Brisbane City Childcare
February 29, 2016
Exploration & Concept
Brisbane City Child Care is a quality inner city childcare centre that occupies a four storey building in Brisbane’s Spring Hill
The top floor rooftop of the center is an outdoor playspace that was definitely showing its age, the goal was to revitalize it with a holistic design incorporating natural play elements.
After several concept development meetings with the staff, we crafted a design that created a playspace that felt as natural as possible, and provided a wide variety of activities assembled around the walls of the space, linked by a circulating “bike track”, and focused on a central open space that could accommodate not just play possibilities but also social events for the parent groups.
Project Delivery
The site posed some very real challenges: Access to remove existing equipment and under surfacing and to bring in the new materials and components was by crane from the street outside. Cost and permit considerations limited this to two Saturdays. Potential leakages through the top floor meant that no drilling for fixings or footings was allowed. Creating a flowing creek in those circumstances was especially challenging. To ensure long project life in this environment of high exposure to the elements all metals were to be either stainless steel or aluminium.
Apart from several smaller items from our Natural Play range, the project elements were custom designed and built. The main structures were made of timber (principally kwilla with some incidental cypress) on welded aluminium space frames glued to the floor. The 2m wide slide was in stainless steel, as were all fixings. The “bird nest” feature was fabricated in aluminium and stainless steel. The creek feature was created with river gravel and concrete, with BCCC bringing their project management past to design and execute the water reticulation system.
