Project Overview

Peter Elliott Architecture and Urban Design and TCL (Taylor Cullity Lethlean) have delivered a much-needed extension to Victoria’s historic Parliament House that sensitively integrates contemporary architecture into a magnificent heritage garden setting.

Project Commissioner

Department of Parliamentary Services

Project Creator

Taylor Cullity Lethlean / Peter Elliott Architecture

Project Brief

Parliament House is nearly 160 years old but was never completed. After a century and a half of makeshift and inadequate members’ offices and numerous failed schemes to extend Parliament House, the new building finally solves a long standing accommodation problem.

Project Innovation/Need

The annexe has been constructed as a separate free-standing building within the eastern gardens of the Parliamentary precinct but is linked back into Parliament House via a bridge, tunnel and lane-way connections. The new annexe has been conceived as a companion building set in a garden where one hundred percent of the footprint has been replaced with landscape on the roof and within a large central courtyard.

The 19th century Picturesque garden – which is considered one of the finest in the state – has been complemented with heritage planting but also juxtaposed with more contemporary garden expressions. A sunken courtyard takes a cloistered form and provides a new social setting for parliamentarians and lets natural light flood into the new building. This space references the existing garden, using its emblematic planting to create compositions of overlapping textures. More than 12,000 plants frame a central sloping lawn and terrace that can be used for events and announcements.

By contrast, the roof garden atop of the new building introduces an Australian meadow to emphatically place this contemporary building in its broader loci. Structured via drifts of silver Eremophila nivea and Eremophila glabra, the roof garden features a serpentine bluestone path that weaves through a rich mosaic of native shrubs, grasses and wildflowers, providing a powerful new setting to the remarkable ensemble of 19th century buildings. It also illustrates the beauty and importance of indigenous landscapes, which are seldom celebrated in the garden designs of significant public buildings.

Sustainability

The new gardens will encourage greater biodiversity within the dense urban context, provide excellent thermal insulation to the new building and create iconic spaces for events, announcements and contemplation.