Hummingbird Sports Pavilion, Tarneit, Australia
The Hummingbird Sports Pavilion brings sports fans from local areas together. When it came to the look of their design, the architects were not satisfied with a simple municipal building.
In just ten months, the Melbourne suburb of Tarneit gained a sports club house for the community. The complex includes the club house, a kitchen and changing rooms, storage space and public toilets as well as an adjacent parking lot and surrounding landscaping. Planning was taken on by k20 Architects, based in Melbourne. “The new facility was designed to provide for universal accessibility, enable multi-gender sporting capabilities and reduced ongoing maintenance,” say the architects.
The planners designed a narrow, colorful building. Thanks to its color and shape, it comes across as lightweight and easy-going - just like the agile bird after which the building was named. The two halves of the building were joined together at a slight angle to mimic the shape of a bird in flight. The cantilevered roof forms points at the sides of the building like the wings of a bird, making the structure look smaller than it is. “The design concept is representative of the wing of a hummingbird and this idea is embedded within the building, expressed in the pavilion with precast panels communicating the tips of the bird’s wings,” say the architects.
This design promises lightness, and implementation involved elastic formliners. RECKLI Australia delivered a 9-meter wide and 2.74-meter high formliner to the prefabrication plant GCS Precast. The plant is a valued longstanding partner and has already been involved in multiple projects using RECKLI formliners. The staff at the plant are experienced in the professional application of formliners: they are placed into the frame before the concrete is poured to ensure the texture is embossed into the concrete as it hardens. Once dry, the formliner is removed from the concrete. Thanks to the formliners’ elasticity, no edges or details are damaged.
The architects decided on a texture from RECKLI’s Select range, which groups more than 250 textures into six different categories: using the Select textured formliners, wood, rock, masonry, Oriental or fantasy textures can be applied to the façade.
K20 Architects chose the vertical wood texture 2/31 Iller. The design uses narrow offset branches of different lengths to create a bamboo effect on exposed concrete. This let the architects create a huge effect on a small scale: only one elastic formliner was necessary to design the complete façade area for the whole building.