Queensland Projects
Pioneer Park, Townsville Riverway
introduction / overview / images / location / Qld-Projects
Landscape Architect: Gamble McKinnon Green
Location: Riverway Drive, Thuringowa, Townsville, Queensland
OVERVIEW:
Pioneer Park is a 17-hectare riverside park in the tropical city of Townsville, and the pivotal development in a series of parks comprising the overall Riverway Masterplan for the region. Commencing in 2003, Gamble McKinnon Green designed, documented and delivered construction of all landscape works for the park. Opening in 2008, the park manifests 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.
The park offers informal recreation including swimming lagoons, the formal Riverway Sports Stadium, a gallery and auditorium in the Riverway Arts Centre, and retail and residential precincts. These facilities are woven throughout a large open setting which functions as an urban common, fostering relaxation, health and social interaction. The landscape 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, Pioneer Park 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.
SPECIAL FACTORS:
- Pioneer Park establishes a benchmark for the incorporation of environmental and social awareness in waterfront park design. Its innovative integration of landscape and architecture distinguishes it from the myriad of other waterfront parks.
- It contributes significantly to the creation of a distinctive landscape identity for the Townsville region: the majority of its 50,000 plants are endemic.
- Gamble McKinnon Green received a Planning Award in 2003 and a Design Award in 2007 for the Queensland AILA Awards for Stage 1 of the Pioneer Park Masterplan: the Arts and Lagoon Precinct.
BUDGET: $15M overall = $100 per m2 for landscape works
Pioneer Park sets a new direction for the Ecologically Sustainable Development of waterfront parks in Australia (see also Criterion 2). Expressed as an endemic dry tropical landscape, it aims to inspire current and future designers, planners, and politicians to value, protect, regenerate and utilise local open space and enhance community environmental awareness, recreational, social and cultural opportunities.
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 4000m2 swimming lagoons. These form the watery front garden of the Arts Centre, with the gallery and auditorium foyers opening directly onto them. This unusual juxtaposition creates a perceptual link to the river, reflecting and encouraging the laid back, simultaneously high-low cultural character of north Queensland. It has been described as “remarkably successful, refreshingly popular, and emphatically egalitarian ... [it] blends functions and blurs social boundaries” (Skinner, 2007).
Extending the fusion of built and natural form, the design creates the whole park as “land art,” shaping the earth into “swales, bunds, and berms, which rise to the ridges encircling the playing fields and culminate in a major amphitheatre form that wraps the auditorium building” (Skinner, 2007). A child-scale version unfolds down by the river, full of intriguing hills and valleys to run up, roll down, play hide-and-seek in, or just relax in quietly. Across the park collaboratively developed artworks and a “dry tropical” planting palette result in a refreshingly distinctive north Queensland landscape experience.
The design responds to a brief identifying a lack of outdoor, social and cultural spaces that meant this south-western area of Townsville suffered a diminished sense of local identity. Gamble McKinnon Green have delivered a special place addressing these needs while catering for a growing population. The Masterplan gave way to rezoning for residential development on park fringes for medium density, and as a result the residential population has increased significantly since the park opening. The park is close to existing services and infrastructure, and key locations and routes are incorporated into the circulation design to facilitate daily park use as well as event-day requirements for large volumes of visitors. The legibility of the park experience, coupled with opportunities for surprise and delight, are facilitated by the high level of truth to Gamble McKinnon Green’s refined detailing manifest in the design implementation, especially of the amphitheatre terraces, floating timber walkways, bio-swales, lagoon edges and cascades.
The important natural context of the pre-existing spectacular dry tropical treescape along the Ross River has been protected and enhanced. The location and scale of buildings, lagoons, and other landscape elements are influenced by the preservation of this treescape. Over 95% of 211 pre-existing trees have been retained (see also Criterion 2), lending the park its distinctively dry tropical aesthetic and providing effective microclimate mediation.
Addressing the Australian Landscape Principles
VALUE OUR LANDSCAPE: In response to detailed landscape assessment, the concept designated the pre-existing dry tropical treescape as the invaluable foundation layer of the design. The existing stands of Rain Trees and other significant species such as the Poplar Gum and Paperbark established the underlying landscape structure through which the park’s forms and functions were woven.
Equally importantly, the Masterplan values the park as social infrastructure. In association with Council the design team undertook detailed public consultation to discover what park qualities were valued by locals. The project delivers on all key points of community consensus: creation of a special place to bring the community together and be a source of communal pride. Specifically, the local community prioritized the retention of undeveloped open space and recreational river access; preservation of the Rain Trees; improvement of the sporting grounds; increased car parking and playgrounds.
PROTECT › ENHANCE › REGENERATE: The design of Pioneer Park responds to the need to protect, enhance and regenerate natural forms and systems to engender local and regional resilience in the face of the realities of climate change. The project demonstrates the aims and objectives of Ecologically Sustainable Development with design initiatives reducing reliance on traditional, unsustainable practices. Passive design systems coupled with new technologies underpin the establishment and promotion of sustainable site policies and environmental best practice in the park and region. For example, Gamble McKinnon Green were responsible for the design, detailing, construction methodology and delivery of a Green Roof for the Arts Centre, which allows the building skin to perform vital biological functions, making significant contributions to heat reduction, water conservation and air purification, whilst improving aesthetic, acoustic and biodiversity values. The roof also provides a recreation space and performance amphitheatre.
The Townsville region currently sustains a high level of biodiversity, with the Ross River forming a significant habitat corridor. The improvement of biodiversity within the park was a vital component of the park’s original Masterplan, striking a balance between the human impact on the river and its natural values. Measures to maintain biodiversity protect, enhance and regenerate endemic plant communities within the transformed habitat of Pioneer Park.
DESIGN WITH RESPECT: Recognising and respecting the resource conservation value of water in urban landscapes, Pioneer Park incorporates 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. Overall, the landscape achieves: aquifer replenishment through infiltration; removal of hydrocarbons from water via bio-swales; a new Australian best practice standard irrigation system designed and constructed to minimise water consumption (via underground drippers with computer monitoring from council HQ) ensuring unimpeded overland flow back into the Ross River. A network of vegetated swales follow natural drainage patterns, and the car parking incorporates a series of centrally drained turf swales in the median strips and flush kerbing to roadways. The swales and shade trees soften the experiential amenity of the car parking and draw the visitor’s eye to the water conservation strategy.
DESIGN FOR THE FUTURE: Pioneer Park is a flexible place providing for social and environmental resilience now and into the future. 50% of Townsville’s population is currently under 30, and their opportunities to access the health and social benefits of outdoor recreation and the arts were a high priority. It has secured a huge parcel of open space in the heart of the Townsville suburbs for future generations. A large proportion of its open spaces remain intentionally unprogrammed to accommodate a range of activities such as festivals and outdoor cinema, and so it can evolve over time to suit Townsville’s changing size and needs into the future.
Relevance to the profession of landscape architecture, the public and the education of future practitioners:
Pioneer Park is the first in a series of parks planned along the Ross River in greater Townsville, as expressed in the Riverway Masterplan developed by a consortium including Gamble MCKinnon Green, led by Cox Rayner. Following council endorsement of the Masterplan, Gamble MCKinnon Green’s role is to design and deliver all external spaces, systems and elements in each park, and to link them back into each site’s architecture and suburban form, function and character.
Pioneer Park expands the scope of Australian landscape architecture’s role in waterfront development, with an innovative integration of environment, recreation and culture, underpinned by the principles of ESD in which the park has been a leader since its conception in 2003. It is a landscape designed to shift public perceptions of the role of the park by juxtaposing uses, blending familiarity with discovery and surprise. Pioneer Park is transformed from a place most locals avoided to a place attracting visitors not only from across Townsville but from all over 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
