Here in my relative idleness, otherwise known as semi-retirement, I am pleasurably free of the pressures of architectural practice while nevertheless enjoying vicariously design and intellectual explorations carried out by others, responding with the odd personal contribution.

The long gestation periods that large and complex projects typically experience can at times provide unexpected and delightful interruptions to my reveries. As happened last week, when the news arrived that the Hellenic Club in Canberra had succeeded in purchasing the Woden Village site adjacent its club facilities.

It was in the middle of 2023 that I last saw the Woden Village project when, at the time a Partner of Fender Katsalidis, we submitted our scheme along with the financials to the ACT Suburban and Land Authority as part of a two stage design/financial competition. Now a year later, out of the system pops approval and resultant purchase.

For most of 2022, with the Hellenic Club and Oculus we explored opportunities for the large land holding the club sits on, and at the end of that year we made our (successful) application for planning approval for the resultant scheme. With its key aspirations to create a porous and connected precinct encouraging seamless public access and providing significant public opportunities, the opportunity to explore the linking of those possibilities into the adjacent Woden Village site was an opportunity too good to miss when the competition for that precinct was launched in May 2023.

Miss it we didn't, examining with the Hellenic Club and Oculus until the end of 2023 the community and private opportunities of the Woden Village precinct, arriving at a scheme centred on significant, highly useable and activated linked ground level and elevated public open spaces.

The success of the two schemes arose from collaborations with the Hellenic Club, Oculus and with an FK team of intelligence, skill and purpose: Jacqueline Bartholomeusz, David Robinson, James Lawrence, Marina Rukavishnikova, Zhenwen Zhang, Max Cooke, Ciara Losty , Frazer Spencer, Isabel Solin, and Ethan Horne.