City of Sydney Council announced finalists in the Green Square Design Competition for the Aquatic Centre and neighbouring Gunyama Park on 17 June 2014. The five teams selected from 144 local and international entries: Andrew Burns Architect, Cullinan Ivanov Partnership, CHROFI & McGregor Coxall, Andrew Burges Architects, and TYP-TOP Studio (Andrew Daly and Kevin Liu).
All five final schemes promise inclusive public recreational spaces while rehabilitating natural and wetland habitats lost during Zetland’s industrial expansion. Scenarios depicted within some of the final designs include a picket-fence reminder of old cricket fields, a grand central foyer with sprawling views, a swimming pools sunken amid revived wetlands, a beach and boardwalk, and connected pools that can be rearranged for fun.
Located on Joynton Avenue, opposite the former South Sydney Hospital, 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, and will house a 50-metre outdoor pool, a 25-metre indoor pool, a leisure pool, a hydrotherapy pool and gymnasium. It’s part of Australia’s biggest single urban development at present, and one of Sydney’s fastest growing communities, says Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore.
“With forty thousand residents and twenty-two thousand workers on the way, the City is moving ahead with the construction of new community facilities. Our new aquatic centre, parks and library will be at the heart of this growing community. What we asked for [with the brief] was a sustainable design that mingled swimming, running, training and spectating and could also be a recreational place for local residents.”
Typ-Top Studio | Green Square Aquatic Centre competition scheme: the Aquatic Centre bounded by Zetland and Joynton Avenues.
An independent jury of eminent architects and other experts (see below) selected the five finalists in the competition. Entries were submitted for judging and public comment anonymously (the same approach as for the Green Square Library and Plaza design competition won in 2013 by Stewart Hollenstein). Intriguingly, all five shortlisted designs are from Sydney-based teams.
“Even though it’s an entirely anonymous judging process the jury is particularly pleased that five finalists are all significant emerging design practices from Sydney,” said jury chair Carey Lyon. “It demonstrates the design community’s support for what the City of Sydney is doing to receive 144 proposals, it’s absolutely remarkable. All five final schemes are innovative concepts that will bring vibrant character to the local community in Green Square. We’re looking forward to seeing how each of them develops in the next stage.”
Stage-one entries, including thirty-three from overseas architects, were exhibited at Green Square and online with all comments passed on to the jury for consideration. Selection of the final designs marks the end of stage one of the competition, which is based on guidelines from Australia’s Institute of Architects and the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects.
Over the next ten weeks, these stage-one finalists will prepare more detailed designs and cost assessments, but it’s encouraging to see already the contest of ideas shaping up. Andrew Burns (who gave us Australia House in northern Japan and Crescent House in Paddington) drew a ring around the site, seeing it as a fenced, rounded undulating landscape of community gardens and parks and pools, in a tailored and precise island effect. By contrast, the CHROFI & McGregor Coxall proposal conceives the site as an urban void, sinking the pool and other built facilities beneath an “ephemeral landscape of seasons – a time clock of change, migrationary birds, the ebb and flow of water and riparian plantings, a re-colonization of the land, an ecological presence within the community.”
The jury will recommend a winner to the City of Sydney Council later this year.
Green Square Aquatic Centre and Gunyama Park Competition jury
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).
