South Hedland  is one of Australia’s great iron ore regions and demographically lopsided. The town runs on mining, which means a large, transient, predominantly male FIFO workforce living alongside a permanent local community that includes a significant Kariyarra population. Wanangkura Stadium added sport and everything that comes with it: a reason to be here, a place that belongs to the community rather than the industry, a counter to the particular pressures of remote extraction towns.

If you fly in to Port Hedland (as pretty much everyone who goes there does), beyond the vast expanses of red desert soil you'll see the building’s black-and-white striped roof. The colours celebrate the South Hedland Swans football team, one of the local sporting groups that play there. The building announces itself before you've landed.

The design reads the landscape honestly. The exterior is modelled on the isobars of a weather-mapped cyclone – a halftone pixelated pattern that shimmers and shifts with the weather and the time of day. The entrance looks like a giant punched a fistful of pixels out of the facade – revealing an orange interior of colonnades and gathering spaces, like an enormous blue fruit with its flesh exposed.

The building has to work hard to withstand its harsh environment. The vitreous enamel facade creates a vented thermal cavity to combat the heat load and can survive objects hurling at cyclone velocity. Nearly all components were manufactured elsewhere and shipped in – a reality of regional construction, and we knew it going in. These conditions patently influenced the budget but didn’t prevent configuring the venue to international standards for multiple codes including basketball, netball, futsal and badminton.

In a capital city, there's always another building down the road. In South Hedland, a good building arrives once in a generation. It has to be worthy 50 years on, which Wanangkura was designed to be.