FESTIVE REGATTA.

Evoking the jolly spirit of regattas the rowing centre has a festive functionalism that sits lightly on the earth.

Located 44km west of Homebush Bay, the International Regatta Centre at Penrith Lakes is the furthest-flung of all the Games sites. Here in the Blue Mountain foothills, a former sand and gravel quarry has been transformed into a network of lakes to provide courses for Olympic rowing, kayaking and canoeing (p70). (Sailing has its own separate venue at Rushcutter's Bay in Sydney.) As part of the Games' remit to create a wider public legacy, the site around the boating lakes was extensively landscaped to form a new 2000 hectare rural park. Deferring to the dominant presence of water, the new buildings on the site are conceived as modest, functional pavilions, but they also aim to engender something of the festive spirit of a regatta. (Renoir's The Boating Party depicting picnicking revellers by the Seine conjures up the appropriate mood.)

Set on an island between the warm-up lake to the north and 2300m long competition course to the south, the centre consists of four elements: a main pavilion, two boathouses, a grandstand, and general course infrastructure (start and finish towers and timing huts). Containing offices, dining and other facilities, the main pavilion is a lightweight, linear bar slung at an angle between the two blind boxes of the boathouses below. An almost imperceptibly inclined roof shades an external terrace.

Pavilion and boathouses are linked by a pedestrian walkway to the grandstand which overlooks the course finishing line. A broad-brimmed roof of cream canvas supported by slim steel columns extends over the tiered grandstand, which has a series of function rooms to the rear above the seating terraces. Capable of holding 1000 spectators, the grandstand is set into an artificial mound, minimizing its mass. The gentle slope of the mound also provides informal spots for people to picnic and watch the races. Start and finish towers are modular cubes clad in corrugated steel and glass, topped by jaunty curved roofs equipped with solar panels. (These were designed separately by Conybeare Morrison & Partners.) Materials are carefully chosen for both their elegance and durability: recycled timber, canvas awnings, polished concrete floors and crisply articulated steel frames allude to the functional expressiveness of traditional boat sheds, here reinterpreted in an intelligent yet festive contemporary synthesis.

Architect

Woods Bagot, Sydney

Project team

Warwick Simmonds, Phillippa Randall, Carl Degroot

Structural and civil engineer

Taylor Thomson & Whitting

Photographs

Patrick Bingham-Hall