 | A WALK IN KINGS PARK BY BOTH CHALLENGING AND REINFORCING PICTURESQUE MODES OF VIEWING, DONALDSON + WARN’S LATEST WALKWAY GIVES VISITORS NEW WAYS TO ENGAGE WITH PERTH’S OLDEST PARK.
REVIEW PHILIP GOLDSWAIN PHOTOGRAPHY MARTIN FARQUHARSON
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View over Kings Park towards the Swan River, with
the slender form of the Lotterywest Federation
Walkway bridge in the middle ground and the
Watergarden Pavilion in the foreground. The walkway
opens up new views and ways of interpreting the park.
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Looking along the elevated walkway through the
tree canopy, with the Balga Lookout to the left.
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The slender ribbon-like bridge arcs across a small
valley, evoking the journey of the dreamtime serpent,
the Wagyl and providing uninterrupted views to the
Swan River.
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The finely worked surfaces of the
walkway and bridge.
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The finely worked surfaces of the
walkway and bridge.
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The bridge offers the visitor
access to the upper tree canopy.
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KINGS PARK IS Perth’s landmark public park. Located high on the Mount Eliza scarp,
overlooking the city, it has an ongoing and highly significant role in the way the city has
constructed an image of itself. The latest addition to this landscape, Donaldson + Warn’s
Lotterywest Federation Walkway, provides new opportunities for engaging with the park
and thinking about its layered histories.
The project is made up of five discernable elements and experiences. It begins with
a pathway that moves through a series of didactic gardens to an elevated walkway that
carries the visitor through a canopy of mature native Karri, Marri, Tingle and Jarrah trees.
A bridge then allows panoramic views of the Swan and Canning Rivers to the south, as
well as offering an understanding of the significance of the site to the local Nyoongar
people. A second walkway delivers the visitor back to the ground through what architect
Geoff Warn calls a “cathedral of Marri trees” and links into existing pathways that reveal
the rusted weather resistant (WR) steel pylons etched with the art of Kevin Draper. In
many ways the project is sympathetic with the dominant picturesque mode of the park
while also proposing new ways of thinking about non-European representational space.
The park has its origins in the early 1870s when a 175-hectare tract of land on the
scarp overlooking the fledgling colonial settlement of Perth was designated as future
public garden and parkland. In 1890 this was expanded to a total of 400 hectares and
thus began a process of clearing, planting and manipulating; shaping, contouring and
remodelling the native terrain into a European-style garden that remains in evidence
today as Kings Park.
The elevation of the park makes it a popular vantage point from which to enjoy the
framed view of the Perth CBD and a spectacular vista across the Swan River and beyond,
across the flat sandy plains, to the Darling Scarp on the eastern horizon. This “viewing
edge” – identified by Perth architect and academic Hannah Lewi as one of a series of
narrative spaces throughout this extensive parkland – is significant as the location from
which Perth’s development since settlement, has been recorded through countless
paintings and photographs.1 It constructed a view that Lewi describes as “falling
somewhere between the panorama, the topographic map and the picturesque,
romantic scene” – an amalgam of many of the concerns of nineteenth-century
landscape and garden design.
From 1900, the park also became a repository for monuments that helped to
place the West Australian colony in the greater context of the British Empire. The
imposing statue of Queen Victoria, the monument to the Boer War, and collections of
munitions and artillery guns constituted and reinforced the collective memory of a
culture at the fringe of an imperial domain. These two thematic strains – the picturesque
and the European collective memorial – are both reinforced and challenged by Kings
Park’s newest insertion.
The Lotterywest Federation Walkway begins with a pathway that integrates
seamlessly into the established network of serpentine walkways. Of the five million park
visitors a year, very few currently venture beyond the “viewing edge”, the war memorial
and visitor’s centre. The pathway is designed to draw some of these visitors deeper into
the park to enjoy its extensive Botanic Gardens. The path’s orchestrated meandering
through gardens that represent the seven states of Federation, the Kimberley garden
with its striking collection of boab trees and the Tuart Lawn, place it in firmly in the
park’s established nineteenth-century picturesque tradition. The overt choreography of
the pathway experience posits the visitor as viewer. The route is prescribed, marked with
inset cast iron plates bearing the project’s logo, views are framed, scenes are set,
landscapes manipulated. However, it also provides unexpected vistas – like the one
through to fountains of the Pioneer Women’s Memorial, which is normally viewed from
the opposite direction. It allows the viewer to make visual connections between a
dismantled and repositioned Hosking’s 1897 rotunda and one further up the park in its
original location. To these traditional notions of the picturesque D+W, with engineers
Capital House Australasia, have added their own Modernist twist. An elegantly
engineered parabolic timber roof from a demolished 1960s staff quarters is reinvented
as a shelter and pavilion.
The elevated walkway departs from a small landing adjunct to the relocated
Hosking’s Rotunda, where the sloping earth is folded up to create a “plaza” retained by
12 millimetre thick WR steel. The formal, tectonic language of the second stage of the
project is thus established – bold, repetitive, monolithic forms, simply detailed. The
structural support for walkway consists of elemental WR steel pylons. The same width
steel is used for the walkway, decked with reeded jarrah, and the balustrade is simple
welded WR flat bar with a galvanised steel handrail. The pathway cast iron panel is
repeated as an inlay in the decking. Deceptively simple in plan and elevation, these
repetitious objects become vastly more complex and visually arresting when viewed
obliquely in the landscape. The broader expanses of WR steel pylons are as rich in
colour and subtle variation as the paintings of Mark Rothko or Rover Thomas. The
monolithic pylons and the vertical balustrades frame and define the landscape like the
sculpture of Richard Serra. As well as transcending its simple forms to hover as an
architectural mediation between engineering, sculpture and land art, the walkway draws
attention to the significance of the location to Indigenous people. The footings are
shallow and wide to avoid disturbing the ground dwelling ancestral spirits and the 16-
metre spans allow for fewer pylons to be placed in the floor of the valley. The walkway
provides a transcendental viewpoint that coincides with a botanical interest in the canopy
of trees. A lookout halfway along its length mimics the form of an upturned grass tree.
The walkway changes direction awkwardly but then arcs elegantly across the small
valley as the third element of the project. The ribbon-like thinness of the bridge is
accentuated by the cast iron floor panels, embossed and cut out using the project’s
double leaf logo which, when viewed from below, evoke the sensation of looking into the
shifting light of the tree canopy. A glass balustrade allows uninterrupted views to the
river and the controversially sited Swan Brewery below. After moving from the raw
simplicity of the walkway, the applied graphics of the bridge appear superfluous. They
seem unnecessary to the overwhelming gestural strength of the bridge that creates a
powerful sense of the space occupied by the dreamtime serpent, the Wagyl. The
Nyoongar Aboriginals say this ancient creature created this small valley on its way to the
Swan River. The bridge gives a clear spatial sense of the scale of the transformation
wrought by these ancestral creatures on Australian landscape.
The bridge then delivers the viewer to a second walkway, the Law Walk, beneath the
Marri forest canopy. This walkway, closer to the ground, is detailed with an open mesh
floor bringing the valley floor to the viewer’s attention. The design team worked in
collaboration with Aboriginal arts consultant Richard Walley to include a performance
space, Beedewong, for the Nyoongar people whose cultural traditions are maintained
through dance and storytelling rather than painting. Past the amphitheatre, the walkway
links into existing network of paths offering alternative routes through the garden. As the
Law Walk moves underneath the bridge and walkway the analogy between Serra’s work
and the walkway’s pylon becomes more obvious. Like Serra’s sculpture, the pylons simply
appear as objects in a landscape. It is not until you are close to the great expanses of
rusted metal that you realise that are actually finely worked with the addition of welded
images – banksia leaves, seed pods, geological stratifications – ground back and
scratched into the surface of the steel. Initially the applied outline of flora appears slightly
naïve and superfluous, overwhelmed by the monolithic simplicity of the pylons. However,
they are transformed by the weathering of the WR steel – the collection of water in the
weld ridges create patches of golden ochre oxidisation, wind-driven rain streaks mimic
the fall of seed pods, the areas exposed to sun become blackened as if burnt.
D+W’s walkway is a bold, contemporary insertion into a very traditional terrain.
The project successfully brings together the predominant nineteenth-century picturesque
landscape with traces of the colonial eye, as well as suggesting new ways of
comprehending the transformations wrought on the land from a much early mythic time.
This evocation of the journey of the Wagyl is one of the triumphs of the project. It
proposes a contemporary architectural expression for Indigenous culture as well as
providing a space for its narrative to be retold and renewed.
PHILIP GOLDSWAIN IS A GRADUATE ARCHITECT WORKING FOR WOODS BAGOT.
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| Project Credits |
LOTTERYWEST FEDERATION WALKWAY
Architect Donaldson + Warn—design director Geoff Warn,
Tom Griffiths, Jonathan Lake, Chris Mellor, Robyn Moore,
Andrew Scafe, James Webb. Structural engineers Capital
House Australasia—Brian Nelson, John Knuckey, Domenic
Malatesta, Chris Samson. Environmental artist David
Jones. Graphic design Ray Leeves. Electrical engineers
CCD Australia—Guy Tomlinson. Quantity surveyors Ralph
Beattie Bosworth—Bruce Greenwood, Graeme Zorn.
Landscape architect Plan E—David Smith. Aboriginal
arts consultant Richard Walley. Universal access
consultant Independent Living Centre of WA—Ann O’Brien.
Signage graphics Sean Elsegood Design. Contributing
artists Pylon Artwork—Kevin Draper; Aboriginal Artwork—
Lyle Calyon, Jenny Calyon, Peter Calyon, Lance Chad, Shane
Pickett, John Walley, Olman Walley, Richard Walley. Head
contractor John Holland—Frank Dilizia , Peter Pugliese,
David Grist. Steelwork fabricator Jupiter Steel—Russell
Lang, Ron Browne, Alan Brown, Simon Van Hall. Steelwork
erection On-Site Engineering—Rob Nolan. Steelwork shop
drawings Appro Drafting—Andrew Poole. Survey control
Fugro Surveying—Ash Craven, Mark Trichet. Electrical
services M & M De Luca—Mario De Luca, Andrew De Luca.
Landscaping Stillwater—Justin Byrne. Glazing
Armourglass—Gerhard Trichard. Stressing and ground
anchors Frilling and Grouting Services—Laurent Carles.
Concrete and civil works A. H. Civil—Alvin Harrison. Client
Botanic Gardens and Parks Authority—Steve Hopper, Mark
Webb, Roger Fryer, Grady Brand, Jacqui Kennedy; Friends of
Kings Park—Tom Alford; Lotterywest—Andrew Walton.
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