Jury citation
The prioritization of people, nature and community is clear in this innovative and provocative thought piece that raises the question: Should architects be the initiators of returning public space to the community?
The proposal presents a multi-layered street experience that brings the community back to basics, providing a place for neighbours to connect, strengthening social bonds and promoting a sense of belonging. The curation of the public realm – both street and verge – transforms asphalt and concrete into a sustainable urban landscape cared for and owned by the community.
The design gesture of doing less will encourage physical activity and contribute to improved community health. The increased biodiversity and permeability will assist to manage the urban heat island effect, air pollution and stormwater.
This entry is deserving of an honourable mention because it challenges the idea of how we structure our neighbourhoods around transport corridors and the automobile, when nature and humans were here first.
Entrant’s description
Gardens on Oxford is an imaginative reinterpretation for cultivation of care in public space. It transforms Oxford Street, Sydney into a street-enriching, sustainable urban landscape through a series of garden beds owned by its community rather than a corporate governing body. The proposal amplifies architecture that accepts mess, idiosyncrasies and informality as a critical alternative for future public space.
Current proposals for urban renewal are increasingly additive, resource inefficient and unsustainable. Our society privileges efficiency over sufficiency, apparently forgetting how to give a second life to space. The Gardens challenge this via the belief that transforming what is already there should never come as an afterthought.
The Gardens reinvent the public land cared for by the City of Sydney and Woollahra Councils with a new central boulevard. The existing shopfronts and footpaths are left untouched. Six lanes of traffic become two, with the Gardens as the central nerve occupying a new form of unregulated public land.
Inspiration for the Gardens is taken from Oxford Street’s rear suburban laneways and informal public spaces such as Rose Terrace, Boundary Reserve and Burtons Lane. Although governed by council regulation, they are full of eccentricities, demonstrating how individual agency, locality and public ownership can transform the city.
The Gardens embed levels of permeability into the ground plane using six different low-maintenance garden typologies. New care and maintenance guidelines in harmony with the Indigenous seasonal calendar ensure the future proliferation of the garden ecologies.
The architectural profession is rarely afforded agency in the care, transformation and maintenance of public space. A grassroots approach of intense investigation, precise observation and reimag-ination of the existing offers an alternative path to intervene yet preserve public space. The Gardens on Oxford is beyond picturesque. Its inhabitants are central. It represents a factual, perceptual and sustainable transformation based on a design gesture of doing less.
