A Civic Landmark,
A Cultural Legacy
Entries are now open for The Centenary Pools Project — a celebration of Australian modernist design, civic memory, and public imagination.
SHARE YOUR STORYThe Centenary Pools Project is a civic and cultural platform dedicated to celebrating the legacy, design, and community significance of Brisbane’s Centenary Pool Complex.
Through storytelling, public engagement, architectural critique and heritage recognition, it aims to honour this modernist icon and inspire future projects that value the places that shape us.
The Centenary Pools Project is a civic and cultural platform dedicated to celebrating the legacy, design, and community significance of Brisbane’s Centenary Pool Complex.
Through storytelling, public engagement, architectural critique, and heritage recognition, it aims to honour this modernist icon and inspire future projects that value the places that shape us.
A book and exhibition mark the beginning of The Centenary Pools Project and we want you to help us tell this story.
The Centenary Pools book will be available for purchase in 2026. All profits from the sale of the Centenary Pools Book will be donated to Paralympics Australia, to help our current and future Paralympians chase their sporting dreams.
SUBMIT NOWABOUT
For more than sixty years, Centenary Pool has been deeply woven into the story of Brisbane — a place where generations have learned to swim, trained, competed, gathered, and grown.
A true zeitgeist of its era, the pool opened in 1959, just three years after Australia’s triumphant showing at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. That moment — defined by national icons like Dawn Fraser and Murray Rose — ignited a cultural passion for swimming across the country. Brisbane responded with its own bold civic expression: the Centenary Pool Complex, designed by then-City Architect James Birrell.
The result was a public place like no other — sculptural in form, embedded in its landscape, and ambitious in its vision. A celebration of modernist design and public spirit, it stood as both a functional facility and a cultural statement.
Now, as Brisbane prepares to host the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the Centenary Pools Project invites us to pause and reflect:
What should be remembered?
What deserves to shape our city’s future?
Through creative storytelling, visual art, public memory, and architectural recognition, this project offers a living tribute to one of Brisbane’s most important civic landmarks — and a platform for reimagining how it can inspire future generations.
Built to mark 100 years of Brisbane's local government, Centenary Pool was a reflection of the city's growing love for competitive swimming.
ABOUT
For more than sixty years, Centenary Pool has been deeply woven into the story of Brisbane — a place where generations have learned to swim, trained, competed, gathered, and grown.
A true zeitgeist of its era, the pool opened in 1959, just three years after Australia’s triumphant showing at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. That moment — defined by national icons like Dawn Fraser and Murray Rose — ignited a cultural passion for swimming across the country. Brisbane responded with its own bold civic expression: the Centenary Pool Complex, designed by then-City Architect James Birrell.
The result was a public place like no other — sculptural in form, embedded in its landscape, and ambitious in its vision. A celebration of modernist design and public spirit, it stood as both a functional facility and a cultural statement.
Now, as Brisbane prepares to host the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the Centenary Pools Project invites us to pause and reflect:
What should be remembered?
What deserves to shape our city’s future?
Through creative storytelling, visual art, public memory, and architectural recognition, this project offers a living tribute to one of Brisbane’s most important civic landmarks — and a platform for reimagining how it can inspire future generations.
Built to mark 100 years of Brisbane's local government, Centenary Pool was a reflection of the city's growing love for competitive swimming.
Share a Story.
Contribute Your Creativity.
Shape the Legacy.
Artists, writers, photographers, architects, historians, and everyday storytellers — we invite you to contribute to growing a cultural project that honours one of Australia’s most iconic examples of modernist architecture: the Centenary Pool Complex.
Your contribution may be featured in a landmark publication or a public exhibition that celebrate the legacy and ongoing relevance of this civic icon. Whether your connection is personal, professional, or simply passionate — we want to hear from you.
Built to mark 100 years of Brisbane's local government, Centenary Pool was a reflection of the city's growing love for competitive swimming.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
Photography
Images that capture the beauty, activity, and social history of Centenary Pool — across decades and generations.
Visual Art
Paintings, drawings, collages, or sculptures that reflect the form, spirit, and significance of the space.
Memoirs
Written pieces that share memories, reflections, and personal moments tied to the pool.
Historical Accounts
Insights from researchers or participants in events at the pool — from swim meets to civic ceremonies.
This is your opportunity to help shape a project that captures the enduring significance of Centenary Pool — not just as a place, but as part of Australia’s cultural identity.
SUBMIT NOW
HOW IT WORKS
Upload your artwork
Use the submission form below to upload your artwork or other submission content to us. You'll need to include your contact information to ensure we can get in touch about your submission if we need to.
Complete the release form
As part of the submission process, you’ll be asked to fill out a brief form at the end of the submission. This helps us ensure all submitted content can be included in the exhibition and publication. A few things to note are:
- You’ll confirm that the work you’re submitting is your own—or that you have permission to share it on behalf of someone else.
- Participation is entirely voluntary, and while your contribution is deeply valued, no financial compensation can be provided.
Grant permission to publish
By submitting, you agree to have your work considered for inclusion in a curated exhibition and a printed coffee table book. Credit will be given to all contributors.
Submissions close 1 December 2025
Centenary Pools Project
Submit your Contribution
The Centenary Pool is an emblem of Brisbane's love of swimming and its deep connection to the water. Through this publication, we seek to capture the spirit of the Pool, showcasing its history, beauty, and the people whose lives it has touched.
Gallery Showcase
Future Relevance
The Centenary Pools Project supports this goal — through recognition, preservation, and cultural storytelling that elevates the site’s importance across generations.
James Birrell Legacy
Designed by the late James Birrell and completed in 1959 as part of Brisbane’s centenary celebrations, the Centenary Pool Complex stands as a landmark of Australian modernist architecture.
Conceived during Birrell’s visionary tenure as Brisbane City Architect, the design was a radical departure from conventional civic form. It embraced bold curves, expressive volumes, and a sensitivity to site and climate rarely seen in public buildings of the time.
More than a swimming venue, it was a work of civic imagination, a reflection of Birrell’s belief that public architecture should be both socially purposeful and visually ambitious. Today, it remains a cultural touchstone both for the era it helped define and the possibilities it still represents.
James Birrell Legacy
Designed by the late James Birrell and completed in 1959 as part of Brisbane’s centenary celebrations, the Centenary Pool Complex stands as a landmark of Australian modernist architecture.
Conceived during Birrell’s visionary tenure as Brisbane City Architect, the design was a radical departure from conventional civic form, it embraced bold curves, expressive volumes, and a sensitivity to site and climate rarely seen in public buildings of the time.
More than a swimming venue, it was a work of civic imagination, a reflection of Birrell’s belief that public architecture should be both socially purposeful and visually ambitious. Today, it remains a cultural touchstone both for the era it helped define, and the possibilities it still represents.
The Pool
The Centenary Pool Complex is distinguished by a series of formally inventive and structurally ambitious elements.
The Spiral Concrete Diving Tower
The Curvilinear Pavilion
Site Integration
Innovative Structures
In 1960, Architecture and Arts magazine named the complex one of Australia’s top ten buildings — a statement of national architectural significance.
The Pool
The Centenary Pool Complex is distinguished by a series of formally inventive and structurally ambitious elements.
The Spiral Concrete Diving Tower
The Curvilinear Pavilion
Site Integration
Innovative Structures
In 1960, Architecture and Arts magazine named the complex one of Australia’s top ten buildings — a statement of national architectural significance.
Architecture, art and landscape
At the heart of its conception was James Birrell, then Chief Architect for Brisbane City Council. His vision, outlined in a remarkable design memo and later reflections, reveals a pool designed not merely for swimming, but for urban life, artistic expression, and a new relationship between people and place.
LANDSCAPE AS A GENERATOR
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At Centenary Pool, the landscape is not backdrop; it is the origin and organiser of architectural form. This was not landscaping applied to a finished design; it was architecture emerging from terrain, in both concept and composition.
Birrell’s chosen site was no blank canvas. The Centenary Pool was carved into a gully within Victoria Park, concealed from the surrounding city by mature trees and natural terrain. It was, in his words, a place with the potential to become an “Arcadian glade”, a serene retreat just minutes from Brisbane’s urban core.
Rather than impose geometry onto the land, Birrell allowed the contours and views to generate form. The gully’s axis aligned with the Palladian façade of the School of Medicine, establishing a long, formal vista that echoed the spatial planning of 18th-century English gardens, but also something more modern.
Birrell had long admired Walter Burley Griffin’s design for Canberra, particularly Griffin’s use of “generating lines”: visual and geometric alignments that tied the urban structure to surrounding natural landforms. This same principle is evident at Centenary Pool — the way the natural depression determines the sequence of pools, the position of concourses, and the relationship between landscape, building, and the viewer.
A completely detached atmosphere of an Arcadian glade promises itself.
– James Birrell, 1957
ARCHITECTURE AS MATERIAL EXPRESSION
Birrell’s architecture at Centenary Pool isn’t just functional, it’s tactile, textural, and provocatively composed. Nowhere is this clearer than in the famous brickwork of the restaurant walls, where mortar bursts from the joints in deliberate contrast to the sleekness of the adjacent steel and glass.
Historians John Macarthur and Shane Murray noted how the oozing mortar, far from being crude, becomes marble-like under Queensland sunlight, completing the architecture with light and shadow rather than polish. The result is an aesthetic of critical contrast — rough against smooth, mass against line, natural against constructed. It is both modernist and sculptural, formal and improvised.
Everybody raked bricks, so I did the opposite. I hated raked bricks. I still do… That’s the textural tactility between the building and the steel.
– James Birrell
ART AS INFLUENCE
The Centenary Pool complex, particularly the restaurant poised above the concourse, was shaped not only by functional needs, but by a love of contemporary art, sculpture, and architectural theory.
HANS ARP, BARBARA HEPWORTH & LASZLO MOHOLY-NAGY
James Birrell drew inspiration from the organic abstraction of Hans Arp, the sculptural clarity of Barbara Hepworth, and the experimental ethos of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s Vision in Motion. These references reflect his belief that architecture should be a tactile, visual, and compositional art form, not merely a technical service. This philosophy led to an architecture of contrast and assemblage: where rough brickwork heightened the refinement of steel, and handcrafted forms coexisted with engineered structure. The result was a tactile richness and layered visual field rarely seen in Australian civic architecture of the time.
Image: Thierry Allard, www.thal.art
OSCAR NIEMEYER
Birrell’s work also shows the unmistakable influence of Oscar Niemeyer, whose civic architecture in Brazil — most notably in Brasília — combined sculptural dynamism with public grandeur. The sweeping curves, floating platforms, and elevated pavilions of Niemeyer’s buildings are echoed in the Centenary Pool’s suspended restaurant, its roof terrace, and the geometric volumes balanced against open space.
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JAMES BIRRELL
Birrell, like Niemeyer, was unafraid to blur the boundaries between architecture and art, embracing contradiction, sensuality, and form as instruments of civic delight. His architecture wasn’t just designed, it was composed, with the same care and provocation as sculpture. This was modernism without monotony, expressive, fearless, and deeply human!
pools for people, not just performance
While many mid-century pools were designed around competitive sport, Birrell’s focus was on recreation, community, and the festive. The pools were arranged informally, following the fall of the land, rather than rigid alignment. Seating was embedded in slopes rather than imposed upon them.
The design encouraged fluid movement and informal gathering, with zones for sunbathing, promenading, and eventually dancing.
Pools in line become too regimented… we wanted a festive air.
– James Birrell
AN ALL-SEASON CIVIC STAGE
Birrell imagined Centenary Pool as a site of constant use, not just for swimmers in summer. These elements positioned the pool as a civic gathering space, embedding it into the cultural life of Brisbane.
A moveable dance floor across the main pool in the off-season
A restaurant and rooftop terrace with sweeping city views
A bandshell and outdoor seating for concerts and public events
LEGACY: A DECORATIVE ART OF CONSTRUCTION
As architectural historian Philip Goad notes, Birrell’s work embraced a kind of “difficult complexity”, running counter to the austere puritanism of much post-war modernism. His buildings were not merely efficient; they were expressive, rooted in landscape, art, and architectural form.
Centenary Pool remains one of Australia’s most significant examples of mid-century public architecture, not just because of what it was, but because of what it proposed:
That landscape is not background, but structure.
That texture is not failure, but expression.
That public architecture can be imaginative, joyful, and enduring.
ADD YOUR MEMORY TO THE BOOK
We invite you to contribute to growing a cultural project that honours one of Australia’s most iconic examples of modernist architecture: the Centenary Pool Complex.