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Award for Design in Landscape Architecture
VICTORIAN
RACING CLUB FLEMINGTON
Landscape Architect:
ERM Pty Ltd
This award recognises a
collection of discrete projects that, when combined, have added
significant environmental, cultural, aesthetic and commercial value to the
VRC’s Flemington Race Course. The project team turned significant project
challenges, deemed initially to require highly engineered solutions, into
a series of wonderful landscape assets for their client and the public.
ERM’s work stems from an original invitation to assess a culturally
important group of elm trees. The trees were to be removed to make way
for a concrete wall to protect the Flemington Race Course from flooding.
ERM’s approach is best
illustrated in their response to protecting the race course from the
Maribyrnong River flood waters. The solution sees the reuse on site of a
difficult and polluting material – Coode Island Silt – within a feature
gabion flood wall. This approach, along with careful attention and
appreciation of often subtle grading and levels, has resulted in the net
addition of considerable areas of public open space, the retention of
culturally significant trees and the creation of a new landscape marker
along the river itself. Other important but less obvious outcomes for
Flemington include the creation of a new public viewing area as well as
the creation of an attractive wetland and associated ponds for the
capture, storage and reuse of storm water for site and track irrigation.
For rethinking seemingly
predetermined solutions, and for their clear, simple, and understated
response, ERM is to be congratulated. They developed technically elegant,
landscape driven approaches to problem-solving. The team clearly
identified and defined the site issues and then, through a thorough design
process, developed sound solutions to numerous, integrated and complex
problems.
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