Pingelly Recreation and Cultural Centre

BACKGROUND Pingelly is a small town with some 1000 inhabitants, situated in the sparsely populated Wheatbelt of Western Australia. Architecture has significant potential to enhance sport’s traditional role in the local community by facilitating youth engagement and furthering long-term reconciliation between the settler and Indigenous Australian communities. This project draws upon Pingelly’s proud country spirit and its long history of Indigenous sportspeople to create lasting community impact through design. CONTRIBUTION The Pingelly Recreation and Cultural Centre (PRACC) is a multi-functional recreation and cultural centre with four timber pavilions including a function centre with bar, sports hall with changerooms, a gym and storage spaces, linked by a curving verandah facing east towards the already established sports fields. I led the design aspects while working with Advanced Timber Concepts Studio to develop a prefabricated, engineered timber building for quick assembly. All visible surfaces are of prefabricated eucalyptus wood, locally grown and processed in thick sections to stand the harsh climate. Its use of materials reflects my ongoing practice in creating built works that are culturally and environmentally specific. SIGNIFICANCE PRACC is the largest timber building in WA since WWII and the first timber civic building built since 1920. It was a Shire initiative, commissioned in response to demand from the local community and has since contributed to the economy of the Wheatbelt. PRACC was named Architecture of Necessity Overall Winner, Sweden, in 2019 and has also received the 2019 World Architecture Festival Award for Best Use of Certified Timber, the 2020 Wallace Greenham Award for Sustainable Architecture and The George Temple Poole Award 2020, with the jury describing the project as demonstrating ‘outstandingly resourceful, sustainable design’.