Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2017 i Architecture Australia

The East Pilbara Arts Centre, a gallery for Indigenous art collective Martumili Artists, opened recently in Newman, Western Australia – a small town some 1,200 kilometres north of Perth. In 2011 an architectural competition was organized by Patric de Villiers from the University of Western Australia (UWA), in collaboration with the Shire of East Pilbara, Martumili Artists and BHP Billiton. The brief was to replace the existing gallery, which was a base for the Martu communities to organize painting in and prepare work for exhibitions, both national and international. The success of the venture had created the need for improved facilities, with a purpose-built environment for painting and exhibitions. The competition was limited to UWA’s architectural staff. Most entries attempted a picturesque approach to landscape and Indigenous themes and wrestled with the relatively small building on a…

The delicate, and delicately observed, are not easily recounted. Historically, this has taken the form of poetry as reflector of the world. And in knowing poetry we see history and understand the breadth of consciousness required to create anything worthwhile. How beautifully T. S. Eliot put it: “… that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career.”1 Any one individual house is usually not important, nor is it relevant alone. Important are the ideas it can offer within the context of history – ideas built upon that which has existed for all time. A permanency of place in the past and the future gives worth to any work of art. Our profession rewards the irrelevant as much as it…

In recent years the impact of housing affordability has spread beyond the most vulnerable to the middle class, for better or worse raising its profile in the broader community and politics alike. Concurrently, rising concerns about poor standards of apartment construction, and the collective impact this has on our cities, have prompted renewed interest in apartment design standards. While regulation can go some way towards improving our living environments, there are inherent limitations to a reliance on a speculative model of development to deliver affordable, high-quality housing. In response, a groundswell of interest in collectively developed housing models such as Baugruppe has emerged in an attempt to confront these issues in Australian cities. This model has the potential to enable architects to engage proactively with prospective communities as agents for positive urban change. Baugruppe, which translates to…

Affordable mixed-use developments in Australian regional towns usually sit in the realm of developers, not architects. The real estate market in regional towns is inconsistent compared with the steady growth of Brisbane or Sydney, and profits for developers are often marginal. To be a successful business proposition, mixed-use developments are mostly situated near the centre of the CBD and prioritize lettable area over architectural language, fine detailing or response to place or climate. The Hub on Echlin by Architects North is both surprising and exceptional, because it is a successful mixed-use development in Townsville that is not in the CBD, created by an architect in a regional town with a real estate market that has shown limited growth since 2010.1 When you travel past The Hub on Echlin, it prompts you to stop…

Calyx: “The sepals of a flower, typically forming a whorl that encloses the petals and forms a protective layer around a flower in bud.” Approaching the Calyx, the newest addition to the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney and a prominent feature of its two hundredth birthday celebrations last year, I’m reminded of the experience of approaching the crematorium at the Woodland Cemetery in Stockholm by Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz from 1915. A long path rises slowly off axis and passes a lawn cut from the dominating green surrounds. There is an overall feeling of informal and easy ceremony that belies an extraordinary sense of careful design at work in the positioning and siting of the elements of the setting, while avoiding the heavy-handedness of a formal axial approach. At the top of…

The Naranga Avenue House by James Russell Architect is both a set of transparent skins wrapping a series of patio-like spaces and a private family home. It subscribes to the logic of a utilitarian camp site, along with the restrained polish and white walls of a thoroughly architectural structure. It is, in short, a set of carefully constructed contradictions. While the project offers a nod to the mid-century modernism of its Florida Gardens setting through patterned screening and paved pool edges, it is absolutely not a breezeblock house. In fact, to categorize the Naranga Avenue House in this way is to collapse many of the points of tension that make the project so interesting. At just under two hundred square metres, Naranga Avenue is a relatively modest four-bedroom house designed to accommodate a growing family. The house sits…

The poor design, quality and sustainability of Australian apartments reflect the fact that around 80 percent of apartments are built for investors. While luxury apartment developers will market quality design and sustainability to homeowners, would-be owner-occupiers on more modest incomes have little option but to purchase a generic product intended for the rental market. This article looks at “deliberative” as opposed to “speculative” development – multi-unit developments undertaken by groups of friends and family without the involvement of a developer – and at the way they are affected by financing. In Germany such do-it-yourself schemes are known as Baugruppen, in France as autopromotion, in the Netherlands as group-build and in the UK as collective custom build. Deliberative developments in Europe have demonstrated consistent and significant cost savings and, unlike speculative developments, projects…

Bates Smart’s recent fitout for an architectural physicist at 106 Flinders Street is an elegant study in warm, relaxed workplace design. “Our client wanted a calm, tranquil space in which to work, collaborate and entertain,” says Bates Smart associate director Grant Filipoff. “And it also had to have a welcoming ambience.” The resulting scheme is striking for its sense of spatial clarity and an uncomplicated plan that resonates because of its domestic scale. But the fitout’s most compelling design expression is a singular material palette of Douglas fir. This sandy-hued timber clads the walls, ceiling and floors, creating a cocoon-like effect conducive to a comfortable workplace. “The interior was meticulously handcrafted by our carpenter, with minimal wastage as offcuts were made into loose furniture and door handles,” explains Filipoff. It’s an environmentally…

The Australian Embassy in Jakarta designed by Denton Corker Marshall (DCM) confronts functional complexity, from the simplest row house to the most challenging secured office space. It reconciles the demands of security, sustainability, seismology, culture, diplomacy, politics and business. And it encapsulates and expresses a whole culture, didactically to its hosts and sympathetically to its residents. The design is exceptional in its assimilation of potentially conflicting requirements and succeeds in an evocation of “Australianness” for disparate audiences. The project had its nascence in the bombing of the former embassy in September 2004. The new compound, with a larger and better defensible plot, was to be “even more impenetrable,” to quote the Sydney Morning Herald,1 while seeming “open and friendly” (the brief ). The design and architect were selected by invited competition in…

 The two halves of Melbourne practice Croxon Ramsay, Catherine Ramsay and Andrew Croxon, are an inspiring duo. A conversation about their ethos and motivation, as well as their impressive catalogue of projects, brings to mind architectural theorist Tony Fry’s assertion that design is world making. It can transform how people think and live. Their particular interest in civic architecture – community centres, schools, libraries and sporting centres – alongside commercial projects, speaks to the significant public role that place design plays and the generative commonalities that can flow between public and private buildings and programs. After meeting as associates at Williams Boag Architects, Ramsay and Croxon established Croxon Ramsay in 2005. Their intention was always to foster close, individualized client relations that would drive the design process for both large and small projects. Collaboration is crucial for them, in ideas and…

Few places capture the harshness and beauty of the Pilbara like Karratha. A region occupied by ancestors of the Ngarluma, Yindjibarndi, Marthudunera and Yaburara people for more than 30,000 years, it is also a resources hotspot where thousands of workers either fly in and out weekly or choose to stay and live. The township of Karratha was established in the 1960s in response to the growth of Western Australia’s iron ore boom and the need to accommodate the growing number of workers and families settling in the area. In more recent times, Karratha has looked to put down some roots. In 2009 Karratha was identified in the state government’s Pilbara Cities program, an initiative aimed at encouraging more people to live in the region. Considerable investment has flowed into Karratha in an effort to upgrade infrastructure, increase quality…

Affordable and accessible housing Architectural intelligence is integral to creating – and sustaining – affordable housing. Yet almost a decade ago, Shane Murray brought our attention to a troubling reality: less than 10 percent of housing in Australia has architectural involvement.1 Murray challenged the architectural community to reconsider its relationship to general housing at a time when single dwellings outstripped other dwelling forms and public housing was at an all-time low.2 Since then, semidetached units and apartment construction have overtaken single houses and Australia’s community housing sector has doubled in size.3 So what now is the relationship of architecture to general housing? I put this question to four architects committed to affordable and accessible housing: Eloise Atkinson, director of Deicke Richards and chair of the Brisbane Housing Company (BHC) board; Eli Giannani and Rob McGauran, directors of MGS Architects; and Kieran Wong, director…

The co-development of Queensland University of Technology’s (QUT) Kelvin Grove Campus as an integral element of the Kelvin Grove Urban Village in inner northern Brisbane has enabled the university to expand, reducing the demands made upon its tightly constrained Gardens Point Campus in Brisbane’s CBD. The evolving campus-cum-urban-village ranges across a challenging topography that hampers the ability to shape a coherent urban structure and to achieve a unified sense of place. Urban legibility has been enhanced by defining a series of linked precincts, of which the most emphatic is that for the creative industries disciplines. The Creative Industries Precinct is grounded by the significant space of the former parade ground of the Gona Barracks that once occupied the site of the urban village. Extending along the highest part of the campus and running parallel with the adjacent…

Byron Bay is a complex place. For many Australians the name conjures up images of a slow-paced, hippie getaway with pristine beaches, clear blue skies and fibro surf shacks. They imagine healthy, almost spiritual-looking locals dressed in tie-dye clothes, wandering barefoot down the main street of this seaside village. That may well have been Byron in the 1970s, perhaps even early 1980s. Today’s Byron is somewhat different. The beaches remain breathtaking in their beauty. The spirit of a former era endures, despite increasing development and an ever-changing demographic. This still includes healthy-looking locals but now also a vast number of visitors, from overly tanned backpackers who arrive in cramped campervans to the uber-wealthy who fly in from around the globe (Gold Coast Airport is less than seventy kilometres away). Imagine the excitement…

We don’t need a map: a Martu experience of the Western Desert has carried the incredibly vibrant and diverse creative work of artists in remote Martu communities around Australia. Over two years it developed into a major exhibition that was shown at Fremantle Arts Centre in 2012–2013, featuring over thirty artists and their mesmerizing paintings, immersive video installations, a giant inflatable basket, finely wrought objects and animated maps, not to mention a whole mob travelling to Fremantle for the opening weekend. We don’t need a map has travelled to six interstate venues since and has been seen by over 60,000 people. Finally, in April last year, the exhibition returned to the desert for the opening of the beautiful new East Pilbara Arts Centre in Newman (see review page 16…