Architecture
Bound to Landscape - Pinnacles Interpretive Centre
Embedded into a series of larger scale narratives about landscape, place and relationship, the Interpretation Centre, designed by Woodhead at the Pinnacles Desert, is integrated with this beautiful landscape through the use of wood.
Located 250km north of Perth in the Nambung National Park, the Pinnacles is made of thousands of protruding limestone formations spread over a vast dunal landscape. The rock formations are the exposed eroded remnants of a formerly thick bed of Tamala Limestone, created over time by rain and wind.
Primarily, the architectural interventions at The Pinnacles can be read as investigative parts of a landscape narrative, based on an underlying conviction of the fundamental importance of relationship to place.
The material language for the scheme fits into its environment, becoming just another part of the background to the desert. The materials used are specifically ‘of the place’ . The podium and the wall elements are constructed in limestone. Timber elements are direct references to the nearby grove of vanishing Tuarts that are disappearing under a shifting sand dune. Thus, the design principle for the centre is completely embedded in the mutable narrative of that landscape.
The forces at play in the landscape determined the configuration of the elements and distinct staging of construction. Stage One involved the complete construction of the freestanding limestone walls only that were then left to sit inconspicuously in the landscape as both ‘ruins in reverse’ and ‘immature pinnacles’ for a period of time. At the completion of Stage two of construction, the vertical timber elements, which were a figurative reference to the heath shrub in the area, were deliberately set on fire.
As a consequence this project deliberately favours shifting and multiple axis lines over a singular orientational logic, resulting in precarious spatial relationships. The configuration of the walls creates open-ended opportunities for enclosure, rather than clear-cut pockets of space, and material elements both fragment and overlap to emphasise the shifting focal points.
Text Compilation: Ritu Sharma
Photographs: Courtesy Woodhead + John Gollings
Project: | The Pinnacles Interpretive Centre |
|---|---|
Location: | Pinnacles Drive, via Nambung National Park, Western Australia |
Architect: | Woodhead |
Year of Completion: | 2007 |
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