Project Overview

Located at the edge of central Sydney, the ambition of the project was to reinvigorate the under-ulitised 7.5 hectare park, and upgrade the tired public pool. The overriding principle was to premiate landscape over built form, based on a conviction that in these inner urban areas, green space is sacred.
The old pool facility building was removed from the middle of the park, allowing the landscape to be visually opened and re-graded, amplifying its distinctive pastoral quality. New activities such as playing courts, fitness hubs, playgrounds, and picnic tables are concentrated along the railway edge and have added life to the park. Pathways choreograph desire lines and shed stormwater to grassy swales for collection and reuse on the park playing field. New plantings and avenues draw on the Victorian love of exotica, while a rolling, grassy topography blurs the park perimeter with an urban grassland ecology. The new pool building is designed as a ‘folded landscape’ with a green roof of native meadow grasses. In this single move the building disappears from the adjacent street, and is embedded into the rolling park landscape. Two crisply shaped landscape mounds define the pool enclosure, simultaneously connecting and separating it and the park.

Project Commissioner

City of Sydney

 

Project Creator

City of Sydney and Neeson Murcutt Architects with Sue Barnsley Design

Team

Client:
City of Sydney

City Projects and Property Design + Project Managers:
Elizabeth Sandoval, Lisa Dodd, John O'Shea

Architect: Neeson Murcutt Architects Pty Ltd
Landscape Architect: Sue Barnsley Design

Project Brief

The Prince Alfred Park and Pool upgrade has reinvigorated this, the largest public open space in Surry Hills. Once a park that was under-utilised, it has already become a popular year round destination.
The main pathway through the park runs parallel with the railway. It is an important commuter route for pedestrian and cycles. The project widens and re-shapes this shareway, concentrating new activities along it – playing courts, fitness hubs, playgrounds, and picnic tables – adding greater park amenity, life and safety. The project includes other new pathways that choreography desire lines and improve accessibility, recast entries aligning with bounding streets, and site-wide water management. Pool entry paths from Chalmers Street have been engineered to take service and emergency vehicles.
The existing 50m outdoor pool is retained and upgraded to meet sustainable aspirations and is the City of Sydney’s first that is fully trigeneration ready. The new pool facility building houses all the required support including ticketing, change rooms, plant, offices, first aid, café/kiosk, and accessible park toilets.
The simple materials palette – concrete, timber, tile, planting – is robust, and importantly, unifies pool and park allowing the building to sit confidently within this parkland without compromising or cluttering this prized open space.

Project Need

The splayed alignments of the railway, pool and former avenue planting, established powerful geometries within the park that define three zones – a recreation edge adjacent the railway, a central ‘pastoral’ zone, and the Chalmers Street ‘parkland’ edge that includes the park entry from Central Station. This is the urban framework from which the project was developed.
The project actively draws upon its urban heritage. The cranked alignment of the building and angular geometries of the grass mounds, resonate with the triangular geometries of the park itself, local subdivision patterns and local building profiles, created by the incising of the railway across the city grid in the 1850s. The memory of the Inter-colonial Exhibitions is recalled in a series of park elements that abstract the circus pens and animalia of the Agricultural Show. The toddler’s playground in the park is the most direct interpretation of these elements. The circular shape of the toddler splash deck also finds fascination in the ‘circuses’ of horses, cattle and pigs from this era. The seats and picnic tables, fitness nodes and flower beds also adopt this circular arrangement while the path lights crane or gather, like flocks of birds with long coloured necks to populate the park.
The green meadow roof with its cantilevered edge is critical to the realization of the building as a piece of ‘folded landscape.’ The continuous concrete cantilevered soffit-ceiling-rear wall, is lined with tiny white tiles that reflect light and exude a beautiful liquid quality.

Design Challenge

Originally laid out for the holding of large exhibitions in the English style, the new park plays on the episodic placement of elements with a new spatial and ecological sensibility – adding life and contemporizing the park without erasing its Victorian roots. New plantings and avenues draw on the Victorian love of exotica, while a rolling, grassy topography blurs the park perimeter with an urban grassland ecology. The sinuous lines of the new concrete pathways have resonance with the park’s Victorian heritage. Elements such as the park lights, playgrounds, fitness nodes, pool enclosure fence, iconic yellow umbrellas, toddler shade structure, tree-seat, chimneys, bestow a playful character as ‘follies’ within the Victorian park.
The greatest design challenge was making the 1000m2 pool facilities building ‘disappear’ within its park setting. This was achieved through the folded landscape strategy, which also concealed the presence of Chalmers Street with its busy traffic, from the actual pool. The fluing of pool plant, building services and future planned trigeneration equipment through the meadow roof, was a particular challenge. An artful solution was found through their design as individual chimneys rather than consolidating the flues into a single vent.
Two crisply shaped landscape mounds define the space of the pool enclosure, simultaneously connecting and separating park and pool. They were created from soil on site, and provide wind protection and create areas for discrete sunbathing. The mounds also provide wind protection and create areas for discrete sunbathing. Strategic gaps between the mounds allows views between park and pool, including glimpses from Chalmers Street.

Sustainability

Prince Alfred Park and Pool is a benchmark project of sustainability initiatives providing a direct benefit to city residents whilst showcasing complex ESD measures integrated with contemporary state-of-the-art design including:
• green roof insulation - biggest green roof of its kind in Sydney using local native plants;
• new pathways set level with lawns making them universally accessible while allowing for natural drainage, enhanced infiltration and purification of stormwater flows;
• capture of storm water from upper catchment in a 500cc underground storage tank for irrigation of the playing field and pool lawns
• grass swales and a planted bio retention swale improving water quality before discharge to Blackwattle Bay
• moisture sensors to reduce irrigation;
• improved topsoil conditions
• extensive tree, under-storey and habitat plantings;
• meadows protect mature figs from compaction and provides habitat for urban wildlife
• extensive lawns including non mowable grass slopes to the external face of pool mounds
• high coverage of porous, green cover, reducing reflectivity and heat
• created from soil on site
• bike parking;
• recycled construction materials;
• timber products from sustainable forests;
• rationalised lighting and energy efficient lamps including LED lights;
• pool plant designed to house future trigeneration equipment that will provide electricity for the whole site;
• environmental messages through signage.

Tags

• GOV