|
|
Oculus
Flanking Adelaide’s city grid is the burgeoning East End with its civic, education, cultural and recreational uses. The Royal Adelaide Hospital site is located at the nexus of the City’s East End, North Terrace Cultural Boulevard, The City Park Lands, Riverbank and the University Institute Precinct. While the site’s historic origins were that of a Hospital in the Park within this broader precinct, its expansion and focus on health care has gradually disassociated the site from the city and the Botanic Gardens. The reinvention of the site is unrestricted by the previous demands of a single land use.
At a macro level, the site is a nexus for the cultural heritage influences of its surrounding context. Within the proposal, the park lands and Botanical Gardens permeate the site, re-establishing its historic context in Light’s green belt. Strong connections to surrounding precincts will be re-established. The University campus will further expand into the site through the creation of a multi-purpose learning centre which will open out onto a new Heritage Plaza that celebrates the site’s significant buildings. The Heritage Plaza will be sited at the North Terrace level, functioning as a canvas for public events, street artists and passive relaxation as well as a means to allow the heritage buildings to “breath” and expose their beauty in-the-round.
The planned reuse of historic buildings along North Terrace and Frome Road will provide an important tangible connection to the precinct’s history and cultural heritage values. The context of these historic buildings will be re-energised, reverting to an open permeable civic and landscape setting that not only celebrates the history of the site and the individual buildings, but provides a welcoming entry to this re-generated cultural precinct. This collective of historic buildings will form an important precinct within the site. The heritage precinct will facilitate the convergence of educational, creative and social functions. University space, a digital library, office space, bars and restaurants, an acoustic music venue and a boutique hotel are some of the proposed adaptive reuses.
The Heritage Plaza will also serve as a forecourt for the Gallery and Museum building, a flexible, multi-purpose facility that harks back to the great Adelaide Jubilee Exhibition Building, that once occupied pride of place along the North Terrace Cultural Precinct. The contemporary building will include exhibition spaces, a cinema and a multi-purpose space supported by sculpture gardens, a bookshop, bars, restaurants and cafés overlooking the Botanic Gardens and new park land. A series of wings creates a building in which parts can be integrated or separated in a highly flexible melange.
The Gallery and Museum building formation will allow the primary use of museum to be supplemented and complemented by other uses. The primary east-west oriented wings are composed as a babushka of vertically interlinked volumes, enabling controlled and controllable natural light in the ground floor galleries, and providing a series of secondary or servant spaces above. Woven from materials redolent of Adelaide, including references to the historic materiality of sandstone and brick, these pavilions create an interplay between inside and outside, gallery and courtyard, lower floors and upper floors.
The new park land occupying the centre of the site will augment the City’s green space with a Childrens’ Water Garden, City Ponds and Wetland, Skate Space, Lawn Amphitheatre for small outdoor performances and open grass areas for picnics and informal social gatherings. The north-east facing spaces will be bathed in winter sun and will filter storm water runoff from the site
|
|
Presentation Boards
 |
 |
 |
||
 |
 |
 |