Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2016 i Architecture Australia

The unique atmosphere of the pier jutting 200 metres into the Baltic Sea in the German resort town of Heiligendamm invites all to stroll along it and stay for a while. Even as twilight fades and dusk sets in, the pier with its scenic lighting continues to draw people. The pier’s inviting atmosphere is the result of a finely tuned lighting concept realised entirely with WE-EF luminaires. The immediate proximity of the saltwater sea posed the greatest technical challenge in this project, as did the design and static specifications. WE-EF’s answer to severe weather and the aggressive marine climate is its 5CE superior corrosion protection system. In this system, material selection and processing as well as multi-layer coatings ensure reliable protection and a long service life for the luminaires and…

The words “Aqua profunda,” painted in giant black capital letters, loom over Melbourne’s Fitzroy Swimming Pool. Meaning “deep water” in Italian, the sign was added by James Murphy, manager of the pool in the early 1950s. He had become exasperated by constantly hauling migrant children (who couldn’t read the English signs) out of the deep end. Now heritage listed, the sign captures a moment in Melbourne’s history of great influx of new residents from the Mediterranean, and of the pool as a place where people, cultures and languages collide. It’s this idea of the pool as a frontier of cultural difference and integration that is the subject of this year’s exhibition in the Australian pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Curated by Amelia Holliday and Isabelle Toland (of Aileen Sage)…

Despite Vo Trong Nghia Architects’ recent awards and acclaim, there has been little consideration of the work of the practice beyond the most sentimental and essentialist accounts. The Architectural Record tells this story: “Born in rural Quang Binh in a house without electricity, Vo helped care for his family’s cows as a boy [. . .] his architecture is rooted in the lessons he learned in his childhood. When you live in a hot, humid place without air-conditioning, you understand the need for shade, water, and natural ventilation. You grasp in a very direct and meaningful way the connection between buildings and their environments. You know the versatility of local materials such as bamboo and how to use them. All of this informs Vo’s architecture …1 ” Such romanticism is…

One of the most successful recent strategies of visual arts institutions has been to include architecture. In particular, the Serpentine Pavilion program developed by Julia Peyton-Jones from 2000 until she stepped down as director in 2015 has inspired a global phenomenon in the commissioning of temporary, largely functionless pavilions or installations by art galleries, notably the annual Young Architects Program initiated by Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 in New York in 2000, with an Italian edition at MAXXI in Rome (since 2011), and countless one-off examples including the BMW Guggenheim Lab (2011). Australia is no exception to this trend, with the Fugitive Structures series first commissioned by the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF) in 2013, the Naomi Milgrom Foundation’s MPavilion in 2014, and most recently the National Gallery…

It has been a while since the Australian National Maritime Museum commissioned a new building and exhibition. The original building, by Philip Cox, Richardson, Taylor and Partners (now Cox Richardson), was designed for the 1988 Australian Bicentennial and opened in 1991. Designed to accommodate the tall masts of exhibited boats and seven exhibition themes, the large white vaulted forms by necessity out-scaled the heritage fleet and wharfs adjacent, though this is mitigated by the wave-like roof stepping down to the Darling Harbour water edge. The new Waterfront Pavilion by Francis-Jones Morehen Thorp (FJMT), located on the wharf of the original building, is quite the opposite. It is a modest standalone building with a specific function – to provide a transition experience from wharf to floating exhibit via a small artefact…

Tasmania’s Clarence High School Oval Sports Pavilion by Dock4 Architects hums like a well-oiled machine. When I visit midweek for a twilight Little Athletics meet, the streets and car parks are full. Crowds of children and parents fill the space with an intense, positive atmosphere. The pavilion, set in a sea of colourful family tents, is quietly efficient without drawing attention to itself. It is an elegant response to the architectural brief and the obvious enjoyment of the people using it is equally due to the effective organization of community groups and a design that focuses and supports their efforts. Modernism once brought clarity to architecture. Function generated form. New economic realities, however, have changed those simple parameters. Sustainability factors and the bundling of disparate funding sources mean that buildings…

If you follow the news you could be easily forgiven for believing that our most valuable asset is iron ore, coal, uranium or Atlassian. This constant bombardment of market reporting seeks to establish that our country has never been so rich, but it could also be said that we have never been so bad at accounting. We constantly overlook our most important asset – water. We all know that without water there is no life on this planet, but it seems that our media only reports on dam levels or precipitation in a crisis (drought/flood/bushfire) or during events like the Spring Racing Carnival and the AFL Grand Final. What has this got to do with taking someone’s picture? Creative directors Amelia Holliday and Isabelle Toland (of Aileen Sage) and Michelle…

More than one thousand pieces of brightly coloured recyclable plastic fixed to the underside of a steel grid shell form the inaugural Summer Architecture Commission at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). Designed by John Wardle Architects, the structure channels a heritage of Australian inventiveness and references the advancement of technology over time. As an architectural type, the pavilion is old: garden pavilions, tea pavilions and gazebos stretch back centuries; sports pavilions and bandstands flourished in the nineteenth century and continue to flourish today, albeit in altered form. Pavilions of another kind were used from the nineteenth century to set national agendas at expositions and, in the first decade of the twentieth century, the idea was taken up in Venice. The exposition pavilions were temporary; the Venice Biennale pavilion presented…

The chapel and study centre at Doshisha University’s Kyotanabe Campus in Japan isn’t made from brick. Cut grey tiles, the clay finished by hand with cobalt powder and then fired in a kiln, cover the buildings’ facades. In general the Doshisha University campuses in Imadegawa and Kyotanabe use brown-red bricks and brick was specified in the design competition as a focus of the project. However, Facet Studio, the architects of the Kyotanabe chapel, saw this part of the competition as an opportunity to question the meaning of brick and, in doing so, to ask what it means to use brick in a facade and what this in turn means for the identity of a building. The university’s existing brick buildings create a homogeneous campus, with different volumes that look alike.…

Recognize and honour the original Aboriginal people of this land. History There is a growing tendency, as life becomes increasingly regulatory, that fewer questions are asked and more standards are followed. I recall, as a child and young boy, the challenge and art of climbing a tree. Assessing potential, reviewing possibilities, considering structure, danger, descent and the tangle of other decisions required to ensure a successful outcome. The feeling of balancing precariously on a fine branch, making an intuitive assessment of plan B should a mistake ensue. How far could a leg stretch and was ascent and descent replicated? Inevitably, there was a range of physical, cognitive and intuitive assessments to be coordinated to successfully negotiate the process. I suspect all those aspects of the “art of tree climbing” do,…

The scale of Walter Burley Griffin’s design for Canberra is quite beyond the visual comprehension of any ground-level observer. It is a marvellous landscape composition that has served the city and the nation well for more than a hundred years. With Griffin’s main lines firmly established on the ground, the attention of the federal government and the National Capital Authority (NCA) has moved in recent times to the creation of a finer grain for the Central National Area and a careful filling in of the bits that people should be able to use. Once described by Griffin as an “accessible but still quiet area,” the southern lake shore of the central basin is one such precinct, which is developing as a very successful linear park. The new Bowen Place Crossing…

Established by the Naomi Milgrom Foundation, the 2015 MPavilion is the second of four annual pavilions commissioned with support from City of Melbourne and the Victorian Government. Designed by UK-based firm AL_A (Amanda Levete Architects), the pavilion follows Sean Godsell’s contentious 2014 proposition, now relocated to a permanent home at the Hellenic Museum in Melbourne. Located in the Queen Victoria Gardens, opposite the Arts Centre on St Kilda Road, MPavilion is an optimistic concept that presents a diverse list of cultural programs to highlight Melbourne’s commitment to architecture and the arts via an innovative form of urban occupation. In its parkland atmosphere, the 2015 pavilion grapples with how the small scale might compete with or complement the gardens en masse. AL_A’s primary response was to give presence to both the…

For more than sixty years the remnants of the once prosperous Nestlé condensed milk factory showed little signs of its previous role in the economic and social life of the tiny farming township of Toogoolawah, Queensland. The new Somerset Regional Art Gallery reinstates this relationship, signifying a shift in the town from a centre for production and distribution to a site of culture, tourism and leisure. Fifty years after settlement in 1840, Cressbrook Station in the Brisbane Valley was subdivided into a series of dairy farms and secondary industries to process milk products. A condensed milk factory established by the McConnel family on the banks of Cressbrook Creek in 1889 underpinned the growth of the neighbouring township, which became known as Toogoolawah. This growth facilitated the extension of the Brisbane…

Ken Woolley was the most complete architect of the modern era in Australia. He designed buildings of every type and scale – from small homes and project houses to office towers, apartments, churches, corporate headquarters and civic squares, for public and private clients and from prestigious to poor. He was the quintessential Sydney architect; almost all of his work can be found within forty kilometres of the Sydney Town Hall (for which he designed an office tower and public square). He was a founder of the “Sydney School” in houses, and notably his A.S. Hook RAIA Gold Medal address in 1993 was entitled “State of the Art in Sydney.” Every building he designed was different (there being no “starchitect” repetition or house style) but every one seems right for its…