MSAC (The Melbourne Sports & Aquatic Centre)

The Melbourne Sports & Aquatic Centre international sporting venue, overlooking Albert Park Lake, is the largest integrated sports and leisure facility of its type in the southern hemisphere, and the most significant addition to Victoria’s infrastructure for elite and participant sports since the 1956 Olympics. The Centre was designed to provide state-of-the-art facilities, which can be integrated to offer a venue for a wide variety of sports, from competition swimming and dive pools to leisure water incorporating wave pools, hydrotherapy pool and multipurpose pool, full gymnasium, basketball, badminton and table tennis courts. Linking these facilities is a 2 storey area incorporating offices, amenities, a gymnasium, aerobics centre, crèche, sports medicine, retail, café and substantial atrium areas. The ability of athletes to cross train between sports has proven to be a major factor in the centre's commercial success. Having completed the highly successful Stage 1, Peddle Thorp undertook the extensions to MSAC for the Commonwealth Games Pool and associated facilities. These extensions include a 54 m outdoor pool with 4 m moveable boom, multi-level 700 space car park, office accommodation / meeting rooms for state sporting bodies, additional water leisure features and retail and catering facilities to accommodate the expansion to the centre. “The project was a spectacular opportunity to extend MSAC with a multipurpose outdoor pool to complement the existing indoor facilities.”