CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA

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
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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
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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
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(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.