Walla Mulla Park

CEA worked with Terragram to upgrade two small parks in the centre of Sydney. The work was commissioned by the City of Sydney Council and was treated as one project. The project recently won a Sydney Design Award. It is also currently a finalist in the BPN sustainability Awards and is long-listed in the World Architecture News Awards in the Landscape category. The project was a political "hot potato" For the local residents the parks were a "no-go zone"! Throughout the parks people were sleeping or passed out. Clothing, blankets, mattresses and other belongings and rubbish were strewn about the place, even on the toilet roof. The dilapidated facilities in Walla Mulla Park were lined with pornographic graffiti, excrement and vomit. A side room contained was filled with syringes. Bourke Street Park had no facilities, just a temporary builder's toilet. People were screaming for action. Council was forced to walk a fine line trying to please both sides. They conducted an extensive community consultation process but it was clear that it would be difficult to please everyone. Everyone wanted something done! But what to do?? Project Need Walla Mulla Park was dirty, gloomy and unattractive. The idea here was to eliminate the existing retaining walls, and many of the trees. The park needed to be emptied out to enable a better and easier flow through the park, and facilitate easier cleaning by council trucks. Given that there was not much space for gardens vertical gardens were adopted instead. We chose to incorporate the amenities structure into one of the large steel trellises that line the two “urban walls”. The structures are connected seamlessly. The intention is that the vines will eventually grow up and extend along the mesh roof to hang over the edge forming a “green cascade”. The siting of the Bourke Street amenities was constrained by the viaduct (it couldn't be under it), the community garden and some existing trees that were to be preserved. Its layout was generated by the need to provide an entrance to the garden, an accessible toilet and an storage room and potting bench and trough for the gardeners. The roof is a 6mm thick steel folded plane supported by just two circular steel posts. It sweeps up to allow in air, light and some rain! Design Challenge An important part of the brief was that there should good surveillance, people need to be aware if someone is in the toilet, especially at night. We used panels composed of stainless steel with cutouts combined with a translucent material to satisfy this requirement. The stainless steel doors are laser cut to a pattern that was abstracted from the plan of the park. New grassed areas were provided and in the case of Bourke St, some exercise equipment and a community garden, where locals could grow vegetables and socialize. No longer do the parks carry such a foreboding stigma, but rather they have a sense of dignity and comfort, enhancing the mixing of people of various socio-economic and cultural groups. This was a difficult project with a clear social agenda. This area has always attracted Sydney's outcasts, those on the margins or beyond the boundaries of polite society. We are very pleased that we've helped to give them a little more safety – and dignity. Sustainability This is a tough urban area and it was important that the materials used were similarly tough, durable and graffiti resistant. The chosen palette consisted of concrete flooring, concrete blockwork with ceramic tiles and steel roof structures. The long term future of the parks is uncertain - changes in council's urban design plans may mean that in the longer term the underside of the viaduct is built-in. Sustainability is an important aspiration for the council as it is for us and the structures are constructed in a way that makes it possible to re-locate them or recycle most of the components. Heritage was also important. The parks are surrounded by terrace houses and the famous murals depicting the resident's struggle against developers high-rise plans for the area are significant cultural artifacts.