{"id":650557,"date":"2026-05-05T06:00:14","date_gmt":"2026-05-05T06:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/650557\/"},"modified":"2026-05-05T06:00:14","modified_gmt":"2026-05-05T06:00:14","slug":"adelaide-aquatic-centre-by-jpe-design-studio-in-collaboration-with-warren-and-mahoney-and-karl-winda-telfer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/650557\/","title":{"rendered":"Adelaide Aquatic Centre by JPE Design Studio in collaboration with Warren and Mahoney and Karl Winda Telfer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Building on Adelaide\u2019s Park Lands will always be contentious \u2013 even when replacing an existing structure. Architectural commissions within them are as much a professional privilege as they are a political and social challenge. The Park Lands have long been described as Adelaide\u2019s lungs, allowing the city to breathe through nature, and as its urban moat, demarcating the city and limiting the organic changes in scale seen elsewhere.<\/p>\n

Surviving largely intact since Colonel William Light\u2019s original 1837 plan, the Park Lands form a continuous ring around the CBD and North Adelaide. By global standards, they are immense: more than double the size of New York\u2019s Central Park, five times larger than London\u2019s Hyde Park, and 25 times the size of Sydney\u2019s Royal Botanic Gardens. Yet they often feel smaller, operating as a fragmented landscape system rather than a single park. This has produced a chequered history of built interventions and a persistent tension between preservation and growth not anticipated in 1837. Positions range from a strict \u201cdo nothing\u201d stance to calls to \u201cdo the right kinds of things,\u201d even before First Nations knowledge and cultural memory enter the discussion.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

View gallery<\/p>\n

The original Adelaide Swimming Centre, located in Park 2 \u2013 named Pardipardinyilla (swimming place) in Kaurna language \u2013 within the Park Lands, replaced the City Baths on King William Street as the city\u2019s primary swimming facility, following their demolition in 1969 to make way for the Festival Centre. Initially a collection of outdoor pools, the swimming centre was enclosed with a unifying roof in 1985. This all\u2011encompassing enclosure combined the noise of lap swimming, diver training, swimming carnivals and children\u2019s parties with the inescapable smell of chlorine, overwhelming the senses on entry. In replacing this ageing infrastructure on such significant ground, the design question was not simply where to start, but how.<\/p>\n

For the design team, that meant walking on Country, led by Cultural Creative, Burka, Senior Man, Mullawirra Meyunna, Karl Winda Telfer, through a methodology he describes as an alternative form of CAD \u2013 Country Aligned Design. This involved sitting and observing sight lines across and beyond the site, and uncovering what Telfer describes as \u201cripples of understanding\u201d within the story of water from above, within and below. This cultural landscape approach sought to soften the hard edges of the brief, introduce curves and return space to the landscape. The project gives back 1,000 square metres of Park Lands, delivers 15 hectares of landscape design across the broader site, adds more than 300 trees and reinstates the former car park, incorporating water\u2011sensitive urban design principles.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

View gallery<\/p>\n

Philosophically and architecturally, the project centres on water as life, and as that great human leveller where ages, abilities and cultures converge. Formally, this is expressed by breaking the substantial program into two pavilions. The southern wing is lower, longer and wetter, housing a 50\u2011metre lap pool, a warm-water pool and learn\u2011to\u2011swim facilities. The northern pavilion is a more playful, curved two\u2011storey form engaging more directly with the park, containing the foyer, a gym and children\u2019s spaces. A generous circulation spine maintains visual connections to either the Park Lands or a courtyard garden, ensuring visitors remain aware of the \u201cplace\u201d in \u201cswimming place.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Materially,<\/p>\n

View gallery<\/p>\n

While the building\u2019s softened geometries introduce moments of complex detailing, this is not a project driven by finessed detail. Instead, organic forms soften a hard brief, supported by clear and intuitive programming that consistently orients the visitor. A sensory room and garden for neurodivergent users, culturally responsive changing facilities and fully accessible pools are all exemplary, reinforcing the project\u2019s inclusive ambitions. Materially, mass timber and a restrained palette create robust yet light\u2011filled spaces, offering spatial generosity and a sense of softness far removed from the rusting tubular steel aquatic centres of old.<\/p>\n

The Adelaide Aquatic Centre could easily have become another contentious Park Lands intervention, with a case made for returning Pardipardinyilla entirely to open space. But when the design conversation both begins and ends with learning from, and connecting to, that place, the project offers an exemplar for how our cultural pasts might inform our collective cultural future.<\/p>\n

\"Organic<\/p>\n

View gallery<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Building on Adelaide\u2019s Park Lands will always be contentious \u2013 even when replacing an existing structure. Architectural commissions…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":650558,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[449,458,459,64,63,460,134],"class_list":["post-650557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=650557"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650557\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/650558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=650557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=650557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=650557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}