McNeilly Park Project.
Great to give a talk on Wednesday night @_architecturest with @AKorSyd Here is a sequence of images that we showed re #McNeillyPark, #Marrickville The first image shows the business as usual planning throughout NSW. i.e. put most new apartments on busy roads because it is politically expediate. It suits the developers, the councillors and the NIMBYs who typically controls about 80% of the land in any given LGA. (see our earlier post). So in Marrickville thanks to planning controls of the Inner West Council you pretty much get a choice of Marrickville Road and Illawarra Road.
Council can masterplan and upzone this laneway park frontage and enable developers to build apartments here where they could have 100% north facing apartments, with 75% of them having views directly to the park from their living areas? People can come home from work and see trees and hear birds instead of seeing and hearing traffic and cars.
We show here a quick sketch as to how this might be done looking at just the western block, which has 10 garages and houses fronting the Greenbank Street behind. In our sketch plan we have a 4 level building of 1 bedroom apartments facing the park, providing 36 apartments. Separated by a 12metre wide, deep soil courtyard fronting Greenback Street is a 6 level building of 18 x 2 bed and 18 x 3 bedroom apartments. This makes 72 apartments in all. All facing north, more than 80% with views to the park from their living rooms. All cross ventilated. There are 3 circulation cores with natural light and air. One of the buildings could have a single isle carpark… or both if council insisted. There would be more than 33% deep soil.
There are public benefits too! A safer park with more passive surveillance. The edge of the western side of the western block could be setback to enable Moyes Street a wider access to the park. The edge of the park could be upgraded with new planting and a bike path along it edge.
These images are a small excerpt from our talk at Architecture Street talks at Marrickville Library with Angelo Korsanos from Redshift
Not far from the railway station in a much quieter part of town is the 1.1 Hectare McNeilly Park. Sadly, what is a great public asset is currently fronted by garages; surely, truly an insult to this invaluable #publicspace. This park is actually within 200metres of the station.
Below are the council zoning maps, as you can see, all the FSR and height is placed along either Illawarra Road or Marrickville Road. Not sure which one is the noisiest, maybe Illawarra Road, because at the south end you also get the railway line for extra stereophonic effect.
