Ross Slip Shipwright School
The Hobart City Planning Scheme highlights the Battery Point slipyards as a suitable site for an Interpretation Centre documenting the significance of the Ross Patent Slip. This project has been established around the rejection of the interpretation centre as a building typology, instead interweaving interpretational ideas into the architectural design of a shipwright school on the site.
Currently, the open site is dotted with sheds dating from the mid 1960’s through to present with a deep cutting separating the two existing park areas; the remains of the Ross Patent Slip. This cutting is the location of the proposed shipwright school and slip. The building encourages the preservation of the unique craftsmanship as well as the slip as a physical artifact. The project also maintains and strengthens the working slipyard by re-establishing the once impressive Ross Slip.
Jury Comment
Interventions into the urban fabric of our cities that respect the past and also anticipate the future are rare yet increasingly necessary. Keith Westbrook’s modest yet decisive project, set around a deep cutting and remnants of the Ross Patent Slip, provides an exemplar in its sensitive interpretation and engaging design quality.
By rejecting the idea of an interpretive centre in favour of a live and meaningful use, a renewed relationship is provided between this part of the city and the water. The clarity of the linear spine is enriched through carefully arranged shifts in geometry and vertical alignments, which engage with the water and anchor expressive markers recalling earlier maritime occupations. An intelligent and intimate experience encourages public enjoyment of this previously underutilized site.
This incisive design proposition gives rise to a distinctive, gentle and particular architectural expression, as well as a delightful manipulation of space. A sense of craft underpins the genesis of the concept as well permeating the materiality.
With its elegant balance between forms and spaces, this work displays great sensitivity to the landscape setting, and provides a coherency from the overall composition right through to the fine details. This is a welcome return of preoccupation with informed materiality and craft, providing an antidote to the more currently familiar digital domination.
In challenging restrictive planning schemes and tackling conservation in a refreshingly unapologetic manner, Westbrook provides a model for active urban re-interpretation that is simultaneously practical and poetic.
