This project is for a new recreation park adjacent to the stadiums in which Sydney’s 2000 Olympics were staged. In collaboration with landscape architects Room 4.1.3, TERROIR developed a notion of NewParkSpace as a means of responding to the needs of recreation spaces in the contemporary city.
The image of a hi-tech running shoe meeting the ground – the moment when the radically light, curved, computer aided, and artificial product meets the organic, dirty, weighty and in this case, toxic earth – provided a conceptual engine and sensibility for the proposal. This avenue of enquiry led to the artificial environment of computer gaming and the landscapes deployed in these environments as a reference from which the spatial maneuvers and representations of these were developed.
In capturing both the aesthetic and functional quality of the running shoe and the computer game and applying it to the site, we acknowledged the site’s artificiality while distinguishing it from others. Thus, a branding exercise emerges from a spatial exercise, resulting in an activated parkspace.
The landscape was then developed in detail as a gameboard upon which people could enjoy what we called “sportfun”. Sportfun is based on all possible official games and sports but it treats them as fun. Sportfun is participatory not passive. Currently there is no place, a place between the ticketed fun park and the instrumental sports grounds where people can feel comfortable to get involved in “sportfun”. Our aim was to create such a place.
TERROIR and Room 4.1.3 were shortlisted to the final 4.
