Emerald, Victoria, Australia
Terroir along with Tract have designed the Puffing Billy Railway Visitor Center, a locomotive inspired community space with deep black exterior, echoing the locomotives of the railway and allowing the large building to recede into the shadows of the bush.
The Puffing Billy Railway Visitor Center has recently been awarded a 2022 International Architecture Award by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.
It is a narrow-gauge heritage railway tourist experience in the southern foothills of the Dandenong Ranges, 40 kilometers east of Melbourne, Australia.
The 24-kilometer line is one of the most popular steam heritage railways in the world, attracting 500,000 tourists annually.
The line, affectionately known as “Puffing Billy,” opened in 1900 to serve the local farming and timber community and closed in 1954 after a landslide.
In 1955, a volunteer organization formed to reopen the railway as a tourist operation, which has continued to operate successfully ever since.
In recent times, Puffing Billy has had unprecedented growth in patronage, which has created exceeding capacity on the first half of the line at peak times, whilst only 10% of visitors traveled the second half.
To ameliorate this bottleneck, a new visitor center was proposed at the midpoint of the railway line, at Lakeside Station.
Lakeside Station overlooks Emerald Lake Park, a rural park that was once the largest plant nursery in the Southern Hemisphere, with over 180 hectares.
Behind Lakeside Station is native bushland and the southernmost point of Australia’s 3,500-kilometer-long Great Dividing Range.
This location enabled a contemporary, functional center that can pay respect to the natural and introduced heritage of the region and railway, recognizing the local indigenous people as the original custodians of the land.
Often in tourism projects there is pressure to build a new experience, or “icon” where there is not one already.
The challenge for this project was to enhance the already iconic Puffing Billy Railway by adding new dimensions and experiences that do not replace or stand out from that which exists, but that build upon those qualities that have made it so successful.
The strategy was to focus not on building a new attraction, but rather to focus on existing characteristics of the railway line and platform, creating a visitor experience anchored within the authentic sights, smells, and sounds of the railway.
The design also responds specifically to the two unique landscape contexts; native bushland and a European park landscape that is overlooked.
In providing a new destination and negotiating between these two contrasting landscapes, the visitor center is an instrument through which these multiple dimensions of the site can be experienced.
This new instrument retains its relationship to the existing context by starting with the idea of the railway “platform.”
The complex programmatic and operational brief is arranged along this platform that regularly switches back to mimic the railway journey itself, through the Ranges.
The linear arrangement is simple, legible, and accessible to the many visitor types.
Running parallel to the “carriage-like” functions is one elongated internal circulation space with uninterrupted trackside views and a timber finish with an imprinted rhythm of structure inspired by the long winding trestle bridges that are so important for the Puffing Billy experience.
Thus, connections are maede both in physical and in psycho-spatial means. In an interpretive sense, the visitor moves from the wider immersive landscape to a more specific journey into the world of Puffing Billy—a journey of exploration, wonder, enquiry, and discovery into the natural environment and the inner workings of the trains and the people of the railway.
Externally, the visitor center is covered in shiny black cladding.
In addition to a continuous windows on the trackside, occasional pleat-like openings in the enclosure hint at the interior.
The building resembles the signature iconic black Puffing Billy steam locomotives and recedes into the shadows of the native bushland.
It is a silhouette backdrop, grounded in place, to the hero that is the Puffing Billy Railway experience.
Project: Puffing Billy Railway Visitor Centre
Architects: TERROIR
Lead Architects: Scott Balmforth, Gerard Reinmuth
Project Leader: Emily Slevin
Design Team: Paul Sayers, Michael Carlotto, Jack Andrews, Kate Hyland, and Matt Flack
Landscape Architects: Tract
General Contractor: Kane Constructions Pty Ltd.
Client: Puffing Billy Railway
Photographers: Peter Bennetts
