Wooden Wall: A Timber Threshold Dividing Visitors From Recovering Koalas in Queensland

Most wildlife facilities treat the line between people and animals as a fence. Wooden Wall treats it as architecture. The proposal sets a symbolic timber barrier across its Queensland site and lets that single gesture organise everything: on one side, a public world of exhibitions, gathering and learning; on the other, a protected habitat where koalas injured by bushfire can recover without an audience. The wall is a boundary, but it is also the building's argument about how close humans should get to the creatures they want to save.

Designed by Maria Yurchenko and Maria Bochkareva, the project was named a Runner-up in Haven 2020. It responds to the pressure on koala populations in Queensland, where habitat loss and recurring wildfires have taken a heavy toll. Rather than a clinical rescue centre, the designers propose a combined rehabilitation facility, visitor centre and parkland, with low volumes that follow the land's contours and lift off the ground to leave the existing terrain largely undisturbed.

A Stepped Timber Forum Where the Visit Begins

The visitor centre is the public face of the complex, and these views show it working less like a museum hall and more like an open-air amphitheatre. Broad timber steps double as seating, scattered with simple black cubes, while printed banners hang beneath the flat roof edge to carry the exhibition content: the history of koalas, the impact of wildfire, and the conservation work underway. Trees frame the space, and in the second view one grows straight up through a planter beside a perforated screen, a small but telling sign that the building is meant to share its footprint with the landscape rather than clear it.

The informality matters. People sit, linger and drift past instead of being marched through a sequence of glass cases. The designers describe a route that gradually deepens a visitor's understanding as they move through the site, and these terraced platforms are where that education starts: casual, shaded and porous to the bush around them.

A Quiet Corridor Behind the Wall

On the protected side of the barrier, the mood changes completely. A timber-floored corridor runs between glazed examination rooms, soft light washes the surfaces, and two clinicians walk through with a koala in their arms. This is the rehabilitation centre, which the designers call the heart of the project: a calm, controlled environment for treatment, recovery and long-term care.

Its placement is the key decision. By locating rehabilitation away from heavily visited zones, the plan keeps stress on recovering animals low, with the centrally positioned staff area, holding offices, kitchens, storage and support spaces, acting as the operational link between the public and clinical sides. The three-zone master plan reads as a gradient of exposure, and the wooden wall is what makes that gradient legible on the ground.

Pavilions That Hover Over the Hillside

Seen from the landscape, Wooden Wall almost disappears. A low pavilion of timber and concrete walls sits under a thin roof plane, tucked into a grassy slope under overcast mist. The geometry is deliberately restrained: clean, rectilinear forms set against the soft curves of the terrain, so the contrast between built and natural is clear without the building ever shouting.

The designers' central environmental move is to adapt the architecture to the site instead of reshaping the site for the architecture. Volumes follow the contours and appear to float above the ground, preserving the natural topography and minimising disturbance. For a project about habitat recovery, that light touch is not just an aesthetic preference; it is consistent with the brief's own values.

A Clearing Among the Eucalyptus

Beyond the buildings, the parkland carries the experience outdoors. Here a group gathers in a circular clearing ringed by log seats, surrounded by native grasses and eucalyptus, with a timber boardwalk curving in from one side. The designers drew on the principles of English landscape gardens for this part of the scheme: winding routes, framed views and a sense of discovery that encourages exploration.

The borrowing is an interesting one. The English landscape garden was historically about composing nature for human enjoyment, yet here the same techniques are put to work protecting habitat integrity. The boardwalk keeps feet off the ground, and the clearing gives visitors a defined place to stop, so curiosity is channelled rather than allowed to spill into the koalas' territory.

Why This Project Matters

Wooden Wall understands that a wildlife sanctuary has two clients with opposite needs. Visitors want proximity, information and an emotional connection; injured animals need distance, quiet and predictability. Instead of splitting the difference, Yurchenko and Bochkareva give each group its own world and use a single timber threshold to hold them apart, with staff spaces mediating in the middle. It is a clear, buildable idea, and it gives the plan a logic that survives at every scale, from the master plan down to a corridor of glazed treatment rooms.

Just as valuable is the project's restraint. In a post-fire landscape, the temptation is to build something heroic. This proposal does the opposite: it lifts its volumes off the ground, lets trees grow through its platforms and keeps its forms quiet against the hills. Education happens on open timber steps and in a clearing among eucalyptus, not in a monumental hall. The result is architecture that turns visitors into allies of conservation while making sure the animals at its centre are left in peace.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Maria Yurchenko, Maria Bochkareva

Enter a Design Competition on uni.xyz

uni.xyz runs architecture and design competitions year-round that reward proposals with spatial conviction and real site intelligence.

Project credits: Wooden Wall by Maria Yurchenko, Maria Bochkareva Haven 2020 (uni.xyz).