Joyce Chapel Bridge by Searle X Waldron Architecture

Located in a picturesque garden cemetery, Joyce Chapel Bridge creates a calm and serene creek crossing that integrates with the surrounding landscape and heritage setting.

Fawkner Memorial Park in Melbourne’s northern suburbs is one of Australia’s largest and much-loved burial grounds. Originally designed by architect and surveyor Charles Heath, the cemetery is state heritage listed for its “unusual layout” with its seven radiating avenues and its connection with the garden cemetery movement. The vast 113 hectare park integrates a number of ornamental gardens, creeks, monuments, rare trees and bridges to create a variety of settings for reflection and memorialisation.

More than 100 years on from the first burial that took place in 1906, one of the bridges, likely also designed by Health in the 1930s, had fallen into disrepair. Searle X Waldron Architecture was commissioned by the Greater Metropolitan Cemeteries Trust to design a suitable replacement.

Despite having never designed a bridge before, the practice took on the challenge of creating a structure that would both serve the functional requirement of spanning over a creek, as well as satisfying the heritage requirements of its location.

The bridge connects the nearby Joyce Chapel with an existing carpark. “The bridge is used quite heavily by people who are on their way to a memorial service, so it’s a very stressful time for them,” explained Searle X Waldron design director Suzannah Waldron. “We took on the idea that the bridge itself could be a place where you could appreciate the landscape setting and surroundings, as a memorial within the park.”

The design of bridge reflects both the design of its predecessor and the geometries of Heath’s masterplan for the park. Semi-circular cut-outs in both the elevation and plan of structure reference the concrete culvert of the former bridge. Along the bridge deck, the cutouts offer glimpses of Merlynston Creek below. Planter beds integrated in the bridge deck are also an echo of the design of the previous bridge.

“It’s a subtraction of the culvert on either side of the bridge that allows you to have a moment of reflection at the midway point,” Waldron said. “We also created a seat that curves around each of those apertures and provides a space for people to sit and reflect or meet somebody before or after a service.”

The new bridge uses bricks salvaged from the previous structure, as well as the lava stone, which has been reinstated into the landscape. Brick balustrades have also been built up on either side of the deck into a unique tapering shape.

“There’s a sense of arrival at the chapel, with a low balustrade that is visible from the car park, which increases in height as you approach the memorial chapel. The balustrade also changes in terms of its porosity – there’s hit-and-miss brickwork that filters the landscape as you get closer to the chapel and as the height of the balustrade increases,” Waldron said.

“It also acts quite well as a navigation device. Because large numbers of people arrive and need to get to the chapel quickly, tapering of the balustrade gives a strong sense of directionality.”

The bridge uses a mix of red and grey bricks that reinterpret the brick and lava stone design of the former structure, which also helps it to integrate into the surrounding context. Its use of brick earned it the Bruce Mackenzie Landscape Award at the 2022 Think Brick Awards. Juror Kerstin Thompson said, “It’s really interesting the way, from a distance, [the bridge] plays a game of camouflage – the colour and texture of the bricks sit beautifully in the landscape context; it’s very subtle. And then as you get closer to the bridge and its delights and details become more apparent.”

Waldron said, “When you go to visit a grave, you want an experience where you’re surrounded by things that are beautiful, calm and serene.

“I have a personal connection to that, too. When we think about death and memorialisation, we’re not always comfortable with those discussions, so it’s acknowledging that these are pretty difficult times for people, [and asking] is there a way that architecture can – in some small way – make those experiences more beautiful and memorable for people?”