Andrew Burges Architects with Grimshaw and Taylor Cullity Lethlean have won the City of Sydney’s Green Square Gunyama Park and Aquatic Centre competition. The jury were unanimous in their selection. The winning scheme, inspired by rock pool formations, brings the essence of the beach to the city fringe.
“It establishes a playful interaction of natural and constructed landscapes that grafts the beach into the urban pool experience,” said the design team in their proposal. “[It aims] to match the primacy and hedonistic experience of swimming in Sydney’s beach and harbour pools.”
The aquatic centre is the largest development of its kind since the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Located at Joynton Avenue, this site the size of three football fields will house a 50-metre outdoor pool, 25-metre indoor pool, a leisure pool, a hydrotherapy pool and a gymnasium.
The focal point of the design is a new topographically constructed landscape with two lap pools nestled within an organically shaped “beach”. A rectilinear pavilion structure, housing a gymnasium and fitness studios, also provides an urban scale shading device that encloses the indoor pool. “It’s going to be a new kind of pool design where recreation is seamless with the program,” said jury member Camilla Block.
The indoor pool is enclosed by an “urban trellis”.
Image: City of Sydney
At the eastern end of the site, an outdoor playground, boardwalk and rehabilitated native landscape surrounds a multipurpose sports field.
The design competition solicited 144 local and international entries, submitted anonymously. Interestingly, the five shortlisted entries announced in June 2014 comprised entirely of local and emerging Sydney practices: Andrew Burns Architect, Cullinan Ivanov Partnership, CHROFI & McGregor Coxall, Andrew Burges Architects, TYP-TOP Studio (Andrew Daly and Kevin Liu). Stage 1 entries were exhibited at Green Square and online for public comment which was passed onto the jury.
The aquatic centre and park will form part of the commercial, retail and cultural heart of the $8 billion greater Green Square redevelopment on the city’s southern fringe. It includes the Green Square Library and Plaza (competition won by Stewart Hollenstein) and redevelopment of the former South Sydney Hospital by Peter Stutchbury, which is directly opposite the proposed aquatic centre.
On the jury were: Carey Lyon (chair, director of Lyons); professor Richard Johnson MBE AO (director of Johnson Pilton Walker); Camilla Block (director of Durbach Block Jaggers); professor Gini Lee (landscape architect – Elisabeth Murdoch chair of Landscape Architecture, University of Melbourne); Greg Holman (principal Architect at Harry Seidler & Associates).
