Working with Whadjuk Balardong Elder Robyn Collard, we were selected by the City of Fremantle to prepare a proposal for the ‘Fremantle Malls’ and ‘Fremantle Piazza’ city blocks.

Walyalup / Fremantle What If 2025

Project Team: Whadjuk Balardong Elder Robyn Collard, Simon Pendal, Janine Moroney and Matt Gagen.

Through this proposal we ask the question - What if we were to operate in a state of affection for Country? Shifting the standard emphasis from ‘buildings’ to ‘Country with buildings bending to Country’. We asked What if Country had a greater presence in City…for everyone and everything…human and more-than-human.

The existing Malls and Piazza sites are considered some of the least successful in Fremantle on multiple grounds - as civic places, the quality of their built fabric and their commercial performance. Unloved, ugly and underutilised, our immediate thoughts were to demolish all buildings and start again, unlock the earth, allowing it to breathe for the first time in 150 years. The scale of demolition waste caused us to reconsider the opportunity of a large alterations and additions project. Stripping-back the existing buildings, removing their most ineffective parts, we began to see them as possessing a certain charm. Retaining 85% we opted for strategic demolition, opening up a 50m x 50m endemic wetland garden at the project’s centre.

Comprised in six built parts we seek to introduce a diversity of uses - ground floor retail and hospitality, social housing, multiple sites for offices, hotel and residential. The centre of the site is kept less dense or entirely emptied for the garden, an invitation to the sun, wind and rain. The edges of the site - particularly the east and west edges - are built-up to a more metropolitan scale, looking outwards, over the rooftops and into newly created urban laneways.

It became important that the new buildings (above the existing 2-storey layer) would appear as a cohesive set, as equals, irrespective of use. Each of the new buildings is moulded to its adjacent piece of the city, their scale relationships crucial to being good neighbours. Within the site, terraces and rooftop gardens allow the occupants long, enjoyable vistas through its centre, between distant neighbours, and to the new wetland garden.

The wetland garden, terraces and rooftops offer extensive habitat for birds, reptiles, amphibians and insects. It would be a place of water, and on occasion, of cultural fire, language, ceremony and cultural exchange.