Increasingly regional centres are investing in indoor facilities to ensure the community can engage in aquatic activity year-round. Concept commissioned by Dubbo Regional Council.
Creating the ideal regional aquatic facility Warren and Mahoney’s Daryl Maguire shares the guiding principles his practice has defined to create the ideal aquatic centre to meet current and future needs of regional areas
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s sports are at the heart of any regional community, the immersion in water is one of life’s truly lovely leisure activities. Having worked on more than 30 large aquatic and sporting projects around the Pacific Rim over the last few decades, Warren and Mahoney has spent some time coming up with a sound approach for how to meet the aquatic needs of inland communities where, for many, an aquatic centre is their only water-based leisure experience. As Warren and Mahoney Senior Associate, Tom Vandenberg explains “what we’ve found with regional aquatic facilities is that they were often built with that idea of replicating the natural water source - a lake or an ocean. “The existing facilities are often all outdoors, uncovered and while they provide a slice of summer where there is no beach or foreshore, they are typically only used for six to eight months of the year. It gets pretty cold inland in winter. “Compare this to the builds of centres in metropolitan cities, where there are often multiple options for indoor training or leisure 12 months of the year. “So, we’ve spent quite a bit of time coming up with a strategy that can extend the usage of these regional facilities and, thereby, enhancing the role an aquatic centre can play as a social hub for those communities all year round. “We’re often tasked with upgrading or building new structures 24 Australasian Leisure Management Issue 146
that will support comfortable temperatures for people wanting to swim outside daylight hours - such as Learn to Swim before school or competitive swimmer training. “On top of the Learn to Swim and competitive swimming opportunities these facilities provide, we believe regional centres need and deserve an enhancement in the usage and range of play activities available to them and we’ve used six guiding principles of design to achieve this.” Our six guiding principles to create the ideal aquatic facility for inland regions: 1. Sustainability and Energy Efficiency It is essential that any new facility is designed with strong sustainability outcomes embedded. Adding any new indoor component to an existing sporting or aquatic facility will naturally require more energy resources and must also work in conjunction with the existing outdoor facilities. Planning needs to centre around the latest in environmentally sustainable design (ESD) principles including ‘open balance’ mechanical design, heat pumps for both water and air and 300kW of photovoltaic cells on the roof to provide solar energy resource. This should be complemented by the adoption of a low carbon timber structure – using principles like Mass Timber and CLT – and the careful consideration of how to maximise daylighting through the orientation of external windows and overhead glazing.
