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Blyth Street House
Brunswick East, Melbourne/Naarm
2025





The New Day Rising project presents a strategy for densifying housing above a much-loved commercial strip located along a transport corridor in Naarm’s inner North. As an alternative to demolition-intensive urban development that would discard the original single-story commercial tenancies and displace the small-scale community businesses that occupy them, the buildings are retained and provide a foundation for prefabricated light-weight timber framed apartments above. The development takes a deliberately modest approach, in exploring ways for increasing the density of housing along the city’s transport corridors and in established suburbs where services and infrastructure are well placed to support a growing number of residents.









In our city’s recent history and still today, building development follows a pattern of relentless demolition and building anew. This paradigm is commonly acknowledged as being part of ‘progress’ for the modern city, that destruction and waste are somehow the necessary precursors to construction and continual growth.



Ground floor plan.



What if we placed greater value on the buildings we have? Would we care for them more, and would they serve us longer (despite their eventual decay)? What if we reduce, reuse and recycle the materials used in buildings and construction?












Project team and credits TBA.
Simulaa is an architecture practice based in Naarm, dedicated to both built commissions and research projects. The work of the practice is defined by considered analysis and a research-based approach that prioritises a time-based design thinking that recognises architecture’s inherent entanglement with social, economic, aesthetic, political, and environmental concerns. The practice has a particular interest in reconciling architecture’s relationship with technology, energy, waste, and ecology through critical experimentation. As architects and design professionals we must demonstrate the social and economic advantages of new and better ways of thinking about the built environment. It is critical we re-evaluate and reset our priorities on a more empathetic and resilient path. 
Simulaa is an architecture practice based in Naarm, dedicated to both built commissions and research projects. The work of the practice is defined by considered analysis and a research-based approach that prioritises a time-based design thinking that recognises architecture’s inherent entanglement with social, economic, aesthetic, political, and environmental concerns. The practice has a particular interest in reconciling architecture’s relationship with technology, energy, waste, and ecology through critical experimentation. As architects and design professionals we must demonstrate the social and economic advantages of new and better ways of thinking about the built environment. It is critical we re-evaluate and reset our priorities on a more empathetic and resilient path.