Award in Sustainable Architecture
Victorian Architecture Awards 2020
Professional Excellence in Building Award
AIB Victorian & Tasmanian Professional Excellence Awards 2020
Professional Excellence in Building Award
AIB National Professional Excellence Awards 2020
Award in Cultural Heritage
AILA Vic Landscape Architecture Awards 2021
Award for Cultural Heritage
AILA National Landscape Architecture Awards 2021
wunggurrwil dhurrung
This project represents best practice in environmentally sustainable architecture. The project champions a triple bottom line approach, fulfilling a comprehensive social response and excellent environmental credentials within a highly constrained budget. The implementation of sustainable outcomes through early engagement with the traditional owners are a highlight of the project, where strong aboriginal leadership and collaboration has resulted in a positive transformation of the site and setting a benchmark for future sustainable development. The jury applauds this project as an outstanding example of respect and sustainability. - Award Citation
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In a landscape millions of years old, in which human inhabitation stretches back tens of thousands of years, it seems naively premature to present this project, Wunggurrwil Dhurrung, for a landscape architecture award in the year 2021.
Its native plantings were only established a year and a half ago, and are only just beginning to assume their mature forms. Moreover, the specimens were planted into existing site soil without recourse to artificial irrigation or fertilisation. Finally, incipient growth has been across periods with inconsistent and unseasonable patterns of heat and rainfall.
But this is Wathaurung Country. It has always been.
REALMstudios, in collaboration with Gresley Abas and Gregory Burgess Architects, worked across a deeply consultative program to develop the design for Wunggurrwil Dhurrung in Wyndham, an Aboriginal Community and Integrated Family Centre.
Through a process of engagement and design, involving community and traditional owners, the project brought together; the site’s deeper connections to Country, its stories and its meaning, to form an outcome immediately identifiable to its intended community, successfully avoiding a tokenistic or emblematic design response.
Further, to connect site to Country, REALMstudios worked closely with acclaimed plantsman Paul Thompson and water specialist Dr Peter Breen to form a scientific nexus between planting, water and place, where passive water management gives rise to a range of landscape types and seasonal plantings. Intermittent streams and their associated landscapes are designed as playful landscape elements supported by passive watering systems of capture and release from tanked roofscape water, where water is released over longer periods to mimic more gentle and extended rainfall patterns as part of negotiating a broader changing climate phenomena.
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Awards
Professional Excellence in Building Award, AIB Victorian & Tasmanian Professional Excellence Awards 2020
Professional Excellence in Building Award, AIB National Professional Excellence Awards 2020
Sustainable Architecture, Victorian Architecture Awards 2020
Award in Cultural Heritage, AILA Vic Landscape Architecture Awards 2021
Award for Cultural Heritage, AILA National Landscape Architecture Awards 2021
Country
Wadawurrung
Location
Wyndham, Victoria
Year
2016 - 20
Status
Completed
Client
Wyndham City Council
Collaborators
Gresley Abas Architects, Gregory Burgess Architects, Paul Thompson (Planting), Dr Peter Breen (E2DesignLab),
Vicki Couzens (Indigenous artist)
Photography
Peter Bennets, Rory Gardiner