Canberra Arboretum

Perspective view of Garden Terrace.

Project details

• Project Name: Canberra Arboretum
• Client: Shaping Our Territory Implementation Group, ACT Government
• Project Type: Masterplan
• Principal Designer/s: Taylor Cullity Lethlean with Tonkin Zulaikha Greer
• Design Team: Perry Lethlean, Scott Adams, Chris Johnstone, Lisa de Jong, Lin Tan, Simone Bliss, Tim Schork
• Date of commencement of project: 2005
• Date of completion of project: Ongoing
• Location of site: Canberra, ACT, Australia
• Site Area: 260 Hectares
• Cost of Construction/Execution: $10 million

Perspective view of amphitheatre proposal and central.

Words from the Architect

In June 2005, Taylor Cullity Lethlean with Tonkin Zulaikha Greer won the international arboretum competition in Canberra.

The concept for the Arboretum arises from a particular taxonomic strategy - from a method of curating and arranging trees, in an ordered collection, as though for a tree museum.

This is not an arrangement of exemplars, each chosen to stand in for a genus or geographical region. Rather it is a logic of profusion and accumulation, a limited palette, a very select range. The trees will be chosen for their ecological value and sensory effect and curated accordin to colour of foliage, pattern of bark and leaf, filigree of branches, scent, texture, and other architectural qualities. They will be forests of experience, curated according to their experiential and sensory qualities.

Plan at 1:5000.

This visitor to the Arboretum will be able to walk into the woods, be engulfed and surrounded by a particular kind of tree, and this will offer a rare and sublime pleasure in the modern, urbanised world. For the early colonists in Australia, being lost in the bush was a fearsome and dangerous thing. The image of a lost child - the flash of a white dress amongst the slender grey-green trunks - is enduring Australian folklore.

Plan at 1:1000.

The Arboretum will reclaim the experience of being lost in a forest, will offer a logic and ordering system that, like Hansel and Gretel with their trail of crumbs, like the unrolling ball of string that offers a way back from the centre of the labyrinth, will provide a taming of the impossible profusion of trees.

Credits

• Text and images courtesy of Taylor Cullity Lethlean