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Connecting to site through wonder and surprise
Commonwealth Place Kiosks
This small pair of café, kiosk and amenity buildings are located in the most formal yet desolate series of public spaces in Australia. Canberra is distinctive for its intense city plan and resultant choreography of movement around and between the key landscape features through which it derived its geometry. At the centre of the plan sits Parliament House, located at the apex of a triangle from which all geometry in the area is derived. In front of the Parliament are buildings containing Australia’s major public institutions – a sort of ‘architectural zoo’ constructed over the last 50 years and designed by the country’s finest architects.
To provide amenity for those visiting this precinct, it was determined that a toilet block and small café should be located in the foreground, on the edge of Lake Burley Griffin. The question arose, how does one install a toilet just meters from such a stately array of buildings and institutions? The strangeness of this context led to the design of grey timber facades with coloured soffits – a surprising combination that is also a deeply contextual response, that opens the eyes, and mind, of those visiting to the qualities of the place around them.
- TYPE Public
- LOCATION Canberra | AU
- YEAR 2007
APPROACH
"Instruments" Diagram
The project was derived from two key moves. First, the buildings were aligned with the existing geometries of the area – an avenue of trees parallel to the lake and, in counterpoint to this line, an imaginary radial alignment centred in Parliament House. Both served to formalise the instrument’s recreational focus at the water’s edge but also, through the non-orthogonal geometry that results, hinting at the larger spatial forces at play in this special place.
The second move centres on a decision to clad the facilities in greying timber, tying these objects to the mute and often off-form concrete of most buildings in the precinct. This monumentality is then confounded by the surprise of circular openings in the soffit that only appear on approach. The openings house a system of tubes that filter natural light to the covered areas below, a light coloured by the tonal range of the adjacent Manchurian Pear Trees in Autumn.
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