The acknowledgement of the powerful civic setting of the basalt staircase and its success as a place of public assembly has generated a plan that unravels into the gardens flanking the parliament either side of its Bourke Street axis.
This is a highly legible, realistic, understated scheme which is both generous and subtle. It extends the public contact with parliament, and allows ongoing development to the building and its functions over time.
The strategy offers a new, lowered public courtyard around three sides of the incomplete building, with long tiered ramps extending out into the exterior gardens to invite access and connection. In close to the historic building, new offices are established below with an excavated plaza gaining light, air and visual linkages, and with direct functional connections into the parliament complex. Within this strategy, parts of the building, incomplete for a hundred years, appear as 'unfinished' history; the infinity of "incompletion".
This is a strong landscape-based approach which might have been richer with greater consideration of the whole of the extended site.
Jury Comments
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