City of Port Adelaide Enfield with Ashley Halliday Architects, Wax Design and the Yitpi Yartapuultiku Custodian Group , 1:200.
Celebrating indigenous culture and land through landscape, ecology, and architecture, the building and landscape together offer indoor and outdoor performance venues. The facade and roof, adorned with a rustic red hue and constructed from weathered spotted gum, envelop the inner spaces. In the model, the roof was removable, revealing the interior performance spaces and amenities with materials that echoes the building design. Floor tones and laser etchings conveyed specific materials and unique ground art considered for the project. The two internal volumes diverge to form the ‘joining space,’ where the lights of the seven sisters are depicted in the roof, providing a sheltered area with views of the surrounding hillsides and rivers. In the architectural model, textures and colors were thoughtfully employed to emphasize the diverse trails, narratives, and local cultural elements embedded within the design.
Employing a place-centric co-design process involving dialogue and modeling with kinetic sand, the design team enabled custodian groups to shape the site with their own hands. This unique model-making approach resulted in an undulating, textural topography, aimed at fostering further storytelling opportunities. Describing the shoreline as dynamic and alive, the team requested the model convey the profound significance of the connection to water, particularly as the coastal edge converges with the tides within the joining space. Within the model, this shifting tide and shoreline are suggested through a softly textured array of recycled timber shavings that create an edgeless quality that extends and disappears beneath the water, symbolized by reflective, frosted acrylic. Sculptures and cultural references were modeled and colored to shine through in the landscape, these tiny objects marked key locations in the landscape design where contours shifted to carve out meeting spaces.