At the Twelve Apostles, Grimshaw and ASPECT Studios and the Eastern Maar Aboriginal Land Corporation have conceived the new visitor precinct as a landscape from which the architecture emerges. The project brings together a new Visitor Experience Centre, Welcome Garden, extensive revegetation, landscaped parking and a reorganisation of pedestrian and vehicle movement to create a new arrival and visitor experience for one of Australia’s most visited natural landmarks.

Led by Grimshaw, the multidisciplinary design has been co-designed with Eastern Maar Aboriginal Corporation and with landscape architects ASPECT Studios. Rather than treating the Visitor Experience Centre as an isolated building, the project uses landscape, architecture and movement through the site to establish a sequence from arrival to Country and, ultimately, the coast.

The transformation begins well before the building. A new landscaped car park and access roads separate buses and private vehicles, while pedestrian routes draw visitors from the parking areas into the Welcome Garden and towards the Visitor Experience Centre. From here, visitors continue towards the existing coastal zone and the Twelve Apostles. The result replaces an arrival previously dominated by vehicles with a more legible progression through landscape.

This sequence is central to a broader ambition for the precinct: to move beyond simply processing large numbers of visitors and create a slower and more connected experience of Country. The project has been developed through a Traditional Owner-led co-design process with Eastern Maar, whose knowledge, culture and understanding of Country as an interconnected system form the bio-cultural foundation of the project.

The Welcome Garden plays an important role in this transition. Coastal scrub, grassland and woodland landscapes converge around the Visitor Experience Centre, with pathways allowing visitors to move through these different ecologies. Bush tucker planting, habitat and environmental interpretation extend the experience of Country into the landscape itself.

The same landscape logic generates the architecture. Grimshaw describes the Visitor Experience Centre as a “land form” building: an architecture that emerges from, and remains secondary to, the surrounding landscape. The convergence of woodland, grassland and coastal scrub informs the building’s siting, massing, and the spaces around it, blurring the conventional boundary between built form and landscape.

The Visitor Experience Centre is organised as two connected forms embedded within the landscape. The Coastal Building contains the principal public-facing spaces and orientation area, while the Hinterland Building accommodates the café together with retail space , and servicing functions. In the main orientation space visitors are given opportunities to understand the natural and cultural landscape and the responsibilities associated with moving through Country, before proceeding into the coastal zone.

The building’s position and orientation respond closely to the existing site. Its location hugging the crest of the paddock captures views towards the coast, while its siting also responds to historic ecological vegetation classes, topography, universal access, solar and wind conditions, areas of cultural significance and the presence of rare River Swamp Wallaby Grass. Views from the heritage-listed Great Ocean Road and culturally significant visual connections identified by Eastern Maar have also informed the extent and placement of built form.

This relationship between architecture and landscape continues onto the roof. The publicly accessible Great Ocean Lookout transforms the roof of the Visitor Experience Centre into another part of the visitor journey, creating an elevated landscape from which visitors can look across the precinct towards the coast. The lookout forms part of an all-abilities route incorporating gathering areas, places to pause and opportunities for interpretation, before visitors continue towards the Twelve Apostles and surrounding coastal landscape.

Landscape regeneration extends across the wider precinct. New coastal scrub, grassland and woodland planting is intended to progressively offset the hardscape introduced by the redevelopment while restoring habitat and creating opportunities for environmental education and Eastern Maar bush-tucker planting. Rather than landscape operating as a setting for the architecture, revegetation is conceived as an evolving part of the project, gradually reshaping the precinct over time.

Together, the Visitor Experience Centre, Welcome Garden, new arrival landscape, parking and pedestrian network recast the Twelve Apostles precinct as a connected journey through landscape. The architecture is one element within that larger experience: emerging from Country, framing the visitor’s arrival and establishing a new threshold between the Great Ocean Road and the extraordinary coastal landscape beyond. 

Andrew Perez, Melbourne Managing Partner, Grimshaw, said, “Grimshaw has been privileged to work collaboratively with Eastern Maar Aboriginal Corporation and our landscape architecture partners, ASPECT Studios, on a project that begins with a profound respect for this extraordinary place.

"The Twelve Apostles is a truly unique landscape in Australia and arguably anywhere in the world, where the power of the natural environment, the experience of Country and the enduring culture of Eastern Maar come together. It is a rare opportunity to create a place that allows visitors to experience this landscape in a deeper and more meaningful way."

"More than simply providing a new destination from which to experience the Twelve Apostles, the project invites visitors to pause, linger and explore, creating a meaningful connection to this extraordinary landscape and the culture and history that have shaped it.”