Australia
page 02
Australia
page 03
Australia
page 04 - 10
Interview with landscape architect Kate Cullity
page 11
Harry Seidler
page 12 - 20
Australian architecture turns up the volume
page 21 - 29
Troppo architects: creative pragmatism with a social agenda
page 30
Pro-bono architecture
page 31 - 33
Ian Strange's suburbia
page 34 - 39
A photographer's view of the Australian landscape
page 40 - 48
New perspectives on Indigenous architecture
page 49 - 53
National Museum of Australia, Canberra
page 54
Landmarks Aussie style
page 55 - 57
A blossoming pavilion in Queen Victoria Gardens
page 58
Dig, Aussie, Dig!!! By Mister Mourau
page 59
Thank You I’ll Do It Myself
uncube's editors are Sophie Lovell (Art Director, Editor-in-Chief), Florian Heilmeyer, Rob Wilson and Elvia Wilk; editorial assistance: Susie S. Lee, Leigh Theodore Vlassis (our own in-house Australian) and Fiona Shipwright; graphic design: Lena Giavanazzi; graphics assistance: Madalena Guerra. uncube is based in Berlin and is published by BauNetz, Germany's most-read online portal covering architecture in a thoughtful way since 1996.
Welcome to the continent of contradictions: home to some of the very oldest and very youngest human cultures in the world, some of the hottest, driest, most inhospitable places on earth and the lushest, wettest, most diverse of biospheres. One thing you’re sure to notice throughout uncube’s Australia issue is the complex interplay between the soft and the loud, the old and the new – and those mad shapes!
We’ve had our long-distance intel network on full alert for months and picked a range of local contributors to give us the lowdown on what makes architecture tick in the landscape between the Never Never and the ‘burbs. So join us as we travel the uncube way to the land down under: no kangaroos, no boomerangs, no cricket and only one koala – but a whole feast of surprises.
By Leigh Theodore Vlassis
In our search to discover whether there is really such a thing as “Australian-ness” – and whether it comes from the land itself – uncube spoke to leading landscape architect and environmental artist Kate Cullity from TCL (Taylor Cullity Lethlean) about working with the Australian landscape and the relationships between culture and climate.
How would you define landscape architecture in Australia and its influences?
Although people have been practising the art of landscape design for millennia, landscape architecture is a relatively new field throughout the world. In Australia, as the practice of landscape architecture is a western construct we often look towards Europe and America. In a sense, the tyranny of distance means that we mould ideas taken from there and make them our own. We can be quite maverick about art and design; although we like to look towards other societies we don’t always follow their rules – Australian design can be quite irreverent and inventive. There is a vast amount of land in Australia and, unlike Europe, Australia has not all been filled in, so this condition demands that we work in a slightly different way.
Another factor is the paradox of the time frame. Non-Aboriginal Australians have one of the youngest Western cultures in the world. Old in non-Aboriginal Australia is only about 200 hundred years – which is not at all old in Europe. With this in mind, the Aborigines have one of the oldest, if not the oldest, known living indigenous cultures in the world. So we live in this incredible paradox between old and new.
And the landscape?
In geological terms Europe is relatively new, whereas Australia has some of the oldest geologies in the world, so our soils are some of the most depleted. One of the reasons that there is less mountainous terrain in Australia is that our landscape is so old: it has been eroded and worn away.
In terms of your own practice, what are the key factors you always consider when developing a design?
These basic factors are something that the practice’s founders, Perry Lethlean and Kevin Taylor (my late husband) and I, explored in depth when we were all doing our PhDs. We were thinking about the threads that drive our practice. We came up with a number of them: our relationship to site, the materials we use, the narrative of the stories and ideas behind each project, the civic nature of our work in cities and urban areas, and how we work with other professionals and collaborators. One factor that we all focused on was the Australian condition, or “Australian-ness”.
We ended up removing this thread, because we found that it was the conditions of site, narrative, materiality, civicness and collaboration that actually formed the way that we worked, rather than the “Australian-ness” of what we do. As I explained before, Australia looks towards Europe and America, but I think that when we tease that out, it is those remaining factors that define our work.
TCL’s design for the Australian Garden in Cranbourne, Victoria, won World Landscape of the Year 2013. Was it designed to portray a specifically Australian identity?
The Australian Garden was an incredible gift for us. We really wanted that project and felt it resonated well with TCL. The way that we approached the job came from the very inspiring brief: to express the Australian flora and the Australian relationship to landscape in an artistic and sculptural manner. What we were essentially inspired to do was to abstract the qualities of the landscape, just as Australian contemporary artists had done and continue to do, and distill the essence of what makes the landscapes here so particular. We were interested in telling stories about the Australian landscape in an immersive rather than sign-based or didactic way.
What does it tell the visitor about the landscape and the ecosystems represented?
In the first garden, the Sand Garden, for example, we wanted to express the sublime and surreal qualities of the dry, desert areas of Australia – characteristics such as a sense of spaciousness and minimalism. An often misunderstood notion is that these vast landscapes are robust, but in fact they are quite fragile and made from incredibly impoverished soils. We wanted the visitors to have a sense of reverence as in a Japanese garden, and to encourage that sensibility, we composed a viewing garden rather than a garden for walking, a garden people are not allowed to enter.
The defining narrative in the Australian Garden is the journey of water. It’s either the abundance or the absence of water that defines the Australian landscape. The first section of the garden, completed in 2006, tells stories about dry desert landscapes and the scarcity, preciousness and ephemeral quality of water. The more recently completed section, finished in 2012, is about the immersive and urbane landscapes of the continental edge, the coast, estuaries and rivers. Here the garden is informed by the presence of water rather than its absence.
Kate Cullity is a noted landscape architect particularly skilled in the integration of public art with landscape and urban design. From 1986 onwards she has worked on a wide range of landscape projects varying from small-scale courtyard designs to large-scale masterplans. She founded the landscape architecture and urban design firm Taylor Cullity Lethlean (TCL) in 1989 with her late husband Kevin Taylor, with Perry Lethlean joining the practice in 1995.
Kate also works as an artist and has been commissioned by agencies such as the City of Melbourne, Melbourne International Festival, The McClelland Survey, the National Museum of Australia and International Garden Festivals in France and Canada.
tcl.net.au
How does one intervene and design landscapes in the remote, sensitive, regions of Australia, like the design you made for the Uluru Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre, where the harsh environment is so closely part of Indigenous culture and life?
In such a remote area, it really was about discovering the landscape and culture as we found them. It was based on an appreciation of a landscape that is magnificent at every scale and about a reverence for the living Aboriginal culture found at Uluru. The indigenous people are known as Anangu and are the custodians and owners of the land. They are the hosts while the tourists are the guests.
When visitors come to Uluru they think they are just going to be looking and experiencing an enormous iconic rock, but to the Anangu people everything there is precious and to be respected. Before the cultural centre was constructed in 1993, most visitors only drove through the landscape and their experience of the desert was limited to taking photos or climbing the rock, a practice Anangu do not approve of as the rock is sacred and they feel responsible if people injure themselves while climbing.
Rather than tourists getting out of air-conditioned buses or cars and just walking straight into the cultural centre, we sited the bus and the car park 300 metres away, so visitors walk through the desert along sinuous pathways of red sand and actually experience what it is like to be immersed in the desert, to experience the nuances of the flora and fauna. This meandering journey prepares them for the cultural knowledge they will encounter in the cultural centre.
What was your brief from the Anangu people?
That the visitor is invited to experience the desert as found at that particular site and on that particular day. The Anangu wanted as little as possible to be altered, added or removed. To this end no trees were removed and there was minimal removal of other vegetation. As many materials as possible from the site were used, including for the pathways, walls and path edging, and no drainage patterns were altered, as even a slight change in gradient can alter the way water is dispersed across the desert landscape. p
Designed by Harry Seidler (1923-2006) and completed in 1967‚ Sydney’s Australia Square Tower was immediately acclaimed as a landmark building for the country. At the time of its completion‚ the complex′s 170-metre-high‚ 50-storey cylindrical tower was the tallest lightweight concrete building in the world and Australia′s first true skyscraper. Indeed it remained the tallest building in the city until 1976.
Born in Vienna in 1923, Seidler fled Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938 for England. During the Second World War, he was at first interned, but later travelled to Canada to study architecture, going on to complete his studies under Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1945-6. Emigrating to Australia in 1948, he became one of the key proponents of post-war modernism. p (fs)
Text by Rob Wilson
The past few years have seen a crop of new public buildings with vivid colours, and splintered geometries and façades, high-kicking their way onto the streets of Australian cities. Taking their cue from isolated earlier flowerings, seen in projects like Storey Hall, RMIT University by ARM Architecture from 1996, together they appear to herald the development of a specifically Australian aesthetic, or at least a “Victorian” one – with its origins in Melbourne, Victoria and a number of practices, like ARM, based there – seeming to riff off that city’s famously filigree Victorian architecture.
From the torn multicoloured pixelations of the exterior “cloak” of Lyons Architecture’s Swanston Academic Building (2012), to the illusionistic white neon exterior tubing and blood-red interior of ARM’s MTC Southbank Theatre in Melbourne (2008), these are buildings in whose company even the recent Bond University building in Brisbane by Peter Cook, looks positively sedate, and against which the excesses of Will Alsop in his prime seem positively muted.
Like some Darwinesque hot-house transformation – in the vein of the rich and strange flora and fauna unique to the continent – a fabulous and distinctively new genus has arisen, a hybrid of PoMo and Deconstruction, which somehow never died out here, but just grafted together, sprouted and spread.
These buildings show an alternative institutional critique: why smash up the institution when you can make it loud and proud instead?
Location: Melbourne
Completed: 2012
Architects: Lyons Architecture
Location: Melbourne
Completed: 2008
Architects: ARM Architecture
Location: Perth, Western Australia
Completed: 2012
Architects: ARM Architecture
Location: Victoria
Completed: 2013
Architects: Lyons Architecture
Location: Adelaide
Completed: 2007
Architects: John Wardle Architects
Location: Victoria
Completed: 2013
Architects: Lyons Architecture
Location: Melbourne
Completed: 1996
Architects: ARM Architecture
By David Welsh
Australia is a big place. To travel from where I sit writing here in Sydney, to the northernmost of our capital cities, Darwin, is roughly the same distance as the journey from Berlin to Marrakesh. A lot of different kinds of architecture can develop across distances like this. Any answer to the question of how architecture is made in Australia really depends on the place you’re sitting.
Following their graduation from the University of Adelaide in 1978‚ architects Adrian Welke and Phil Harris moved to the tropical city of Darwin in the far north‚ establishing the firm Troppo in 1980. Darwin had been flattened in 1974 by Cyclone Tracy; as the town rebuilt itself in the coming years‚ the young architects, “armed”‚ as they have said‚ “with a grant to study the history of tropical housing”, found themselves able to offer an alternative to the well-intentioned but questionable cyclone-proof offerings that were shaping the re-born tropical city. Grounded in the lessons learned from common sense – tropical architecture of the past that utilised locally available materials and passive design principles – the partners of Troppo began to experiment with new ways to create responsible regional architecture.
Deriving their name from the term “going troppo”, a phrase that refers to the heat-induced craziness to which inhabitants of the tropics can succumb, the young architects designed their first house in 1982, and named it “the Green Can” after the emerald green can of the Northern Territory’s favourite beer, Victoria Bitter. The result of a low-cost housing competition, the Green Can was a prototype for further models, utilising wide shaded verandahs, a central breezeway and cost-effective, pragmatic materials such as local timber, steel and corrugated iron sheeting.
The house gained notoriety, attracting a deluge of criticism from some more conservative local groups, but also attracting more adventurous, like-minded clients who saw a way to live with, rather than in spite of, the local climate. A series of commissions started rolling in for buildings that tapped into not only the material aspects of the tropical regions, but also the social aspects of places where people were willing to chip in and help construct both buildings and the communities around them.
Troppo’s own description of creating “shop drawings for the owner-builder” is an apt description of much of their early work output, where the architect is simply a part of the overall design process, helping to facilitate the involvement of an array of people – clients, contractors, consultants and indeed everyone who uses the building throughout its life.
Welke and Harris believe “shelter is about engaging with the environment on your own terms”. Housing examples such as their 1996 Thiel House, where the generosity of a Balinese villa is given their larrikin (meaning mischievous) touch, the twinned pavilion forms of the Rozak House (2002) at Lake Bennett or the Mortlock Lee House (2011), a pavilion house they describe as a building “connecting bush with bush”. These are three examples of the approach where equal attention is given to the environment and the people who live in it.
»Simplicity belies the deep consideration of how a building might exist as part of its environment rather than something just sitting in it.«
Generous deck areas, operable louvred walls and flipped-tin roof forms are just as much about letting the elements in as keeping them out. The forms’ simplicity belies the deep consideration of how a building might exist as part of its environment rather than something just sitting in it.
This critical, regional approach, where climatic engagement is one driver in how an architect responds to a brief, is something Troppo shares with other Australian contemporaries such as Gabriel Poole, Rex Addison, Lindsay and Kerry Clare, Rick LePlastrier and Glenn Murcutt. Most began their practices in tropical regions.
The considerations of context and environment follow in Troppo’s public work as well. Their 1992 Bowali Visitor Centre, designed with Glenn Murcutt, shows all of the climatic considerations of their single housing work.
»Shelter is about engaging with the environment on your own terms.«
David Welsh is a partner of Welsh + Major Architects, a practice he established in Sydney in 2004 with Christine Major. He has taught at The University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales, and runs masters studios in environmental sustainability and material technologies at the University of Technology, Sydney. He is also a regular contributing writer to design and architecture publications such as Houses, Artichoke and AR Asia Pacific.
welshmajor.com
However, some themes, such as the way a building acts as a social symbol and a place for communal gathering, are brought to the fore. The Lavarack Barracks project, completed in 2002 with BVN Architecture, sees Troppo shift in scale again and explore the way large groups of people might come together and engage with each other and their environment.
Troppo’s social agenda is also a key driver in their work. Their practice has done a lot of work over three decades to improve the workability, and livability of buildings in remote indigenous communities. The source of materials and resources has always been at the core of what they do; in these projects in remote locations, the ways that the materials and the buildings get to their site is also just as important in resolving an architectural solution.
“Going Troppo” may have been a way to describe a heat-induced madness, but with the practice of Welke and Harris, it seems the heat and humidity has unlocked their minds to generate a creative pragmatism with a generous social agenda at its (naturally ventilated) heart. I
In a place called Winton deep in the the Australian outback, smack bang in the middle of north Queensland and eleven kilometres from the nearest highway, sits a rather isolated and peculiar building. Founded by cattle station owner David Elliot and his wife Judy, the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum houses a collection of 99-million-year-old dinosaur skeletons that David found beneath his land. Since being bitten by the paleontology bug, the couple have handed over the running of the cattle station to their son in order to dedicate their time solely to discovering, conserving and displaying the fossils. Their museum is entirely self-funded and was designed by Cox Architecture pro-bono. p (ltv)
Artist Ian Strange was born and raised in the suburbs of Perth‚ Australia’s fourth most populous city‚ and its most isolated as well. Like much of Australia‚ Perth is a vast sprawl of a place, with 80 percent of its 1.9 million residents living‚ not within the city centre‚ but in its vast orbit of suburbs. It is an urban format that is both economically and environmentally extremely inefficient.
Strange says that it was the profound isolation and mundanity characterising Australian suburbia, that first drove him to become an artist. And his pedominantly site-specific works‚ with titles such as HOME and SUBURBAN, grapple explicitly with these issues.
Now based in New York‚ he has also explored the theme across the states of Middle America. However, he notes that Australia’s remoteness adds a complexity to the suburban experience‚ creating a “deeply unnatural environment” unique within the western world. Strange has observed what he describes as a superficial sense of stability in suburbia coupled with a worrying dislocation from the continent′s landscape, an attitude which seems to be in part a hangover from the colonists who “discovered” it. “The suburbs are a large point of contention and really expose how much of Australian identity is in denial of our environment”‚ he says. “This is perhaps best illustrated by the existence of typical-looking suburban homes built near mining sites in far northwestern Australia. Although they look like any other house in a leafy suburb‚ these places require 24/7 air conditioning and perpetual watering to keep their front lawns green. There is an absurdity in seeing them next to the dry inland red dirt and in the unforgiving desert conditions. It highlights the contradiction of the suburban home in Australia and its symbolic and emotional power to white Australians.” p (fs)
Photography and text by John Gollings
The photographer John Gollings, who took many of the pictures in this issue, grew up in Melbourne, where he started taking photos as a child with a folding Ensign camera. During family holidays camping in national parks, he became intrigued by the idea of solely surviving off the land – an alien skill for a modern urban dweller. Gollings went on to study architecture at Melbourne University. In the 1980s he began using aerial photography to document the changes in the Australian landscape after bushfires devastated the vegetation and found it an ideal method for capturing the essence of the landscapes of his homeland.
“Australia is vast, empty and relatively flat. It is also hot and difficult to survive without the knowledge of the aboriginal people about water supplies, food sources and walking tracks. These are expressed in aboriginal art as symbolic aerial maps, which encompass spiritual beings and mythologies as well.
The complex patterns and meaning of this art have had a profound effect on my aerial photography. The viewer’s eye moves differently over a two-dimensional aerial image, exploring detail, pattern and meaning without the emotional overlays of beauty, composition or art theory that are part of appreciating European art.”
“My attraction to sites such as the open cut mines and the aftermath of the McClelland bush fires is the idea of fundamental change, whether wrought by nature or humans, that offers a new vision of the world – economic, environmental, or cultural.
The Australian vegetation needs to be burned and renewed regularly to perpetuate the ecosystem. I’m interested in the way the underlying topology of the land becomes visible after these fires. Fire has tragic effects on humans, but a profound and necessary effect on the landscape.”
“The air is clean and dry, so sun penetration is high, as is the contrast with shadows. With a low, warm sun angle at dawn and dusk, the colours are spectacular and pure. With increasing pollution, east-coast cities now have developed a softer light, as the rays are dispersed through haze, but photographing in Australia can still be difficult if you are used to the northern hemisphere.
I have intensified the colours a little with contrast and saturation, but my photos express the extraordinary range of chemical elements left buried in the desert by people. The irony is that these human-made piles of rubbish exactly mimic the aboriginal dot paintings of the western desert.”
Born 1944, Melbourne Australia, John Gollings is a photographer specialising in the built environment including the documentation of both ancient and modern cities around the world. He operates from a collaborative design, photography and 3D rendering studio in Melbourne, Australia and works extensively in Asia, especially in India, Cambodia, China, Libya and New Guinea.
He was the co-creative director 2010-12 of the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Architectural Biennale and in 2014 he launched a documentation of every high-rise on the Gold Coast, which Gollings achieved by walking from Paradise Point to Coolangatta, taking one image of every high-rise building along the way.
“The central landscape metaphor in Australian architecture represents the exploration and colonisation of the land. It also contains a lot of social and political comment on our treatment of the first peoples using symbolic architectural elements to express massacre and mythology.” p
By Jefa Greenaway
Australia’s relationship with its original inhabitants has been troubled, contested and complex – and architecture has played its part in the story. As an Indigenous practitioner, Jefa Greenaway has 20 years experience navigating through the multitude of competing issues in mediating meaningful cultural exchange through the design of the built environment.
Over the past three decades a discernible shift has emerged, not only in developing a dialogue between the dominant (settler) society in Australia and its First Peoples, but also in the placing of great importance on the symbolic capital of reconciliation as a means of addressing past injustices.
Australia encompasses a huge range of climates, ecologies and natural attributes. With over 250 language groups, its Indigenous people well reflect this diversity. But the cultures of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are often erroneously construed as homogeneous, creating a flawed starting point in the search for an appropriate means of connection or acknowledgement. This, as well as historical prejudice, has frequently led to a misunderstanding of how to approach projects designed to relate to Indigenous Australia.
Recently, built environment professionals have attempted to develop a language that responds to the needs and aspirations of Indigenous people, representing and connecting to their culture.
Simultaneously there has been a renaissance of Aboriginal pride, identification and cultural expression, generating an appetite and commitment to developing new models that remedy the lack of a discernible presence or focus for Indigenous Australians. One architect who has secured a well-deserved reputation in this field is Gregory Burgess, who is adept at developing distinct, iconic and evocative projects specifically for Aboriginal clients. One of the most recognisable is the Brambuk Living Cultural Centre (1990) in the Gariwerd Ranges of the Grampians National Park, Victoria.
With totemic references to the spread wings of a cockatoo, and rough-hewn tectonics that echo the contours of the adjacent mountains, it is an exercise in intuitive connection with a client and the spirit of place. In speaking to staff, key stakeholders and representatives of the Aboriginal community, it is clear that the project is seen as a powerful representation of a respectful, considered and collaborative experience of mutual listening. It is an example of a project that builds a bridge between its original patrons or clients, its users and the broader public.
However, it is worth noting that some within the local community feel the sheer power of its fixed form (and meaning) may have limited its adaptability in responding to changing demographics, use patterns and technology. While an easy critique, this does raise the key question of how a culture can be appropriately represented through built form. Indeed, how can the world’s oldest continuing civilisation be referenced while maintaining its position as a “lived culture”?
»How can the world’s oldest continuing civilisation be referenced while maintaining its position as a ‘lived culture’?«
The Uluru-Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre (1995), also designed by Burgess and located in the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, Northern Territory, is embedded in the red earth at the scorched centre of Australia. It speaks the same distinct language as Brambuk. Celebrating Anangu culture, combining critical axes and views with a sense of groundedness, this project has become an emblem embraced by its client, traditional owners and the public alike. Its environmental credentials, natural materials and deference to its surroundings is both legible and refined. It is a product of its time and the philosophical leanings of its architect and has become shorthand for how to tackle challenging projects and contexts.
One might be compelled to ask how an Indigenous architect would approach the same brief. Would the outcome be markedly different or enhanced? While a moot point for this project, it raises the question of what unique value Indigenous practitioners bring to architecture. Would new modes of thinking arise when viewed through the lens of Indigenous sensibilities and connectedness? I certainly think so.
Design’s frame of reference is arguably still too narrow, with the fixed silos of architecture, landscape architecture, interior design and construction. The more inclusive term favoured among many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders is “Indigenous placemaking”.
This suggests the essence of a cohesive approach which references country and layers of history and meaning, while formulating an outcome evolving from a process that respects cultural protocols, consultation, collaboration and participation.
There should be no imposing a solution upon a community. The role of the architect is particularly valuable as a conduit to realise the aspirations of community, presupposing that the architect, whatever their background, parks his or her ego at the door.
This conversation is still in its infancy. There have been less than ten registered Indigenous architects in Australia ever! Why are there so few Indigenous people involved in this vital and creative field? Is it due to more pressing needs and careers in areas such as health, law and justice, and political activism? Or is it simply a case that the act of building so often still assumes a precondition of terra nullius, or land belonging to no one? Or perhaps it is a perception that architecture is too esoteric and disconnected from the social and pragmatic needs of Indigenous communities?
»Is it simply a case that the act of building so often still assumes a precondition of terra nullius, or land belonging to no one?«
Jefa Greenaway is an architect, interior designer, academic and Director of Greenaway Architects, a practice specialising in residential, commercial and community projects. He is a descendant of the Wailwan and Kamilaroi peoples of North West NSW and also of German descent.
He is co-Director of IADV / Indigenous Architecture and Design Victoria, a not-for-profit organisation providing support and advice regarding all aspects of architecture related to Aboriginal people in Victoria. Educated at Melbourne and Latrobe universities, he was recipient of the AIA National Emerging architect prize (2011), the Inaugural Stormtech Scholarship to the Glenn Murcutt International Master Class (2011) and participant in the British Council’s Accelerate Indigenous Leadership Intensive (2012). He was recently appointed as an Honorary Senior Fellow at the University of Melbourne, is currently a Lecturer at the Melbourne School of Design, and is a studio leader for the Robin Boyd Foundation Masterclass intensives.
Jefa is the only registered Indigenous Architect in Victoria.
Architecture is the last major creative field still in this position. Achievements in other fields from music, dance and movies to art, demonstrate that Indigenous practitioners have a capacity to make a greater mark than their 2.5 percent proportion of the population figure suggests. The opportunities are broad and the possibilities really exciting. The capacity to unpack new ways of thinking about design that resonate with deep conceptual foundations has the potential to herald a new era acknowledging history, place and culture.
As the Australian playwright Wesley Enoch eloquently puts it, “We express ourselves through our song and our dance, our storytelling, our visual arts, our music, our craft, our genealogy. Our history. Our economy… our sense of our community comes through ourselves through our arts″. I imagine a time when Indigenous knowledge is equally valued in design teaching. I imagine a place where key civic institutions are conceived through the prism of Indigenous sensibilities. I imagine an experience where Indigenous projects are sought out as compelling models that exceed the mainstream offerings.
The arguments needs to be put that Indigenous perspectives can indeed strengthen culture and design in the built environment. Indigenous aspirations to improve housing for example, aiding wellbeing and cementing the cultural bonds of communities, could all be realised through the creative problem-solving that architecture does so well.
The opportunities afforded to us by the pioneering work of our forebears clearly places the current generation at the vanguard of new design thinking, with the chance to offer unique insights and to articulately enunciate the emerging forms of a cultural leadership. p
If Australian architecture has an enfant terrible it is surely Ashton Ragatt McDougall (ARM) architects. Prior to their receiving the commission to design the National Museum of Australia (NMA), ARM had shown its propensity for architectural in-jokes: a medical centre was designed by warping an image of Robert Venturi’s Vanna Venturi House on the photocopier; a library was given an Oldenburg scaled stone “open book” for a façade; and the Marion Cultural Centre, completed the same year as the NMA in 2001, was literally built in the shape of the word “Marion” when seen from above.
A thoroughly Melbourne practice, ARM were (and perhaps still are) a large part of the local avant-garde responsible for shaping Melbourne’s current architectural identity, typified by experimental and colourful buildings that show more than a hint of postmodern nudge-nudge wink-wink. So when, at the start of the millenium, the commission for the most nationally significant building in recent memory was awarded to Australian architecture’s court jesters, the feathers of more than a few drawing board dusters across the country were ruffled.
The resulting building for the National Museum of Australia was opened in 2001, and concerns voiced at the time by the harbingers of architectural conservatism were well-founded. Perversely, these complaints were also the best thing that could have happened to the project. Given the task of providing form to a contemporary museum with populist aspirations (they have Kylie Minogue’s gold hot pants on display!), a blank, recessive vessel for the objects would have been all wrong. ARM emptied their architectural box of tricks and successfully wove through the building a rich and complex story that turns the architecture into an educational device in its own right.
At the time of designing the NMA, ARM was busy investigating the Boolean string as both a narrative and form-making device. Strung out across the Acton Headland on the edge of Lake Burley-Griffen, this model played out beautifully as a means to literally connect the disparate strands of Australian history and tie them together. Some strings contain galleries which are then brought together in a heroically scaled and dynamic entrance hall “knot”, while others unfurl into the landscape, looping-the-loop or unsettling the ground-plane, designed with help from landscape architects Room 4.1.3. Within the pastiche of cultural and architectural symbolism, such as the comically over-scaled braille façades and elements of the Sydney Opera House and Neue Staatsgalerie, is inserted an element that caused the most controversy: an all-black replica of the Villa Savoye.
Brett Seakins is a practising architect at Williams Boag Architects, Deakin University graduate, and writer, who regularly contributes to Architect Victoria, among other publications, when he isn’t designing buildings.
This building is occupied by the Centre for Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Straight Island Studies, a parallel gesture, which both critiques and dramatically underscores the fraught history that colonial Australia has with Australia’s original inhabitants.
Without an architectural frame of reference, the level of chaotic theatricality, so heavily laden with both architectural and cultural references, could potentially be a little overwhelming for first time visitors to Australia. If nothing else, people take from the museum an impression that Australia’s short but explosive Western history, in contrast to its long and rich Indigenous history, is certainly no tabula rasa p (Brett Seakins)
It may seem a stereotype, but growing up on the wild, vast and isolated continent of Australia means splashing about on pristine beaches, participating in almost every sport imaginable, and constant barbecues (or did for this author). And with all that space, and all those distances, it means road trips: cars full of enthusiasts spending endless hours driving across harsh red terrain with jumping kangaroos and scorching heat – only to arrive a bit dehydrated, exhausted and overheated at ...a very big thing.
With so much flat space, a mania has developed for outsized objects, which punctuate the horizon of long road trips and create landmarks for otherwise anonymous places. So on your next sweltering journey through the great southern land, don’t be alarmed if you come across a bunch of people walking into a giant cow’s bottom – it’s just an Australian thing. p (ltv)
In the green oasis of Queen Victoria Gardens, right in the heart of Melbourne and set against the backdrop of the city’s skyscrapers, sits a simple metal box of 15 by 15 metres: the MPavilion. Inspired by the Serpentine Gallery annual temporary pavilion installations on the other side of the globe, the MPavilion is hosting a four-month programme of events dealing with art and architecture. As architect Sean Godsell explains, it also has a functional purpose: “This is a summer pavilion and in Australia we need shade.” He connects his little building to the hay sheds, barns and verandahs of the Australian Outback where people congregate for shelter from the sun and heat. Each morning when its pneumatic arms lift the perforated aluminium panels to reveal its interior, the pavilion “blooms like a flower” – a flower that also closes its petals again at sunset when the pavilion shuts up for the night. p (fh)
Mister Mourao (aka Vasco Mourao) is a freelance architect turned illustrator based in Barcelona. His client list includes, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Wired US, Domus, Ogilvy and uncube.
Issue No. 28:
November 27th 2014
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