Punch Park Amenities
By Carter Williamson Architects
A small public building in the Sydney Harbourside suburb of Balmain designed to serve a diverse community of users, from playground parents and dog-walkers in the local park to tennis players from the adjacent courts. Public amenities must be secure and safe to use, easily maintained, and built for longevity. Ideally, they also add to the public domain quality.
Designed to mediate between the park and adjacent tennis courts, the amenities offer a simple form under a skillion roof using familiar domestic elements: a corrugated steel water tank and a vintage concrete twin laundry tub, recycled as a handbasin. The white weatherboard exterior nods to the worker’s cottages of Balmain, while the skylit pale pink interior is a delightful surprise. The amenities are open to all by day, with steel gates along three sides sliding closed to secure the building by night. Rainwater harvested from the amenities and tennis shelters is used for toilet flushing and landscape irrigation.
Photography: Brett Boardman
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Punch Park Amenities
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Our work is spatially exciting, playful, and robust, tuned to nature and place.
Architecture should allow us to feel safe & secure, confident & expressive, quiet & reflective. It should make our lives better.
Our team comes from a range of backgrounds and disciplines, united by a passion for design excellence. Our focus on fostering a supportive, inclusive, well-balanced studio environment earned us the Best In Practice prize at the 2020 NSW Institute of Architects Awards.
Carter Williamson acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of the Land on which we work, the Wangal people of the Eora nation, and the Land on which our projects are sited, including the Gadigal, Guringai, and Cammeraygal peoples. We pay our respects to Elders past, present, and emerging, and recognise the myriad ongoing ways First Nations peoples have cared for and shaped their natural and built environments across thousands of generations.