The project’s goal was to provide a gateway to the site of the siege and the broader Kelly story. The Rural City of Wangaratta (RCoW) engaged Content Studio to design a cultural heritage centre to mark the site and tell the story of Ned Kelly’s last stand. The building needed to provide travellers on the Hume Highway with a compelling reason to stop and explore Glenrowan.
The brief was to create a circular lookout platform, so visual references to Ned Kelly’s iconic helmet were unavoidable. We twisted the form to create a series of helices, the different radii adding to the visual dynamism of the structure. A curved staircase follows the line of one of the helices, taking visitors to a circular viewing platform. The platform, featuring a rondel with a cast bronze map, acts as a compass to key staging points of the siege. Stainless steel webmesh encloses the lookout, its transparency allows uninterrupted sightlines of the culturally significant sites.
We used steel to create the helices because it’s light, strong and easy to fabricate and it gave us the flexibility we needed to construct the building’s complex geometric shape. Steel was also an important expressive part of our design as it referenced the armour worn by the Kelly gang.
The charred timber board and batten cladding references the role fire plays in the Australian bush and the siege, and the bush construction typology of the time. The charring also preserves the timber reducing the need for applied finishes.
The architecture gives form to the Kelly mythology and further establishes Glenrowan as a cultural destination.