![]() ![]() ![]() The frugal use of new interventions focusses attention to particular moments and provides a way over and through the rich fabric of the site. We repaired collapsing sandstone walls, collapsing timber stairs, we carried out archeological analysis on the garden beds to discover lost planting palettes for garden restoration. The project was part restoration and part new insertion. One, whose ordinariness and apparent arbitrariness can be so easily lost under the impulse to manage, categorise, unify, rationalise and standardise these sites. The focus was to maintain the strange collision of the industrial military with the quotidian. The project sought to enable the landscape as found and give it new equal importance.Ĭockatoo Island Clifftop Walk is a very modest intervention that responds to the immediate micro-context of each problem as encountered by inserting another layer of fragments rather than establishing a clear continuity and overarching approach that could be read as a new system of or for recreation. The project uses the paradoxes and schisms that these land uses produce as the basis for a new set of modest interventions aimed at allowing simple access and at revealing the particular and peculiar detail resulting from the past land use. #Cockatoo island how to#The approach taken to the Cockatoo Island Cliff top walk offers a clear position vis-a-vis the question of how to repurpose landscapes that have been so singularly formed for a very narrow use at the exclusion of the public and any notions of the civic. The new access path also had to bypass the cliff edge gardens of the former superintendent’s residence “Biloela” that is now run as a venue for private functions. The brief required a connection from the top of the Northern Apron stair, around the residential buildings past the tennis court, over the former Brass Foundry and the convict-built granary silos along the eastern edge of the clifftop to the network of pathways on the southern side of the island. The area we had to work with was characterised by an ad hoc mixture of paths, gardens, stone walls, fire services, a tennis court, a small above ground pool and deck perched on the edge of a 20 metre cliff above the eastern industrial apron. The collection of carefully placed interventions made possible public access through and around an area occupied by residential buildings, repaired failed walls and re-instated a garden around the residence. The Sydney Harbour Federation Trust commissioned JMD design in 2007 to design and document a pedestrian access route around the eastern edge of the upper part of the island. ![]()
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