Site and context
The Worcester Terraces site is encompassed by three inner-city streets and the recently developed Rauora Park.
Established trees and green park space to the east and west allows for the site to be viewed from a distance across the parks with prominent visibility to the site corners.
The site is in a transitional area of scale between the urban realm of city and the eastern suburbs.
Therefore, the site experiences a high flow of foot traffic throughout all times of the day.
Careful consideration has been given to the street interfaces, especially in situations where the primary outdoor living terrace or bedroom are facing the street or parks.
Building platforms have been raised to a level above the public footpath levels to provide passive surveillance while decreasing the ability for the public to look into the units and amenities.
The existing ground levels around the perimeter of the site vary while the design levels have been restricted by the need for level thresholds around the central car park for vehicle and Lifemark accreditation unit access.
Design constraints
A key planning consideration in the design of the development was the balance in spatial arrangement between the built forms, outdoor living space amenity and the provision for garages and car parking.
Given the design guidelines associated with the site required a single vehicle access point to/from the site, this meant that all vehicle manoeuvring need to be catered from within the development.
While this had several advantages such as minimising the dominance of car parking and garaging when viewed from public spaces, it presented a number of challenges in the design of the central court to ensure a high level of amenity and outlook.
The response was to break up the external car parking bulk as much as possible through pockets of green space.
Large established trees have been planted within to mask the visibility of buildings from looking across one another in the internal car court.
Different surface treatments and pathways have also been introduced into the central court to reduce the visual appearance of the hardscape.
The future adaptability of the internal car court transforming into green space was also considered, as the dependence of car ownership potentially shrinks and ride-share services within city centres grows.
This formed another reason to group the cars together within the centre of the site to allow for flexibility in the ever-changing and sustainably conscious world we live in.