Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2021 i Architecture Australia

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania consists of multiple compact neighbourhoods occupying habitable land between its three signature rivers – the Allegheny, the Monongahela and the Ohio – and its frequently irregular topography. The city is populated by many old buildings, yet few of them have undergone the kind of stylish and strategic transformation now apparent at Museum Lab, an initiative of the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, designed by Koning Eizenberg Architecture. The rehabilitation of disused structures by the museum and its architects matters not only for the preservation of individual buildings but also to the broader host community, and this latest project is evidence that a little care and ingenuity can have radical impact. Until 1907, Pittsburgh’s North Side was an independent municipality known as Allegheny City. Its urban plan dates from the…

Built on the land of the Gunung-Willam-Balluk people of the Wurundjeri Late in 2019, before it all changed, I drove out to Broadmeadows on a balmy and clear-skied evening to hear Kerstin Thompson talk at the opening of the first exhibition to be held at the renewed Broadmeadows Town Hall. After insightful words, drinks and a walk around the carefully considered and restored interiors, guests wandered outside and around the “handsome beast,” as the architect had called the building. To some delight, radiant colour from the new glass walls of the extension shone through the dusk sky. There was optimism in the air. Seven months later, during Melbourne’s long, grim winter of lockdown, we watched the Victorian Architecture Awards online from home, with the Broadmeadows Town Hall taking the top…

Heirisson Island Pedestrian Bridge by IPV Delft WSP’s Indigenous Specialist Services facilitated a co-design session with the Noongar Reference Group and Dutch bridge designers IPV Delft to help the client to consider the potential impact of this development on Aboriginal Country, to establish a cultural context for the project and to understand how local themes, stories and Country can inform the design of a future pedestrian bridge.  The Noongar Traditional Owners are powerful people. They each hold knowledge of Country and culture, which can make operating in this area difficult for clients trying to juggle competing interests. With this project, we found that it was beneficial to have an external Aboriginal designer as part of the project to ensure that the relationship between the elders, the design team and the…

Melbourne-based architecture practice Lovell Chen is home to one of the most extensive archives of architectural, heritage and conservation knowledge in Australia. Even so, it would be wrong to characterize the firm’s work over the past four decades in these terms alone. Lovell Chen has been playing the long game, eschewing the limelight of design heroics in favour of rigorous research and design and collaborative processes. While many architects appear to espouse alternative practice models, Lovell Chen has actually realized one. Under the seemingly polite guise of heritage architecture, this firm has, over time, developed a compelling and radical practice model: the result of a complex interaction between ever-evolving expertise in design, masterplanning, heritage, conservation, construction and sustainability. It is a remarkable story. The firm began as Allom Lovell and…

Built on the land of the muwinina people of nipaluna Australia’s oldest continuously operating theatre, Hobart’s Theatre Royal has been a catalyst for Tasmania’s cultural life since the 1830s. Described by composer Noël Coward as “a dream of a theatre,” it was established via the philanthropic endeavours of a group of Hobart business leaders. Since its opening in 1837, the Theatre Royal has had a rich and colourful life, hosting a broad range of performances from music halls to cockfights. Saved from demolition several times as the city developed around it, the theatre underwent extensive refurbishment following a fire in 1984. The original splendour of the ornate and intimate auditorium was revived, the stage house, lighting and flying equipment were upgraded, and a new black-box Backspace Theatre was added. In…

The protection of buildings of significant value is ordinarily the task of heritage bodies, who carefully interpret planning laws and assessment criteria when evaluating places of heritage significance. However, when valuable but unprotected public buildings are suddenly under threat of demolition, redevelopment or sale, community activism can be a powerful way to effect change. Community-led activism moves nimbly and loudly and can mobilize public support, propelling the discussion about protecting our cities’ important built assets beyond the confines of formal heritage processes. In recent years, we have seen activists fight to save buildings of significant public value. Campaigns to defend Federation Square in Melbourne, the Marion Cultural Centre in Adelaide, the Sirius building in Sydney and the Australian War Memorial’s Anzac Hall in Canberra have galvanized not only the public…

Built on the land of the Iningai, Malintji and Kuunkari peoples I first visited the rural Queensland town of Longreach in the late 1980s in my mid-teens. On a family convoy road trip we drove north 600 kilometres from Brisbane to Rockhampton and then headed west almost 700 kilometres, passing through the charming country towns of Jericho and Barcaldine. The flatness of the landscape and the vastness of the sky in this part of Central Queensland are remarkable. This is the land of the Iningai people, whose country is an area west of the Great Dividing Range through to Longreach, running south along the Alice River and north to Aramac and Muttaburra. On this teenage sojourn I vividly recall stopping on the side of the Capricorn Highway to admire the…

Built on the land of the Gadigal and Wangal peoples of the Eora nation Any house – even a hut – you build embodies a history, that of its own building. For a public institution, the actual business of building may have a complicated backlog of debates and even quarrels that have shaped it. After it is built, time will alter and modify it, year by year. — Joseph Rykwert on David Chipperfield’s Neues Museum (2009)1 The curious in-between ground that school buildings occupy is both private and public – and at the same time, neither. Perhaps the Latin words communicare (“to share”) and communitas (the “community” or “kinship” that develops among people experiencing a rite of passage, such as a school cohort) might best describe the state that binds…

Our houses are connected to the past in diverse and complex ways. For most people, the experience of domestic space is polytemporal: interiors become the repositories of things old and new, while routine maintenance and periodic renovation tend to punctuate the passage of time rather than erase it. This is to say that we cohabitate with the past – an idea that establishes the broader backdrop for this essay and against which I want to survey just some of the ways in which recent residential architecture has reckoned with history, with built heritage, and with the forms and fabric of buildings that linger with us from other times. To be clear, my concern here is not with heritage and preservation per se, but with those projects that appropriate historical precedents…

Built on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation Modest buildings occasionally take on a significance far greater than their footprint. The Hat Factory in Sydney’s Newtown is certainly one of those. While its box form was utilitarian, it became a famous symbol of squatters’ rights when it was sold as a derelict building in 2014. It had originally been built as a two-storey hat factory and was later used as a printery before becoming a well-known squat for the 13 years before its sale. It became a centre for the movement against the sale of heritage public housing in Sydney’s Rocks area and for squatters’ rights generally. It featured a central shared kitchen, library, bike repair shop and gig space. As the inner west of Sydney…