ARCHITECTURAL WORLD

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 ...

Canada’s architecture has been intricately bound up with the nation’s search for an identity distinct from European and American influences. At the dawn of the 20th Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 390 century, the lingering effects of England’s authority over Canadian political and economic affairs were still keenly felt, and Canadian architecture was held firmly in the thrall of Victorian trends. Although the major external influences on Canada’s architecture originally came from France and Great Britain, movements popular in the United States began to attract notice as Canada directed more interest toward the nation with whom it shared a common geography and a history of recent settlement. Nonetheless, the new century also represented a coming of age for Canada’s architects, as professional associations of architecture and engineering were established to ensure clients of minimum standards of practice and to enable Canadian architects to offer serious competition to British...