Shipwreck (Blowhole Lookout)
Port Campbell, VIC
Port Campbell, VIC
Architect: Denton Corker Marshall, McGregor Coxall
Engineering Consultant: ARUP
Contractors: Simpson Construction Company
Product: ShapeShell™-RT
Surface Area: Park Sculptural Feature
Application: Architectural
Responsibility: Design, Engineer & Manufacture of Feature Elements
The Blowhole is a place of contrasts. While discreetly nestled amongst the recessive coastal vegetation, hidden from the approaching paths, the Blowhole is a surprising and thrilling experience.
The lookout proposal is conceptually subsumed into the landscape, revealing itself as unexpectedly as the Blowhole itself. The lookout is a singular, sculptural shell-like object anchored into the edges of the Blowhole. The dynamic form creates ever changing and
subtlety revealed viewing opportunities, stretching the viewing perimeter whilst hiding much of the intervention.
The shell offers partial protection from the elements and is shaped to amplify the dramatic atmosphere of sound and spray. It perhaps gives a sense of being within a cresting wave, or shaped by the extreme forces of nature.
The Blowhole lookout at Port Campbell on the Victorian coast is designed by Denton Corker Marshall with McGregor Coxall as a single sculptural shell anchored into the edges of the blowhole. It is intended to be subsumed into the coastal landscape, revealing views progressively rather than framing one, while offering partial shelter and amplifying the sound and spray below. The structure is ShapeShell™-RT.
Port Campbell faces the Southern Ocean, and a structure anchored into the lip of a blowhole is not merely near the sea. It is in the spray.
That combination defeats most conventional materials. Structural steel in direct salt spray depends entirely on its protective system and becomes a maintenance liability from the day it is installed. Reinforced concrete in a chloride-rich environment is vulnerable to corrosion of the reinforcement, which is the mechanism that eventually spalls coastal concrete. Timber in constant wetting and drying under high UV has a short service life. And every one of those options assumes someone will come back to maintain it, on a clifftop, in a protected landscape, indefinitely.
A fibre reinforced thermoset has no embedded steel and therefore no corrosion mechanism to manage. Colour moulded into the laminate rather than applied as a coating removes the paint system as a maintenance item. In an environment this hostile, the question is not which material performs best on day one but which one is still acceptable in twenty years without intervention.
The design is described as a shell, and a shell is exactly what composite construction does best. Strength comes from curvature rather than from section depth, so a continuously curved form is structurally efficient precisely where it is architecturally expressive. There is no frame to hide and no lining to add, because the surface is the structure.
That also serves the experiential intent. A monocoque shell can be moulded to a geometry chosen to amplify sound and spray and to reveal views progressively, without the internal structure that would otherwise interrupt those surfaces.
A clifftop site in a protected coastal landscape has no laydown area, restricted access and real limits on what plant can reach it. Light prefabricated elements can be carried in and assembled with minimal ground disturbance, which is usually a condition of approval in a setting like this rather than a preference.
Low weight helps again at the anchorages. A lighter structure needs fewer and smaller anchors into the rock, and in a salt-spray environment every metallic fixing is a durability risk, so reducing their number and size is a direct gain in service life.
This project used ShapeShell-RT, our FRP composite system.
Browse all ShapeShift Technologies projects, or compare the panel materials in cladding panels compared.