CAC Powerhouse

All of the design is in the boundary

The commission was the entrance gate and perimeter wall for a church camp: striking and welcoming, in that order. There is no building in the brief at all.

That is a harder problem than it sounds. A gate has no interior to fall back on and no programme to organise. It is one gesture, seen from a moving car, and it has to carry the identity of everything behind it.

Scale was the real difficulty

A camp boundary runs for hundreds of metres. At that length, a conventional fence is simply a long repetition of nothing, and a gate detailed at the scale of a house disappears against it.

So the wall had to be designed as one continuous thing rather than as a gate with fencing attached. It has to read at sixty kilometres an hour from the road and still be worth standing next to on foot — two very different distances, resolved in the same form.

Open palms

The form comes from the shape of open hands raised in prayer, which is a gesture every person arriving at that camp already understands without being told.

It is built as a cascade: a sequence of angled wall panels that rise and fall along the boundary, each one leaning slightly, so the wall has a rhythm and a direction instead of just a length. The cascade builds toward the entrance, where the panels converge and the opening sits at the point they meet.

That convergence does the welcoming. You are not directed to the gate by a sign — the wall itself gathers toward it, and by the time you can see the entrance the whole boundary has been pointing at it for a hundred metres.