 | NORTH TERRACE Both conduit and locale, stage one of the redevelopment of Adelaide's North Terrace, by Taylor Cullity Lethlean with Peter Elliot, draws on the past to reimagine the city's future.
REVIEW Gini Lee PHOTOGRAPHY John Gollings Grant Hancock
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Aerial view of stage
one of the North Terrace
redevelopment, with the
South Australian Museum
forecourt to the left and
the Art Gallery of South
Australia to the right.
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Aerial view showing
North Terrace as a
mediating element
between the escarpment
and CBD grid and the
Torrens River below.
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The city’s major
cultural institutions line
the north side of the
Terrace. These buildings
are now carefully framed
by the Terrace’s new
topography.
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Looking
along the length of the
stage one redevelopment,
which extends from the
Library of South
Australia to the
University of Adelaide.
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Looking west up the
Terrace’s inner walk
towards the library.
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Sequential linear
arrangements of pattern
and texture carefully
articulate the facades of
the buildings along the
escarpment.
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Looking
across the central
mediating zone to the
museum forecourt.
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Looking east along the
section of the Terrace in
front of the art gallery.
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Water is used in a variety
of ways along the length
of the Terrace. These
features are also part of
an extensive system for
collecting and recycling
water. A fine fountain
plays in front of the
library.
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A linear pool
with gentle waterfall
bounds the space in front
of the art gallery.
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Water collects in
Fourteen Pieces, an
installation by Hossein
and Angela Valamanesh
in front of the Museum.
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Playful planting
draws on Victorian-era
traditions of selecting
plants to highlight
architectural aspects.
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The new wetland
garden in the museum’s
forecourt.
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The careful
detailing extends to the
scale of street furniture
and other elements.
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Planting detail.
Photography credits
01–07, 09–11 John Gollings. 08, 12–14 Grant Hancock. 15 Ryan Sims.
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After long years of planning and politics and great
persistence on the part of the urban design team –
Taylor Cullity Lethlean in association with Peter
Elliott Architects, writer and artist Paul Carter, and
James Hayter and Associates – the first stage of the
revitalization of Adelaide’s North Terrace is proving
worth the wait. The city is typically imagined
through Colonel Light’s iconic grid and the linearity
of North Terrace, reinforced by its procession of
major public buildings, has encouraged tourists and
locals to picture Adelaide as a legible place. One
that is easily traversable along a flat and wide
streetscape, although that walk has long been
affected by somewhat scruffy planting, ageing trees
and a confusion of sculptures, statues, signs, street
furniture and traffic.
This uneven journey is now interrupted by the
first stage of the North Terrace Redevelopment,
which spans the section from Kintore Avenue to
Frome Road. This civic space on the north side of
the terrace embraces the forecourts of many major
institutions, including the State Library of South
Australia, the South Australian Museum, the Art
Gallery of South Australia, and the historical
buildings of the University of Adelaide and the
University of South Australia. A wall of commercial
buildings fronts the south side of the terrace. This
commercial side is not ignored by the new work,
but North Terrace is aligned asymmetrically, both
spatially and functionally, and the renewal of the
street continues in this tradition.
North Terrace is often described as Adelaide’s
cultural boulevard, and it carries high expectations
for the functional and symbolic representation of
the city. These expectations have been met with a
design intervention that respectfully reinterprets the
conditions that have framed the cultural
development of Adelaide. The realized project is the
product of a collaborative approach embracing
history and tradition alongside contemporary
concerns. Taylor Cullity Lethlean’s well-regarded
design ethos – to creatively build upon tradition in
seeking new imaginings of civic space – while
constrained by the primacy of Light’s plan and a
conservative city as client, has resulted in a layered
spatial design and a precise programme of detailing
that responds to local conditions. These new spatial
and topographic elements now enable the Terrace to
act simultaneously as both conduit and locale.
The initial framework document for the
development of the entire North Terrace precinct
provided a robust vision that has been successfully
realized in stage one. It recognized that the Terrace
has a many-layered identity – arterial road and civic
spine, it is also the repository for the city’s
collective memories and aspirations. In reflecting
on the conceptual beginnings of the project, Kevin
Taylor emphasizes the importance of Paul Carter’s
work, which drew on Light’s original planning and
the topographic origins of North Terrace. Light’s
vision of North Terrace as a mediation between the
escarpment and the Torrens River below, along with
the linearity of forms between road and river,
suggested a topographical approach to reimagining
the Terrace.
Landscape and architecture can both be
understood as topographical arts, produced through
the interdependence of nature and art. The new
urban design transforms the Terrace and its borders
into a topographical composition, which is
conceptually framed by the dual spatial meanings of
terrace – both a flat surface, and a series of
steppings mediated by the escarpment edge. In the
new North Terrace such large-scale relationships
between terrain and built form are topographically
inscribed and architecturally reinforced through the
articulated ground plane.
Upon entering the Terrace’s northern walks, the
pedestrian is greeted by unfolding spaces which
convey the variability and layered meaning of this
civic space. The familiar double pathways of the
former Prince Henry Gardens still exist but the
mediating area, the thirteen-metre central flexible
zone, encourages an altered negotiation. The
southern border of the commercial city is still
visible, but the immediate ground plane has
emerged from the flattened plain in a kind of
micro-topography that spatially refocuses one’s
position between the chaos of the busy street and
the formality of the institutional buildings.
Building upon a civic garden tradition, the
planting beds, water features and seating step down
towards the river. A new intensity of patterning and
texture, in sequential linear arrangements running
north to south, folds up to the architecture that
marches along the escarpment. The eight-metre
zone separating garden from road retains its
character as a spatial buffer. Here, north-south
movement is focused through the rhythm of
insertions into paved zones, which interrupt the
primary east-west linearity of the street.
The familiar four-metre walkway that hugs the
buildings is expanded, not in scale but in presence.
It now invites the pedestrian to interact with the
patterned surfaces, and establishes new spatial
relationships with the built forms and garden fabric
that border it. The library, museum and art gallery
form a serrated built edge in a series of imposing,
mostly Victorian-era facades, relieved by deep
insertions and courtyards leading to contemporary
architectural entrances set far back from the Terrace.
The walk along the inner Terrace now encourages a
negotiation with garden and building spaces in very
altered ways. The rhythm of spaces, where dense
garden detail opens up to expansive paved areas at
each building and its forecourt (redesigned to
respond to entry conditions), emphasizes the spatial
framing of the adjacent buildings.
Features emerge from the garden zone,
encourage the pedestrian to pause, jump the walk
and emerge again in forecourts, either in reality or
through spatial association. Water, a precious
resource in this arid place, is contained in a series
of pools reminiscent of those seen in grander
gardens. The library’s fountain plays a series of fine
jets; the museum has subtle still water in Hossein
and Angela Valamanesh’s Fourteen Pieces, which
visually link to the stylized wetland forecourt
garden; and the art gallery is bounded to the east by
a linear pool culminating in a gentle waterfall. The
poetics of water along the walk are also a subtle
reminder of the pragmatics of good design: the
water is part of an extensive system of gathering
and recycling of local resources.
Pragmatic topography, the functional need for
level change from street to buildings, is developed
in a variety of devices: ramps, steps and platforms
for future kiosks and artworks. The terracing of
seating plinths infers a subtle mediation of the
slope in association with the original landscape.
Material selection and detailing were informed by a
desire for local presence. Paving was all sourced
locally, from the sands to the judicious use of slate
and granite. There is care in the small details, for
example where Kanmantoo squares have been
inserted into the precast to reinforce a building
facade or to define a seating edge.
The attention to traces and marks inscribes a
contemporary design sensibility onto the terrain of
the Terrace. The design embraces the array of
statues and existing urban detritus that speak the
civic history of the place with a respect that often
belies their material qualities. And the bold and
playful garden plantings suggest an almost
domestic gardening practice in their highly
detailed planting compositions. Kate Cullity’s
rationale for this intensity draws on Victorian-era
garden traditions where plant selection favours
the architecture through the use of striking and
robust plants that reinforce each building’s
spatial character.
Walking the new Terrace it is possible to pause
in many places, to revisit the familiar, to review the
detail of buildings and to consider aspirations for
Adelaide from renewed perspectives. All routes
offer themselves as sites to be experienced
repeatedly, and variety and change are essential
qualities of responsive urban space. North Terrace is
an intensely detailed and complex space and it has
gained wide public acceptance as a new urban
garden for the city where designed topographies
promote public exploration and delight. Yet the
absences are also striking. The programme is
incomplete. Elements that were planned but not
realized, such as a contemporary architectural
presence in the flexible zone and public artworks
that invite imagining the city, have become invisible
pauses in the Terrace.
To enable this civic space to become a place for
gathering, and to respect the conservative values of
this city while also suggesting that a contemporary
imagination has relevance to other city sites – this
expansive vision was the designers’ intent. Putting
the “terrace” back into North Terrace has indeed
been a challenge, and I look forward to the city
taking up the project’s visible and imaginative
legacy elsewhere.
GINI LEE IS A LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT, INTERIOR DESIGNER,
AND LECTURER AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA.
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NORTH TERRACE
REDEVELOPMENT
STAGE ONE
Landscape architect and
urban designer
(principal consultant)
Taylor Cullity Lethlean—
project team Kevin
Taylor, Perry Lethlean,
Kate Cullity, Simon
Brown, Damian Schultz,
Health Edwards, Susan
Duldig, Carlo Missio.
Architect and urban
designer Peter Elliott
Architecture + Urban
Design—project team
Peter Elliott. Civil and
service engineer Dare
Sutton Clarke. Traffic
engineer QED.
Artist/historian Paul
Carter. Artist (water
feature) Hossein and
Angela Valamanesh,
Fourteen Pieces.
Pavement engineer HDS
Australia. Lighting and
electrical engineer Barry
Webb & Associates.
Irrigation design Hydro-
Plan. Quantity surveyor
Rider Hunt. Furniture
design Dryden & Crute
Design. Graphic design
Gregg Mitchell Design.
Water features
(hydraulics and
electrical) Sydney
Fountains Waterforms.
Client Adelaide City
Council and the
Government of South
Australia. Surveyor
DSC Andrew.
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NORTH TERRACE
REDEVELOPMENT
STAGE ONE
Landscape architect and
urban designer
(principal consultant)
Taylor Cullity Lethlean—
project team Kevin
Taylor, Perry Lethlean,
Kate Cullity, Simon
Brown, Damian Schultz,
Health Edwards, Susan
Duldig, Carlo Missio.
Architect and urban
designer Peter Elliott
Architecture + Urban
Design—project team
Peter Elliott. Civil and
service engineer Dare
Sutton Clarke. Traffic
engineer QED.
Artist/historian Paul
Carter. Artist (water
feature) Hossein and
Angela Valamanesh,
Fourteen Pieces.
Pavement engineer HDS
Australia. Lighting and
electrical engineer Barry
Webb & Associates.
Irrigation design Hydro-
Plan. Quantity surveyor
Rider Hunt. Furniture
design Dryden & Crute
Design. Graphic design
Gregg Mitchell Design.
Water features
(hydraulics and
electrical) Sydney
Fountains Waterforms.
Client Adelaide City
Council and the
Government of South
Australia. Surveyor
DSC Andrew.
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