The Study of Place

Topology, from the Greek topos, place, and ology, the study of, is not just a label but a prescribed methodology. "That's our process," says Darren Kaye, who co-founded Topology Studio with Amy Hallett in 2012. "We apply it to all of our projects."

It begins, always, with looking. Not just at concept, feasibility, or planning overlays, but at the accumulated life of a site, its geography, its history, the layers of human activity that precede any new architecture. Located on the lands of the Woiworung people of the Kulin Nation, 146 Union Street in Brunswick is a rectangular site, 30 metres wide and 88 metres deep, bounded by Union Street to the south, the bluestone laneway of Kaiseal Lane to the north and east, and the rear gardens of Hennessy Street to the west. Six kilometres from the CBD, the environment is embedded in a neighbourhood of freestanding cottages and incremental densification. For Kaye and Hallett, that looking led north of the site to the old Hoffman Patent Brick and Tile Company.

Established in 1870 by Jenkin Collier, David Mackenzie, and Barry and William Owen, the Hoffmans site once produced up to 35,000 bricks a day. Its Marseilles-patterned terracotta tiles are still visible on rooftops across the city. As is a massive heritage chimneystack which remains standing, clearly visible from within the site, a strong vertical datum anchoring the project to its industrial past. "That immediately started getting us to think about bricks," Kaye says. "And what that might look like in the language of the building."

The brickworks became something more than a material reference. Their language, geometric, resilient, nostalgic, informed the sculpturally led facade and the recessed entry markers that distinguish each townhouse: vertical, chimney-like forms that signal arrival, buffer against the weather, and hold the threshold between the semi-public corridor and the private home, the site’s history absorbed and returned as architecture.

This willingness to let a place speak before imposing a response defines Topology's approach and distinguishes it from practices that arrive with a resolved aesthetic already in hand. "We love the idea of not having a specific language in our architecture, but instead having a specific process," Kaye explains. "Different things can come out of different sites. We don't really know when we start how a project is going to look or feel. But we do know it's going to be embedded in, and respond to place."

At 146 Union Street, a second conceptual thread ran alongside the brickwork history: the mews. Kaye and Hallett had both lived in London, and walked those semi-enclosed pedestrian lanes where housing clusters around shared space and neighbourliness is architecturally encouraged. "We've walked down many mews and experienced how successful they can be," Kaye says. Studies of precedents informed the design: the scale of the central corridor, the quality of light admitted through the four-quadrant site division, and the way the mews entry on Union Street is marked by a sculptural, semi-circular glazed-brick portal, which becomes a gateway that differentiates the public street from the semi-public interior without severing them.

The third conceptual thread was Jørn Utzon. Faced with the challenge of designing twenty-four townhouses without creating sameness, Kaye returned to what Utzon called additive architecture, a theory drawn from nature, in which the whole achieves richness through the accumulation of subtle variation. "Every leaf is slightly different, every tree branch is slightly different," Kaye explains. "It gives character, and a whole that looks detailed and layered." The Kingo and Fredensborg Houses in Denmark, Utzon's cluster housing projects of the late 1950s and early 1960s, can be considered reference points for how individual dwellings might each carry a distinct sense of identity while remaining legible as a family. At Union Street, that logic operates at multiple scales: across housing types, across facade geometries, across the positioning of windows and the depth of reveals.

The material palette, comprising bricks, glazed terracotta, timber-frame windows, and timber decks spilling into gardens planted by Mud Office, is also a durability argument. "You can design the best energy-efficient home ever," Kaye says, "but if you don't use robust materials, it won't last. And you’re faced with rebuilding it one day." Topology's approach to passive design is similarly rigorous in its simplicity: orientation, cross-flow ventilation, insulation, and the leveraging of northern light. "They're fairly simple approaches, really," he says, "but they make a huge difference to the overall feel and comfort of the building." Brick on the high-traffic entries and the mews corridor, timber introducing warmth in the living spaces, materiality deployed strategically, not uniformly.

This is what Kaye means when he speaks of sustainability as a lived experience rather than a specification. The feeling of morning light tracking through a well-oriented room. The coolness of a space that breathes. The sense, over years and decades, that the building is bedding in rather than wearing out. "Brick, as it slowly starts to get some ageing layers on it, just looks better," he says. "In twenty years' time, we hope this landscape grows to converse with the built environment. We hope it feels even better than it does on day one."

That resistance to the provisional extends to Topology's approach to speculative residential design, in which the end user is unknown. Rather than building on the assumptions of now, Kaye anchors to what he calls the core elements: connection to garden, sense of entry, efficient and generous layouts. "There are core parts of being human that don't shift that much," he says. "The quality of light. Cross ventilation. The elegance of the design,” these all speak to the inherent need we have to be connected to nature, to order and calm, to the world and its rhythms. The unbreakable threads that keep us tethered to a sense of humanity.

And community. Perhaps especially that. "The more we get siloed," Kaye reflects, "the more these interfaces between public and private, interior and landscape, will need to be really prioritised from the beginning. Before, they were just a given. Now we need to have a sense of responsibility about it and actively promote them." At 146 Union Street, the shared mews, with its sunlit gardens running the full length of the development, is as much a social proposition as a spatial one: an invitation to the kind of opportunistic encounter that increasingly has to be designed for, because it no longer simply happens.

You can find out more about Topology Studio on their website or Instagram. Interview by Tiffany Jade. Photography by Tom Ross.

Congratulations to Topology Studio on winning the Residential Architecture – Houses (Alterations and Additions) award at the Australian Institute of Architects' 2026 Victorian Architecture Awards for Eleanor.