Award winning Wunggurrwil Dhurrung in Victoria
Wunggurrwil Dhurrung in Victoria, Australia, and designed by REALM Studios, won awards for cultural heritage in the 2021 AILA Victoria and National Landscape Architecture Awards.
Completed in 2020 for the Wyndham City Council, the space in Wathaurung Country is culturally resonant for Aboriginal people, and REALM took the time to work with the area’s custodians, the Wathaurung people, as well as to understand the physical, environmental and cultural systems of place.
The multi award winning Wunggurrwil Dhurrung project in Wathaurung Country, Victoria.
“Through a process of engagement and design, involving community and traditional owners,” say the designers, “the project brought together; the site’s deeper connections to Country, its stories and its meaning, to form an outcome immediately identifiable to its intended community, successfully avoiding a tokenistic or emblematic design response.”
The Wyndham Aboriginal Community Centre and Integrated Family Centre is central and, “allows community to connect to and care for Country. It has become a healing ground, a ‘strong heart’ for the Wathaurung.”
The project technically requires no maintenance.
Wunggurrwil Dhurrung’s materials are derived from the basalt plains, with whole and sawn basket boulders, and crushed aggregations of stone across the ground plain. These materials extend into the base of the building, rising vertically above the ground.
REALM’s design focuses on the natural management of water, with water being absorbed through the pores of the solidified lava, collecting in natural rock depressions, soils and propagating plants, and soaking into the broader landscape, supporting diverse surface ecologies.
The project focusses on the natural management of water.
All the water that falls on site is returned to the ground through the landscape or is reused in the building. Rainwater is harvested from the roof, decelerated and slowly released into depressions and pools across the landscape.
REALM worked with plantsman Paul Thompson and water specialist Dr Peter Breen to establish a scientific tie between planting, water and place. Passive water management allows for a range of landscape types and seasonal plantings, and water is released over longer periods of time to mimic gentle and extended rainfall patterns.
Wunggurrwil Dhurrung’s materials come from the basalt plains.
Wunggurrwil Dhurrung is not reliant on maintenance; it has no engineered irrigation, plants are exposed to the elements, and the only managed hydrology is the recycled water reticulated into the central courtyard, where a winter sunroom or summer shade room offers protection from the endemic conditions of the western plains.
Soil is reconstituted to support wider biodiversity aims, such as reducing pollutants, recharging groundwater, producing healthier food, and cleaner water and purer air.
Passive water management allows for a range of landscape types and seasonal plantings.
REALM appreciates, “that unmarked time in which this project, intended to be embedded deeply within its community and its evolution, will become a key instrument in that progress, caring and uplifting, a vehicle embodying the Wathaurung and enabling their renewed vision for the future.”