Queensland Sites
Kingaroy Cultural Precinct
introduction / overview / slides / location / Qld-Projects
Landscape Architect: John Mongard Landscape Architects
LOCATION: Kingaroy, Queensland.
Listed as A Case Study for the AILA's 2008-2009 National Climate Change Project
Introduction
Country towns are a threatened urban form. An ageing population coupled with migration to city and sea is leaving a rural landscape without jobs, prospect or vitality. One of the major reasons people leave the country is because of a lack of cultural life – the events, art and vibrancy of the city. In these times of drought, attempts to regenerate cultural life in the country are extremely difficult. No money, no direction and no design expertise to make changes. In the context of this, Kingaroy’s attempt to create a cultural precinct is an important precedent for Australia’s future rural landscape.
Rural centres like Kingaroy are not famous for their cultural or environmental credentials. Years of Joh Bjelke Peterson have left the town with a good road, great farms and not much else. The emergence, embracing and implementation of a cultural precinct in such a town is thus a significant moment. JMLA were invited to provide ‘landscaping’ for a main street car park. After setting-up shop in town and undertaking community design, the plan changed, to build a town square and a cultural precinct. JMLA designed a town square and relocated the old railway station to provide a café/office/produce marketing space. The square was built where the town used to gather, before highways took over, next to the historic pub and where there used to be a symbolic gathering tree.
Another Set-Up Shop process expanded the plan to link the town square to the run-down history museum, near the grain silos on the edge of town. Community design process uncovered the need to relocate the town’s visitor and information centre, and also its dysfunctional art gallery. JMLA masterplanned a link building and courtyard between the old museum and the underutilised old Council Chambers. JMLA wrote a grant application and the precinct received $2 million dollars. After writing briefs for an architect to design an environmentally sustainable link building, JMLA managed the design and construction process. The outcome linked a new footpath to the town square, recycled the old Council Hall into an art gallery, built a visitor centre and craft/interpretive courtyard as the linking elements to tie into a renovated and re-interpreted historical museum.
The public spaces in the cultural precinct are the first improved streetscapes in Kingaroy since the 1970’s. They form a template for better quality walkways with shade, colour and stories. Highly reactive clay soils had damaged prior footpaths so new public spaces utilise long-lasting structural pavements. Farmers with red soil on their boots coupled with a chaotic arrangement of service pits on footpaths generated a paving pattern using red clay pavers in a patchwork pattern reminiscent of local agriculture. A cluster of disused or underused buildings have been relocated and refurbished. JMLA lined the old railways station to form an active edge to one side of the town square (O’Neill Square) and designed the building renovations and repainting. A public toilet and an events stage were incorporated into a square which faces the town’s last remaining historic streetscape. A second building was recycled into and art gallery and a third old building has been renovated to form a craft and choir activity space in the interpretive courtyard. The principle of recycling extended to using old railway timbers for benches and collecting local rural artefacts to interpret history and culture.
The theory behind the project was that a series of linked high quality public spaces accompanied by clustered and relocated buildings and facilities could allow emergent cultural and social patterns and groups to blossom. The implementation of this now evident – the town square provides daily lunchtime refuge, and has become the main venue for civic events and celebrations. The interpretive courtyard forms a public space around which visitors, crafts people and residents can engage. The interpretation tells about ecologies and hidden histories that had not been told before. The visitor and information centre incorporating the gallery, museum and craft areas is the new nexus for a broad range of cultural activities which shows that Kingaroy has creative people and who will enliven the town further as time goes by.
The project deserves citation in the areas of Local Government and small project innovation, since it shows that new important town activities can be created by a landscape architect working with local authority with little resources and utilising creative building recycling and land use facility replanning. It is a small project which began with a car park and emerged to consolidate a range of disparate functions and spaces, effectively binding them together to create a larger whole, The Cultural Precinct.
The project shows new directions for landscape architecture in the broadening of the landscape architects role to affect much more than just soft landscape and public space. By guiding the actual cultural facilities of the town and co-locating them, the project creates a nexus of activities and events which can actually generate public life beside and around newly crated public spaces. By using a community design process called Set-Up Shop, JMLA were able to really prioritise community needs and become champions for activating cultural life in town. The role of networking people and resources together is fundamental to the success of the project, overshadowing the conventional focus of drawing up plans. When community and Council leaders get excited and see opportunities to fix generational problems, such projects take a life of their own and become models for change.
introduction / overview / slides / location / Qld-Projects
2008
