Patterson Lakes Community Centre

The old Patterson Lakes Community Centre has been re-worked to improve public facilities, with a new library, kindergarten, a refreshed community hall and parking, adjacent to an existing primary school and on busy Thompson’s Road. A sound attenuation wall adjacent to an old age home becomes a barcode translation of ‘Patterson Lakes Community Centre’ with White-trunked Eucalypts planted in rhythm and complicity with the barcode pattern. Permeable surfaces and swales carry runoff into the new trees. Plantings carefully mass vegetation as a sun screen to the library, and existing mature trees have been retained wherever possible. The manipulation of the forecourt ground plane levels is a response to the constraints of road crossing; wheel chair access to the book chute; provision of universal access; and heights of underground piping revealed during construction. Inadvertently then, the forecourt became the place where the rigidity of the suburban footpath was re-invented as a sculpted gathering place.