Gunyama Park Aquatic Recreation Centre

Very few Aquatic Centres have been able to offer the pleasures of swimming that can match the primacy and hedonistic experience of swimming in Sydney’s beach and harbour pools. Inspired by our collage of Sydney beach pools, our competition winning proposal established a playful interaction of natural and constructed landscapes that grafts the beach into the urban pool experience.

Gunyama Park Aquatic and Recreation Centre (GPARC) is located within the Green Square Town Centre, one of the largest urban regeneration sites in Australia. The project establishes a new recreational heart in an emerging urban context that will become the highest density neighbourhood in Australia. The program includes a combination of 5 pools (indoor and outdoor), a large health and fitness centre, and a park including a sporting field, outdoor gym and outdoor BBQ’s.

Close analysis of the physical and social qualities of Sydney’s coastal pools, synthesised with an extensive analysis of the past and future character of the GPARC’s site at Green Square, defined our approach. We used the studies of coastal pools as a way of re-imagining the Aquatic centre, identifying social and physical landscape elements – free form swimming areas, informal swimming areas with beach entries, wind protected bleachers, to stretch the community opportunities for both passive and active recreation within a more hedonistic conception of the Aquatic Centre typology.

The site was re-imagined as a continuous wetland landscape of the original Botany Swamp, with a series of pool and recreational landscapes embedded through topographic insertions into the wetland landscape, creating a continuous park footprint across the whole site. The enclosure of the Aquatic Centre was created by an industrial scale urban trellis floating over this park landscape – a remnant large span roof reminiscent of the structures of the area prior to its contemporary transformation in the face of industrial obsolescence.

Rethinking all the scenarios of the change rooms was an important innovation at GPARC. Housed in cabanas reminiscent of beach pool enclosures, we created a change village that housed small spaces for families to change in privacy, individual changing spaces, accessible change rooms, family change with showers, group change for larger events such as school carnivals, as well as more traditional gendered change rooms. Change room innovation to accommodate all the scenarios of modern life was an important part of making a safe and enjoyable inclusive community facility.

Physical models were important to our process of testing this new Aquatic landscape, helping finalise the geometries of the bermed landscapes surrounding the pool concourse.

GPARC introduces a completely fresh material palette to the Aquatic Centre typology, including a mass timber structure with translucent ETFE pillows to create a warm and inviting interior pool hall filled withdaylight, playful references to beaches pools through the detailing and colour palette of the cabanas, and an emphasis oncommunity health and well being through the rich timber palette of the gym areas. The timber beams of the pool halls, put together in the 50m pool and craned into place over the two indoor pools, span 36m, the largest mass timber span in the Southern Hemisphere.