
Harris Farm
Peter Rowlands
SOHO China
Ritz-Carlton
Swinbourne University
Melbourne Museum
City of Wyndam
RMIT
Mission Australia
The Just Group
Investa
Dandenong Market
South Melbourne Market
City of Stonnington
Substancia
Federation Square Management
And many other private clients.