Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2015 i Architecture Australia

Founded initially as part of the Art Biennale under Visual Arts curator Vittorio Gregotti in 1975, the first independent Biennale occurred in 1980 under the direction of Paolo Portoghesi. Now running for six months and most recently curated by Rem Koolhaas, who declared it is “about architecture not architects,” the Venice Biennale is the most prestigious and significant international architecture event. Selecting the creative directors for the Australian entry to the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale is a daunting task, notthe least because this will be the first in Denton Corker Marshall’s recently completed, competition-winning Australian Pavilion. Twenty teams responded to the Institute’s invitation, their submissions embodying a wide range of creative and intellectual positions on architecture, culture and design issues. The selection panel was seeking enthusiastic and talented teams to…

As I continue to mentally inhabit stage 1 of Bunbury Catholic College (BCC), Mercy Campus by Broderick Architects and CODA Studio (in joint venture), this description, “space, surface and urban structure meticulously hand-sewn,” speaks to me of the project’s conception and the manner of its execution in the direct present and as a lingering impression. This is a project to which I will gladly return. It’s painstaking but not laboured, rather the mature act of mid-career practitioners, restless innovators, architects in clear command of their own spatial and material project. Internally, the grammar of each of the three first-stage buildings is that of a central spine with double-loaded rooms. Patterned and interwoven, each spine employs a rigorously consistent (and restlessly intense) set of material strategies: solid brick floors, concrete ceilings…

In 2012 I gave a keynote address at the annual Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand conference entitled “Conflicting Identities: Religious Architecture and Imperial Expansion in the Age of Sectarianism, c. 1840–1900.” As the title suggests, this lecture dealt almost exclusively with church buildings, but it needn’t have. The lecture was intended to highlight the almost forgotten significance of religion (namely Christianity) in Victorian life and culture vis-a-vis architectural production in Britain’s empire, exploring, on this occasion, the impact of religious art on the urban and rural landscapes of Africa, Australia and New Zealand. However, in another, more fundamental way, the lecture was designed to draw out and make apparent how this process was part of a much wider, globally orientated initiative that was not merely engineered to…

Early experiments with civilian confinement in Australia took place on reserves and mission stations, where dispossessed Aboriginal people gathered during the later years of the nineteenth century. In the settler town of Coura Rocks (present-day Cowra) in Central (West) New South Wales, Wiradjuri peoples alienated from the Lachlan, Macquarie and Murrumbidgee river lands sought refuge at the Mulyan reserve around 1890. In 1924 the thirty-two-acre property was renamed Erambie Mission, where, writes Lawrence Bamblett in Our Stories are our Survival, an early period of unmanaged, residence-forged community resistance to settler hostility occurred. Today, a patch of tightly knit streets at the periphery of the generous grid provides evidence of Cowra’s divisive past. In contrast, the town’s more famous internment history celebrates its military commitments through encampments, wartime production and training.…

In Medibank Place, Medibank’s new Docklands headquarters for client Cbus Property, Hassell’s multidisciplinary team of architects, interior designers and landscape architects wanted to create the healthiest workplace in the world. They also needed the new space to support Medibank’s transformation from a government-owned health insurance business into a privately owned integrated healthcare provider. Medibank’s CEO George Savvides is quoted as wanting “a living, breathing, healthy building.” So how does Hassell’s building live up to such an aspirational brief and how did the design team go about meeting the client’s expectations? Adjacent to Melbourne’s Docklands Stadium, the location immediately conveys the right messages about physical health. The triangular site is a narrow wedge between Bourke Street and Cbus Property’s new NAB headquarters, which addresses a new raised pedestrian concourse from Southern…

After logging nearly five hundred hours of floating around the world in a helicopter, the noise, wind and smell of jet fuel are still intoxicating. However, making photographs at the same time is challenging. The pilot is integral in establishing the ideal position in space, which requires an understanding of camera angles and perspective. Many pilots lack this and can ruin a shoot. A good pilot asks me what the subject is, what height I want and what lens I’m using and then flies to the perfect point in space and I can just press the button. There are a few tricks to keep in mind and one is to not fall out! On one night we were flying over Sydney and I was sitting on the plywood floor of…

The Venice Biennale national exhibition formula is simple. You select an artist, you put them in your pavilion, you may engage in some PR promotion but, knowing that all the other pavilions and gallerists (usually it is they who are paying for the production of the works) are doing the same thing, you hope that there is some reason you stand out from the crowd and that someone acknowledges and recognizes the quality of the work. Art is big business and Venice is at the apex of the pyramid of prestigious art (and marketing) events. Venice is where brands are maintained and protected, built up and established. It is where the Academy meets the market and where a massive proportion of the visitors is the crowd that “matter$$” who visit…

St Francis Xavier College and St Catherine’s Catholic Primary School share a campus on busy Clyde Road in Berwick, in Melbourne’s outer south-east. The schools’ new chapel, the Our Lady of the Southern Cross Chapel by Branch Studio Architects, is a duck in a landscape of decorated sheds. Zagame’s, Hungry Jack’s, Kmart, Shell and Aldi sprawl along the highway, their signs vying for motorists’ attention at the road’s edge. Ducks, by their nature, need no such announcement. This new addition looks like a chapel: its shape is foretelling of the activities that go on inside it. But in its own way, it does participate in the “big sign, little building” roadside banter through the inclusion of a ten-metre-high cross tower, which, while expressed as part of a family of rammed…

Between 1958 and 1975 a boom in the tertiary education sector in Australia saw the establishment of ten new universities – Monash (1958), Macquarie (1964), Latrobe (1964), Newcastle (1965), Flinders (1966), James Cook (1970), Griffith (1971), Murdoch (1973), Deakin (1974) and Wollongong (1975). This more than doubled the number of universities in Australia and mirrored the significant international growth witnessed by these institutions in the wake of World War II. In Australia the policy framework for this expansion was set out in the Murray (1958) and Martin (1964) Reports, both commissioned by then-Prime Minister Robert Menzies, which together comprise the first concerted effort to declare a national vision for tertiary education. Most of the new universities were established ex nihilo, as new campuses on greenfield or bushland sites, and presented…

Among the low-rise buildings and mature trees along Bellamy Street in Petaling Hill, Kuala Lumpur, a distinguished monochromatic grey precast concrete facade stands out from the pre-existing buildings of The Alice Smith School. The Alice Smith School was opened for expatriate families living in Kuala Lumpur in 1946 by Mrs Alice Fairfield-Smith at her home in Eaton Road. After she left for Australia in 1950, parents of children at the school formally incorporated The Alice Smith Schools Association, a not-for-profit educational foundation. Subsequently, the Alice Smith School moved to Bellamy Street in 1952 and was established as a formal educational centre. It is now the primary campus, catering to children aged three to eleven (a secondary campus for students aged eleven to eighteen was established in 1997), and has undergone…

Perspective on a Flat Surface by John Wardle Architects and Long Term Parking by Kristin Green (KGA Architecture) and Michelle Hamer are the winning entries in the Tapestry Design Prize for Architects competition. The chair of the Australian Tapestry Workshop (ATW) board, architect Peter Williams, and the director, Antonia Syme, devised and conducted the competition for a tapestry design for the then yet-to-be-constructed and not-yet-finally-designed Australian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Architects were invited to submit proposals for a tapestry that would grace the “white cube” of the interior, an interior at that stage lit partly by a skylight. This tapestry could, given the program of the pavilion, hang there only once, or at irregular intervals. Forty-two entries were received. A judging panel chaired by Professor Kay Lawrence AM (Adelaide)…

How do we experience architecture? In just one evening this year an estimated one billion people watched a game of cricket at the redeveloped Adelaide Oval. Watching sport on television provides opportunities for different levels of engagement with a physical environment. The viewer can drift in and out or be completely immersed. Television cameras only distinguish peculiarities such as roof shape or the punctuation of light towers. Zoom out and it is the ground’s setting that gives it identity, leading commentators to rate sporting venues not just for their popularity, but for how picturesque they are. The redevelopment has not been without controversy. With a history dating back to 1871, when the grounds first served as a cricket field, what we now know as the Adelaide Oval has seen several…

In the 1950s the Port of Sydney visibly connected the islands of the South Pacific and the world. The great white ocean liners of the Matson Line – the Mariposa and the Monterey – would regularly depart for San Francisco via Suva. Also evident were the smaller ships of the island traders Burns Philp and W. R. Carpenter, and the dark hulled vessels of the Messageries Maritimes fleet, which linked Tahiti and New Caledonia to France. The South Pacific was settled more than eight-hundred years ago by the most intrepid sailors and navigators – firstly Melanesians, and then Polynesians – who travelled thousands of nautical miles in double-hulled sailing canoes to reach remote and previously unoccupied islands. Facing the natural hazards of the region – devastating storms and the heaving…

In February 2015, I caught up with Santa Monica-based architects Hank Koning and Julie Eizenberg. Remarkably, they still seemed to me the same canny Melbourne architects making clever and responsible architecture that I met thirty years ago as a fresh-faced PhD student. Back then, in 1985, they were working on something that was unusual in Los Angeles: architect-designed affordable housing for families from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. They were intent on imparting – with minimal means – design dignity to a series of modest walk-up apartments. They spoke about the importance of spaces between buildings, and about ordinary “people” elements like a balcony, a stoop and a stair where chance meetings might grow into something more meaningful, perhaps even a sense of community. The two Australians established their practice in 1981…