New South Wales Sites
ResMed Corporate Campus
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Landscape Architect: EDAW
Location: 1 Elizabeth Macarthur Drive, Bella Vista, New South Wales
Introduction
BUDGET $9 million (Including civil earthworks)
What was once a degraded and intermittent creek has become the central unifying element in the master plan for client ResMed’s 12-hectare campus in Sydney. Wrapped in a framework of site ecologies and histories, the concept envisaged the creek as an ‘Ideas Stream’, a flow of waking thought, unifying the site’s corporate, recreation, aesthetic, environmental and stormwater treatment objectives.
Australian-owned and publicly-listed on the Australian and New York stock exchanges, ResMed is a leading developer, manufacturer and marketer of products for the screening, treatment and long-term management of sleep-disordered breathing and other respiratory disorders, operating in over 68 countries worldwide.
EDAW were engaged by ResMed to provide full landscape architectural and environmental management services for their new 12-hectare international headquarters in Sydney’s Norwest Business Park. EDAW were responsible for work ranging from landscape and site master planning, through to construction supervision for all stages of this internationally-significant campus development.
ResMed find their major markets in the United States and Europe, however their manufacturing is completed at their corporate headquarters in Sydney, and to showcase this, the client insisted on a distinctly Australian response to the site. ResMed required EDAW to provide a site response that encouraged the landscape to be used as a workplace, where many of the 1200 staff members could conduct meetings and recreate during down time.
The landscape was also required to be innovative and respectful of both our cultural history and the natural systems that support each and every one of us.
The landscape master planning response is multi-layered in its vision and cohesive in its execution. The plan recognises the cultural importance of being located next to one of Australia’s most significant heritage sites, Elizabeth Farm or Bella Vista Farm Park, containing part of the oldest surviving European dwelling in Australia. It meets the functional requirements of a 1200-person learning campus and also provides catchment-wide ecological benefits befitting a site with a remnant stand of the endangered Shale Plains Woodland.
The entire site master plan hangs off a central spine, which bisects the site in an east/west direction. The central spine or ‘zipper’ in the landscape manifests itself in the form of water. A stream, fed by harvested storm water, connects several permanent water bodies and reinvents itself as it moves down through the site. This central water element represents the ‘Ideas Stream’ or a ‘Stream of Consciousness’.
The ‘Ideas Stream’ is an infinite concept that extends both upstream and downstream of the site and represents the human thought process or the ‘ResMed Ideas Factory’. When an idea is generated, it is represented along the stream as a ‘Moment’ or an ‘Intervention’. The nature of these ‘Moments’ is random, like trees falling in an open woodland. These ‘Moments’ are represented in the physical form as straight walls, descending logically through a sequence of ponds and dams, producing a series of stepped level changes.
At each ‘Moment’ along the ‘Ideas Stream’ there is an ‘Outcome’. The ‘Outcome’ is the result of an ‘Idea’ or ‘Moment’ and is represented in the physical form by a folly that plugs into each point of intervention along the ‘Ideas Stream’. These follies are art installations or landscape architectural in their realisation and perform the function of momentarily shifting both the participant’s perception of the site and their immediate thinking.
Changes in the stream’s materiality and textures are woven throughout the construct to recall site memories and histories — of the rusty corten and timber of nearby Elizabeth MacArthur Farm, of the bricks of the once local convict brick works, to the polished steel of today’s high-tech business.
The ‘Ideas Stream’ is infinite and dynamic and has become core to, and resonant with, the client’s self-image.
introduction / overview / images / location / Projects
2008
