PROJECT
Courtyards at the Shrine of
Remembrance, Melbourne
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT
Rush\Wright Associates
PROJECT TEAM
Michael Wright, Catherine Rush,
Teresa Koo, Chris Erskine, Yijun Lu,
Thomas Gooch
ARCHITECT
ARM Architecture
STRUCTURAL AND CIVIL ENGINEER
Irwin Consult
LIGHTING
Electrolight
CONTRACTOR
Probuild and Australian Native
Landscape Constructions
TIME SCHEDULE
Design, documentation: 9 months
Construction: 18 monthstogether in southern Europe. Eryngium pandanifo-
lium (giant sea holly) spears up near the entrance,
while Parthenocissus tricuspidata (Boston ivy) and
Ficus creeper coat parts of the side walls. Colour is
confined to shades of green, grey and white (except
for some autumn leaves). Paving on the shaded side
includes old wharf timbers and superbly laid
Castlemaine slate in hues of brown, orange and
cream. Wright speaks about this fourteen-year-old
space in terms of the way it will continue, providing
memories for observers and an ecological underlay
suggestive of the Dardanelles.
Wright is practical and flexible in terms of
plants. Practical, if they fade away. “Let’s find some-
thing else!” Flexible, because if plants grow strongly,
why not give them (to a degree) their head? The
Terrace Courtyard, he says, is meant to be jungly,
overgrown and not maintained too strongly. “I believe
a cultivated wildness is important. Too often planting
is over-manicured and clipped to death, or just plain
boring.”
The Terrace Courtyard is entered at one side and
once you’ve turned the first corner it is as if you are in
another world. Branches, leaves, creepers, flowers,
even amazing fruit (Musa spp., including banana)
hang above and around you and crawl across the
ground – and the plantings only about three years old.
The design aims to evoke the Pacific and South-East
Asian theatres of service, sacrifice and peacekeeping;
the centrally located and fast-growing Ficus
dammaropsis (highland breadfruit) is native to a rain-
forest in New Guinea, and the feathery leaves of Cycas
revoluta (sago palm) hail from Japan. This is a varied
and engaging space. Close to the Ficus, a man relaxes
at an army green metal chair and table that looks like
it might have been used by the RAAF during wartime.
Immediately beneath the huge banana tree at the high
corner of the courtyard, and near wall creepers with
flowers in hues of pink, red, yellow and white, a
woman takes lunch on a solid timber bench – she tells
me she is there daily. Further away, a young couple
looks at red wall tiling that names the Victorian towns
from which soldiers came in World War II. Wright says
the trees and flowering plants, the paving and seating
are “not meant to be literal, but rather to suggest
things to people about another place, and to provoke
the imagination.”
How will this design evolve? For sure, the plants
will continue to grow; there is no substitute for the
delight we will feel in this, especially in patches of
enclosed space. Designers love to think big, but as our
world expands, do we also need to think smaller and
respond to compressed spaces in terms of design
and detail, just as we do to plants? The Shrine of
Remembrance offers two versions of each, where
landscape architecture interpenetrates architecture –
at varying levels – to make living, changing spaces of
lasting significance. These breathe new life into the
historic shrine and will continue to do so.4LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE AUSTRALIA MAY 2017 51