Winner of Department of Transport Bicycle Parking Design Competition
The Department of Transport with the Office of the Victorian Architect recently sought out an architect to rethink the Parkiteer so that it might encourage more riders to participate. The brief called for a new design, ‘celebrating & inspiring’ cycling as a viable model of transport. It would have an elevated status in the urban realm, comparable to railway stations & freeways …
The four participating practices were BKK, Terroir, Six Degrees & PHOOEY …
It was one simple cyclist-friendly feature … that may have clinched it for winner PHOOEY Architects – a covered entry so you needn’t get drenched while fumbling for your swipe card.
PHOOEY’s sawtooth roof & plate steel palette is meant to echo the industrial shed, & ‘shed’ is a word that Peter Ho uses deliberately instead of ‘cage’. Cages protect people from hungry animals inside, but bikes aren’t tigers. Sheds protect the goods inside from the people & weather outside. As the goods are bicycles, the wall fins can be well spaced. PHOOEY’s shed, now documented comes in prefabricated chunks & uses off-the-shelf parts wherever it can. All offcuts from the six-metre vertical bars are inserted back into the building as cross-bracing that doubles as decoration. At one end of the shed is a laser-cut steel panel that might display cycling maps of the area.
Excerpt from
Johns, P 2010, ‘Parkiteer MKII’, Architecture Australia, Nov/Dec pp 34-35