Park Facilities for Masons Falls and Jehosaphat Gully

By combining familiar rural forms with a direct response to the site, we wanted these facilities to connect into new park infrastructure – but feel like they’d always been there.

Project Overview
Characteristics
Specifications

Client Brief

This project replaces facilities within the Kinglake Ranges National Park that were destroyed in the Black Saturday bush fires. Toilets, picnic and BBQ shelters and a new lookout to Masons Falls were designed as part of a project to establish two new picnic areas.

The designs had to accommodate accessibility, longevity and low maintenance, and respond to the different landscapes at the two sites. With many thousands of visitors to the two sites each year, these facilities are an important contribution to places that are at once beautiful and held dear.

Design Response

Following the path of a walking trail, tracking the edge of a clearing, or seeming to weaving between trees, they are shaped by the landscapes of their sites. At the same time they also bear a likeness to the sheds and structures that appear as silhouettes in the countryside.

A simple and robust ‘kit of parts’ was established, that with slight variations could provide a variety of site specific designs for each type of shelter and toilet, as well as accommodate future expansion.

Despite being small and simple structures, nothing is concealed within linings, all elements need to be considered and coordinated. As such the core part in the kit was the Yellow Stringybark timber truss roof structure that was developed through collaboration between architecture and engineering.
Park Facility Characteristics
Key values
- Kit of parts provides variety through small modifications
- Lookout designed as both viewpoint and gathering place
- Timber structure and cladding
- Response to landscape and local built form
Key materials
- Lysaught Spandek roofing and cladding,
- Yellow stringybark structural trusses
- Shadowclad profiled cladding
- Polycarbonate roofing
- Exterior plywood wall linings
Park Facility Specifications
Core deliverables
- Lookout
- Ttoilets x 2
- 4 and 3 table picnic shelters
- BBQ shelters
Services provided
- Concept design
- Developed design
- Tender documentation
Architect

Antarctica (with Simon Whibley as co-director)

People

Project Director: Simon Whibley
Project Team: Simon Whibley, Sasha Hadjimouratis, Ben Clements, Piran Reitze, Cameron Newham.
Landscape Architect: Mike Smith and Associates

Client

Parks Victoria

Date completed

2013

Location and area

Masons Falls and Jehosaphat Gully picnic areas, Kinglake Ranges National Park, Victoria

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