A cyclone-proof community centre for Atherton: tropical monumentality to enable resilience in Far North Queensland communities

Abstract

This research thesis aims to mobilise Queensland Government funding destined to the construction of public cyclone shelters to address the higher goal of enhancing community resilience of inland Far North Queensland (FNQ) communities threatened by cyclonic events.The thesis comprises a written portion and a design proposal for a cyclone-proof community centre in Atherton, ninety kilometres south-west of Cairns, the main city of FNQ. The applied strategy seeks to surpass the limited and mono-functional government solution with a more versatile proposal. The design proposal aspires to activate community socialisation in three disparate conditions. The cyclone-proof community centre will operate: during the disaster as public cyclone shelter; after the disaster as a dedicated place where the community could find a familiar venue to perform social activities that rebound the severed social networks which are considered fundamental components to achieve community full recovery; and outside the disaster scenario as one of the civic-life pivots.Criteria for success are identified through a comparative study of architectural exemplars for disaster relief. Extrapolating from good-practice precedents for post-disaster facilities and with the additional ambition of enhancing resilience in communities threatened by cyclonic events a hybrid civic incubator has been designed for local needs. Analysis of the deficiencies of the Queensland Government cyclone shelters has been used to further inform the proposal. The observed deficiencies are: limited doubling-up functionality of the cyclone shelter which typically serve as sports hall for local state schools; lack of integration with other community functions in enhancing township civic and social liveliness; and the absence of a clear architectural expression. The centrally-located civic incubator plans to bind together Atherton's social life and to provide a public space in a rural township founded on secular planning principles. A pool-theatre; an outdoor volleyball court; a sports hall that doubles as a community cyclone shelter; rooms for the local nonprofit and socially-oriented associations; and a partially roofed venue for the local market; have been considered strategic functions in stirring Atherton resilience.Starting from structural constraints imposed by community-cyclone-shelter requirements, concrete is the main building material. However, taking an opposite approach to the mediocre anti-architectural solutions pursued by the government, the poetics of the béton-brut together with monumental compositional aspect have been embraced and advanced. These two parallel traditions have been presented to contextualise and support the design solution. Taking into account the main characteristics of Atherton and the natural hazardous condition to which is exposed, the monumentality of the cyclone-proof community centre acquires a symbolic dimension for expressing the resilience of the community and its civic pride.The architectural contribution to disaster situatio...

The architecture of resilience in rural towns

“…The good-practice examples were analysed according to four criteria as identified by Bischeri (2015): location, function, compositional strategies and formal expression, and community involvement. For the location and function criteria, the determination of the significance of a facility’s location or function in terms of its strategic or symbolic roles for the targeted community has been taken into account as previous studies have shown that memories and community identity were very often the only possessions left to the survivors (Bischeri, 2015).…”