Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2017 i Architecture Australia

One of the great pleasures of the national president’s role is to attend the state, territory and international chapter awards nights. The awards program is one of our most significant undertakings as an institute and one of the profession’s key advocacy opportunities for the critical role of design in the development of our cities and towns. It is important that we not only understand its value to the industry, but also ensure that it continues to evolve to reflect this primary role. Within the awards themselves, there is certainly an emerging understanding that successful projects have an immense opportunity for positive influence – perhaps even an obligation – beyond the site or the occupants. The 2017 awarded projects’ citations rightly focus on the way these projects place the broader public…

In 2009, then lord mayor Campbell Newman launched Brisbane’s “New World City” campaign, presumably seeking to put distance between the aspirational, rapidly developing region and its historical reputation as a big country town. Disposing of unflattering and difficult comparisons with Sydney and Melbourne, the New World City slogan positioned Brisbane as a dynamic hub for the Asia-Pacific region, on a fast track to global connectivity and prosperity for the residents of South East Queensland. Much more than just a piece of urban marketing, the New World City campaign might also be read as a manifesto for 1 William Street, designed by Woods Bagot, Newman’s first major architectural project as Queensland’s thirty-eighth premier. Elected in March of 2012, the Newman administration immediately put its full power behind the 1 William Street…

All over Sydney, public amenities are critical pieces of community infrastructure. They support tourists in the city, picnickers in parks and beachgoers along the coast. The toilets and change rooms they provide are essential facilities, but are often seen as ugly and unhealthy places that need to be concealed. As a consequence, they frequently become unsafe, causing local councils to roll out their toolkit of security cameras, vandal-proof finishes and gates. However, the architects tackling new amenities buildings across Sydney are proving that good design can change the ubiquitous brick toilet into something a local community can take pride in. And why not? For a regular surfer at Bondi Beach, a change room is a routine part of their life and deserves the same attention as any other public building.…

The Sunshine Coast, to the north of Brisbane, has long been recognized for the laidback coastal lifestyle it offers, in contrast to the faster pace and racier reputation of the Gold Coast to the south. Despite the relatively small size of its individual townships, the overall region is the ninth largest populated region in Australia. The latest facility to be added to strengthen services across this regional network is the $1.8 billion Sunshine Coast University Hospital (SCUH), located on a twenty-hectare greenfield site in Birtinya, a suburb in the unofficially named Kawana Waters area between Caloundra and Mooloolaba. Although Kawana Waters is now far larger than the original Kawana Waters development, it is yet to become a fully-fledged town. Until the projected development of the Kawana Town Centre adjacent to…

This issue records the outcomes of the Australian Institute of Architects’ 2017 chapter awards, telling the story of Australian architecture and its achievements over the past year (page 43). The chapter awards are presented across the nation’s six states, two territories and internationally in the lead-up to the National Architecture Awards, presented in Canberra in November. The gala events that announce the winners are an important platform for peer recognition, a forum for professional camaraderie and an opportunity for advocacy and solidarity. In 2017 there was a rousing call to action in many of the speeches by the chapter presidents. In Victoria, Vanessa Bird encouraged the profession to speak with one voice as it responds to continuing de-professionalization. She observed that “competition is healthy, but there has never been a…

In the six or so years that it took 41 Birmingham to assume its final form, its suburban surroundings changed dramatically. The SJB project – comprised of twenty-three apartments with a ground-floor commercial space – was conceived relatively early in Alexandria’s recent transition from an industrial hub to a vibrant mixed-use suburb in Sydney’s inner east. Dubbed “the Birmingham of Australia” in the 1940s, Alexandria retains an urban grain broadly consistent with its industrial past, but the area is now also home to cafes offering specialty coffee and locally sourced produce, artisanal bakers, cheese merchants and small-batch breweries. A number of residential developments also looking to capitalize on Alexandria’s popular industrial aesthetic are currently being or have recently been constructed around the edges of the suburb. As you stroll up…

A few years ago a former national park, Te Urewera in New Zealand’s north island, was legally granted the status of “personhood” – a move that ended a long dispute over its ownership and that grants it the same rights as a human citizen. New Zealand’s Whanganui River was also recognized as a “person” under law in 2017. The Te Urewera settlement was hailed by Dr Pita Sharples, who was Minister of Maori Affairs at the time the law was passed, as “a profound alternative to the human presumption of sovereignty over the natural world.” The notion of personhood within the natural world provides a radical framework within which we might reconsider the built environment. Can a building be a person? And what might constitute personhood in architecture? It is…

The Cirqua Apartments by BKK Architects, located on a busy arterial in Melbourne’s inner-eastern suburb of Ivanhoe East, were developed amid a perceived glut of apartments saturating the market. Despite an ever-growing population, calls for increasingly dense urban centres and a general lack of affordability in detached housing, there persists a notion that we are in danger of supplying too many. Right or wrong, this perception gave the team developing Cirqua the impetus to shift away from apartments as “financial instruments” and to think of them as homes. Steering the development toward the owner-occupier camp made sense given the current trend of suburban couples downsizing from large family homes to inner-city apartments, releasing significant capital and getting a bit closer to the “action” at the same time. So how does…

New South Wales Commercial Sir Arthur G Stephenson Award Glasshouse at Goonoo Goonoo Station by TKD Architects Award Sydney Processing Centre by Genton Architecture Award The EY Centre by fjmt Commendations 13 Bowden by H&E Architects; Tramsheds Harold Park by Mirvac Design Educational William E Kemp Award NBCS by WMK Award Charles Sturt University Engineering Building by ThomsonAdsett Award East Sydney Early Learning Centre by Andrew Burges Architects in association with City of Sydney Commendations Dr Chau Chak Wing Building by Gehry Partners (design architect) with DJRD (executive architect); The University of Sydney Business School by Woods Bagot and KANNFINCH Public The Sulman Medal Orange Regional Museum by Crone Architects Award Albury Wodonga Regional Cancer Centre by Billard Leece Partnership Award Juanita Nielsen Community Centre by Neeson Murcutt Architects in…

We’ve become used to new hospitals making bold architectural statements that significantly challenge perceptions of what a hospital should look like. Lyons perhaps began that trend, with its Sunshine Hospital (2001), followed up by the Royal Children’s Hospital (Billard Leece Partnership and Bates Smart, 2011), the Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital (Conrad Gargett and Lyons, 2014) and, most recently, the Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre (Silver Thomas Hanley, DesignInc and McBride Charles Ryan, 2016). All of these have been colourful and thoroughly contemporary reimaginings of what the hospital can and should be, with a strong emphasis on patient experience. The new Bendigo Hospital (Silver Thomas Hanley in collaboration with Bates Smart) joins this cohort of contemporary hospitals. Although it makes a confident civic statement, it was not designed with the same attention-grabbing…

When I first met Philip, he and his wife Krissy were living in a shoebox above Walter Burley and Marion Mahony Griffin’s Capitol Theatre in Melbourne. It was a wonder to me that their life could fit in that little white box: a bike, a table, a sewing machine, a TV and later a cot, the prosaic luggage of daily life. The manner of its fitting fascinated me – this was no Victorian jumble nor the aesthete’s obsession but the accommodation of possibility with humble means. They had moved from Launceston to Melbourne, drawn by the city’s reputation for culture and progressive architecture. Philip talks about being educated from books and journals, at a distance from the object of study. It was Rory Spence’s legendary history lectures at the University…