Project Overview

Providing an iconic ‘front door’ to the suburb of Wentworth Point and the Olympic Park precinct, the development consists of a mix of uses including retail, anchored by a specialist supermarket, supported by fresh food and beverage, service retail, childcare, community rooms and residential, organised around a major public spine which links the existing ferry terminal to the rest of the suburb.

Organisation

PAYCE & Sekisui House

 

Team

Developer: PAYCE & Sekisui House
Architectural: HDR | Rice Daubney
Project Management: Iconic Management
Structural: Browns
Landscape Architect: Context
Hydraulic and Fire: Wood & Grieves
Green Star: Northrop
Traffic: Colin Henson
ESD: Footprint

Project Brief

The SOPA Ferry Wharf site, soon to be known as Marina Quays, provided the opportunity to culminate a 25 year dream by Payce to turn an industrial wasteland on the Parramatta River into a thriving community. One that proudly boasts Sydney Harbour as its front door. This development proposes a different residential and mixed use exemplar; based on the vision to provide connection and permeability to link water, landscape and suburb, not as a typically private enclave, but rather as an essential piece of public domain.

Defined as a series of three buildings, their organisation is driven by the vision to create a building that mediates between the harbour and the suburb. This mediation occurs through the creation of the main organising principles of connecting and permeable spines enhancing view and movement through the public domain.

Project Innovation/Need

This development starts with an understanding of movement, connection and permeability not as a site concern, but rather primarily at the level of the suburb. Minute mapping of the existing physical, cultural and social infrastructure led to the realisation that this site could either enhance and promote these connections, or indeed deny them. This development was about improved urban outcomes on a suburb wide basis. This could only be done by radically re-thinking the relationship between built form and waterfront.

Scheduled to begin in late 2014 (10,430sqm including 256 apartments and 4,200sqm of retail and childcare) this mixed use development consists of a major public spine which seamlessly reconnects the ferry wharf through ‘ferry walk’, an active marketplace, to Wentworth Point; a second spine, the ‘lookout’ provides a rich communal space for residents and a vantage spot to watch the ferries for the public; and ‘dock walk’, created to link to the new school slated for the adjacent land. Permeable and connected, the buildings create dramatic public spaces which enhance view, light and movement to the greater urban context.

Design Challenge

The project vision was not to create a building but to create a place.

It’s all about a connection; to landscape, to place, to community (physically and spiritually)
The proposal opens and invites these connections through a rich and layered public domain stretching from the water edge to the built form, the parklands and the community beyond. (Built form strengthening rather than denying these connections).

In so doing, places are created; iconic, memorable, accessible, vibrant, sustainable, communal; the ‘green blanket’ cloaks the point and in so doing creates a gateway to a place already iconic; naturally, physically, historically”.
The proposed development uses a fine patterned sheath of gold anodised aluminium as its primary materiality, offset by a neutral palette of patterned and moulded concrete and glass. The use of a restricted palette of materials provides a strikingly simple proposal whereby the materials are used to signify both a macro and micro series of moves. On the scale of the harbour, the use of a rich and hugely symbolic material as gold signifies ‘gateway’; at the scale of the suburb the gold intensifies through the two major public spines signifying the importance of the public space and, at the level of the built form, the gold is finely patterned to mimic shimmering water to signify the importance of human scale.

Sustainability

The architecture led team included all disciplines with the aim of providing a coherent and comprehensive development. Engineering of all types, from civil to sustainability, have come together in a development that has:

- A civil underpinning that minimises cost in the ground and potential delays and risk through an optimised parking strategy;
- A simple concrete framed structure with visible elements connecting to the ground and reinforcing structural logic.
- One Planet principles which have informed the architectural outcome; together with Green Star and Basix compliance are fundamental to the design approach- they are not treated as ‘value adds’
- Optimises its environmental performance largely through positive passive design integrated into the DNA of the development. The massing, internal layouts and orientation have been organised to provide good access to natural light, solar access, view and cross ventilation
- Provides a desirable place to live through careful planning around access to units, mix and diversity of types, price points, sizes and configurations promoting a diverse population of inhabitants.