A 317-metre rainbow bridge at Perth Children's Hospital wins design praise
Among the winners announced in Thursday night’s Australian Institute of Architects – West Australian chapter architecture awards was a new civic building that scooped four accolades and a commendation, and two quirky structures that are very different except for the one attribute they have in common: positive encouragement of user interaction.
These three projects perhaps signal a breakaway direction eschewing flashy, impressive structures that might make spectacular city skyline profiles but that can be so fortress-like and remote that they remain enigmatic to anyone who doesn’t work or live in them.
And if there’s a gravitation effect associated with this year’s WA awards, Perth’s coastal satellite, Fremantle, is its fulcrum because that’s where the new civic centre, its historic town hall, and a very lyrical public seat built around a big old fig tree all got a gong.
Yet while the purpose of the various state awards is to sift out the standout recent architectural work for the main name awards and send them on to the national competition in November, sometimes projects dubbed with a commendation also deserve to pull focus.
One such is a new bridge connecting the Perth Children’s Hospital to the famous Kings Park. In rainbow colours, in sinuous curves, in the sheer joyousness it offers its user groups, from all angles the Kid’s Bridge is a gorgeous piece of work that gained a commendation in both the Urban and the Enabling architecture categories.
Leading out from the much-awarded hospital that scooped the AIA prize pool in 2019, crossing a busy road and arriving into the healing embrace of the bushy parkland, the Koolangka Bridge – a word meaning “children” in the Noongar language – has been made “to allow respite from the clinical world of the hospital”.
Local architects Fratelle worked with British engineering experts, Brownlie Ernst and Marks, BEaM, and Noongar artist Kamsani Bin Salleh who muralled the underside, to make this 317-metre-long construction not only a practical crossing but an aerial play space.
Everything about Kid’s Bridge announces that purpose, and obviously, as such a colourful installation has already become an icon in itself.
The main name prize in the Urban design category, in Interior design, and in Public, and taking out the paramount George Poole Award for Kerry Hill Architects, is the new Walyalup Civic Centre in Fremantle.
Its direct neighbour, the pale 1887 Town Hall, not incidentally took out the Heritage Award for Hocking Heritage and Architecture’s careful restoration.
One of Australia’s most brilliant tropical architecture specialists, the modernist work of the late Kerry Hill is continued by his two practices in Singapore and Fremantle. In the complex but subtly-veiled new Civic Centre, the most publicly interactive feature is the sloping and over-manteled front lawn. Beneath it is a library.
The lawn space – so useful for gatherings, protests, event staging et al – is the most overt aspect of what the judges saw as the marvellous “permeability” of the multipurpose amenity.
As a whole, Walyalup “invites the community deep within the central functions of the building” the judges admired for being so “effortless in its simplicity”.
How simple is the idea of putting a seat around a significant tree overlooking a river?
Also in Fremantle and winning the Small Projects award for local studio Penhale + Winter and Whadjuk elder Sandra Harben, is a curving form-ply seat set around a massive old Morton Bay fig.
Inscribed with writing that makes it a “love letter” to place, the judges said, “The Gathering Place” project more than fulfils the architect’s mandate of “merging the pragmatic with the poetic” and of setting out to “explore delight”.
