AILA's landscape architecture occasional papers, articles and essays

	A paper presented as part of the AILA 2009 conference

Examining Collaborations

Case Study of the Pt Fraser Development, Perth, Western Australia

Debbie Kuh

Syrinx Environmental PL, Perth, Western Australia

Let us accept the following premise : that the very nature of design is a collaborative one. I’m not implying that everyone has a hand in designing something. Rather, with increasing scale and complexity, a diverse range of disciplines always informs our designs, and to be informed by these disciplines, we as designers should allow these disciplines to influence and shape our proposition. Hence, instead of viewing other disciplines information as constraints, we see them as opportunities. In short, we work with people and their ideas, not against them.

This brings us to the fundamental question of process. I do not doubt we all aspire to collaborate, but I question the methodology: the design process.

All too often, I have seen design proposals drawn up before sufficient information on the ground and biodiversity conditions are obtained. I have listened to design presentations devoid of specificity to site and place, and I have read design submissions that only speak of the new and the proposed, not of how the design relates to its original environment.

Maybe we feel this addictive need to be ‘original’. So let’s examine this. To be original is to describe as an adjective an origin : a starting point. Would this starting point not be of place? Our profession is in existence only because there are places for us to design. Would this not be origin enough? Therefore, to be original would be to reference and be inspired by the place. This does not stop or inhibit us from being creative or do something ‘new’. This line of thinking merely highlights the importance of place.

So what do we know about the places we design? Not a lot. We are not ecologists, geologists, or the range of disciplines I have been referring to. Hence, in order to understand place so that we can be original, surely we must collaborate with those who can inform us of the place?

Hence, before we start designing, we should first be collaborating, and our design should reflect the input of our collaborators. Now, what if we put into practice what we preach.

Syrinx Environmental PL is a multidisciplinary company integrating science, engineering, design, consultation, and construction to solve complex environmental and urban design problems. The Company was founded upon the principles of People, Process, Product : that by an integrated approach to a project team [people], one can create a more seamless project process and thus deliver more innovative and effective products. It is a firm belief that pivotal to the success of any project are the technical capabilities of a wide skill-set to analyse, interpret and directly feed into the design process the complex array of technical data, thus offering immediate integration of differing disciplines and viewpoints; innovation of possible solutions; and furthering excellence in design and construction resolution.

This belief was applied to the Pt Fraser Development, located on the city’s foreshore, Perth, Western Australia. The multidisciplinary collaborations for Pt Fraser created a contemporary landscape built on a sound understanding of the local and regional environment. The landscape features interpretation, bioengineering technologies and the re-introduction of endemic plant communities previously alienated from the area by development. The project included the following :

History
Ecology
Geoscience
Botany
Hydrology
Geochemistry
Meteorology
Civil | Structural | Marine | Geotechnical | Bio Engineering
Horticulture
Biology
Ethnography
Consultation
Landscape Architecture
Architecture
Interpretation
Graphic Design
Construction

The scheme is not so much about regulating space and the development as a whole, but rather about allowing Pt Fraser to ‘speak’ and ‘breathe’, allowing the information of place to enrich and deliver a more locally response design. While the project seeks to complement the existing urban fabric, it also strives to establish a presence and strength in its own identity and context. Perth suffers from a lack of visual identification, its ubiquitous grid providing a cartesian reference but not a spatial one. It was a challenge for the project to ripple throughout the city, to allow the existing environmental conditions to re-inform the grid and explore new possibilities.

From history, ecology, botany, geoscience, geochemistry and hydrology; the design narrative rewinds to the origins of the city, the Perth of 1829. It is an important story : it’s the story that grounds us and roots us to this place. The city of Perth was initially built on a long, linear fossil dune, running from Mount Elisa [Kings Park] down through St George’s and Adelaide Terrace. It was a thin rise overlooking the river flats, which at the smallest scale was also patched with sands over clay, waterholes and mud. The mud, sedges and wetlands became the people’s depression, the unsure foreshore, the mud between the skinny dune toe and the clean river.

If we can fast forward to the present, we can transform this story through mechanical and biological architecture in order to locate ourselves within it. In contrast to the first responses and interventions to deny and infill this foreshore, we can take new ownership of the land re-examine with our intervention on the site, in a proposal imbued with public awareness, ecology, and an architectural concern for nature; for further investigations, for its conservation, and its inspiration.

From this, the design proposal explores the design theory of folding space as a process for achieving the pragmatic requirements of the brief, and to fulfil the potential of the Pt Fraser Development as an area of high public usage. The resulting graded planes of the landscape are an abstract replay of this story, folding back the fill to mirror the fossil dune, returning the sedges and mudflats, and inviting play in the dune swales; the ‘common’ spaces, the truth of the foreshore. The folding peels back and reveal stories, histories, materials and spatial experiences, and the program allows for spaces of the past and for the future, mindful that a historical narrative not only describes events at and to a location but also describes what the location communicates.

At a functional level, the folds allow opportunities to happen, and allow diversified usage of the site. The folded planes result in unobstructed sightlines whilst addressing the geotechnical instability of the site. Tucks within the folds serve to conceal spaces for necessary services. The reshuffled earthworks fold conceptually to physically overlap earth and water, enabling the concept of the fold to specifically recognize and address the site where the drainage is poor and the water table is close to the surface.

At an experiential level, we can extrapolate the site in terms of nodes, edges, pathways and landforms. Each fold has been designed with the primary thematic concern of supporting, encouraging and consolidating social interaction. The results are made tangible in platforms for sitting and viewing, intersecting paths, intimate spaces that unravel into larger spaces, points of activities and textured surfaces. The folds also function beyond their use as a space-planning tool and generator of form. Ultimately, they also prompt new viable sites for commercial, cultural and educational use, because the fold itself is a strategy for weaving use into the site. The word speaks of the project’s multiplicity, about spaces that slip into each other, and ideas that collide. The fold is not just about clinical, radical, sharp edges. This is not an attempt to delineate cultures; rather, it is an exercise in joining cultures and activities together. Each visitor to the site can adopt it as their own, to adapt it as their story for the whole foreshore.

The Pt Fraser Development had sought out and consciously utilised the varying historical, environmental, social and urban information to provoke the constraints of the site and turn them into opportunities that contribute to urban and landscape theory. The folds take up the nature of the edge, to change the condition and the mindset of the place. After a culture of past intervention to make the wilderness neat and to organise the unknown, Pt Fraser now becomes a comment to those first chaotic mudflats. The fold as a device has the potential to explore this chaos, to evoke it. Yet we are not trying to produce chaos; it will emerge on its own along with its own order and experiences.

The profundity of experiencing a site is what Paul Devereux calls a “multi-mode”, experiencing sites from the vantage points of both knowing and feeling. Knowing means having an intellectual and factual knowledge of such things as the mythology, archaeology, history, geology, astronomy, and geomancy of a site. Feeling means the practiced ability to intuitively tune into and sense the presence of a site.1

Footnote
1 From Martin Gray’s book, “Sacred Earth, Places of Peace and Power”. He references Paul Devereux’s idea of multi-mode in Chapter Two. Though specifically referenced to sacred sites, the idea of multi-mode is, by Paul’s own account, based on the premise that all sites of the earth are sacred, inherently possessed with “Earth Mysteries” that we should not for an instant pretend we know. It goes back to his Dragon Project [1977], and though the basis of his endeavours might seem fringe, even loose, it is worth considering the terminology to encapsulate the multiplicity of studies required to inform design.