Located at the edge of central Sydney, the ambition of the project was to reinvigorate the tired park and public pool. The overriding principle to premiate landscape over built form, based on a conviction that in these inner urban areas, green space is sacred.
Originally laid out for the holding of large exhibitions in the English style, the new park plays on the episodic placement of elements with a new spatial and ecological sensibility- adding life and contemporizing the park without erasing its Victorian roots. The old pool building was removed from the middle of the park, allowing the landscape to be visually opened and re-graded, amplifying its distinctive pastoral quality. New activities such as playing courts, fitness nodes, playgrounds and picnic tables are concentrated along the railway edge and new shareway. Park entries were aligned with bounding streets and recast. The sinuous lines of the new pathways resonate with the park’s heritage and shed stormwater to grassy swales as part of a system of water collection and reuse. New plantings draw on the Victorian love of exotica, while a rolling, grassy topography blurs the park perimeter. At its centre the new pool building is designed as a piece of ‘folded landscape’ with a green roof of native ‘meadow’ grasses that embeds it into the park. Two crisply shaped landscape mounds define the space of the outdoor pool enclosure, simultaneously connecting and separating park and pool, while containing overburden.
The memory of the Inter-colonial Exhibition is recalled in a series of park elements of which the toddlers playground is the most direct interpretation. Path lights, flower beds and park furniture, the ephemeral pool fence, yellow umbrellas, blue and white shade structure, coloured trigeneration chimneys, palm trees and mound slide: all bestow a playful character as ‘follies’ within the Victorian park.
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