NATIONAL ARBORETUM CANBERRA VILLAGE CENTRE
Thylacine’s role
- design management
- interpretive design
- graphic design
- multimedia design
- furniture selection
- fabrication
- installation
Award
Landscape of the Year 2014
World Architecture Festival
Awarded to Taylor Cullity Lethlean and Tonkin Zulaikha Greer
Australian Medal Landscape Architecture 2014
Awarded to Taylor Cullity Lethlean and Tonkin Zulaikha Greer
Permanent exhibition
The National Arboretum Canberra was designed to be a place of peace, beauty, recreation, research, and education. It holds rare, endangered, and culturally significant trees from Australia and around the world and is a living seedbank of international significance. The site holds 93 forests and many themed gardens which create unique sensory experiences in each area whilst playing an important role in conservation and biodiversity.
As interpretive designers, Thylacine conceived, designed, developed and implemented the fit-out of the Village Centre, including the retail space. Thylacine’s design supported the 100 Forests 100 Gardens concept conceived by the landscape architects Taylor Cullity Lethlean and the building designers Tonkin Zulaikha Greer.
We designed several feature pieces, such as a six-metre inlaid floor feature representing the 100 forests of the Arboretum. The average fully-grown trunk diameter of each tree is shown in cross-section (as a tree ring), giving the visitor a glimpse of the future of the Arboretum.
The Village Centre serves as the entry point and orientation experience for the Arboretum providing a range of interpretive experiences, visitor services and in the evening, operating as a function space hosting key events such as The Australian of the Year Awards.
To meet this requirement, we designed a series of flexible low-profile table-height joinery forms made from timber and a lightweight polymer concrete base, referencing the timber ceiling struts and concrete floor of the architectural design. All units were designed with concealed wheels so that they can be packed away to clear the space for evening functions and then easily reset for the next day. The joinery forms hold interactives, displays and botanic samples.
The Arboretum is both a recreational and educational resource and attracts national and international visitation. Its overarching objective is to encourage visitors to understand, value, enjoy and care for forests, and importantly, to do so in a way that engenders a strong personal connection between visitors and the arboretum. In tandem with the forests and plantings themselves, the key mechanisms for achieving this are the information points, interpretive exhibits and retail experiences and associated visitor display infrastructure.
Each year the Arboretum attracts over 700,000 visitors and continues to surpass the initial projected visitor numbers of 1 million visitors anticipated in the first five years.