Innholdsfortegnelse for April/May 2015 i Architectural Review Asia Pacific

In the words of Barry Bergdoll, in his interview, what kind of architecture ‘would either be a resistance to the status quo or would seek to be the leading edge of some critical activity?’ Bergdoll’s conversation sets a promising tone for the issue, but he also sets out a warning, a call to ‘counteract architecture’s own self-destructive tendencies: to save it from vague defeatism’. This admonition is paralleled by Ben Hewett’s call for clearer communication of how and why architecture has value, in terms that people outside the discipline will understand: ‘The value of communicating simply and effectively is paramount and until we’re able to discuss our value collectively in those terms we need to stop complaining about those not recognising our importance.’ AR138 is distinguished by the presence of…

Realising the Creative Potential of Building Information Modelling (AD Smart Series) Richard Garber Wiley Publishing, 2014 Hardcover • 248pp • $50.00 The dedication at the front of the book best describes its cause and is a curious reflection on the profession: ‘For the people of the world who are suspicious of the digital…’ It is a statement on the architect’s contemporary position, whereby Building Information Modelling (BIM) is proposed to shake up design and delivery processes and to redefine the construction hierarchy. BIM Design: Realising the Creative Potential of Building Information Modelling, a follow-up to the author’s guest-editor slot for Architectural Design’s ‘Closing the Gap’ issue (Volume 79, Issue 2, March/April 2009), is a high calibre collaboration. The effective use of projects illustrates the creative application of BIM – diagrams,…

With precast planks being fixed on-site over the holiday season and heading for an early 2015 completion for the first northern section, the Goods Line in Ultimo, Sydney sits between urban typologies of street and park and is best described as cultural infrastructure. ‘It was a social project before it was a design project,’ comments Sacha Coles of ASPECT Studios, (project lead and landscape architect) who, with CHROFI (design partner and architect), has designed and championed the project. The aim of the Goods Line is to unlock the neighbourhood, becoming a pivotal axis in the creative precinct that is now defined from Pyrmont, through Ultimo to Surry Hills. For a relatively small budget in city terms, this project comes loaded with civic ambition and public purpose – a rarity in…

Should we really hide the medicine in the mashed potatoes – as per the Preview to this issue (in AR138–Margins) – to persuade the discipline to look at its critical and pedagogical approaches? Are facts and information scrupulously concealed, preventing full disclosure in procurement and contractual aspects of the profession? Is contemporary society hell-bent on the immediate shorthand version of events or commentary, rather than advocating for something, anything? Where AR138–Margins sought to locate disciplinary parameters in order to establish the conditions by which problems are made stark, AR139–Disclosure is entirely contrasting. AR138 suggested the profession is marginalised, wallowing in the fact that architecture is driven by the bottom line and that Modernism reigns in marginalia. AR139 has an investigative focus, highlighting why the profession is marginalised by a lack…

Chris Abel Manchester University Press, 2014 Paperback • 416pp • $40.00 Chris Abel is an established author specialising in architectural history, theory and criticism, who first came to international prominence with a series of essays published in Architectural Design in the 1960s and 70s. The essays explored self-organising urban systems and computer-based methods of flexible manufacture. He later immigrated to Australia, sponsored by the late Harry Seidler, returning to the UK just last year. In The Extended Self: Architecture, Memes and Minds, Abel is typically varied and obtusely taxonomical. It is a quirky and inclusive plethora of ideas and cultural referent; indeed to note British tennis player Andy Murray alongside phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty and polymath Michael Polanyi is nothing short of outstanding! However, none of the references or precedents…

As Christchurch recovers from a series of earthquakes that destroyed large parts of the city four years ago, two contrasting forms of closure and disclosure can be seen operating across the city. Closure can be identified when examining how contemporary organisations attempt to control public narratives. Concerned communities and publics act in ways that transcend these restrictive strategies: opening up discussion and action, a process of disclosure. These two modes offer an instructive lesson in how architects might reconsider notions of activism, specifically in relation to critique and education. Closure can be defined as the equivalent of stating ‘nothing to see here’; it is the resolution of something previously contested or controversial. Claiming closure is a political activity that is not necessarily the same thing as achieving it. Disclosure is…

A recent visit to a series of iconic 1950s Modernist houses in Melbourne – as part of the Robin Boyd Foundation’s Open Day and Design Discussion, ‘Sean Godsell’s Favourite Houses’, in November 2014 – revealed a very distinct common attribute: the scale and configurations of the internal spaces were considerably different, and often contradictory, to the external projection. This arguably deliberate disconnect between public image and architectural intention supported the insertion of some very bold architectural propositions into one of Australia’s most socially and aesthetically constrained contexts: the suburbs. Given that our current architectural scene is plagued with political and regulatory constraints, which have been blamed for a lack of architectural progression (noted in Marissa Looby’s ‘The New Radical Pragmatist (On Validation)’ AR130 Pawn), could these issues similarly be overcome…

‘The revolution in architecture brought us freedom but robbed us of taste,’ wrote Roy Simpson of Yuncken Freeman Architects. So what would Simpson think of the addition to his building by Lyons Architecture? Simpson was the architect of the La Trobe University masterplan and of the primary buildings on the Bundoora campus in Victoria in the late 1960s. He died shortly after receiving the Royal Australian Institute of Architects Gold Medal in 1997, but not before penning his opinion on contemporary architecture. Simpson believed ‘that most buildings are required to play a background role in order that the occasional special one can exert its proper emphasis in the group composition’; the special one being a new opera house or an old cathedral. Lyons’ teaching facility makes the most of its…

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In Bernard Tschumi’s Architecture and Disjunction (1994) the relationship between architecture and reality, notably in ‘Fragment 7 Metaphor of seduction – the Mask’ (p090–091) is explored, noting that ‘there is rarely pleasure without seduction, or seduction without illusion. Consider: sometimes you wish to seduce, so you act in the most appropriate way in order to reach your ends. You wear a disguise. Conversely, you may wish to change roles and be seduced: you consent to someone else’s disguise, you accept his or her assumed personality for it gives you pleasure, even if you know that it dissimulates “something else”.’ The artistic practice of Surrealism is architecture’s dark secret. While Expressionism, Futurism, Constructivism and Cubism (Purism) resonate with Modern architecture, Surrealism plays its own part in architectural production and theory from…

Melonie Bayl-Smith is director of Bijl Architecture and adjunct professor at University of Technology, Sydney, where she also conducts design-based research. Alysia Bennett is a doctoral candidate at Monash University and was previously employed at BVN Donovan Hill. Barnaby Bennett is a doctoral candidate at University of Technology, Sydney, examining temporary architecture in the post-quake city. He is the founder and director of the cooperative publishing company Freerange Press. Anthony Burke is professor of architecture and head of school at University of Technology, Sydney and a director at Offshore Studio. John de Manincor is an architect and director at The Architecture Office and senior lecturer at the University of Queensland. Tobias Horrocks is an architect at Fold Theory and occasionally teaches history, theory and design at the University of Melbourne.…

Edited by Neil Spiller and Nic Clear Thames & Hudson, 2014 Hardcover • 352pp • $50.00 There is no doubt what constitutes an architectural education or, more bluntly, what it is that architecture students ‘must learn’, has been widely debated for much of the past fifty years. Apart from the inevitable and varied discourses on design and theory, in more recent times discussions have focused on possible futures of architectural practice, means and modes of representation, globalisation and sustainability, and the agendas and positioning of research in the broader context of architecture and the academy. In Educating Architects, editors Neil Spiller and Nic Clear, respectively chair and head of the Department of Architecture and Landscape at the University of Greenwich, collate a series of essays and writings that in one…

Following the much maligned overuse in the business world of the terms ‘sustainability’ and ‘community’ in the midnoughties, ‘design thinking’ is catching on as a new term and framework for addressing business challenges. In many ways ‘design thinking’ is a logical extension of the call to innovate. Indeed, ‘innovation’ is the current buzzword in business literature. ‘Innovate or die is the stark message for big business. Big companies that fail to innovate risk extinction. That’s the stark truth,’ according to BBC journalist Matthew Wall. The entry of design thinking into the parlance of business is an intriguing evolution of strategic thinking and the latest convergence with the design world. Design thinking, as is understood in architecture, is a process-driven, iterative examination that draws forth and analyses the complexities of creating…

The Haymarket area sits on the south-west fringe of Sydney’s CBD and has been undergoing gradual change over the last thirty years. The City of Sydney and the State Government’s Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority control some of the land and, before 1998 the Darling Harbour Authority, resulting in variable built form and greatly varied height controls. Chinatown’s bustle and tight urban grain is located within the precinct, with Bates Smart’s 180 Elizabeth Street existing site to its west in a mixed urban context of institutional, residential and commercial buildings. Overall, aside from a number of Heritage remnants, the surrounding building stock is of mostly unremarkable quality. The commission for the project was won through a City of Sydney Design Excellence Competition. This process awards bonus floor space if an architectural…

Research is the bedrock of creativity. The investigations into historical, spatial, aesthetic, geographic and sociological contexts taught to students in architecture and design schools are vital for socially responsive and progressive education. And yet, once those students have left university, that kind of research for the sake of intellectual enrichment, for taking the wide view and coming up with new and exciting interpretations and solutions – as opposed to the normal preparatory investigation every architect should undertake for each project – appears to be an endangered, if not a dying, art within the wider architectural profession. There are few practices with the overt commitment to broad-ranging research demonstrated by the likes of OMA. Its multidisciplinary research arm AMO aims to ‘fertilise architecture with intelligence’ from the worlds of fashion, media,…