A 40-storey student tower beside Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Market addresses the importance of community 

For students stepping off a plane into an unfamiliar city, the first weeks of comfort and security depend on finding the right people to share them with, and the design of a residence can make that task easier or harder. To that end, COX Architecture has completed Journal Market Way for Journal Student Living, a 40-storey residence with 715 units at 100 Franklin Street, beside Queen Victoria Market in Melbourne. The team shaped the tower around that moment of arrival.

COX associate director Johannes Lupolo-Chan describes the building as a crucial introduction to Melbourne living for students. “For many residents, this will be their first home in Melbourne and, for others, their first home in Australia,” he says. That context gives the brief an emotional dimension, because a home for newcomers must serve as shelter, as an introduction to the city and as a ready-made community.

In most cases, a tower with hundreds of rooms renders neighbours strangers for an entire semester, with density negating familiarity. To address this, the design team has run an extensive network of shared spaces vertically through the tower and placed them along the everyday routes residents take between their rooms and the street. Students pass study zones, cook, exercise, gather and pause on the way to and from their homes, increasing their chances of meeting someone along the way.

Lupolo-Chan explains the logic behind that organisation. “We considered the whole journey through the building and the moments where people naturally cross paths. Those everyday encounters became an important part of how we organised the building,” he says.

Spaces that support study, creativity and wellbeing

From small pockets for casual socialising, a Grand Library for quiet study, to communal kitchens and dining areas, maker and music spaces, a podcast studio, a games lounge, a cinema and a gym, no activity – studious or otherwise – is neglected. To top it off, a rooftop garden above the CBD and a sky lounge lend limitless potential. This spread of scales gives students a choice between a quiet corner and a lively gathering, and it supports the full range of student life, from late-night assignments to shared meals and creative projects.

Journal Student Living CEO and director Ian Davidoff explains the benefit in terms of the whole student experience. “Journal Market Way offers Melbourne students a unique living experience, a home where the city’s rich history and future possibilities meet – where genuine community, learning, creativity, friendship and wellbeing can flourish,” says Davidoff.

The adaptive reuse of the four-storey Burbank House extends to the base of the tower, where the team have retained the building’s heritage and linked it to the new tower through a central atrium and circulation network. Here, residents share a historic setting that connects them to the neighbourhood’s past. That retention anchors the project in the Queen Victoria Market precinct, where it stitches into a network of laneways and a new green boulevard that forms a southern gateway to the market. 

Journal Market Way continues a collaboration between COX and Journal Student Living that spans sister projects in Brisbane and Adelaide. Across the portfolio, the two teams are building a shared approach centred on community, belonging and connection to place, with each project responding to its own city, site and climate. “The continuity of the relationship allows us to learn from each project and carry that knowledge into the next,” says Lupolo-Chan. “At Journal Market Way, this is expressed through the spaces students share and encounter every day, and through the relationship the building establishes with Melbourne.”

Photos: Trevor Mein.