Narooma Art Centre | Yuin Country
To imagine a new Arts Centre for Narooma is a wonderful opportunity; It will connect community, welcome visitors, enable sharing of knowledge and skills, and engage with that powerful, ever moving, unique surrounding landscape, that so often inspires. It will be a new home for the arts in the region.
The site, already a hub of the arts, has been long under-utilised. Embracing the Kinema (Memorial Hall), the proposal is to create a single level creative precinct, consisting of two contrasting major functions - the Art Gallery, engaging with the earth, enclosed and introspective, and the Art Studios, open, perched, connected to the view, the breeze, the sky.
In connecting the spaces on one level across a dramatically falling site, the journey to the centralised entry area, becomes key. The Artway ramp orchestrates an atmospheric sequence of entry experience. Past hidden garden of the courtyard cafe, alongside the Memorial Hall, guided, drawn by an axial view through the studio to Gulaga.
Circulation around the existing Kinema (Memorial Hall) enables its cultural presence to remain while protecting its structural integrity. The street frontage gently references this delightful building, a curved courtyard wall protects the cafe space and buffers highway traffic impacts while playfully marking this new cultural site within the streetscape.
Materials and building elements throughout make reference to the wider landscape - folded ceiling planes for acoustic performance recall the folded rocks along the coast, a water body along the Artway suggests connection to the surrounding tidal inlet, the studio's cladding nods towards the eucalypts at the rear and the gallery's brick facade, in keeping with the existing Hall.
Above all, the proposal is imagined long into the future, to play a part in the creative history of Narooma. A simple series of buildings, environmentally aware, designed to age gracefully. A backdrop, a supporting character for the wonderful creative life of this place.
To be under construction soon.
Project team
Brent Dunn, Katharina Hendel, Daniel Rivers, Emma Gaal