Penguin Parade Visitor Center
People have been coming at twilight to watch Little Penguins come ashore on Phillip Island for almost a century. The ability to get close to the penguins in a spectacular but sensitive landscape, makes this one of the key places in the world for this experience and subsequently the Penguin Parade on Philip Island is the number one wildlife attraction in Australia – with up to 4000 visitors every evening. In the 1980s, Summerland Estate consisted of 177 houses and research identified the penguins would disappear from the Penguin Parade by 1997. The state government secured the future of the little penguins by committing to buy back the entire estate ? a world first in environmental conservation. At the same time, Philip Island Nature Parks has become a pre-eminent authority on care for penguins and development of penguin habitat. The new Penguin Parade Visitor Centre has to carry the ambitions of this tourism and conservation program across iconographic, experiential and functional contexts. Photography by © Peter Bennetts
The building sits at the nexus between 3 landscapes: dunes, headland and wetland, linking these landscapes like a brooch that gathers these together and responds to each in specific ways ? formally and experientially. The power of the three landscapes is acknowledged in the homogenous zinc cladding to the building that increases its abstraction while providing a constant against which the three landscapes are registered...