Canberra (Australian Capital Territory) provides a showcase of Australian planning and
architecture during the 20th century. The first parliament of the Commonwealth of
Australia met in
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 398
Melbourne in 1901. An international competition for the federal capital city of
Canberra was conducted in 1911 and was won by Walter Burley Griffin and Marion
Mahony Griffin of Chicago.
The so-called Departmental Board Plan was under way by 1913, designed by
bureaucrats using features assembled from the competition entries. This procedure and its
ugly product caused a public outrage, so Griffin visited Australia in late 1913, when he
was appointed director of Federal Capital Works. The Griffins thus settled in Australia in
May 1914, but their Canberra Plan was frustrated by wartime conditions, by quickly
changing governments, and by hostile public servants—the authors of the discarded
conglomerate plan. Griffin, having achieved very little, resigned in 1920 from any further
involvement in Canberra. In 1921 Sir John Sulman headed the Federal Capital Advisory
Committee, which was formed to procure the construction of the city and its suburbs. He
fashioned a sparse garden suburbia and “introduced a modified mediterranean style of red
tile roofs, white stucco walls, [and] simplified classical details.”
The Griffins’ Canberra Plan (1911, revised 1918) was consistent with the City
Beautiful movement and with precedents by Daniel Burnham (e.g., the Chicago Plan,
1909). The basic geometry of the Griffins’ Plan was put in place: the Land Axis,
connecting Mount Ainslie, Capitol Hill, and a mountain peak beyond; the bisecting Water
Axis; and the overlay of a triangle of broad avenues between Capitol Hill and the Civic
and Municipal Centres via two bridges across the lake basin. These elements were fitted
majestically into the terrain, but the building types that the Griffins had named for the key
nodes were not adhered to. Their crystalline suburban road network was not established;
of their building designs in Canberra, only a military general’ gravestone survives intact.
Capitol Hill had been the site for the Griffins’ major 1911 competition landmark, a
national cultural archive building, a “ziggurat” that included imagery of Hellenic tombs
and Oriental temples. The politicians in 1974 legislated that Capitol Hill instead become
the site for a new parliament building. However, in 1914 Griffin had organized and then
withdrawn a wartime international competition for a new parliament building on Camp
Hill, a less elevated site on the Land Axis between Capitol Hill and the central lake basin.
Louis Sullivan (Chicago), Otto Wagner (Vienna), John Burnet (London), and Victor
Laloux (Paris) had been invited as judges. In 1927 John Smith Murdoch (chief architect,
Commonwealth Works) completed a temporary Parliament House located below Camp
Hill toward the lake. Consequently the politicians and government departments moved to
Canberra from the interim capital, Melbourne.
Public servants have always been reluctant to relocate in Canberra. The city’s
development languished until Robert Gordon Menzies became prime minister in 1949.
Menzies engaged the British town planner William Holford and the British landscape
architect Sylvia Crowe to evaluate Canberra’s prospects (Holford Report, 1957). Holford
described Canberra as “a camel—a horse designed by a committee” and as “suburbs in
search of a city,” and recommended that the Griffins’ denser city proposal be reinstated.
Crowe nevertheless advocated the retention of Canberra as a garden city. The National
Capital Development Commission (NCDC) was formed, directed by John Overall. The
Molonglo River was dammed in 1963; at last the lake system was filled and was
ironically named Lake Burley Griffin. The city has since been extended with distant
suburban satellites on the postwar English model of new towns beyond a greenbelt, each
with a civic center. Central Canberra became a park dotted with white modernist foci, but
Entries A–F 399
today it has improved in amenity and urban coherence as it has been gradually filled in
with buildings.
A new Parliament House competition for Capitol Hill, conducted in 1980, was won by
Romaldo Giurgola (Mitchell/Giurgola Thorp). The ziggurat-like configuration of the
Griffins’ projected capitol (1911) and its landscaped setting (1918) were the inspiration
for Giurgola’s scheme (1988)—the main central bulk of the reinforced-concrete building
complex was contained within two curving retaining walls topped by a huge flagpole
(Holford Report recommendation, 1957) supported by four stanchions ghosting the
Griffins’ originally proposed shape. The House of Representatives and the Senate were
roofed with red tile, each house placed in a courtyard on either side of the curved walls.
The public can still climb Capitol Hill and look down through the skylight on the
Members’ Hall. The Land Axis vista was architecturally emphasized: the colonnade of
Giurgola’s “Great Verandah” entrance appears integrated with the stripped classicism of
Murdoch’s temporary parliament building, today a national portrait gallery.
The NCDC (now disbanded) located a few monumental buildings off the Land Axis
but within the Parliamentary Triangle between Capitol Hill and the lake’s edge. Walter
Bunning (Bunning and Madden and T.E.O’Mahoney) followed the lead of Walter
Gropius and The Architects Collaborative (U.S. Embassy, Athens, 1956) with a classical
peripteral colonnade (National Library of Australia, 1968). Colonel Madigan (Edwards
Madigan Torzillo and Briggs) celebrated the architectural promenade: lofty cubic atrium
and ramps (High Court of Australia Building, 1981) and diagonal and dogleg
passageways through gallery spaces (Australian National Gallery, 1982). Concrete work
by Louis Kahn, fractured forms by Richard Meier, and Paul Rudolph’s design-by-section
methods were the context for Madigan’s idiosyncratic compositions. Lawrence Nield
thematically referred to Palladio’s Villa Rotonda, with compositional strategies and
detailing informed by Le Corbusier (Science and Technology Center, 1988). The prime
minister’s department building (Edmund Barton Offices, 1974) by Harry Seidler was
adjoined to the Triangle; scalloped, precast-concrete beams of great length were
suspended between cylindrical service towers.
The Griffins intended for a community sports and recreation casino to terminate the
Land Axis at the base of Mount Ainslie. Placed there instead was a sepulchral museum
by Emil Sodersteen and John Crust (Australian War Memorial, 1941), twice
sympathetically extended by Denton Corker Marshall (1988, 1999).
Where the Griffins envisaged a civic center—a town hall atop a knoll—nothing was
ever built: this topographical prominence is a lawn that is densely surrounded by cypress
trees. Sulman’s shopping blocks, with pedestrian sidewalks enclosed by arcades and
loggias, were built below it (Sydney and Melbourne Buildings, 1926). Roy Simpson
(Yuncken Freeman Brothers Griffiths and Simpson) formed a distant plaza enclosed by
offices (Civic Offices, 1961) and theaters (Canberra Theatre Center, 1965). Further
around the knoll, Simpson alluded to the Greek temple in gray marble (ACT Law Courts,
1962).
Brian Lewis, Roy Simpson, and others were involved in the campus planning of the
nearby Australian National University. Professor Brian Lewis designed the residence
(University House, 1952), and Simpson designed many student and academic department
buildings (for example, University Union Plaza, 1975). Roy Grounds, initially desiring a
shell structure, evolved a paraboloid reinforced-concrete dome in a ring-beam moat
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 400
(Australian Academy of Science, 1958). Daryl Jackson and Evan Walker demonstrated
an interest in muscular Brutalist forms in reinforced concrete (Canberra School of Music,
1976).
Markets, a railway station, and a city cathedral were never constructed at the Griffins’
Municipal Centre, but a projected military function was. In their master plan (Russell,
1959) Skidmore, Owings and Merrill incorporated into the forecourt Richard Ure’s
aluminum obelisk (Australian-American Memorial, 1954); the buildings were by Buchan
Laird and Buchan (Russell Defense Group Offices, 1966). The nearby carillon, a gift
from the United Kingdom (Aspen Island, Central Basin, Lake Burley Griffin, 1970), was
by Cameron Chisholm and Nicol.
Belconnen and Woden provide examples of civic center buildings in Canberra’s
satellite suburbs. John Andrews’s works related to the Archigram projects of the 1960s
(WodenTAFE College, 1981) and to International Brutalism (Cameron Offices,
Belconnen, 1972). Concrete blocks and landscaped courtyards dominated the latter,
connected by a “street in the air” to an extensive bus terminal. McConnel Smith and
Johnson (Benjamin Offices, 1979), in similarly conceived public office blocks, color
coded service towers to assist the users’ identification and location of the parts. In
startling contrast, Peter Corrigan (Edmond and Corrigan) referred to late 19th-century
polychrome brick office-warehouses of Melbourne and Sydney (Belconnen Community
Center, 1987). Daryl Jackson also made postmodern reference to traditional brickwork
and school yards (Belconnen College, 1988).
Philip Cox, at another significant outlying site, the Australian Institute of Sport
(Bruce, ACT), designed the dynamic (Bruce National Athletics Stadium, 1977) and the
relatively inert (National Indoor Sports and Training Centre, 1981) in the spirit of 1950s
tensile-steel structures in Melbourne. Daryl Jackson used expressive wave shapes and
tight-skinned surfaces (Swimming Training Halls, 1983) and brightly colored bands
(Basketball Indoor Courts, 1988). Allen Jack and Cottier arranged urban terraces to form
wind-sheltered courts (AIS Halls of Residence, 1988).
The Griffins had proposed in their 1911 drawings to align public buildings along the
lake’s edges, and drew their reflections in the water. However, the Canberra Hospital
(main ward block, Leighton Irwin, 1964, demolished) was, typically, placed in the middle
of its peninsula site. Ashton Raggatt McDougall have recently placed here a series of
building masses (National Museum, 1999) right at the water’s edge, a tactic that will only
enhance the Griffins’ original vision for the city of Canberra.
Showing posts with label AUSTRALIA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label AUSTRALIA. Show all posts
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,
Entries A–F 161
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.
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 162
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
Entries A–F 163
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.
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,
Entries A–F 161
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.
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 162
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
Entries A–F 163
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.
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