Spoken by Rob Copeland—Senior Principal Landscape Architect and Urban Designer, Tract

The brief that we worked to was the significance of landscape in terms of health and wellness and its contribution to health and wellness, and what we tried to do is incorporate landscape and greenery in every aspect of the development.

As you approach the building from the outside, from any of the street systems, there’s a series of landscape treatments, so the streetscape and the buffer zone where the building have been set back from the streets so that we can incorporate an extensive area of landscape, particularly on the main streets of Ballarat and Geelong roads.

So you’re actually moving through a wooded area, Effectively, a landscape buffer as you come into the building complex. And then you enter this space, which is enclosed by the five buildings of the complex, a landscape central zone that welcomes people into the space and provides an orientation device for the incorporation of landscape within and on the outside of the building.

There are pergolas, climbers on pergolas and arbours along the northern side of the village green. There are central internal courtyards and then facade planters and terraces on the outside of the building facing onto the streetscape. So that, from within the building, and with many of the rooms, you’re actually looking into a lush green courtyard which is also accessible to sit quietly or to sit with a group. They’re open to the sky and the sun, and you get a breeze in those spaces as well.

The central village green space has a series of different character areas, It’s intended to be a circulation and orientation space with a pathway around the outside, a central raised landscape zone with planting the lawn area and a series of different seating spaces, the children’s playground and the ceremonial space, and has stepped access or ramped access so that anyone can come into this space. We envisage that rehabilitating patients could use it for exercise or to sit in the sun, spend some time with family, and enjoy the space and enjoy the greenery.

What we’ve found, and research is showing more and more, is the benefit of being able to have exposure to natural systems, to have exposure to greenery and landscape makes people feel better. We find that that’s contributing significantly to the rate of recovery of patients and being able to enjoy the outside in almost a garden situation, so it’s much more familiar for people to feel comfortable in these sorts of spaces and get away from the machinery and the wards and the spaces that they’re having to deal with inside the buildings.

As you move through the area, we’ve incorporated a number of elements retained from the demolition of houses on the site, so that the brickwork on the retaining walls around the whole village green area has been incorporated from the demolished houses on site. There are elements of bluestone lintels and step treads that have been incorporated, and some of which have been carved into paving stones and incorporated into the paving together with a number of site 1 boulders that have been sliced and incorporated into the ceremonial space in conjunction with work that we did with the First Nations representatives.

The landscape design it incorporates over 40,000 plants, 95% of which are native and indigenous to the area, a number of which are significant to the First Nations people who inhabited this area prior to colonization.

One of the significant things in considering this design was the fact that we would have a series of microclimates within the building complex; from sunny areas to shaded areas. etc. so what we tried to do with the plant selection was to encapsulate the native ecosystems and the biodiversity from a range of different ecological areas, from the Maribyrnong River and the escarpment associated with that, across the grassy western plains, into the You Yangs and the ravines and valleys of the You Yang mountains, so that we could incorporate a full range of plants for whatever orientation or microclimate they experience within the site complex.

One of the interesting aspects for me is the benefit of landscape and the capacity for landscape to change over time and rapidly establish itself in this context of a significant built form being softened by planting climbing over pergolas and arbours, hanging over the facades of the front of the building and softening the environment as it develops.