Green Square Aquatic Centre + Gunyama Park

Project Information/Data

Date : 2014
Client : City of Sydney
Location : Green Square, NSW (Cadigal)
Project Team : Andrew Daly, Kevin Liu, Shuang West, Wenray Wang
Collaborators : Tonkin Zulaikha Greer Architects, Professor Anton James (JMD Design) of RMIT

Our proposal focused around producing opportunites for events and activities through a connected landscape of cellular zones, arrayed along a running track looping around the entire site. The aquatic centre itself sat below a public podium also connected by the running track, aiming to maximise and maintain public access to as much of the site as possible into the future.

The introduction of implied spaces for non-specified programs aimed to produce an 'intense', multi-modal centre capable of taking on multiple identities. The adjacency of otherwise atypically associated programs - linked together by the running track - produced a non-singular identity and sought to promote unusual cultural/social interactions that were not specific to one single culture, time or place.

The landscape component of the project - a large parkland area and a synthetic sports field - was conceived of as a cellular landscape of artificial topographies, activity cells and landscaping strategies, presenting an alternative concept of urban landscapes to the contemporary trend of 'naturalising' cities by returning them to pre-urban planting species and types. Here we proposed a landscape driven by activity, use, intensity and congestion, presenting a range of linked landscape cells with open-ended opportunities for urban life to take place.

Addressing the main street, the proposal was purposefully non-monumental, breaking down programmes into a series of distinct pods and volumes that vary in relation with the datum of the horizontal, raised ground plane that proposed public access over the functions below.

The landscape strategy for the project proposed a cellular landscape that provided structured opportunity for activities within a broader concept of flexibility that acknowledged structure and intent is required to facilitate urban activity. Rather than a straightforward open landscape 'field', the proposal incorporated a series of gridded micro-landscapes and 'clearings' sized to allow for specific activities.

Linked together by the running track, the landscape was seen as an extension of the activation logic for a part of the city that needed more, rather than less, opportunity for activity and coming together in public set against the dense, privatised apartment-building landscape around it.

At night, the buildings themselves further deny monumentality, with their perforated cladding screen disappearing and the internals revealing themselves as pieces of the public infrastructure of Sydney. The broad facing facades of the main corner building, twisted to provide the potential for night time events and projections onto the building itself facilitate a broader concept of what utility public buildings can offer our city as it densifies.

Our stage 1 entry panels ; 4 x A3 documents that expressed a direct, clear concept around usage, urban engagement and opportunity for activity in a dense developing community with limited public facilities.