Parramatta Aquatic Centre | Grimshaw and Andrew Burges Architects with McGregor Coxall

The Walter Burley Griffin Award for Urban Design

With an overt public agenda – creating a local-council-operated aquatic and recreation centre for Parramatta – the urban generosity of this project transforms the reach of a public building. The design effortlessly integrates a large program of pools, a gym, a cafe, change rooms and multipurpose rooms hidden in plain sight with sensitive layering of built and landscaped form.

The seamless integration of landscape provides a protected sanctuary for pool users, while the partial burying of the centre gives a restored ecosystem back to the surrounding neighbourhood. Historic sightlines are maintained towards Parramatta River, instilling a renewed sense of place in a previously forgotten site and maintaining the importance of the river to the city.

Protection is key to the success of this building. The pools are carved into the edges of the interior, ensuring climatically appropriate spaces for play and learning. The building’s oculus, open to the sky and housing the main outdoor pool, becomes a central gathering point for the community, shielded from the surrounding urbanity of roads and railway tracks. The integration of a rain garden fosters its own microclimate to dampen the heat of Western Sydney.

Parramatta Aquatic Centre raises the agenda of a local government facility, exemplifying the transformative qualities of public spaces for not only their immediate users but the wider community and the urban form. The resulting landscape becomes a beacon for the adjacent city towers while framing these same contextual sightlines for swimmers sheltered within the building below. The simplicity of the form is multi-faceted, seemingly solving planning and program constraints with climatic and culturally sensitive responses in a single move. The materiality rejects the established norms for a public pool, creating a robustness and longevity that celebrate Country and provide a distinctive contribution to the urban fabric.

National Award for Public Architecture

Parramatta Aquatic Centre is situated on Mays Hill, directly across the rail line from the UNESCO World 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 Dharug.

The project is a consummate example of a public facility that moves beyond the brief to transform space at the edge of a transit corridor into a newly realised, publicly accessible locale. Acknowledging both Burramaatagal heritage and the colonial history of the area, the project strategy assimilated Mays Hill as a traditional outlook point. The deft insertion of the facility within the landform is an act of respect and preservation and exhibits considerable expertise in accommodating a 15,000-square-metre footprint.

Conceived as a community landscape, the pool sits as a sunken court, allowing the public to meander around Mays Hill and view the Parramatta vista. The circle becomes both focal ring and core around which subsidiary facilities are incised, allowing a clear and logical program for events and utilisation, with natural light filtering through generous roof lights. The drawing-in of park flora is a counterpoint to what might be traditionally experienced within a public pool setting; water-sensitive design is a strong consideration, including the reestablishment of endemic tree species over the parkland. The inclusion of aligned facilities and a cafe promotes a social, community atmosphere within the whole.

PAC is a masterful outcome for public design that ensures the conservation of a key landscape asset for the city of Parramatta.