ARM Architecture is the winning bid for the Gold Coast Cultural Precinct international design competition. The chosen site is 11 hectares of centrally-located land at Evandale, framed by the Nerang River and views to the Surfers Paradise skyline and Gold Coast hinterland.
ARM is partnered with landscape architects TOPOTEK 1 (Berlin), theatre planners Schuler Shook (US and Melbourne), acoustic engineers Marshall Day (Melbourne), sustainability and engineering consultants Arup (global).
With consultants for museum and exhibition designers Cunningham Martyn Design (Melbourne), cost planners Rider Levett Bucknall (Gold Coast) and indigenous and cultural consultants Duncan Gibbs and Michael Aird (Gold Coast).
Council’s vision is for the precinct to become a creative centre for arts, culture and community. The precinct will be a place that celebrates, reflects and builds on the Gold Coast's unique identity. Plans for the precinct include a new arts museum, a living arts centre and a landscaped artscape.
'Winning this international design competition for the Gold Coast Cultural Precinct is, for ARM Architecture, the most perfect project. Not only is it to be the arts focus of this now newly emerging and spectacular Australian city, but it is the complete integration of building and landscape, art and water, people and place." Howard Raggatt, Founding Director ARM Architecture.
ARM’s distinctive geometric web, or voronoi, design was praised by jurors as ‘playful and inclusive’, promising to entice residents and visitors to experience and participate in production of the Gold Coast’s arts and culture – theme, linking:
- An expanded Living Arts Centre, incorporating a new 1200-seat theatre; versatile 350-seat black box theatre; refurbished existing performance theatre accommodating up to 600 people; a 10,000 seat outdoor amphitheatre; and a central Great Terrace.
- A sub-tropical outdoor garden Artscape, with the Evandale Lake as a focal feature and a spiral-helix encased green bridge providing a dappled shade connection to Chevron Island, and
- A 14-storey New Arts Museum, enticing visitors up through the galleries to take in the art, the view, and perhaps – in true Gold Coast style – a bungy jump from the external viewing platform. Reminiscent of other vertical exhibition buildings, including the Eiffel Tower, Anish Kapoor’s Olympic Tower, and the Guggenheim Museum NY, the tower frees up site area for other uses – including green space.
Jury Chair, Head of Griffith University’s Gold Coast School of Architecture, Professor Gordon Holden, said the competition had drawn out some very creative responses to the city’s Vision and the Design Brief. Entries from both competition stages will all be featured in THE REVEAL: Designs for a new cultural precinct exhibition in the City Gallery, The Arts Centre Gold Coast which opens to the public on the 22nd of November for three weeks.
