Dandenong Aquatic Center

Architectural Visualizations for a Wooden Wonder in Australia

Featuring an award-winning design

New technologies may come and go in architecture, but we continue to deliver the same high-quality work and be the visual storytellers that our clientele wants. We often have to address a well-defined target group with our visuals and it wasn’t any different in this major Australian competition. So, we went to great lengths to achieve this objective with CO-OP Studio in our latest award-winning project and aid their efforts to create a beautiful space with our visual ideas and perfectionism and to deliver a clear message on every single rendering to celebrate Dandenongs’ cultural diversity, history and naturally, to make it stand out from all other proposals in the contest.

If you dive into more of our work, you’ll find that similar to this project, our goal is always to tell just the right story our clients desire. Our artists have a great sense to get the feel of a design proposal and highlight the design features that persuade people emotionally, whether it be the local citizens or members of the city council.

In April 2021, with a unique vision for the future to replace the 40-year-old Dandenong Oasis, the city of Greater Dandenong appointed CO-OP Studio to design the new Aquatic Center. The two-storey facility will be a new public sport and recreation building, situated approximately 35 km south-east of Melbourne’s Central Business District, designed for the most culturally diverse community in Victoria with residents from over 160 birthplaces around the globe and is anticipated to serve 600 000 visitors every year.

We immediately fell in love with the breathtaking timber roof and we knew that we’ll have to put this distinctive structure in the spotlight and then guide the viewer’s attention to the spacious lobby to provide a picture-perfect open view that allows the camera to capture much more of the scene than a normal lens can.

The vision of a diverse community

This Australian project came with a challenge: every deliverable image we created needed to serve a very specific goal and audience. To highlight the exclusivity of the design during the competition phase, we developed three architectural visualizations; one served as a flagship image, and two interior images featuring the broad range of facilities the design will offer. Furthermore, the design comes with a well-thought-out connection between the lobby and the pool area and the vision of a diverse community and busy atmosphere in it.

The overseas collaboration with CO-OP is both harmonious and smooth, which is relatively rare given the nature of architectural competitions. Submitting our sketches and previews to Melbourne at night, our time in Budapest then waking up to the comment feedback the next day shows that—after teaming up for the Bentleigh Library, Croydon Park, Maranatha School and The Heffron Center projects—we finally found the perfect rhythm to execute more and larger projects together.