Marsden Park Amenities is Improving the Public Domain

All projects should have an ambition greater than just the client’s brief. The best ambitions should improve the public domain. CHROFI’s Marsden Park Amenities exemplifies this spirit.

Marsden Park Amenities appears to be one of the first public interventions in this new estate and therefore bore a heavy responsibility. The new residential estate on the flattest of Cumberland Planes needed a public building of civic scale to give it a gathering place of importance in an otherwise background of low-rise, repetitive suburbia.

Embracing the side of a main street with its flowering rosettes of columns, these amenities hold a sweeping, unifying, curving roof of suitable civic presence. Clad in a golden mesh, juxtaposed curvaceous forms skillfully roll in and around the columns to comfortably plan for toilets and change sheds for the local sporting fields. The roof acts as a parasol over the curved forms below and is generous enough both to allow a vista between the building elements and to accommodate casual public gatherings on the concrete podium under its ample overhang.

This is skilled architecture moving effortlessly beyond the brief to not only satisfy the programmatic requirements, but more importantly to define a public space with a beautiful and resolved architecture of uplifting civic gestures and fine details.

Project Information

Architect: CHROFI

Photography: Clinton Weaver