Drum’s upbeat!

By Shaun Inguanzo
THE Drum Theatre and Town Hall in Dandenong has scored its architect a prestigious industry award.
Williams Ross Architects, the brains behind the Drum Theatre’s design, picked up Best Public Architecture: Alterations and Additions for the Drum’s refurbishment, at the 2007 Victorian Architecture Awards early this month.
Judges praised the Drum’s new look for adding to the city’s aesthetics.
“The Drum Theatre has provided the City of Dandenong with a new prominent public place by a bold combination of program and a considered layering of a site with street presence, and local historic value and significance,” the citation said.
“The architects have woven the entirely new and complex program of the theatre – with its myriad of flexible spatial and technical requisites – into the site with skill and maturity, demonstrating a clear and practical understanding of the brief, and programmatic and contextual parameters.”