Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2018 i Architecture Australia

The recent Institute elections that closed in January attracted both a large number of candidates and, importantly, an excellent number of voting members. This healthy level of interest is a strong indication that our changes in governance are yielding dividends where it matters most with membership organizations – engagement. Engagement not only with members but with the broader public is something we have been placing a great deal of focus on and this was reinforced in the Institute’s new Strategic Plan 2018–2020. The issues and key focus were identified through a rigorous process from within the membership. The strategy sets out a clear and compelling vision for our profession that recognizes the unique contribution architects make in promoting community and inspiring clients through exceptional design and an ethical approach to…

An Unfinished Experiment in Living: Australian Houses 1950–65 The world has fallen in love (again) with mid-century modernist houses. This collection of Australian mid-century modernism’s greatest hits – which includes houses by Robin Boyd, Harry Seidler, Esmond Dorney and Iwan Iwanoff – no doubt has shelf appeal. But this is not simply an opportunistically timed volume to capitalize on an aesthetic trend – it is a work of careful research, analysis and critique by three academic stalwarts of Australian architecture: Geoffrey London, Philip Goad and Conrad Hamann. The book presents 150 houses, selected to represent an even spread across Australia and the fifteen-year period between 1950 and 1965. Each house is shown with archival photographs “to retain the authenticity of the period,” accompanied by a brief description and architectural plans,…

Brighton, one of Melbourne’s bayside suburbs, is home to March Studio’s recently completed Compound House. The 830-square-metre, two-storey home is situated in a quieter street on a long, narrow site. The house is a clever manipulation of angular planes that carve out spaces throughout. Combining oversized beams and concrete walls with a warm palette of materials and landscaping, the architectural language is both industrial and domestic. From the street, the house reads as a floating pavilion propped up on a sloping landscape. Its copper screen cladding creates fuzzy edges that shimmer in the sunlight. The Compound House embodies much of the thinking behind March Studio’s work. Regardless of scale and type, the practice is driven by a desire to transform problems into opportunities. It has a passion for architectural elements…

Harmer Architecture’s latest education building is a little biology pavilion at Monash University, on the west side of the university’s Jock Marshall flora and fauna reserve in Clayton. The purpose of the Monash University Biological Sciences Lab is to house groups of biology students in prac sessions focused on the native wildlife and plants in that area, which has been preserved with some effort since 1961, three years after the university was established. The pavilion joins a group of newer buildings added to the area since 2002, part of the reserve’s major refurbishment. For Harmer, it follows outstanding work by the practice at Monash’s Peninsula campus in Frankston, notably the Activity and Recreation Centre (2012). In my last years there Monash was in perennial financial straits: divide and rule, naive…

The architect’s own house is a recurring motif in this issue. In the July/August 2013 issue of Architecture Australia, Leon van Schaik opened his review of the View Hill House in Melbourne’s Yarra Valley by Denton Corker Marshall – John Denton’s own vineyard home – with the observation that “architects’ houses are not innocent objects.” The antonym of innocent is, of course, guilty and in this case van Schaik prosecutes a case for the houses of the Denton Corker Marshall founders as discreet manifestos and “platforms from which future works are launched.” In this issue Isabelle Doucet and Janina Gosseye explore the activism and experimentation that an architect brings to their own domestic project in an essay titled “Activism at Home” (page 20). Here Doucet and Gosseye suggest that architects…

On approaching House with a Guest Room by Andrew Power we immediately feel the resonant tones of a meticulous architecture, three pavilions carefully arranged across a wide suburban site creating an entirely composed, modest, enigmatic setting. It reveals a classical order filtered through vernacular sensibility. We think of the ghost of Andrea Palladio’s Villa Pisani in Montagnana, transported to the great southern land, built with local know how from readily available materials. Palladio is known for his ability to combine the order and symmetry of classical structures with the everyday functional imperatives of local households. This architecture builds on such foundations. The rhythm and proportioning of the pavilions and rooms are rigorous and sophisticated. Along the northern street address in Red Head, New South Wales, there are five parts: enclosed…

There’s something very special about looking out to sea. An open horizon, wild clouds, the feel of the wind, a view of ships passing by, thoughts of a voyage to or a voyage from. This must have been what drove Captain James Kelly to site his timber cottage on Bruny Island in Tasmania at the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean in the 1830s. He’d been a whaler and had a tough mariner’s life – part of a profession that was as global and ruthless as the tentacles of empire, possibly more so. Looking east across the long deep bay that leads into Hobart, across to Betsey Island and to Cape Raoul, where distant swells break in flashes of white against the cliffs, the panorama still feels as sublime…

The word “pavilion” in Australian architecture has long evoked the image of a refined, elemental, freestanding building, in harmony with its landscape setting. This veritable idiom of Australian design gained momentum with the embrace of critical regionalism in the 1980s, and was much popularized, in Australia and abroad, by the work of architects such as Glenn Murcutt. It is an image that reinforces a traditional idea of the pavilion as a minimal spatial enclosure and protected vantage point from which to look out and survey one’s surroundings. More recently, however, the pavilion has come to mean something different. It has taken on a new form in the often temporary, largely functionless, idiosyncratic structures commissioned by visual arts institutions and philanthropists – following the model of the popular Serpentine Galleries’ Pavilions,…

Here, Cement, Concrete and Aggregates Australia presents three outstanding Australian projects that have featured in C+A magazine. C+A magazine, published by Cement, Concrete and Aggregates Australia, promotes concrete as a material of choice in architecture and aims to educate and inspire architects, landscape architects, engineers and design professionals on its design possibilities. The magazine’s premise is to look in detail at examples of concrete architecture in Australia and internationally. With a readership that has expanded to embrace an international audience, C+A has captured the imagination of architects worldwide. Balmoral House by Clinton Murray and Polly Harbison With views of Balmoral Beach, the historic Bathers Pavilion and Sydney Harbour National Park, Balmoral House, designed by Clinton Murray and Polly Harbison, makes the most of its spectacular site through the ingenious use…

Northshore Pavilion by Anna O’Gorman Architecture constitutes a momentous opportunity for an emerging architect. With surprising sophistication, it succeeds in syncretizing the competing complexities of an abandoned riverside site for a client whose aspirations blended ambition with ambiguity. The project was essentially an exercise in marketing Economic Development Queensland’s (EDQ) future plans for the Hamilton Reach masterplanned community – a development located in what has been tagged as the state’s largest waterfront urban renewal precinct. Marketing has evolved from the spoken to the printed word, with subsequent transmission by electronic media. Today, the message is propagated throughout the public realm, pervasive enough to saturate our private domains through handheld devices. But, as Crystal Bennes asks, can marketing be architecture?1 Generally considered the spawn of George Orwell’s Big Brother,2 marketing is…

In many respects International House Sydney (IHS) by Tzannes is a sensible commercial building. It hugs its site boundaries and makes deliberate and positive public domain moves, with a two-storey street colonnade along Sussex Street that acts as a threshold to Barangaroo South and a two-storey covered plaza that marks a destination for the pedestrianized Mercantile Walk. The floor plate is clean and clear, save for a central row of columns and a core tucked to the western side. The building had to be sensible; otherwise, it would not have been built. As it is Australia’s first engineered timber office building, there was always a risk that the market would baulk at the idea: what about fire, what about termites, what’s wrong with good old concrete? This is not the…

In the blinding light of a thirty-three-degree summer day, I watch a black-clad figure exit the National Gallery of Victoria’s (NGV) Great Hall onto the court fronting the garden, cross the misting moat and pass through a portal centrally located in a glimmering white wall. The figure turns right, dissolving into a dark shadow, and then left, eerily transmuting into a ghost and then … gradually fades from view … and is no more. This is Garden Wall, the 2017 NGV Architecture Commission, by friends and collaborators Retallack Thompson and Other Architects, both emerging Sydney-based architectural practices, whose winning entry was selected out of seventy-nine proposals. The 2017 NGV Architecture Commission coincides with the inaugural NGV Triennial. Much has been made of the NGV Triennial’s focus on the political, with…

It has become something of a tradition for the A. S. Hook Address to reflect broadly on matters of architecture and the profession generally as well as the built work of the practice. I want to consider a number of themes here that give insight into the enormous generational change that has taken place over the past four decades as well as looking at a way of working as a sole practitioner in one city. I see architecture as a three-pronged endeavour: community and professional advocacy, design teaching and design practice. Over the past few months I have been travelling around the country as part of the Gold Medal tour. I feel a bit like an architectural pinball, randomly bouncing around the nation, delivering Gold Medal dust. It is a…