After many years of consultation, planning and deliberation, the winning design concept for Ngurra, Australia’s National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural precinct was announced. A significant cultural landmark, Ngurra is so much more than a bold architecturally designed building. It is a place imbued with the past, present and future of the oldest living culture in the world 

When it comes to highly competitive design competitions, it goes without saying that success is less about any one person’s grand vision than it is about collaboration and teamwork. When the competition in question is for the design of both the final resting place for First Nations ancestors and a place for public education and knowledge sharing, collaboration plays an even more significant role. 

Building trust: A collaborative partnership years in the making

The collaboration was years in the making for Dr Danièle Hromek, director of Djinjama, a First Nations cultural research and design agency, and Hassell head of design and project director Mark Loughnan, two of the four design team leads for Ngurra. “I remember being in a meeting with one of the other principals of Hassell and we had a moment of mutual recognition that we both were horrified by what we were seeing. We came together and have collaborated on projects ever since,”  Hromek recalls.

When the opportunity for Ngurra came up in 2022, Hromek and Loughnan knew almost immediately that they wanted to collaborate. “We obviously wanted to work with a partner that we trusted. As a small Aboriginal business, it’s really hard to find people that you can trust, that you know are going to listen to you, and who are genuinely interested in integrating First Nations wisdom into projects,” says Hromek. 

For Loughnan, the desire to collaborate, and the ultimate success of their concept, stems from the philosophical alignment of their collective design approaches and personal ideologies. “We don’t come with a preconceived design outcome, so it allows us to work together. We listen and learn from each other to try and come up with something that is specific for the project and obviously, for Ngurra, that was more important than ever.” says Loughnan. 

Embedding Country. Embedding community.

What makes Ngurra so uniquely successful, so “bold, yet elegant in integrating with the landscape,” as the jury phrased it, is the fact that the design team — which included Djinjama, Hassell, Edition Office and COLA Studio — worked closely and collaboratively not only amongst themselves but also with First Nations members of the community. This might seem obvious given the significance of Ngurra. However, it is essential to acknowledge that for genuine collaboration with Country to take place, Country and First Nations knowledge and design principles must necessarily be embedded into every facet of the process — from the physical design through to the relationships between individuals.

“We had to have [a] strong community within our team and we worked really hard to build that and make sure that we had a very collaborative, open truth-telling approach within the team, says Hromek. “Everyone had to be sensitive to what we were actually dealing with, which enabled the First Nations principles and values and understandings of Country to come forward.”

For Loughnan, who is no stranger to landmark design projects, the experience was one of amazement and profound emotion. “It’s one of the most interesting and important projects I’ve ever worked on, and I’ve been lucky to work on things around the world,” he said. “This was a real challenge and a unique challenge. I learned an enormous amount through the process. We wanted to create an emotional design, but the process itself was very emotional and I think that was very unique and special in its own right.”

Designing emotionally 

What does it mean to create an emotional design? Ask ten different architects and you’ll likely receive ten different responses. Emotions are, by definition, individual and nuanced. Yet, as American psychologist Carl Rogers said, “What is most personal is most universal”. The emotional roots of Ngurra’s design stem from the personal stories that Hromek, her team and the wider collective of Aunties and community members brought back and shared with the wider design team to not simply inform the design direction, but to impart knowledge and develop shared understanding and empathy for the significance of the site itself. 

“As First Nations people, we understood that anyone who’s coming into the National Resting Place could be one of our ancestors,” recalls Hromek. “We understood that we were designing for them. When you think of it like that, immediately it’s an emotional thing because they could literally be someone related to you. A lot of our family records [and] information about our communities are held there [in the AIATSIS part of Ngurra]. I’ve had to access it myself and I know the process of doing that. So that becomes emotional and personal. It was personal for us.”

Blessed with these personal and profound stories, it became possible for the team to develop a unified architectural design response to the two distinctly different programmatic aspects of Ngurra — the National Resting Place as a private, sacred space for the sheltering of ancestors and the National Indigenous Knowledge and Cultural Centre, an open, welcoming, public space for education and learning.  

Form, function and the monumentalisation of space

Formally, The National Resting Place design concept is composed of two structures. The curved embrace of the outer welcoming building, assembled under the gentle blanket of rolling grasslands, and the tall, stand-alone structure of the Resting Place sheltered within. The Repatriation Space lies in the centre of this form, in direct relationship to a secluded and sacred inner courtyard, allowing a highly protected place for ceremony, song, sorrow and love.

To create these distinct yet harmoniously integrated spaces, responding to the land — to Country — was as essential a part of the process as was community consultation and collaboration. The site in Canberra that Ngurra was designed for is home to the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples, who have lived for thousands of years amid a landscape of limestone plains, mountains, swamps and streams. Reflecting on the significance of the landscape itself, and the role that it played in both the design process and outcome, Hromek explains the concept of sensing Country. 

“We used an approach that we call ‘sensing country’ in our practice. I authored a few methodologies in my PhD for design and we use those regularly. One of them is around sensing how Country speaks to you as a First Nations person and then interpreting it into a design effectively. Sensing Country is about how it all feels. Sometimes the feelings are physical — how rain, or occasionally even snow in Canberra, splashes on your skin and melts. The wind passes by you and blows your hair. These are some of the ways that Country senses itself back to you through all of the senses that we know. And, it’s also about actively listening to Country, to the voice, to the spirit of Country. I think we Aboriginal people have the ability to tap into some of those other senses through our relationship to Country. I think other people do as well. It’s just that we’ve maintained it in terms of Country and I think that’s where that special connection for us comes from and is maintained. That’s part of the methodology.”

The adoption of this methodology and its seamless integration with Western architectural design principles has created arguably one of the most eloquent expressions of beautiful architecture in recent years. Each of the built forms has been carefully considered to provide not only a space for retreat from, or connection between people, but also a profound connection to the land, non-human kin [wildlife] and the original topography of Canberra. “When you do it right with architecture, it doesn’t compete with the landscape but becomes part of it,” says Hromek.

From the elegant outstretched central canopy inspired by the story of the eagle that created the landscape, which can be read as “an embrace from an Aunty”, to the standalone structure of the Resting Place nestled within, at every turn, Ngurra elevates Country. 

At the time of writing, the location for Ngurra has been changed and this concept will unfortunately not come to fruition. The team are now in the process of gathering together again to develop their competitive response to the new site. 

All image renders supplied by Hassell