Taylor Cullity Lethlean (TCL) brings a 'poetic' collaborative design to projects like Adelaide footbridge, expressway

The Riverbank footbridge (top) and the Northern Expressway were major South Australian government projects calling on the artistic collaborative landscaping approach of Taylor Cullity Lethlean (TCL).
Images courtesy Taylor Cullity Lethlean and Tonkin Zulaikha Greer

With an Adelaide base, Taylor Cullity Lethlean (TCL), one of the world’s most highly acclaimed landscape architecture and urban design firms, was immersed in creating two major South Australian government projects: the Northern Expressway (2010) and the Riverbank footbridge (2014).  

Since being founded by South Australian Institute of Technology architecture and Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology landscape architecture graduate Kevin Taylor (killed in a car crash in 2011), Kate Cullity and Perry Lethlean in the early 1990s, the TCL practice became a national award winner annually for its stress on cross-discipline design collaborators.  

TCL’s approach has been called ”a detailed exploration of context, site and community, with a focus on the poetic expression of landscape and contemporary culture”. This was brought in TCL's role in the Northern Expressway project, 23 kilometres of freeway with six interchanges linking the Gawler bypass with Port Wakefield Road north of Adelaide. TCL worked with artists, storytellers and the traditional cohort of technical team members needed to carve a major highway as a landscape narrative across the Adelaide Plains.

Also for the South Australian government department of planning, transport and infrastructure and again working with the Sydney urban design firm of Tonkin Zulaikha Greer (plus Aurecon.) The design team called on consultant Karl Telfer from Cultural Research Education and Design to bring local Aboriginal links and storytelling into the project. The south landing hosted a stainless steel artwork where subtle traces of animals etched into the surface of the steel can be seen by day, and representations of the southern constellations can be seen by night.

TCL also won a sustainability award for its work on the Adelaide Botanic Garden’s wetland, again relying on the same fusing of design disciplines – of landscape architecture, engineering,and interpretation