An 18-storey apartment tower that will eventually look like a stack of colourful Lego blocks has commenced construction on the corner of a busy St Kilda intersection.

Designed by Jackson Clements Burrows, ‘The Icon’ will rise 56 metres into the Port Phillip skyline in six modular tiers, wrapped in different coloured powder coated mesh screens.

The first floors of The Icon were uncovered of their scaffolding wrap this week and the building will be revealed in one level sections over the course of three months as the construction progresses.

The Icon will house 119 apartments within its stacked boxes and JCB director Andrew Jackson says that the building’s layout encourages a communitarian style of living, different from the one encouraged by singular extrusion style apartment buildings.

“Most apartment buildings are just a singular extrusion, so we saw this as an opportunity by seeing it as a series of stacked elements or stacked boxes so that the building would read very differently,” says Jackson in an advertising video.

“Each different box represents a different neighbourhood and each neighbourhood has its own colour… and that’s about giving identity to what we imagine to be different communities within the building.”

“So it was a way of thinking about an apartment building not just as a singular entity but a collection of communities.”

The screens are double powder coated and coloured in violet, indigo blue, moss green and luminous yellow. They also continue to the undersides of the stacked boxes and onto the ceilings of communal areas as seen in the below image. Behind the mesh are Kingspan Insulated Panels and precast concrete panels that will form the structural exterior wall.

The Icon's facilities will include a Teppanyaki Barbeque Deck, a common Dining Room, two kitchen areas, and a communal lounge area with suspended fireplace and gym facilities.

Images: The Icon St Kilda

Nathan Johnson

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