Some of the best winners of the 2016 National Landscape Architecture Awards:
Garangula Gallery,
Harden, NSW
Built as a private gallery for Swiss financier Urs Schwarzenbach and his wife Francesca, Garangula houses the couple's impressive Indigenous art collection. The challenge for Tract Consultants' Sydney office was to design a garden that focused on the sculptures in the couple's collection while maintaining harmony with the broader landscape. "The planting design is sympathetic to and beautifully integrated with the sculptures themselves," the judges said in awarding Tract a Landscape Architecture Award for gardens. The courtyard at the entrance to the gallery is built around a boab tree and looks out over the property's polo fields. "The planting design is bold and deliberate, anchoring the gallery building into its setting."
Penguins Plus viewing area,
Phillip Island, Victoria
Penguins are so cute that hundreds of thousands of people each year make the pilgrimage to Phillip Island off Melbourne to watch them waddle up the beach at sunset. Phillip Island Nature Parks recognised that visitor numbers had reached a tipping point. It contracted Tract Consultants, along with Wood Marsh Architecture, to resolve three competing needs: high-volume, night-time tourism; rehabilitating and preserving the landscape and the penguins' habitat; plus keeping the penguins happy. The result is a combination of boardwalk systems, contoured viewing locations and an underground viewing room. "The designers integrated the lighting superbly by working with scientists and ecologists," says awards juror Malcolm Snow. "The site's curvilinear forms sit beautifully in the dunes. It's an elegant and very sexy shape." It won the Award of Excellence in tourism.
McCulloch Avenue Boardwalk,
Frankston, Victoria
A spread of housing development along the Frankston foreshore led – surprise, surprise – to an increasing number of people cutting tracks through the dunes and coastal vegetation to get to the beach. Frankston City Council gave Site Office from Brunswick a modest budget to design a boardwalk. It created a walled timber pathway that protects the dunes while at the same time, via subtle changes of direction, draws the pedestrian's eye to features of the landscape along the way. "Site Office made a bold statement but in such a way that it still touched the ground lightly," says Snow. Winner of a Landscape Architecture Award for parks and open space.
Shipwreck Coast Master Plan,
Victoria
How to encourage eco-tourism while protecting a unique and fragile landscape – one that meanders 28 kilometres along one of Australia's most rugged coastlines? That was the challenge facing Parks Victoria as visitor numbers to the Shipwreck Coast, with natural wonders such as the 12 Apostles along the Great Ocean Road, kept rising. Sydney practice McGregor Coxall's master plan included viewing platforms, raised walkways and beachside terraces. "It encourages people to linger and sense the land that they're in," says awards juror Snow. "The journey is an uplifting experience, rather than simply being about getting to the destination." On top of that, the project has injected new life into once-struggling townships along the route. It won a Landscape Architecture Award for land conservation.
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The AFR Magazine Design issue, out Friday October 28 inside The Australian Financial Review.
