The Da Vinci Precinct baulks at the usual office park cliches and deliberately develops a new language for industrial workplaces. Not suprising considering the nomenclature – who else, but its eponymous Renaissance genius, more fully encapsulates innovation and experimentation? Such notions were at the forefront of the mind of Developer, David Pearson of Pearson Property Group, when he briefed BVN Architecture to design the park.

Set within the Brisbane Airport Corporation’s land holdings on Brisbane’s outer north-east, the park caters for small to large import and export businesses which require convenient access to the international and domestic airports. Its 44 office/warehouse and office/showroom buildings are arranged in a campus-like setting, allowing for a stronger than usual focus on the pedestrian community.

“We decided to develop the precinct as a village, based on good urban design principles,” says BVN Principal,  Shane Thompson. “The various freight and import-export businesses build up a network over time, which can be encouraged by this more interesting and innovative environment."

Apart from a garden element represting a 10% increase in the required green space (at 15% site coverage), the buildings are divided by wide boulevards to encourage strolling and sitting, while their transparent walls allow colleagues to see what’s happeneing inside. The format is a far cry from massively scaled windowless steel barns.

A wide central boulevard provides a vista along the precinct’s north-south axis and caters to both pedestrians and small to medium sized vehicles. “An industrial park is one of the last of the alienating modern architectural environments,” says BVN’s Morgan Corkill, “and so it’s not usually seen as conducive to place-making. We wanted Da Vinci to be attratice to tenants and for it to target tenants who were like-minded. It’s not a wasteland.”

Corkill and Thompson chose “cheap and prosaic materials” to create a pleasing, repetitive pattern of vibrant protruding red boxes set along the street front, marking the location of the offices within the larger concrete tilt up structures. The red steel boxes are a distinctive feature in colour and patterning, giving a ‘clipped on’ effect. The vary in scale as they make their way along the boulevard of larger, grey boxes, and each tenancy can also be identified by large street numbers on the buildings.

Polycarbonate accent windows on the buildings’ corners add to the arrangement of variation within a rigid grid. The site’s signature office building consists of two wings connected by a glass bridge. Each of the wings is graced with a red tube structure climbing up and over it from the car park below, again bringing colour and vibrancy to the project.

Environmental sustainability principles are addressed in the water collection and recycling system. Air-conditioning is reserved for the small office portions of each of the buildings with the inclusion of a health club and café on the drawing board, and cycle-friendly approaches for staff wishing to cycle to work, the precinct should make for high workplace contentment.