2007 / 2005 / 2004 / 2003 / 2002 / 2001
AILA
Tasmania 2007 Project Awards Winners
Award for Design in Landscape Architecture
Recipient: Inspiring Place
Project: Port Arthur Docklands Implementation Master Plan and Implementation
This was a project in two parts comprising a planning phase and implementation phase, with the landscape architects significantly contributing to both. Both parts were collaborative involving specialist consultants as well as other stakeholders and authorities. The brief had required site analysis and the implementation of interpretative interventions that focused on the site at its peak as a shipyard in 1836, for which there was an extant plan. While the choice of a particular time might have been challenged by the consultants, the project has worked with this, perhaps recognizing the lengthy difficulties of undertaking and negotiating further subtlety in an already complex site. Instead, in choosing to move forward to effective works, the project has indeed achieved its aim to attract and engage the public with a site that continues to offer deeper contemplations for those seeking more.
The outcome demonstrates both a thorough appreciation of processes necessary to undertake built work in such a significant and sensitive environment, as well as a high quality of detailing and finish of the built work itself. The design award for this project then recognizes both the masterplanning and the implementation and physical outcome as an integrated part of a successful professional response to a complex design project with multiple stakeholders. The award values the contribution of the landscape architects not just for the excellence of specific design detailing but for encouraging and enabling the implementation of a potentially fraught process.
Award for Planning in Landscape Architecture
Recipient: Urban Initiatives
Project: Landscape Masterplans, Sandy Bay and Newham Campuses, University of Tasmania
The work of these Masterplans is an enormous and comprehensive study of the two University Campuses, offered through a clear and accessible structure. Six phases are identified in an overall analysis and planning process that has developed over many years and resulted an integrated approach to understanding site specific qualities, campus needs and building programs, all framed in a landscape appreciation the anticipates and values the quality of well-designed spaces beyond efficient, practical and environmentally sensitive development.
In particular the landscape architects have offered detailed design direction for specific projects within the campus that enable an exciting visualization of possibilities that goes beyond the often less accessible abstractions of planning frameworks. The Sandy Bay and Newham campus Landscape Masterplans provide a detailed and carefully considered application of planning process and methodologies, setting out a layered vision from overall policy, to critical day to day maintenance and management issues, from appreciation of the wider landscape contexts of the campuses to guiding ideas for intimate spaces within them.
These Masterplans are offered as a challenge to typical ‘grand visions’ that aspire to a fixed future point in time. Nonetheless, they also offer their own visionary approach to a type of evolutionary Masterplan, grounded in detailed inventory, analysis, understanding of maintenance practices, appreciation of changing administrative and pedagogical systems and attention to site specific opportunities.
Award for Planning in Landscape Architecture
Recipient: Barwick & Associates
Project: Frescati Conservation Management Plan
The Frescati Conservation Managament Plan is a document of exemplary thoughtfulness and thoroughness. It evidences a detailed and coherent application of heritage assessment and planning processes, but also a sensitive and intimate revelation of the site that is carried through to recommendations for restoration and management.
As an on-going reference document for site management and restoration it is comprehensive, well researched and well evidenced.
Special Jury Citation
While some particular criteria are outlined by the awards process for prioritization of outstanding work, the jury wished to recognise this project for its superior depth of research, sensitivity to the site history and the physical evidence of the landscape itself, but especially for the complexity of its layered response to restoration.
While the Plan does not exactly offer a new direction in Conservation Management, it does evidence a new level of importance and involvement for landscape architects which brings with it new views of site complexity. It is a relatively small project that will lead to small built works and it engages effectively with authorities and other interest groups, but beyond this it shows a sophistication and affection for historical knowledge which recognizes and eschews the unconscious if inevitable value-judgments implicit in many restoration plans. It is a deeply engaging document as well as a very useful one.
Local Government Greenspace Award
Recipient: Burnie City Council-Inspiring Place
A Collaborative Approach to the Public Realm
This award recognizes the ambitiousness of the City of Burnie in tackling the difficult interwoven problems of urban social and economic blight through projects of physical infrastructure improvement. To date the City has undertaken almost a dozen projects and while many of them may be typical to urban revitalization plans, the sheer enthusiasm and commitment, the ongoing collaborative support of consultants, particularly landscape architects Inspiring Place, council officers and interest groups, as well as the quality of the outcomes, deserves recognition and support. In viewing the projects selected as examples of the collaborative effort so far, the jury too was excited by the prospects for Burnie and sincerely congratulates the City and all those involved.
