Queensland Sites and Projects
Pioneer Park, Townsville Riverway
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Landscape Architect: Gamble McKinnon Green
Location: Riverway Drive, Thuringowa, Townsville, Queensland
Introduction
Gamble McKinnon Green’s vision for Pioneer Park has created a park manifesting a unique design concept interweaving facilities for outdoor recreation and the arts. It has become a vibrant, sustainable, world-class precinct, expressing the distinctive environmental qualities and social character of the dry tropics.
Pioneer Park is a 17-hectare riverside park in the tropical city of Townsville, the first in a series of parks planned along the Ross River as expressed in the Riverway Masterplan developed by a consortium including Gamble McKinnon Green. Commencing in 2003, Gamble McKinnon Green designed, documented and delivered construction of all landscape works for Pioneer Park.
Opening in 2008, the park expands the scope of Australian landscape architecture’s role in waterfront development, with an innovative integration of environment, recreation and culture. It offers informal recreation including swimming lagoons, a formal sports stadium, a cultural centre, and retail and residential precincts, all woven throughout a large open setting fostering relaxation, health and social interaction. It integrates buildings and land into the pre-existing spectacular treescape and riparian environment, capitalising on the Ross River’s recreational amenity whilst protecting its scenic and environmental values. A popular park, it has made a significant contribution to the development of a distinctive landscape identity for the Townsville region, reinforcing it as a rewarding place to visit, live, or do business.
The Masterplan promotes environmental best practice in the designed landscape, addressing many of the Australian Landscape Principles, such as implementing best practice Water Sensitive Urban Design strategies to minimise flow velocities and maximise stormwater filtering and infiltration, whilst enhancing the riparian landscape’s aesthetic and ecological values. Gamble McKinnon Green also designed and delivered a Green Roof for the Arts Centre, allowing the building skin to perform vital biological functions whilst providing a recreation space and performance amphitheatre.
The design concept, combining unique environmental qualities with the social character of the dry tropics, is clearly expressed in the legible and accessible hybrid forms and functions of this landscape. The integration of land and built forms creates a place characterised by climatically desirable deep shade and the sparkling aquamarine waters of the wildly popular swimming lagoons. These form the watery front garden of the Arts Centre: an unusual juxtaposition reflecting and encouraging the laid back, simultaneously high-low cultural character of north Queensland.
That a regional Australian suburban area should house a world class arts and outdoor recreation facility in a single precinct, and that this be set within a treed, dry-tropical landscape, sets a progressive standard on issues of social and cultural diversity, sustainability, and environmental resilience. That a regional facility should be a sophisticated, carefully designed integration of cutting edge environmental design, architecture and art, is truly ground-breaking in the profession of landscape architecture: an “urban, architectural, and landscape innovation that deserves to be studied by all designers working within our suburban heartlands” (Skinner, 2007).
introduction / overview / images / location / Qld-Projects
2010
