It all started aboard a plane. More specifically, WilkinsonEyre’s Stuart Dow and Ed Daines were looking out of the window for a bird’s-eye-view of Brisbane during a flight out of the city when they couldn’t help but notice a rather desirable potential site for a new approach to the Brisbane Olympics in just seven years’ time, the Mayne Rail Yards.

Located approximately three kilometres to the north-northwest of Brisbane CBD, it’s an undeniably notable spot on a satellite image. Notable, that is, if you’re thinking about design on a truly long-term, city-making scale. WilkinsonEyre recently entered the Brisbane 2032 debate with a proposal for a new Olympics site centring on Mayne Rail Yards. Of course, there is endless detail and complexity to any serious proposal at such a scale, but what really cuts through in speaking to Dow and Daines is their, well, emphasis on cutting through. Their vision is self-consciously transformative, focused on the long-term big picture and the unique opportunity this kind of event holds for a city to make profound changes and lasting legacies. Their vision is, in a word, holistic. What it aims to cut through is a focus on disparate facilities and buildings rather than the question of a city’s legacy.

“We believe a larger conversation needed to be had, one where you step away from the coalface and look at the macro issues,” says Dow, Principal at WilkinsonEyre. “We felt that would benefit Brisbane. It’s about not getting bogged down in the minutiae of how you might deal with particular stakeholders. In our eyes, those are important issues and shouldn’t be cast aside, but you have an Olympics once in a city’s lifetime – if you’re lucky.” Dow then draws attention to the legacy of Melbourne’s Olympics felt even to this day, as well as London 2012, which WilkinsonEyre was directly involved in.

Finding Brisbane’s 2032 sweet spot

Perhaps the danger in designing for a mega-event such as the Olympics lies in missing the forest for the trees. This WilkinsonEyre intervention seems to be an attempt to refocus the design conversation through a holistic lens rather than dealing with specific venues in an unconnected manner.

“It’s a reminder of what Brisbane can win from this process,” says Daines, Director at WilkinsonEyre who again turns to the danger of “getting bogged down.” He continues: “It’s really a case to be made about what the city could win out of it in the long term – a chance to reshape a whole area and have a real legacy.”

On this, Dow adds that “if you take a step back and actually ask, ‘what is the overarching legacy for the city and the people of Queensland?’ – we feel that this is a much more palatable and generationally impressive result.”

Related: Plus Architecture on the Brisbane Olympics

Finding Brisbane’s 2032 sweet spot

With the hypothetical clearing of the rail yard – an undoubtedly thorny question in itself, given the public importance of the transport infrastructure – the designers propose a site running broadly from to the northeast and hugging Enoggera/Breakfast Creek to its west. A 60,000-seat stadium to the south looks to Perth’s Optus Stadium as a benchmark, while the major transport hub would aim at creating a powerful arrival experience. In between, a pedestrian bridge making use of old rail infrastructure to cross the Creek is a standout feature.

“We understand that [moving the rail yard] is a complex and potentially quite costly exercise, but I suppose what we see is an opportunity that most cities would yearn for – a way to be able to look at their built environment and say, ‘what is something we would like to dislocate from its current location in order for a certain area to thrive?’ And we see that this is just a really incredible feature within Brisbane that is rather underwhelming and certainly under-utilised,” says Dow.

The creation of a cohesive Olympics site in a relatively central location is a key part of the design suggested by WilkinsonEyre. Interestingly, for Dow and Daines it’s not that being centrally located is an intrinsic and necessary good in such a project. Rather, it has to do with some of the specific qualities of Brisbane as a city. Where London, for example, was brave in taking its Games out to an area in need of regeneration rather than the swankier parts of the city, Brisbane’s layout and development, they argue, lend themselves to making use of this site.

Finding Brisbane’s 2032 sweet spot

“Brisbane has an extraordinary opportunity where they’ve got a CBD in an elbow on the river and the city spans out in 360 degrees, and they’ve got really interesting precincts and places in all directions,” says Dow, who draws attention to the proposed site’s proximity to areas such as Fortitude Vallery and Newstead as well as the airport and indeed the river.

“There’s all these really great optics with respect to its location, its proximity, its ripple effect on adjacent suburbs and its amenity,” adds Dow.

Daines notes that “in some ways, the site offers the best of both worlds… It’s close enough to the centre that it can work in partnership with other proposed sites [for the Games], but it is far enough out and a large enough site to genuinely put in new facilities and have a lasting effect. You have an overlay of various options and we really do feel it’s something of a sweet spot.”

It’s tempting to say that, if nothing else, WilkinsonEyre’s willingness to make an intervention in a public architecture debate is commendable and something the profession – and society more widely – needs much more of. Putting out a public proposal without any kind of binding design has allowed them to be imaginative, daring and even provocative; the suggestion of a whole new site, for example, puts architectural knowledge back up the chain before the brief has ruled out such possibilities. A large event requires large ideas, and time will tell whether Brisbane is able to truly grasp its opportunities for transformation, legacy and city-making.

WilkinsonEyre
wilkinsoneyre.com

Read on: Richard Francis-Jones on the question of public space and protest

The post Finding Brisbane’s 2032 sweet spot appeared first on Indesign Live: Interior Design and Architecture.

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