Design Excellence and ARCHICAD – A Winning Combination

The reality is starting to dawn – the City of Brisbane is about to be transformed thanks to the Destination Brisbane Consortium’s successful bid for the Queens Wharf precinct.
Behind the scenes local design firm, Cottee Parker Architects have been busily delivering the developer’s vision and marrying design excellence with the warm, welcoming tropical atmosphere that Brisbane folk take for granted.

The proposal aspires to celebrate the birthplace of Brisbane through adaptive re-use of all historical buildings within the precinct and appropriate insertion of tourism, retail and food & beverage uses to breathe new life into these buildings and the precinct.
Some of the key features of the integrated resort precinct include –

• Five new premium hotel brands, including Ritz-Carlton and Rosewood
• Fifty restaurants and bars, from hatted fine dining restaurants to pop-up cafes
• Dozens of unique attractions, including a spectacular water and light show, playing several times each night in the new “River Arena”
• Ball rooms, function spaces, cinemas including a rooftop moonlight cinema
• A new lyric theatre at QPAC
• Riverfront moonlight cinema
• 12 football fields of public event space
• A new Queensland hotel and hospitality school

Cottee Parker’s chosen architectural platform in the work of drafting the winning bid for the Queens Wharf project is ARCHICAD.

“We have been using ARCHICAD in our practice for over 10 years and find it to be the best BIM Design and Documentation platform on the market in an architectural context” said Cottee Parker Managing Director, Matthew Caswell.

“ARCHICAD is a true OPEN BIM platform that provides an intuitive user-interface, and a true integrated workflow. This means that our team can easily convert design concepts into a complete 3D model with documentation using ARCHICAD for all steps in the design-construct workflow.

“Also, we can use ARCHICAD regardless of the software platform that other project participants are using. This saves us a considerable time and makes the entire design-documentation-construction process more efficient”, said Mr. Caswell.

“When we are in place with the Queens Wharf team we hope to be adding additional staff into our team, some of whom will have no experience in ARCHICAD whatsoever.

“We are confident that ARCHICAD’s support of the architectural workflow will support our comprehensive training program and CAD standards to ensure that we can get our staff up to speed and working productively very quickly.” said Matthew Caswell.

About Cottee Parker

Founded in 1989 in Brisbane, Cottee Parker combine intellect and creativity with a skillful, sensitive approach to design. We design considering culture, environment and the human condition to produce responsive and sustainable solutions. We use our experience, skills and knowledge to create designs that work for clients and the community.

Cottee Parker Architects is now a national practice operating in Melbourne, Perth and Brisbane. We have extensive experience in delivering unique and considered design solutions for the built environment. With this level of experience, we have established relationships with local planning authorities and are well recognised for our exceptional urban design outcomes. This has allowed us to achieve design solutions for our clients well beyond the usual planning constraints.

Playing the role of lead designer for our clients, the Destination Brisbane Consortium, on the winning bid for the Queens Wharf integrated resort development will focus attention of the design and delivery qualities of the practice. We expect that over the coming months will be building a team of specialist designers and technicians to deliver this and other exciting projects in our offices on the ArchiCAD platform.