Despite enduring the disruption of two world wars and decades of political, social, and
economic turmoil, Austria has been among the most fertile centers of 20th-century
architecture. From Otto Wagner at the beginning of the century to Co-op Himmelb(l)au at
its end, Austrian architects have often been at the forefront of the struggle to confront the
rapidly changing dictates of the modern age. Those efforts have been marked less by
technical innovation than in many other countries—until recently Austria’s building
industries lagged behind those of most other European nations—but rather by a
remarkable openness to new forms and ideas. On the one hand, modern Austrian
architecture has been characterized by a strong inclination to embrace novelty, to
originate and develop innovative expressions. But Austrian architects have also exhibited
exceptional skill in manipulating and re-using elements from the past, engaging, in the
process, in a sophisticated dialogue with history. In the works of many of the best
Austrian architects, these two tendencies have been combined to yield designs of unusual
power and expressiveness. Often the results have been quite distinctive: the works of
figures like Adolf Loos or Gustav Peichl remain uniquely individual and parochial, even
while they have drawn worldwide attention. And when Austrian architects have followed
wider tendencies, their works nonetheless frequently show original adaptations to culture
and place.
The origins of 20th-century Austrian architecture stem in great part from Otto Wagner.
In his roles as practitioner, revolutionary, and teacher, Wagner inaugurated the headlong
search for the new. His call for an architecture suited to “modern life” and “new materials
and the demands of the present” proved decisive in shaping the distinctive look of the
Viennese Moderne at the beginning of the century. Yet Wagner, like many of those who came
after him, never fully abandoned the past; even his most spare works are redolent of
Austria’s rich building history, especially its legacy from the Renaissance and the
Baroque. Early on, Wagner developed a new form language that mixed freely the
curvilinear lines of the Art Nouveau (Jugendstil) with classical features, compositional
strategies, and planning. By 1904, however, he had begun to pursue a more rectilinear,
abstract style that brought together elements of the old and new. The resulting fusion of
the classical and the modern characterized his most famous works, including the Postal
Savings Bank (1904–05) and the Church am Steinhof (1902–07).
Wagner’s many protégés and followers, although often tracing their own special paths,
continued to investigate the possibilities of innovation and historical revivalism. Joseph
Maria Olbrich, who worked in Wagner’s atelier around the turn of the century, sought a
Entries A–F 165
new architectonic ideal in the florid lines and patterning of the Jugendstil. But Olbrich
was simultaneously drawn to archaic, Asian, and Near Eastern motifs, resulting in a
discernible note of exoticism in his designs, a tendency that has reappeared in the works
of many later Austrian architects. Josef Hoffmann, another of the architects who was
influenced by Wagner, sought to foster a new idiom from the language of rectilinear
geometry: the Quatrats til—the square style—that Hoffmann pioneered along with the graphic artist
and designer Koloman Moser, became the most widely admired—and imitated—images
of early Austrian modernism. Yet Hoffmann, after his brief flirtation with a geometric
purism, returned to employing elements from former times, experimenting at various
times with the Biedermeier, Baroque, Rococo, folk art, and Anglo-American traditions.
Many of Wagner’s former students from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, among
them Hubert Gessner, Franz Gesser, Karl Ehn, and Rudolf Perco, adopted this same
approach in the 1920s and 1930s, combining features of Wagner’s modernized classicism
and other historical imagery.
A parallel, but equally important strain of Viennese modernism is descended from
Adolf Loos. During the early years of the 20th century, Loos formulated an alternative
vision of modern architecture based on his own idiosyncratic ideas of culture and form.
He rejected the Jugendstil as contrived and inappropriate, calling instead for an
architecture that would reflect honestly the inherent modernity he found in contemporary
urban life. This approach led Loos toward a new architecture of complexity and pluralism
most brilliantly expressed in his Goldman and Salatsch store on the Michaelerplatz in
Vienna (1910–11). Loos’s renunciation of the notion of a universal modern style was also
embraced by a number of Vienna’s younger generation of modernists, most notably
Oskar Strnad and Josef Frank, who in the years prior to 1914 developed their own
progressive critique of the Viennese Moderne.
The implications of Loos’s ideas extended beyond traditional concepts of style.
Inspired by the linguistic and ethical writings of his friend Karl Kraus, Loos sought to
establish a modern architectonic language that would articulate his notions of propriety
and civility without sacrificing older conventions of material comfort. In his Goldman
and Salatsch Building, Loos also began to investigate a new spatial idea, the Raumplan, or
spaceplan, a system of interlocking rooms on multiple levels. In a series of later designs,
most notably the Moeller (1927–28) and Müller (1929–30) houses, he raised the Raumplan
concept to a high art, creating some of the most extraordinary spatial assemblages of the
modern era. Both of these notions—the concept of linguistic “appropriateness” and the
idea of intricate spatial play—exerted a strong influence on Loos’s followers and later
Austrian architects, including the philosopher-builder Ludwig Wittgenstein, Josef Frank,
and Hermann Czech.
World War I marked a caesura in the development of Austrian architecture. After
1918 the prosperity and stability of the prewar years gave way to a long period of
economic hardship and political uncertainty that ended only after 1945. Vienna, which
before the war had been the capital of an empire of 60 million inhabitants, was reduced to
a provincial city in a country of barely 6 million. The centerpiece of Austrian building
activity in the interwar years was a massive program launched by the Social Democratic
municipal government in Vienna to combat the city’s severe postwar housing shortage. In
contrast to similar housing programs in Germany and the Netherlands, however, the
Viennese experimented little with new construction technologies, relying instead on
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 166
conventional, labor-intensive building practices as a means of ensuring employment for
as many workers as possible.
With few exceptions, the Austrians of the interwar years also showed a decided
aversion to the modernist purism of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus. The vast majority of
the Vienna communal housing projects were the work of the former Wagner students,
and their buildings, like Karl Ehn’s massive Karl-Marx-Hof (1926–30), reflected older,
traditional ideas of massing and composition. Even those architects like Ernst Lichtblau
and Walter Sobotka who subscribed to the general ideas of the Modern movement
exhibited a notable tendency in the 1920s and early 1930s to introduce historical forms
and complex patterning into their designs.
Among the few Austrians of the interwar period who conformed to tenets of the socalled
International Style were Ernst Plischke, Lois Welzenbacher, and Richard Neutra.
Plischke’s Liesing Labor Office in Vienna (1930–32) and Welzenbacher’s Turmhotel
Seeber in Solbad Hall (1930–31) both brilliantly encapsulated the best features of the
functionalist idiom, but neither architect was able to realize more than a handful of
works. Far more successful was the young Neutra, who immigrated to the United States
in the early 1920s and settled in California where he practiced for a time with Rudolph
M. Schindler, another Viennese-trained modernist. Together with Frederick Kiesler, who
moved to New York in the mid-1920s, the three architects would have a decisive impact
on American modern design, but their work exerted little, if any, influence in their
homeland.
The period between 1933 and 1938 formed the second major break in the history of
20th-century Austrian architecture. With the rise of the conservative Austrian clerical
party and the later German annexation of Austria, many of the country’s leading
architects were forced to flee. Josef Frank moved to Sweden and Clemens Holzmeister to
Turkey, but the majority of Austrian exiles—among them Felix Augenfeld, Victor Gruen,
Ernst Lichtblau, and Bernard Rudofsky—sought refuge in the United States. Very few of
these exiles returned to Austria after 1945, depriving the country of some of its best
architectural talent.
The arduous task of rebuilding Austria after World War II fell to a small group of
mostly middle-aged architects who had been trained in the 1920s and 1930s. The most
significant of these figures were Holzmeister, who promoted an older, traditional, and
popular approach; Oswald Haerdtl, Hoffmann’s former assistant, whose buildings and
interiors carried on the tradition of a distinctive Austrian modernism; and Roland Rainer,
who developed a rational, decidedly antihistoricist architectural idiom. But it was a new
generation, most of whom had been students of Holzmeister at the Vienna Academy of
Fine Arts, including Friedrich Achleitner, Johann Gsteu, Hans Hollein, Wilhelm
Holzbauer, Friedrich Kurrent, Josef Lackner, Gustav Peichl, Anton Schweighofer, and
Johannes Spalt, who took the lead in shaping the direction of Austrian architecture after
the late 1950s. Gsteu, Holzbauer, Peichl, and the others sought to reestablish the links
with Austria’s prewar modernist tradition while at the same time responding to
contemporary trends abroad. The result was a more resolutely modernist and
constructivist architecture, one that for the first time began to explore fully the
possibilities of the newest construction methods. Also important in this development was
Karl Schwanzer, whose Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts (1959–62) and Philips Building
(1962–64) were widely admired.
Entries A–F 167
In the midst of this fascination with technology and tectonics, Hollein, in his Retti
Candle Shop (1964–65) and subsequent works, demonstrated a renewed interest in
aestheticism, one that pointed firmly in the direction of Postmodernism. Like Holzmeister
before him, Hollein probed the potential of symbolism and representation, articulated not
only in formal terms, but also through materials and space. Other Austrian architects of
the 1960s, among them Haus-Rucker-Co (Laurids Ortner, Manfred Ortner, and Günther
Zamp), Co-op Himmelb(l)au (Wolf D.Prix and Helmut Swiczinsky), and Missing Link
(Adolf Krischanitz, Angela Heiterer, and Otto Kapfinger), rebelled against the avantgarde
of the previous decade, seeking to substitute a new architecture—visionary,
dynamic, and socially responsive—in the place of the dominant modernist
monumentalism of the time.
By the 1970s, the works of both the old and the new avantgarde began to attract
worldwide attention. Many of the old avant-garde—including Gsteu, Hollein, Kurrent,
Lackner, Peichl, and Spalt—received academic appointments, and both groups found
increasing numbers of commissions in Austria and abroad. Their position was challenged
in the mid-1970s by two new movements that arose outside Vienna, the Vorarlberger
Baukünstler (Vorarlberg architect-builders) and the Grazer Schule (Graz School). The
former, concentrated in Bregenz near the border with Switzerland and represented by
Carlo Baumschlager, Dietmar Eberle, Roland Gnaiger, and Hermann Kaufmann, stressed
structural refinement and clear tectonic expression; the Graz School, led by Günther
Domenig, Volker Giencke, and Klaus Kada, took an almost diametrically opposite
approach, emphasizing the organic and expressive aspects of building.
The designs of the Vorarlberger Baukünstler, in spite of their use of regional, Alpine
elements, followed the broader development of late modernism. The work of the Graz
School, on the other hand, suggested a much more radical reinterpretation of 20th-century
architecture, at once nervous, irrational, complex, and sometimes even disturbing. Forged
at a moment when the faith in modernism had been broken, the architects of the Graz
School and their counterparts in Vienna, including Coop Himmelb(l)au and Helmut
Richter, challenged conventional notions of functionality, compositional form, and spatial
enclosure. Domenig’s Zentralsparkasse branch bank in the Favoriten section of Vienna
(1975–79), perhaps the most significant example of the early phase of the Graz School,
proffered a trembling assemblage of forms, evoking allusions to biomorphism. The more
recent works of Giencke, Kada, and the others evince this same interest in visual
dynamism, but add to it a greater formal and geometric complexity. Coop
Himmelb(l)au’s Falkenstrasse Roof Construction Project in Vienna (1983–88), among
the most celebrated Austrian designs of the last two decades, introduced not only a potent
construction-based aesthetic, but also a novel kind of space that is both challenging and
inspiring.
Austria in the 1990s presented an unusually rich and diverse architectural scene. At
one extreme were the buildings of Rob Krier, Heinz Tesar, and Hans Hollein, which
sought to reintroduce historical concepts and forms into the contemporary discourse
about urbanism and place. Hollein’s Haas House in Vienna (1985–90), among the most
controversial buildings of the era, demonstrated the long-standing Austrian attitude
toward combining and blending varied elements of the past and present. Hermann Czech
and Gustav Peichl, by contrast, made more specific allusions to the past, drawing in
particular from the early Austrian Moderne. Others, like Wilhelm Holzbauer, Adolf Krischanitz,
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 168
and Boris Podrecca, worked more or less within the codes of late modernism, albeit also
with occasional backward glances. Younger architects, such as Florian Riegler and Roger
Riewe, designers of the Graz Airport (1992–94), sought to frame a new austerity within
the wrappings of technology. At the same time, Ortner & Ortner, Coop Himmelb(l)au,
Völker Giencke, Klaus Kada, Helmut Richter, and their followers continued to challenge
the old orthodoxies, even while their buildings had become firmly positioned within the
mainstream.
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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