New South Wales Sites
Barcom Park
introduction / overview / images / location / Projects
Landscape Architect: Sue Barnsley Design
Location: Barcom Park, Darlinghurst, Sydney NSW
the junction of Barcom Ave, West St and Boundary St, Darlinghurst, Sydney
Overview
significant outcomes
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more sun & more seats
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doubling the size of the park and expressed connections to Oxford Street
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reduction of vehicle traffic
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local traffic improvement measures including reversal of hospital carpark access & egress lanes, speed humps, traffic blisters & kerb realignments
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increased emergency egress areas outside the hospital
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permeable pavements
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bio purification basin
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water capture & transfer system allowing park irrigation with recycled stormwater from the Xavier Building, St Vincent & Mater Health
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use of sustainable plantation grown timbers
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reuse of bluestone flagging
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removal of failing trees & tree replacement & site decompaction
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safe & atmospheric lighting with a single P2 level route through the park
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universal bubblers & seating
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dog drinking bowls
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a new place to sit, pause, rest your arches, exercise your imagination, breathe, meet friends, walk your dog, jog, lunch, escape to, value
The remaking of Barcom Park has come from the closure of two bounding roads, effectively doubling the size of this pocket park. Whilst improving local traffic movement, servicing and emergency access from the hospital, the new park draws light, soft lawns, seats and gathering spaces into a new and engaging composition.
Ten metre road reservations have contracted to a four metre path along West Street and a share way on Barcom Avenue, where pixelated islands of bamboo, veil the shaded hospital perimeter. A diagonal path cuts through the broad and gently falling grass topography to connect these new, dedicated walkways.
Cupped either side of this stone path within the embrace and swelling of the grass, are two small curved seating pods, set at the quiet epicentre of the park. Each pod is formed by two bench seats of different radii, which draw the curve of the hospital into the composition and language of the park. Curved like apostrophes, the benches create a flow and dialogue between the pods that makes for conversation. At night these glowing rings brighten the interior of the park.
Crossing the base of the park a warping concrete wall and boardwalk edge a tangle of rushes and bracken that treat runoff captured across this steep site. Both retaining wall and seating bench, the wall folds from end, to centre, to end: from sloping revetment, to vertical wall, to cantilever. Where the wall projects into the share way it is clad in bead blasted stainless steel as both protection and adornment. Here a constellation of small, white led lights set in the boardwalk illuminates the underside of the wall. By day, this shadowed edge catches light reflected from the face of these lights onto the concrete, patterning the wall like water under a cliff.
Formed below the boardwalk the reed bed and bio purification basin is the most obvious expression of a series of water management initiatives within the park, which combine with gross pollutant traps, permeable pavements and swales to allow infiltration and return of low waterflows to the aquifer whilst treating stormwater particulates before discharge to Rushcutter’s Bay. On the other side of the hydrological cycle, irrigation of the park has been made possible through a public private partnership between the City of Sydney and St Vincent’s and Mater Health, allowing the capture and transfer of stormwater from the hospital to a subterranean retention tank within the new park.
project cost $ 1,500,000/ $ 400 per square metre
This small park project has effectively doubled the size of Barcom Park, one of only a few green spaces in Darlinghurst and enabled the new park design to address the negative impact the hospital has exerted on the public domain. The new composition is straightforward and purposeful: a triangular site with peripheral paths; a green lawn with a bisecting stone path and central seating; a boardwalk and a bio retention basin; a continuous built edge to West Street; a veil to the hospital perimeter.
Barcom Park has currency because it demonstrates processes and articulates ideas which influence urban life at a city wide scale whilst directly engaging with local concerns and the grain of the neighbourhood. In this way the project meshes landscape systems and community issues with the crafting of small spaces, matching sustainable initiatives with fine detailing, robust plantings, select lighting and a materiality that is peculiar to this place. In doing so the project sets a precedent for the development of small parks across the city.
Whilst addressing structural urban issues, the design capably handles issues of use, identity, social inclusion, comfort and sustainability with a light but deliberate touch. The park confidently engages with the scale and materiality of the hospital whilst utilising simple, city standard park details, to embed the park within the neighborhood, giving this space a sense of ease and inevitability. Within this modest setting, key elements give the park a frisson and a particularity, which elevates the quality, identity and interpretation of this place through design.
The calibre of the built works is also testimony to the tenacity and leadership of the community and councils involved in negotiating and realising the scheme. Initiated through community action, the original masterplan and community consultation was prepared by South Sydney Council in 2002 but after municipal boundary changes, the City of Sydney was charged with implementing this project. The community brief for a park with trees, grass, lights and fountains, was broadly endorsed by City Projects. While a vastly increased budget was established to give the project greater scope to successfully engage with sustainable initiatives and the dynamics of public space. It also enabled coordinated action with Woollahra Municipal Council on improved traffic management on Boundary Street and a productive partnership with St Vincent’s and Mater Health on traffic and water management issues vital to the success of the park.
In such a densely populated inner city area with limited open space it is vital that every opportunity is taken to make parks effective, resilient and playful. Barcom Park demonstrates that small, considered interventions together with strategic alliances can transform both place and neighbourhood.
environmental responsibility & sustainability
The design of Barcom Park demonstrates how integrated urban water management systems can be retrofitted to a small, steeply sloping site where an unprecedented density of urban and emergency services including hospital utilities and oxygen supplies, along with the standard hazards of mature trees and proximate bedrock, add to the complexity of the task.
The effect is that a small bio purification basin captures runoff and subsurface flows from permeable park pavements, allowing discharge of particulates and percolation of low flows back into the aquifer. The basin is sized to treat the 1:1 year rainfall event, which whilst modest, posits the incremental effects of small initiatives across the catchment.
On the other side of the hydrological cycle, irrigation of the park has been made possible by the capture and transfer of stormwater from the hospital to a subterranean retention tank holding 100 kilolitres of water within the park. This volume is sufficient to irrigate the site for a period of 30 days in peak summer without supplementary rainfall. Again, this is a modest solution but one which acknowledges the importance of the park to the hospital and the local community, and allows the reuse of stormwater previously destined for outfall at Rushcutter’s Bay.
On a site, heavily shaded by hospital buildings, where dense canopies of mature trees compete with grass for limited available moisture, recreational lawns have been difficult to cultivate. This public private partnership between the City and the Hospital has successfully navigated core business imperatives to make certain this small urban park is not only viable but is of a quality, which adds to the social life of this inner city neighbourhood.
A side benefit of the resumption of West and Barcom Streets and the contraction of impervious surfacing across the park, is a reduced contribution to the city’s urban heat bank and global warming.
New tree plantings and an abstracted understorey of creekline species whilst supporting the greening of the city will, in time, bring a sense of untamed nature to the park. Of interest is the trial of Hypolepis muelleri, the harsh ground fern with a number of rushes of the genus Balaskion; the extension of the built edge of the Centre for Immunology as a green wall covered with species of Passiflora; and the use of Geitonoplesium cymosum, the scrambling lily in combination with the harsh ground fern, as a wild tangled understorey and contrast to the cultivated lawns.
Ecological health is also preserved at a regional scale through the selection of construction materials for resilience, robustness and longevity. Specifically recycled and renewable materials were specified using recycled aggregates for road bases, reusing site stone and bluestone flagging and demanding sustainable plantation grown timbers for seats and benches.
relevance to the profession of landscape architecture, the public & the education of future practitioners
For many years the Darlinghurst Resident Action Group railed against St Vincent’s Hospital, angry that construction had battered and shaded their small neighbourhood park and bewildered how this institution had sidestepped implementation of conditioned landscaping along Barcom Avenue.
While initiated by community agitation and lobbying, today the process of remaking this urban park has helped to reknit the neighbourhood, mend estranged relationships and forge new ones. The partnership between the City of Sydney and St Vincent’s Hospital, which was formed to enable stormwater from the hospital to be recycled within the park, clearly expresses a shifting appreciation of the synergistic relationships between neighbouring sites and the imperative to effectively employ these interrelationships in our transition to healthier more livable cities.
Within this context the project is significant on a number of levels.
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The project makes the case for the more sensitive integration of large scale public institutions within existing neighbourhoods.
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The fact that the project arose out of community action to receive local endorsement on opening, is significant and a political coup.
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The establishment of a public private partnership between the City of Sydney and St Vincent’s and Mater Health to facilitate sustainable initiatives is a real accomplishment. More so, when at the onset of the project, the hospital, as key project stakeholder was vehemently opposed to the road closures and loss of parking long championed by the community.
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For the project to progress and become a model for the City’s small parks initiatives and an exemplar of integrated water management systems is further evidence of its relevancy and innovation. Barcom Park garnered a Highly Commended Award in the Retrofit Category of the Water Sensitive Urban Design, NSW Sustainable Water Challenge 2006, prior to construction completion.
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The project demonstrates how a clear design strategy in combination with a series of modest but capably handled initiatives can transform the public domain.
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As a consequence our design for the reed bed and bio purification basin, the precast concrete boardwalk planks and the light protections cages have now been added to the City of Sydney’s catalogue of standard details.
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In time, opportunities to consolidate the achievements of this project may see the extension of the Barcom Avenue shareway to Oxford Street with the planting of an urban forest along the adjoining road reserve.
materials
walls
- precast concrete wall with metal nosing
- bluestone plinth with metal corner guard
pavements
- ecotrihex & trihex concrete paving with concrete edging to shareways
- asphalt with bluestone/ sandstone kerbs to pedestrian footpaths
- eco basalt to central path
- new & recycled bluestone to seating pods
- bluestone dish drain & edges
- precast concrete boardwalk
furniture
- City standard seats & benches, bubblers, bins & bollards
- precast concrete curved seats with timber batten inserts
- steel frame & wire mesh trellis
lighting
- City standard Largent pole lights, Weef uplights, JSB led & Intralux cog lights
irrigation
- purpose designed subterranean masonry tank, select controllers, pumps, filters & nozzles
turf
- Stenotaphrum secundum ‘Kings Pride’
tree plantings
- Bambusa textilis
- Brachychiton acerifolius
- Ficus rubiginosa
- Hymenosporum flavum
- Kolereuteria paniculata
understorey
- Centella asiatica
- Commelina cyanea
- Dichondra repens
- Geitoplesium cymosum
- Glycine clandestine
- Hypolepis muelleri
- Passiflora cinnabarina
- Passiflora coccinea
- Pratia pedunculatum
- Microlaena stipoides
bio purification
basin
- Balaskion pallens
- Balaskion tetraphyllus
- Hypolepis muelleri
- Tristainiopsis laurina
timing: 2004 – 2007
project cost: $ 1,500,000/ $ 400 per square metre
client : City of Sydney - Chris Thomas, Stephen Merchant, Gynt Drinan, Russell Kosko
design team: TLB Engineers, Andrew Sutton, djcoalition lighting consultants & Northrop Engineers, David Skelley & Barry Lywood, Hydro-Plan Irrigation & Water Resource Consultants, Tony Spinks
city consultants : LHO Group Hydraulic Fire & Civil Engineers, MBM Quantity Surveyors & Cost Consultants
contractor: Regal Innovation - Robert Stanton, Graeme French, Trevor Ohlrich
photography: Eric Sierens, Ian Hobbs, Brett Boardman
awards: Water Sensitive Urban Design in the Sydney Region, NSW Sustainable Water Challenge 2006: Highly Commended Retrofit Category
masterplan: 2002 South Sydney Council
introduction / overview / images / location / Projects
2008
