Reading Country: Case studies
The projects featured here have been designed on Country through collaborative processes. In each case, the architect worked with Traditional Owner groups and others to consider how the design might impact the place, enhance its amenity and reflect its ve
Heirisson Island Pedestrian Bridge by IPV Delft
WSP’s Indigenous Specialist Services facilitated a co-design session with the Noongar Reference Group and Dutch bridge designers IPV Delft to help the client to consider the potential impact of this development on Aboriginal Country, to establish a cultural context for the project and to understand how local themes, stories and Country can inform the design of a future pedestrian bridge.
The Noongar Traditional Owners are powerful people. They each hold knowledge of Country and culture, which can make operating in this area difficult for clients trying to juggle competing interests. With this project, we found that it was beneficial to have an external Aboriginal designer as part of the project to ensure that the relationship between the elders, the design team and the client landed in a respectful and culturally safe way, allowing for meaningful conversation and dodging the potential cultural complications or politics that come with any highly engaged community.
The co-design gatherings resulted in a design that considered the island from a Noongar perspective. We considered not only how the Country would be impacted but how the bridge might celebrate and honour important Noongar people, such as Fanny Balbuk, who lived during the early days of the Swan River Colony and is remembered for her resistance to colonial expansion, and Noongar man Yagan, famed for his resistance to British colonial settlement in the early nineteenth century. We also wanted to reference important tools, such as digging sticks and Woomeras (throwing sticks), in the design.
Western Sydney Aerotropolis by Hassell
Wianamatta is the original name of the cultural landscape on which the Western Sydney Aerotropolis is located. As confirmed by Traditional Custodians and Dharug language Knowledge Holders, the name Wianamatta indicates that this is a female landscape that is important to women – in particular, mothers, as the name implies that it is “the place of the mother creek.”
The Aerotropolis – a new central business district and industry hub – will be the beating heart of the Western Parkland City. Plans for the Aerotropolis establish a 100-year-vision for a new city of 34,000 residents and 120,000 new jobs across 11,000 hectares. It is an urban design, landscape and public realm framework for a sustainable, liveable and prosperous city.
Based on this 100-year mindset, the Aerotropolis plan has a number of key elements:
– Country and landscape form a key structuring element. Ridgetops, creeks, ephemeral streams, remnant vegetation, culture and heritage are retained and enhanced through the blue-green infrastructure framework.
Country soars high into the atmosphere, deep into the planet crust and far into the oceans. Country incorporates both the tangible and the intangible – for instance, all the knowledge and cultural practices associated with land. Aboriginal people are part of Country, and our identity is derived in a large way in relation to Country. Our belonging, nurturing and reciprocal relationships come through our connection to Country. In this way, Country is key to our health and wellbeing. (Danièle Hromek, Indigenous design consultant)
– Wianamatta/South Creek and its tributaries define the Environment and Recreation Zone of the Aerotropolis.
Its corridors carry critical environmental, cultural and recreational functions to boost liveability and establish the primary elements of a cool, parkland city.
– Jobs and mixed-use intensity are highest around the Sydney Metro–Western Sydney Airport line stations at the Aerotropolis
Core and Luddenham. Here, the centres focus amenity on open space and the creek corridors, embedding place at the heart of the city.
Redfern Community Facility by Aileen Sage Architects
Despite colonial impacts, the site of the Redfern Community Facility holds heritage values and narratives for
Aboriginal communities, and maintaining those connections is vital to achieving a sense of place and cultural identity.
Working collaboratively with Danièle Hromek of Djinjama Indigenous Corporation and building heritage specialists Jean Rice and Noni Boyd of Jean Rice Architect, our approach to this project seeks to celebrate and honour a cultural reading of place that is founded on Indigenous knowledge grounded in Country. This approach seeks to design specifically for this place, not only through the materials used, but equally through the design strategy, which provides a framework for the current upgrade works as well as any other work in the future.
While the existing building is a heritage colonial building, we recognize that it used materials of this Country (local sandstone and bricks). These have since been rendered and painted over, but the new additions seek to uncover this original materiality, and honour and respectfully build on them. The new entry point is clearly demarcated by a lift tower, which stands in opposition to the existing clock tower as a sort of resistance to colonial architecture.
In seeking to minimize interventions to the existing built fabric, and maximize future flexibility, we are purposely seeking to minimize demolition and the unnecessary creation of waste. Similarly, the additions seek to maximize the use of recycled building materials – bricks, stone and timber reclaimed from nearby demolished sites – as well as locally produced materials, trades and training programs.
Using the same materials as the existing building, but in a contemporary way that respectfully acknowledges and celebrates their origins from this Country, the entry finds a new way of moving into a colonial space through a new, dedicated pathway.
Blue-tongued skinks, eastern froglets, grey-headed flying foxes and powerful owls once inhabited this area. Our design approach seeks to recognize and honour that more-than-humans belong equally within our cities. The striking patterns of the powerful owl’s plumage inspire the patterns of the brickwork and paving, and selected materials and textures throughout draw on other references and features of the Sydney Turpentine-Ironbark Forest that previously characterized the area – a habitat and community that is now critically endangered.
— Aileen Sage Architects and Djinjama Indigenous Corporation
Kimberwalli by BVN
Kimberwalli, meaning “many stars,” is a new Aboriginal Centre of Excellence located on Dharug Country at the decommissioned Whalan High School in Western Sydney. In conceptual terms, the design of the Kimberwalli project was approached through the way I see Country as a living, omnipresent condition that sustains us. The project embodies the idea of “designing with Country” through three primary moves that essentially articulate cultural settings for fire, an outdoor room and external connectivity.
The first move: The campus sits upon a hill that enjoys views of Colomatta (Blue Mountains). This aspect to a culturally significant entity is celebrated through the careful landscape location of the fire pit as a social setting for both formal (smoking ceremonies) and informal (storytelling) events.
The second move: The existing 1970s brick and concrete school buildings provided no mediating space between inside and outside. The insertion of a two-storey verandah enables a covered, occupiable gathering space and defines a colonnade edge to the landscaped performance space.
The third move: The existing buildings were a series of introverted spaces linked by internal corridors. These spaces lacked light and a relationship to the outside. Within the two-storey former classrooms building, the removal of half of the first-floor slabs, the opening of the butterfly ridge and the enlarging of ground-floor openings all worked to provide direct connectivity to the outside in terms of both light and view.
The influence of these moves is in the spatial ambitions that seek to enable experiences of Country. These moves are not symbolic in that they do not rely on art as signifiers of the “other.” The ideas informing these moves are also part of a much larger set of possibilities that I continue to develop through the specificity of each architectural project encountered – the nature of the Country the project belongs to – with guidance from people of that Country.
New Student Precinct by Lyons-led consortium
The New Student Precinct is a 2.5-hectare site on the University of Melbourne’s Parkville campus that will transform five existing buildings and add two new buildings, with an overarching urban and landscape design stitching the development together.
A signature project for the university’s Reconciliation Action Plan, it is underpinned by a deeply immersive engagement strategy that maps to the university’s reconciliation agenda. Through a carefully calibrated engagement piece with four Traditional Owner groups over the course of 18 months, the requisite permissions were given to tell their stories in particular ways.
In addition, engagement with Indigenous staff, leaders and students of the university provided valuable feedback and insights from a range of voices representing more than 45 Indigenous language groups. The methodology employed by Greenaway Architects and Greenshoot Consulting was captured to embed authentic expressions of Country, culture and connections.
The purpose of this culturally respectful process was to foreground Indigenous agency to weave through a cultural narrative connected to place. Led by one of Australia’s handful of Indigenous-owned and -led architectural practices, the process carved out the requisite time and space to engage in meaningful ways and to infuse a cultural sensitivity that was embraced and amplified by the whole design consortium, providing both depth of meaning and design inspiration.
As a result of this process, the “river of no sound” – a metaphor for the erasure of culture experienced in many places across our country, including the dramatic disturbance and manipulation of the landscape to conceal the stories and echoes of Country – is no more. Instead, a powerful water story has been brought to light, and will be fully revealed and experienced as this transformative project is further unveiled.