Parramatta Aquatic Centre

The site for the Parramatta Aquatic Centre is Mays Hill, a 20 hectare area of park directly across the rail line from the UNESCO heritage site of Parramatta Park and Old Government House. The site has a 60,000 year history of occupation by the Burramattagal people, a clan of the Darug.

In the early history of the colony Mays Hill became a point of outlook - a place to view the emerging colonial town of Parramatta. This history defined the present day heritage controls of the site, to be retained as an empty foreground to look to the emerging city.

The building program required a 10 lane 50m outdoor pool, a 25m indoor pool, a learn to swim pool, a kids recreational play pool, a spa and sauna area, and a substantial health and wellness centre, as well as all the administration and community programs, and extensive change areas. In total it was a footprint over 15,000sq.m.

After careful mapping of the scale of building footprints in the park, and the required program of our project, we explored concepts that could house the substantial physical program of the Aquatic Centre while retaining the primacy of the landscape and the small scale character of the building footprints within the Parramatta Park and Mays Hill landscapes.

To resolve this dilemma we studied closely examples of harbour and River swimming, where minimal enclosures created both continuity and containment – they delineated swimming enclosures while allowing continuity of geography and landscape, becoming a source of inspiration for how we could place a minimal enclosure that simultaneously defined the identity of the Centre while becoming the point of separation between public space and the landscape of the Aquatic Centre.