AUSTRALIA

The 1901 federation of sovereign states and territories that formed the Commonwealth of
Australia centralized cultural developments. A new nationalism subdued regional
differences. A new federal capital, Canberra was chosen, as it was equidistant between
the cities of Melbourne and Sydney. These two metropolitan cities became the primary
settings for major 20th-century architectural movements, although many gems have been
built throughout the whole country: the modernist Education Department Building (1982,
Perth, Western Australia), by Cameron Chisholm and Nicol; Student Union Building,
University of Adelaide (1973, South Australia), by Dickson and Flatten; St Ann’s
Geriatric Hospital (1979, Hobart, Tasmania), by Heffernan Nation Rees and Viney;
Queensland Art Gallery (1982, Brisbane), by Robin Gibson and Partners; and the
contextual “Pee Wees at the Point” restaurant in tropical Darwin (1998, Northern
Territory), by Troppo Architects. The most beautifully crafted building in the nation is
the Postmodern Parliament House complex in Canberra (1988, Australian Capital
Territory), by the Italian-American Romaldo Giurgola (Mitchell Giurgola and Thorpe),
nowadays a resident of Canberra.
The architectural forms of the vast terminal buildings for the suburban electric railway
networks in Melbourne and Sydney were indicative of fin-de-siècle tension between Arts
and Crafts Movement principles and a shift to rational Classicism. The ornate Flinders
Street Station (1911, Melbourne), by J.W.Fawcett and H.P.C.Ashworth, was an
Edwardian Baroque masterpiece and emulated not only buildings in London but also
some in Otto Wagner’s Vienna. The entry on a diagonal to the street intersection has a
generous semicircular arched opening below a band of squat columns compressed
between a heavy lintel and sill, both being familiar tectonic elements in Henry
H.Richardson’s and Louis Sullivan’s Chicago of the 1880s. The sedate facade of the
Central Railway Station in Sydney (1908), by Walter Liberty Vernon, has a heavily
rusticated base in front of an austere neoclassical elevation.
Garden suburbs grew rapidly, starting early in the twentieth century. The detached
house in its own garden became the norm. The middle classes abandoned their 19thcentury
innercity terrace houses, renting them to industrial workers of the inner belt of
factories and warehouses. Brick-walled and terracotta-roofed Federation Style bungalows
that amalgamated English and American Queen Anne traits dominated the new grids of
Melbourne’s tree-lined streets. Typically, the Arthur Norman house (1910, Kew), by
Ussher and Kemp, combined elements of Richard Norman Shaw’s English Domestic
Revival and the American Shingle Style and included the latter’s diagonal compositions
in plan and silhouette.
Exceptions in Melbourne were Robert Haddon’s Art Nouveau red brick Anselm
(1906, Caulfield) and Harold Desbrowe Annear’s half-timbered Chadwick House (1903,
Eaglemont), with inventive Arts and Crafts details and curved forms. In Sydney,
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W.Hardy Wilson revived an elegant Regency colonial domestic architecture, Eryldene
(1913, Gordon), which has his famous Chinese garden pavilion. During the late teens and
the 1920s, architects led the way with the ubiquitous California bungalow-type homes in
the suburbs of both cities. The major central city buildings at this time were the
reinforced concrete Capitol House office block and the adjacent Capitol Theatre (1924,
Melbourne), with its crystalline plaster ceiling. This complex was designed by Walter
Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin, who had settled in Australia in 1914 to
achieve the realization of their 1911 competition-winning design for the city of Canberra.
After the Great Depression, the images of modernism were embraced in Australia in
the mid-1930s. Initially, the styling of the outer fabric of the suburban house was
affected, rather than its planning. Having visited the United States, Harry A.Norris
employed an expressive Jazz Moderne for the reinforced concrete house Burnham
Beeches (1933, Sassafras, Victoria). Roy Grounds, in designing Portland Lodge (1934,
Frankston, Victoria), showed fascination with the linear timber houses of William W.
Wurster of California. Having worked in England, Sydney Ancher, in the Prevost House
(1937, Bellevue Hill, New South Wales) incorporated the open living room idea and the
curved dining screen element found in Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Tugendhat House
(1930, Brno, Czechoslovakia). Ancher’s younger office colleague in the post-World War
II years, Glenn Murcutt, took as his exemplar the Farnsworth House (1950) by Mies and
consequently created a vibrant series of climatecontrolled universal-box houses (1985,
Magney house, Bingy Point, New South Wales) that also reflect Alvar Aalto’s
involvement with materials and their potential for exquisite empathetic detailing.
In Melbourne’s central business district, Marcus Barlow in the Manchester Unity
office block (1932) displayed his enthusiasm for the work of Raymond Hood, for this
example providing a corner marker based on the Chicago Tribune Tower (1922), with
Chicago Gothic verticality in the two street elevations. Norman Seabrook in the
MacPherson Robertson Girls High School (1934, South Melbourne) gave testimony to a
pilgrimage often made by Australian architects to the Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired
Hilversum Town Hall (1931) by Willem Marinus Dudok of the Netherlands.
Despite the privations of World War II, a large, reinforced concrete block of flats of
great sculptural power, Stanhill (1950, Queens Road, Melbourne), by the Swiss-trained
architect Frederick Romberg, was eventually completed. The irregular plan and block
massing, reminiscent of the superstructure of an ocean liner, was composed of
International Style figures in an accomplished and idiosyncratic fashion. This compares
with the rationally simple indented crescent of “urban co-operative multi-home units” in
reinforced concrete (1951, Potts Point Sydney) by Aaron Bolot, a former employee of the
Griffins.
The estate of three family houses at Turramurra, on the out-skirts of Sydney, by the
Gropius- and Breuer-trained, Austrianborn Harry Seidler, reformed and consolidated
International Modernism in Australia. The Rose Seidler House (1950, Wahroonga) is
similar in plan to the American East Coast houses created by his teachers, and its
appearance also reflected De Stijl principles. However, Seidler imaginatively overlaid
aspects of Le Corbusier’s 1920s imagery, specifically, of the white cube thrust up on thin
piloti, the cube cut and sliced, and the ramp as an element of the architectural promenade.
Seidler, in his own house (1967, Killara), enriched the idea of circulation, and the forms
became robust and muscular in reinforced concrete.
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Counter to Seidler’s international rationalism, Peter Muller, a University of
Pennsylvania graduate, and Bruce Rickard independently created site-sensitive houses
around Sydney that were largely based on the characteristics of the Usonian houses of
Frank Lloyd Wright. Muller composed Kumale (1956, Palm Beach) out of circles, and
Rickard formed Mirrabooka (1964, Castle Hill) of rectangles. Hoyts Cinema Centre
(1969, Bourke Street, Melbourne) was designed by Muller. Melbourne architects
Chancellor and Patrick also referred to American organic sensibilities, but in their former
ES&A Bank (1960, Elizabeth Street, Melbourne), the massive corner piers and vertical
concrete ribs were typical of the Griffins’s work, not Wright’s.
Daring use of tensile steel proved to be more feasible than fanciful shell concrete
conceptions for the Olympic Swimming Stadium (1956, Flinders Park Melbourne), by
Kevin Borland, Peter McIntyre, John and Phyllis Murphy (1982, Borland Brown
alterations), and the Sidney Myer Music Bowl (1959, Kings Domain, Melbourne), by
Yuncken Freeman Brothers Griffiths and Simpson (1999, Gregory Burgess
refurbishment). Inspired by expressionistic works by Eero Saarinen, Bruce Goff, and Paul
Rudolph, structural experiments and formal adventures by Melbourne architects in the
1950s were discerned as a “Melbourne School” by the prolific Melbourne commentator
and architect, Robin Boyd. In “The State of Australian Architecture” (1967), Boyd also
identified a “Sydney School” of “nutty crunchy textures,” referring to a disciplined but
picturesque firsthand interpretation of English Brutalism by architects such as Ken
Woolley. His own house (1962, Mosman) consisted of exposed timber-floor terrace
levels stepping down a heavily vegetated natural bush site, enclosed by klinker-brick
walls and terracotta Roman roof tiles.
Boyd was a staunch advocate for the Modern movement and used absolutes derived
from the writings of Walter Gropius to measure and criticize his contemporaries. He grew
to understand, however, that eclectic diversity was real. His The Puzzle of Architecture (1965) reviewed the
plurality of theories and solutions in the world architectural scene. Sharing Gropius’s
belief that Japanese architecture of the 1960s fulfilled the dream of a universal modern
architecture possessing a regional flavor, Boyd wrote Kenzo Tange (1962) and New Directions in J apanes e Architecture (1968).
The Sydney Opera House commission, in an international competition judged by Eero
Saarinen, was won by the Danish architect Jorn Utzon (1957). He proposed free-form
layered roof shells, which proved to be structurally indeterminate. Utzon developed a
reinforced concrete ribbed structural system finished in curved white ceramic tiles, each
“shell” being a segment of a sphere. Political maneuvering soon deprived Utzon of design
control, and he resigned in 1963. The interiors and glass walling were finished by Hall
Todd & Littlemore (1973).
Australian architects have built abroad, including Sydneytrained John Andrews. His
seminal Scarborough College (1965, Toronto, Canada), and Gund Hall, Graduate School
of Design (1968, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts) are like rigourous
zoning and circulation diagrams realized in elegantly detailed reinforced concrete and
glass. Another significant geometrically abstract work was Seidler’s Australian Embassy
in Paris (1977), dominated by two curved-in-counterpoint blocks of office suites. Ken
Woolley assembled relaxed reinforced concrete pavilion forms in a tropical garden in the
Australian Embassy, Bangkok, Thailand (1985, Ancher Mortlock Woolley). Embassy
architects from Melbourne have included strong architectural references to the host
countries. Daryl Jackson, for the Australian Chancery complex, Riyadh (1989, Saudi
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Arabia), used grillwork-shaded courts and robust heavy walls. Denton Corker Marshall in
Beijing (1992, Peoples Republic of China) used as a theme Chinese courtyard houses,
with solid wall enclosures and large-scaled square openings. Their design for Tokyo
(1991) is a sparkling assembly of metal blockforms reflecting the vitality of new
Japanese architecture. Hank Koning and Julie Eizenberg from Melbourne successfully
practice in Los Angeles, California.
The dichotomy of geometric-abstract versus free-style modes still haunts Australian
architectural production. Giurgola, in the new parliament buildings in Canberra (1988),
integrated a classical severity and repose, with an “itinerary” of “fragments” embedded in
a hill. With the RMIT University Building #8 (constructed on top of a low-rise student
union building by John Andrews [1982]), Edmond and Corrigan (in association with
Demaine Partnership [1994]) introduced a variety of pop figures into the ground of
rectangular block wall facing the major Melbourne thoroughfare of Swanston Street.
Peter Corrigan studied at Yale University during the Charles Moore and Robert Venturi
era, enhancing his predilection for startling shapes and juxtapositions, polychromy, and
contrasting patterns. Next door is the restoration and additions for Storey Hall (1995,
former Hibernian Hall, RMITU) by Ashton Raggatt McDougall, which contributes
another masterpiece in the tradition of Melbourne expressionism. Pea-green and purple
paint was sprayed on the multifaceted raw concrete facade, to which a network of
castbronze computer-generated geometric figures was attached. These two buildings
contributed compatibly to the wall of the streetscape.
The values of craftmanship and organicism have also survived in current work by
architects in various cities. Rex Addison, in his own house (1999, Brisbane), freely
interprets the regional qualities of the typical timber and corrugated-iron 19th-century
tropical Queensland house. Richard Leplastrier in a house for the Australian novelist
Peter Carey (1982, Bellingen, New South Wales) provided an airy elevated timber
pavilion beside a native forest. Gregory Burgess lived on site with aboriginal people
before designing their Brambuk Cultural Centre (1990, Halls Gap, Victoria), a birdlike
undulating corrugated-iron roofscape supported on peeled tree-trunk poles in-filled with
timber-clad framing. Similarly, Gregory Burgess designed the aboriginal landowners’
information centre at Uluru (1998, Northern Territory), an icon for Australia at the end of
the millennium.