AILA Queensland 2009 Award Winners
DESIGN
AILA QLD 2009 Landscape Architecture Award of Excellence
City Design, Brisbane City Council
Brisbane Foreshore Parklands Project
The Brisbane Foreshore Parklands Project is an extensive undertaking conceived of by City Design as a series of interconnected landscapes for the foreshore and parklands of Moreton Bay. Determination and strength of vision has been required to conceptualise and then implement a sustainable framework that delivers legibility to the public foreshore over many kilometres. Equally the Foreshore Parklands Project ensures that local historical, environmental and cultural qualities are preserved and enhanced in the process.
The projects at Moora Park, Shorncliffe, Lovers Walk and Flinders Parade, Sandgate, the revitalised Breakwater Park and Wading Pool, Wynnum and Bayside Park, Manly negotiate the entire range of environmental qualities and contemporary issues associated with urban development, social change and altering climates through logical and consistent design strategies. Design interventions skillfully integrate local landscape and architectural elements through a subtle palette of materials, detailing and planting. The excellence in City Design’s project lies in the delivery of a unified and achievable plan for the future of Brisbane’s foreshores.
AILA QLD 2009 Landscape Architecture Award
CONICS Pty Ltd
Northshore Riverside Park
Northshore Riverside Park successfully develops the first stage of a new public place in a previously degraded industrial site for the communities of the Hamilton reaches of the Brisbane River. The project refocuses the public address to the River from separation by the historic sea wall to an unusual tidal beach now accessible by all. The inclusion of designed spaces for recreational and art programs and events highlights the changing nature and histories of the River, drawing attention to the temporal and environmental qualities of Brisbane’s riverine landscape.
Active and passive areas are skillfully planned to enable multiple uses through appropriately scaled zones separated by areas of detailed planting and paving that reference the environmental and cultural stories and details of the original site.
While the project is driven with an eye to future development outcomes, Northshore Riverside Park is clearly concerned with community amenity and the development of a sustainable design aesthetic to lead future public and private projects for the River.
AILA QLD 2009 Landscape Architecture Award
Gamble McKinnon Green
Southbank Institute of Technology
The Southbank Institute of Technology campus project delivers clarity and vibrancy to the public spaces of the once gritty inner city landscape of South Brisbane. Intersections between campus and civic space are successfully blended through collaboration between landscape architecture and architectural site planning and urban detailing. Landscape thinking provides a project specifically suited to the nature of flexible learning and the development of student-based communities that operate between interior and exterior space.
Simultaneously, mechanisms for public and private access to the inner campus and to surrounding facilities in a seamless manner through utilising spirited street furniture assemblages coordinated with sustainable planting regimes. The exterior landscape is curated to provide a range of experiences and opportunities for events, learning and respite.
The SIT campus successfully integrates knowledge of contemporary education achieved through appropriate consultation and collaboration with client groups and design partners to achieved a defining and activated public space for Brisbane.
AILA QLD 2009 Landscape Architecture Award
Special Jury Citation for Innovation
Brisbane City Council
Inhabit
Brisbane City Council continues to engage in new projects for the City and Inhabit is a conceptual program that delivers maximum effect through an innovative approach to the use of small and often forgotten public spaces in order to stage events and temporary installations. Based upon collaborations between art, urban and landscape design practices, Inhabit has successfully delivered a number of projects for the city that endure in the memory of visitors and everyday users. Over only six weeks in 2008 six individual projects provided innovative furniture, sculpture, projection, mobile messaging and reconfigured spaces.
The Citation for Innovation is awarded to Inhabit and the Brisbane City Council as acknowledgement that projects conceived through collaboration with landscape architecture and art enliven the city through engaging a range of dispersed sites and multiple audiences resulting in a network of vibrant public places.
PLANNING
AILA QLD 2009 Landscape Architecture Award of Excellence
JNP Pawsey & Prowse – PAIAM, PNG
The Paiam Village project in PNG show cases the skills of Landscape Architecture to provide an authentic response to the challenge of developing more sustainable indigenous communities.
A key goal of the project was to help create a more resilient community whilst reducing short term exploitation of resource income, long term poverty and a return to a subsistence lifestyle.
The Landscape Architect was critical in translating the opportunities of local resource development into directions that strengthen a sense of place and provided tangible benefits to local community. This was facilitated through a design framework derived from the indigenous landscape and local culture. The key focus of the project was on the development of the town’s liveability, urban form, aesthetics and the opportunities for economic, social and cultural development.
The use of creative and culturally responsive communication material enabled the local community to understand, contribute to and embrace the project.
The Paiam Village project provides insights to the challenge of delivering the benefits of resource development in ways that will support the long term sustainability of local communities.
AILA QLD 2009 Landscape Architecture Award
EDAW AECOM – Broadwater Parklands Master Plan
The Southport Broadwater Parklands Master Plan represents a well planned and thorough application of Landscape Architectural skills to set the foundation for a world class parkland.
This project shows an ability to capture, analyse and communicate complex information in a robust framework that has enabled the creative design process of Landscape Architecture to transform a fragmented place into an environmentally sustainable cultural asset.
The development and application of design tools such as the sustainability filter and layered structure plan analysis has enable the creative design to be well integrated into the many site issues. A commitment to responsive design was strengthened by the peer review process combined with the ongoing consultation with client and community stakeholders.
This project has successfully delivered a civic and ecological synergy that promises to enhance the cultural values of a coastal city. The Southport Broadwater Parklands Master Plan provides a good case study for similar projects
AILA QLD 2009 Landscape Architecture Award
John Mongard Landscape Architects – Atherton Tablelands Placemaking
The Atherton Tablelands Placemaking project provides a considered and incremental program of local improvements across four towns on the Atherton Tablelands. This project represents the outcomes of a 10 year commitment by the Landscape Architect to engage and build local capacity to shape and transform local places.
The project reflects an iterative and grass-roots process that employed at each step, a Set-Up Shop consultation process that would lead to more detailed information and ideas derived from the local community. The Landscape Architectural process helped reveal local environmental and social character and empower the community to assist in local improvement projects.
This approach required regular contact with the community every month or two over the ten years, where intensive sessions were undertaken with the individual communities across the four villages. By the end of ten years, the Council Officers and the Community were able to continue un-aided, building the Tableland Villages in a considered way.
The Atherton Tablelands Placemaking project is a genuine commitment to the principles of community planning and placemaking through a coordinated planning process and in this context provides a model for similar projects.
LAND MANAGEMENT
AILA QLD 2009 Landscape Architecture Award
EDAW AECOM Kedron Brook Waterway Health Enhancement
This best practice example of water sensitive urban design and waterway rehabilitation clearly demonstrates the increasing importance of the landscape architect in advancing waterway enhancements beyond the engineering of hydrology and science of ecology to look more holistically at the social value, landscape and recreational amenity that water catchments also provide in our communities.
Priority catchments and sites were identified by EDAW to assist Brisbane City Council order its waterway health improvement projects and prioritise its capital projects in the Kedron Brook catchment. EDAW then took this process further by assessing the recreational and aesthetic values of the waterways and mapping the linkages to generate integrated design outcomes that build on social capital.
This process, the rehabilitation principles and the designs generated set a new precedent for waterway management and integrated design that can be applied to other catchments and advance the profession of landscape architecture.
AILA QLD 2009 Landscape Architecture Award
Place Design Group Cooroy Lower Mill
The imaginative re-use and rehabilitation of former industrial sites, while not new, is not commonplace in Queensland. The minimalist approach taken by the landscape architect to the remnant industrial buildings of the Cooroy Lower Mill evocatively tells the history of the State’s timber industry.
At the outset this was not a State listed site - though it has been subsequently added to the register - and it is through the leadership of the landscape architect that the site was protected and through their guidance of the community engagement process that it has come to be seen as a community asset.
The limited budget created synergistic resourcefulness between designers, local community groups, businesses and local authorities to deliver the project and activate a strong sense of ownership of the town’s history.
The restraint shown to the industrial heritage and the community based approach is to be commended.
RESEARCH AND COMMUNICATION
AILA QLD 2009 Landscape Architecture Award of Excellence
EDAW AECOM – Concept Design Guidelines for Water Sensitive Urban Design
The Concept Design Guidelines for Water Sensitive Urban Design significantly advance understanding of how to manage water resources in our Urban environment.
Written by a team of landscape architects, environmental engineers, freshwater ecologists, town planners and urban designers within EDAW AECOM, the Guidelines where developed for and with the assistance of the Healthy Waterways Partnership. This Partnership is a special collaboration between government, industry, researchers and the community working together to improve catchment management and waterway health in the eastward-draining rivers of South East Queensland and Moreton Bay.
The Concept Design Guidelines demonstrates the benefits of a multidisciplinary approach to identifying practical solutions to complex problems and represents a significant opportunity to positively influence water sensitive urban design outcomes.
AILA QLD 2009 Landscape Architecture Award
VERGE – Living City
Living City is an annual three day workshop programme developed as a collaboration between verge, Brisbane City Council City Planning and Kelvin Grove State College to educate and empower young people about the design of democratic and sustainable public spaces and provide a mechanism for the perceptions of young people about their city and its public spaces to be considered in the planning and design of those spaces.
Initiated in 1999, The Living City program positions young people as agents for change, not just consumers. It introduces them to the idea of contested sites, values their perspective, empowers them as future citizens with a stake in decision-making, and nurtures their creative thinking about the design of democratic and sustainable public spaces.
This program is recognised for the role of the landscape architect as an initiator of the program and champion for deeper understanding of Brisbane City’s urban spaces.
