Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2016 i Architecture Australia

Kengo Kuma and Associates design a new civic building for Sydney’s Darling Harbour A new civic building for Sydney entitled The Darling Exchange has been designed by Japanese architecture practice Kengo Kuma and Associates. As part of the New South Wales Government’s $3.4 billion redevelopment of Darling Harbour, the building will act as a community hub, featuring a library and exchange program for startups. The six-storey circular design is encased by ribbons of timber in a way reminiscent of a hive. Kengo Kuma explains: “It is a historical reference to Darling Harbour originally being a hive of business activity and a focal point as a market exchange.” READ MORE ABOUT KENGO KUMA’S FIRST AUSTRALIAN PROJECT architectureau.com/articles/kengo-kumas-first-australian-project Alternative stories of Perth’s foreshore Curated by Julian Bolleter of the Australian Urban…

“In this sense, ‘architecture’ – the totality of structures, systems, ideas, practices that are bound up with buildings designed and built by architects – is an ideology. It takes its place beside law, religion, and the rest, as the mystification of material practice.” 1 In reviewing another thoughtfully wrought building by architects of demonstrated professional stature and commitment (in this case Six Degrees Architects), I would like to ask the following: What does this building – this work of commitment, professionalism and obvious competence – ask of us? What does it offer us at the level of professional discussion? I am particularly interested here in putting out some thoughts that we might usefully bring to the work and more especially to the design processes of its making. As Roland…

South Australian architect Guy Maron has been honoured to have several of his major architectural works identified as heritage places and also recognized in Australian Institute of Architects Enduring Architecture awards. His work has been called structuralist or modernist, although he describes it as rationalist, and these particular examples express his core architectural objectives. The Bicentennial Conservatory in Adelaide, by Guy Maron Architects (formerly Raffen Maron Architects), is, at twenty-seven years old, the “youngest” heritage place to be listed in South Australia. Winner of the 2014 Jack Cheesman Award for Enduring Architecture from the SA Chapter of the Institute, the Conservatory has received multiple national and international design awards, including the Institute’s national Sir Zelman Cowen Award for Public Architecture and the BHP Architecture of the Decade Award. Raffen Maron…

The recipients of the 2016 Australian Institute of Architects Gold Medal are Stephen Ashton, Howard Raggatt and Ian McDougall, the founding directors of Ashton Raggatt McDougall, better known simply as ARM. This is a practice that has been a genuine leader, influencer, provocateur, culture builder and disseminator of ideas for nearly three decades, and at the core of the practice are three outstanding architects who have created some of the most extraordinary buildings in the short post-colonial history of this country. For some, their work is controversial and contentious, but for Ashton, Raggatt and McDougall this moniker is a badge of honour. For them, architecture itself is contentious and speculative: to be debated, laid open and ultimately affirmed as a cultural contribution. This Gold Medal recognizes their work for what…

I first met Howard Raggatt in the early 1980s, when he was in a home-based start-up practice with Steve Ashton and I was somehow involved with the Victorian Architecture Awards. The jury was intrigued with the Capper house by Raggatt and asked some questions to which we, innocents at large, expected some straightforward responses about client, site and intent. The conversation that followed led us into territory few juries get to chart. The nearly-all-female jury was well versed and rehearsed in its ambitions to lead architecture and its institute into the world of the feminine but we were startled to be led instead into a discussion of the role of Christian belief and redemption in the making of a suburban house. Yet that is where we went. The practice became…

The design of Point Lonsdale House by NMBW Architecture Studio is highly disciplined, both formally (its plan is basically a nine-square grid) and constructionally (its build was constrained by its location in a bushfire zone and by access issues). And yet this house does not project a sense of the aesthetic minimalism or knitted up constructional poetry that architects often take such restrictions to license. Rather, despite its discipline the house is possessed almost of a whimsy that perhaps responds to the way we might live in such a holiday place as Point Lonsdale. Located on Victoria’s Bellarine Peninsula, Point Lonsdale still has a low-key vibe, more shacksville than suburb or resort. Nestled behind the dunes, Point Lonsdale eschews the view. It’s as if the house’s aesthetic order – apparent…

One of the toughest design challenges that an architectural practice can undertake is to be found dotted throughout the sprawling mass of most metropolises. Commercial buildings in business parks and industrial estates typically do not offer the design cachet of CBD highrise, nor do they tend to attract the budgets and creative liberties associated with their soaring siblings. Stranded in plots of blurry urbanism and seas of asphalted carparks, these projects are used by many architects as bread-and-butter work, gratefully accepted but perhaps not well loved. Value managed to within an inch of their glass facades, once completed they are relegated to the last drop-down tab of the firm’s landing page. This is not the case for HDR Rice Daubney’s recent project for Novartis. The Novartis Head Office is located…

In ARM’s projects there is a constant striving and struggle to uncover and contribute something other than what is already known. The practice has undertaken sustained design experimentation and offered speculative and deliberate propositions formed out of the fluid, messy and difficult cultural material that it believes the architect has a responsibility to engage with and to contribute to. Far from remaining on the drawing board, these ideas and experiments have led to buildings, have been explored within a commercially thriving practice and have been convincingly furthered through the myriad of contingencies that force themselves on a building’s execution. ARM’s contribution to knowledge has been developed across a range of media and in a specific, vibrant and self-consciously polemical culture of ideas in Melbourne that it has cared enough about…

Visiting Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance last year, I was struck by the hundreds and hundreds of red paper poppies fixed randomly into the crater-like wall of the fourth submerged courtyard of ARM Architecture’s remarkable fourteen-year redevelopment of one of Australia’s most revered war memorials. It was a poignant meeting of the ephemeral and the permanent. But what struck me more was that, as I learned later, it was entirely unplanned. Visiting schoolchildren had begun the habit without any encouragement. And now it was a tradition. It was probably not surprising. The story of war and sacrifice is deeply moving. But the storytelling by the architecture could only have helped to make real the emotional connection that these children had made and wanted to make to the building. Storytelling. ARM is…

A conversation on the city, with the city Helen Norrie provides an expansive round-up of the inaugural Asia Pacific Architecture Forum, a two-week-long program of exhibitions, installations, symposia, lectures and workshops held throughout the city of Brisbane that “provid[ed] a gamut of ways for both design professionals and members of the public to actively engage with a range of ideas about design within the Asia Pacific region.” As Norrie finds, the forum managed to take discussion of our region’s urban future beyond professional silos into the broader public realm. READ MORE ABOUT THE ASIA PACIFIC ARCHITECTURE FORUM 2016 architectureau.com/articles/a-conversation-on-the-city-with-the-city Queensland’s design and architecture uncovered Vokes and Peters’ Detail and Manner exhibition at Artisan featured furniture and objects designed by the Brisbane practice, exploring the reciprocal relationships between architecture and…

Architecture exudes from the pages of the UME monograph Clare Design: Works 1980–2015, offering insights into the lineage and legacy of Queensland modernism. In this latest UME publication from Haig Beck and Jackie Cooper on the practice of Lindsay and Kerry Clare, what resonates most are plans, sections, sketches, details and glossy images of selected built and unbuilt projects, generously proffered alongside essays from Beck and Cooper and explanations by the Clares of each individual work selected for inclusion. Surprisingly, projects are presented alphabetically, not chronologically, such that the Goetz House, designed in 1985 when Lindsay and Kerry Clare were practising as Lindsay Clare Villari Architects, is followed immediately by the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), completed in 2006 when both Clares were design directors at Architectus. It also means…

As the Kempsey Crescent Head Surf Life Saving Club building [see review, page 27 ] began to take shape, everyone in the community had an opinion about its design, shape, size, materials and progress. This prominent piece of architecture, which now sits proudly on our beachfront, bears no resemblance to the brick box which had served its purpose in a bygone era. The surf club members, like me, are proud of our exciting new building, which looks to the future. Unlike the old building, one of its major roles is to generate an income. This enables us to provide a service to our community and its many visitors – that of keeping the beach safe for all who use it. We have never lost sight of the fact that…