Key Dates
Image Credit : Peter Bennets, John Gollings
Project Commissioner
Southern Metropolitan Cemeteries Trust
Project Creator
Project Overview
The evolution of Australian cities calls for a new vernacular – for more urban, resilient and multidimensional places. Places reflective of our cultural diversity and the pressures of an increasing and urbanising population.
Bunurong Memorial Park exemplifies an urban future that expands the possibilities and purpose of place, reimagining the landscape within the urbanising environment of south-east Melbourne. The typical typology of a cemetery is challenged and blurred to embrace everyday life and community connection. Aligned with the ambitions of the Southern Metropolitan Cemeteries Trust (SMCT), Bunurong is a place of welcome, a place to come together, or to be apart.
Public space at its best has a key role in connection, identity, wellbeing and liveability, most especially in our increasingly dense and globalised cities. Bunurong Memorial Park reflects a paradigm shift in urban design to align an evolved sense of community and place with expanded behaviour settings, befitting of a 21st century city.
Team
BVN Jane Williams, Principal Brian Donovan, Principal Rod Allan, Project Director Sarah Embling, Project Director & Contract Super Intendant Nick Flutter, Project Architect- Sanctuary Building ASPECT Studios Kirsten Bauer, Director Erwin Taal, Senior Associate Lewis Wright, Associate Blake Farmer-Bowers, Associate
Project Brief
Reimaging an urban cemetery as a place for the celebration of life positions this project as the first of its kind in Australia. The client’s ambition was for a contemporary Memorial Park that celebrates the unique landscape of Australia and embraces the diversity of cultural and religious traditions. Further, to evolve the place from one of memorialisation to one offering varied day to day community uses.
Eleven hectares of an existing masterplan were reworked to serve Bunurong’s core business as well as celebrations and activity of all kinds. This has been realised within one year of operation with weddings, training seminars, informal group gatherings, individual visits, functions and other celebratory occasions being organised alongside funerals and memorial services.
Collaboratively, BVN and ASPECT Studios, led the design, co-ordination and implementation of a new type of cemetery complex unseen in Australia. The creation of Bunurong’s series of buildings and gardens encapsulates a deep reflection of place and provides viably adaptive uses for a diverse community. The accomplishment of Bunurong Memorial Park is reinforcing a willingness to reimagine scarce urban land for public purpose and broad benefit.
Project Innovation/Need
Bunurong Memorial Park is an inner sanctum for everyday life activities as much as celebrating life and death. It is a place for reflection, solitude, gathering and celebration. Bunurong changes the notion of a cemetery as something associated with margins of life to a mainstream destination for south east Melbourne.
Our design response was to re-evaluate the way we live and use urban space. Rather than being removed and related to death in singular purpose, it is a place of life, creating a deep connection between people and place. Like the most loved places Bunurong will grow into itself, under the leadership of a custodian client, allowing for nature and the community to evolve together.
Shifting the public perception of what a cemetery could be though innovative design, the collection of buildings and gardens represent the new heart of Bunurong Memorial Park ASPECT Studios and BVN’s urban design sensitively responds to the complex brief of each building having its own distinct spatial, functional and operational requirements. Spaces are flexible, supporting the client’s core business together with broader aspirations for a mixed use of new activities of celebrations, events and community activities.
Sitting reverentially in gardens are three multipurpose and nondenominational chapels, reflection spaces, a 400 person function centre, retail, funeral directors and customer care centre. A children’s playground, a café and walking paths provide the community reasons to come to Bunurong beyond traditional perceptions of a memorial park to that of a mainstream destination.
Design Challenge
As urban designers, scarce urban land forces us rethink both use and the spatial relationships. How do we design a socially and physically sustainable place for all people? In creating a cemetery as a public space, a new narrative for the community’s experience is generated from the moment of arrival.
What was a flat green wedge, isolated amongst freeways and peri-urban land, has been transformed. A series of innovative design responses allows for circulation into and within Bunurong Memorial Park. The design team moderated the loud and intense roadscape, and removed the broader landscape, transitioning from entry through a series of layers ultimately to an inner sanctum.
Leaving the car park a stone water wall entry threshold greets the start of visitor’s sensory experiences. Behind the wall all is slowly revealed; a series of distinctive Australian themed gardens arranged as a connected suite of intimate and public spaces that are bound by ‘quiet’ buildings with transparent glazed portals that open directly to garden settings.
Relocating key buildings within contemporary flexible public spaces, introducing bold landforms, realigning road networks and reorienting the landscape setting around an existing water body has created a distinct and marketable Australian landscape experience. Heightened connections to the existing lake are provided, accentuating the experience of Bunurong as a place to visit and return to.
Sustainability
Bunurong is an area prone to challenging climatic conditions, including extended low rainfall periods, droughts and extreme heat waves. Water conservation is therefore critical. Water is harvested from roofs and stored in tanks and no potable water is used to irrigate or fill lakes and waterways.
Buildings are energy neutral with smart building management systems, fittings and over 1000 photovoltaic cells; high performance facades and rain water tanks. Landscape initiatives were critical given the extent and arid nature of the area, with vegetation chosen for resilience, compatibility to local conditions and low reliance on long-term irrigation.
Unique to a cemetery, typically represented with exotic species, an Australian based garden system was created. All vegetation is native or indigenous reinforcing a sense of place. The park’s environmental and social sustainability transcends the diverse community and unifies visitors, reconnected in the shared spirit and landscape of Bunurong Memorial Park.
Urban Design
This award celebrates creativity and innovation in the process of designing and shaping cities, towns and villages, and is about making connections between people and places, movement and urban form, nature and the built fabric. Consideration given to giving form, shape and character to groups of buildings, streets and public spaces, transport systems, services and amenities, whole neighbourhoods and districts, and entire cities, to make urban areas functional, attractive and sustainable.
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