Games Village today - Beecroft Park and shopping area, Cnr. Oban Road and Gayton Road, City Beach
Commonwealth Games Athelete's Village
The VIIth Commonwealth Games were held in Perth from 22nd November to 1st December 1962. With a new £640,000 aquatic centre, a £500,000 stadium and a village of 150 homes for the athletes, the 1962 Games set a new high standard for the series.
At the first Games, held in 1930 in Hamilton, Canada, the athletes' village for the 400 participants was a school next to the stadium, and they slept 24 to a classroom. Perth would in fact be the first host city to build a village especially for the Commonwealth Games.
The village as constructed consisted of two areas of housing in the suburb of City Beach, grouped around a central spine which incorporated an area of natural vegetation, recreation hall, dining rooms, administration building & shops. Numerous games village houses remain, though most have been extensively modified. The 'central spine' of the parkland (Beecroft Park) has been retained.
The games village was bounded by The Boulevard (south), Dupont Avenue (west), Tilton Road (north) and Pandora Drive (east)
The plan was to build a dedicated Athletes Village consisting of 150 new houses in a garden setting that would be converted to private housing post-Games. The northern coastal area had been laid out some forty years previously by Klem and Hope s 1925 master-plan for organic dormitory communities collected around open green spaces and shared facilities. The master-plan's garden-city model was realised in the layout of the Athletes Village with its a sinuous road pattern across the sandy contours of the site, grouping two main zones of housing around a central node of temporary facilities.
Along with its architecture, the urban form of the village was very much influenced by postwar British Modernism. Individual blocks were wider and shorter than the traditional suburban lot. Ten alternative designs for modern, economical and innovative houses were adopted from a national architectural competition. The architects of the Games Village experimented with low maintenance, innovative materials and minimising construction systems.
These modern demonstration homes were met with much public interest and both positive and negative responses. Some cheerfully labelled the scheme Sunlight Village , while others likened the houses to cheap public conveniences and shearing sheds.
After the Games, some 20,000 people came to visit the display, and within a few months all houses were sold and subsequently absorbed into the rhythms of everyday life. But after remaining relatively intact for a number of decades, rising land values and growth in expectations of house sizes and amenities led to many Games Village houses being demolished or severely altered in the 1990s.
Above: 5 Oban Road, City Beach, 1963
Below: 5 Oban Road, City Beach, 2012
Back in 1962 the Games Village stood in stark contrast to standard subdivision and building practice of the time, but its influence on the subsequent development of the city is such that it has probably become the most enduring legacy of the Games' building programme. Its innovative designs and layout are now familiar, timeworn elements of Perth's urban fabric, the current dispersed, character of the city's newer suburbs being strongly grounded in the planning and architectural models exemplified by the Games Village.
