Week 5 Exercise

This week we looked at all the areas on parliament house that we thought would have the possibility to be enhanced by an architectural statement. After doing some more research we stumbled across the plans for the underground car park. After looking at the plan it was very noticeable how wasteful the area is, and that parliament should be embracing greener options of transport rather than relying on private vehicles.

Our proposal is to replace a portion of the existing Parliament House car park with a new development that will include a new public transport hub for bus and light rail. The scheme is to promote the use of pubic transport over commuting by car, as this is a more sustainable option of travel for the future.

The underground car park has a huge footprint at nearly 25,000m2 and can house up to 2000 cars, we will retain around 300 existing car parks and we will turn the space from an under-utilised service area to a thriving transport hub and a new and flexible precinct for future Parliament activities.

Existing Structure

The existing space has hundreds of support columns that form the structural support for the public courtyard above. We plan to use these columns as a flexible grid that will house transportable and flexible modules that can be moved and arranged to service different spacial requirements that Parliament may require.

Our proposal will also incorporate a large transparent skin over the new transport hub and Parliament precinct that will create vertical connections to the courtyard and green space above. This skin will add an interesting aesthetic quality to our structure and form an overall cap for the services below.

Cross section of proposal

Flexible Diagrams

While resolving this idea I did some diagramming to further explore our idea

Presence

We also looked into building presence. The presence that a building creates can be a positive or negative experience for the users of the structure, if the form is two overpowering this can overshadow the true meaning for the structure, and on the flip-side if the structure has a weak form or presence the building can be lost in its surroundings.

Our proposal will make use of strong forms and materials to give it a strong visual presence. With the addition of a large transparent skin capping our new developed precinct, this skin will create an interesting form that will complement the organic form of the existing parliament house.

Below is some images that we have created to show the presence of the building

Possible forms for site