Ballast Point Park is located on a prominent headland overlooking Sydney Harbour. A former Caltex lubricant and oil storage facility, it sits at the tip of the suburb of Bichgrove in Sydney’s inner west. The restoration of Ballast Point to a new public harbour-side park, reveals and draws interest from the history of the site by retaining the cliff faces where ballast was once quarried by the early settlers, as well as retaining the footprints of the storage drums which previously occupied the site.

The challenge was to establish an appropriate design language that responded to the sites history whilst celebrating this new layer to its story. Further corruption of the site is avoided with the sites present transition to foreshore park and only minimal contemporary interventions are added to help order and reveal the interest of the disfigured landscape.

The architectural program works within this overall philosophy by layering the site with contemporary structures that complement the remnant site features through their materiality and contemporary industrial aesthetic. The architectural components include two amenity buildings that feature light filled naturally ventilated spaces and a series of finely crafted shade structures that bring a fine-grain textural quality to this otherwise post-industrial context.