东部高速公路延伸(eastern freeway extension)

发布于：2023-05-19 01:02:00

分类：道路

内容：实景照片

图片：7张

When Tract, as part of the VicRoads design team, gave the 7-kilometre Eastern Freeway extension an aesthetic landscape overlay, the design question it investigated was how to engender the experience of the road. Tract explored two ideas of a single dichotomy: the speed experienced by motorists, and the slow unfolding sensations of people strolling in a park.
Along the bitumen corridor of the freeway the traffic roars on, drivers intent on nudging across into the correct !ane to peel off at their junctions.The landscape treatment enhances the mundane experience of freeway driving by being sufficiently varied and pleasant to help drivers stay alert. The drive becomes an episode of flickering rhythms of hard and soft landscape and blurs of muted colour and texture. Along the verges, against the concrete noise barrier walls, earth mounds undulate as a continuous flowing topography, reinforcing the perception of speed. In a painterly, modernist abstract planting composition recalling Burle-Marx, the verges are carpeted by extended stretches of single native plant species that change in composition from riverine to dryland species as one moves up the valley. This environment of the road expresses the high-speed experience of seamless momentum.
Although the proposal to construct a freeway extension caused community consternation, the road became the opportunity to transform an area of neglected bushland into a linear local park, a positive outcome for the community-The route cuts through a water catchment basin.
and the creek here had become a degraded stormwater drain feeding directly into the Yarra River. A standard means of containing and directing polluted stormwater is to barrel it through 2-metre diameter concrete pipes. Tract proposed a simpler remedial strategy for stormwater management, channelling the creek into a series of naturalist ponds and forming a bush park alongside the road.The simpler strategy has many advantages: ecological, financial, aesthetic, social. Ecologically it made sense to reinforce the eroded gully and to channel run-off into settling ponds; plants growing in the water absorb pollutants and oil. Financially this was cheaper by millions of dollars than piping the water: planting represents just 5-10 per cent of a construction budget.The remedial solution has aesthetic and social benefits too, creating a public park through the valley. Pathways link up with the extensive Yarra River track, enabling people to bicycle to work.
This area can never be returned to its pristine bush state. But a memory of its original condition has been reconstructed using indigenous species. Over 4 million native plants were installed, sourced from local seed. And over 4 kilometres of creek bed was re-established and lined with local rocks to create a ‘natural‘ creek base. Small fish that had disappeared returned to the area when the water quality improved and the landscape regenerated.