brickpit ringwalk 2005

The Brickpit Ring Walk is a circular elevated walkway 550 metres in circumferrence, set 18 meters above the base of a vast man-made crater, the result of a century of mining the raw materials for the production of over 3 billion bricks.

Architecture firm Durbach Block proposed and designed the elegant structure in response to a Sydney Olympic Park Authority competition to devise an ecologically appropriate means of providing public access to the Brickpit.

The key imperative was for a design solution that opened up the Brickpit to visitors without disturbing the protected environmental zone of wetlands that are home to endangered frog species.

I worked with curator/historian Peter Emmett to develop the interpretive plan for the Ring Walk project. This provides visitors with information, sound and imagery that reveals the industrial history of the Brickpit and its surprising contemporary role as a refuge for birds, bats, endangered frogs and other species.

In addition to dozens of sequenced graphic panels integrated into the architectural framework, two multi-speaker soundscapes enhance the visitor experience on opposite sides of the Ring Walk.

One uses oral history interviews and sounds from operating brickworks to commemorate the men who worked in the Brickpit, while the other creates a dense wetland soundscape featuring the calls of birds and the various frog species resident in the Brickpit frog ponds below.

Peter and I developed the soundscape concept, I researched and located archival sounds sources and David Chesworth of Wax Sound Media made original recordings on site and produced the layered soundscape tracks.

gary warner 2012