The Interpretation Centre by Woodhead at The Pinnacles Desert, Australia
January 3rd, 2009 - Posted in Architecture Design, Featured
This architecture design, the Interpretation Centre designed by Woodhead at the Pinnacles Desert, as part of its design and building process underscores the unique role of fire, both culturally and environmentally, in Australia. The Pinnacles Desert, located in Western Australia 250km north of Perth in the Nambung National Park, consists of thousands of protruding limestone pinnacle 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.
The Pinnacles Interpretative Centre precisely challenges the heroic in architecture. It is consciously contradictory, non-heroic and embedded into a series of larger scale narratives about landscape, place and relationship. It is the latest in Woodhead’s trilogy of Interpretive Centres for the Department of Environment and Conservation, which include Karijini National Park and the Shark Bay World Heritage Area, which all explore these questions.
Officially opened by WA Environment Minister, Mrs Donna Faragher today, this incredibly evocative gesture by Woodhead, project architect for the Centre, John Nichols, introduces this specific practice into contemporary Australian architecture. While other artists, architects and designers may have used burning as an aesthetic strategy, like Belgian artist, Arne Quinze with his recent spectacular, wooden cathedral Urchronia set alight in Black Rock Desert and Marten Baas with his sacrificial seating series, Smoking Furniture, Nichols goes beyond the aesthetic.
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. Further to this, conscious moves have been made to counter the typical scenic conventions that play out in buildings of a ‘landscape setting’.
Entry into the main building, off the jetty-like boardwalk, is through the side and the culminating orientation from the deck directly adjacent to the retail space, embraces the view towards the aforementioned disappearing grove of Tuarts, rather than the ocean panorama to the west. In these ways, the building can be understood as a marker of a shift in architectural response to landscape as a process of understanding place.
Dialogue about architecture too often focuses on the ‘completed’ building as a finished and finessed sum of its parts. It is not surprising, therefore, that discussions often tend toward an illusory understanding of the fait accompli of a built form. This building, attempts to interrogate such conventions by valuing process and journey over a monocular understanding of architecture as finished form. Read in this way, the architectural interventions at The Pinnacles become a series of exercises in not being precious, of “roughing it up”, and of making explicit the contradictions.
