Kingston Arts Precinct is a significant project that seeks to create a more cohesive and community-focused arts experience in Canberra and will transform an underutilised area of the Lake Burley Griffin waterfront. OCULUS, in close collaboration with Fender Katasaldis, was named the successful tenderer for this project as part of the GEOCON consortium in February 2017.

Our focus was to create a distinctive environment, with new residential and commercial buildings aligning the boundaries of the site, reinforcing the external street alignment, providing permeability, and framing views of the heritage buildings and the foreshore. The public domain was conceived as a broad ‘public canvas’ for a series of public experiences and events forming the heart of a thriving creative hub.

The finer grain of the streets and laneways creates a porous ground plane blurring the inside and outside with a variety of opportunities for public engagement, retail, and active uses. The public domain design centres around a series of ‘villages’ that are activated in different ways, some for small gatherings, others for large events, festivals, and markets.

We collaborated closely with the arts community to develop and expand the functional brief, aligning project objectives with stakeholder aspirations. Our team’s multidisciplinary approach offered an integrated response to the built form and public realm activation, we demonstrated the ability to balance the needs of the development without impacting on the public realm, within existing site constraints.