Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2017 i Architecture Australia

It’s my first visit to Newcastle in New South Wales and as we drive past the dark hills of carbon around the city, it occurs to me that I have brought with me, if not the proverbial coals, then at least conceptual ones. I’m here to see the Research through Design exhibition from the University of Newcastle’s School of Architecture and Built Environment (UON), the first major public airing of work by the UON Design Practice Based Research Group initiated by recently appointed Head of School SueAnne Ware. This group show of creative projects from fourteen higher-degree candidates and supervisors1 gathers both emergent and established practices in a diverse display of architectural “evidence” and exposé of how they work and think. I’m only months out of a similar exhibition of my own…

The regional city of Orange in New South Wales has long been a culturally progressive centre known for its thriving food, wine and arts scene. It is also home to one of only a handful of Sir John Sulman Medal-winning projects in regional NSW, the Orange City Library and Regional Gallery by Ian Thompson and Colin Still of the NSW Government Architect’s Office. On completion in 1986, the library and art gallery joined the Orange Civic Centre by Lund Hutton Ryan Morton (1976) to establish a civic precinct in central Orange that has now been expanded with the recently completed Orange Regional Museum by Crone Architects. In satisfying programs, stakeholders and budgets, the delivery of public architecture can easily run the risk of the unintended privatization of public land. However, in designing the new museum,…

Only on rare occasions did we get our car washed in one of those hulking suburban machines. My father usually filled the brown bucket with warm suds and one of us kids slopped it along the kerb. When we did go, it seemed like some strange and luxurious ritual and not just a whim or a treat. There was always an ominous stillness before the suburban contraption clunked into life and doused us in white velvet, whirligig brushes spinning and slapping. It was terrifying in its way but private, too, a dark and soapy ritual. There’s a carwash out the back of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), insofar as the NGV Architecture Commission could ever be a carwash. It would be easy to call it a copy, but it’s not –…

It has been something of a tradition of the A. S. Hook Address that it is an opportunity to reflect broadly on matters of architecture and the profession rather than addressing concerns about what architecture itself can be or become. While we like to think we share these concerns, we also hope to present something closer to the bone of our own efforts to practise. From time to time our work has been described as “an architecture of ideas” and yet we have always wondered whether such a thing is really possible. We hope to discuss this theme and to use our work to illustrate the possibility of such an architecture. Questioning To this end I would like to begin with the overarching condition of a genuine questioning along the lines of what Jacques Derrida seemed to allude to in his conversation…

The Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre plays host to an incredible five-metre-wide tapestry created by one of Australia’s greatest living artists, John Olsen. The work, Life Burst , was specially commissioned for Peter Mac and brought to life by the renowned weavers at the Australian Tapestry Workshop. Olsen spent time touring Peter Mac’s research labs and talking to researchers about their work before beginning the piece. He says the work reflects the shapes of the atrium and complements the building’s architectural design by Silver Thomas Hanley, DesignInc and McBride Charles Ryan. “The building itself is expressive of optimism and progress and my aim was to capture this feeling for patients and visitors to the centre to enjoy – up close or from afar.” Antonia Syme is director of…

At the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2014, a group of architects and architectural theorists convened a symposium to discuss design research. Although another biennale has come and gone since then, the effects of that symposium live on in a book, Perspectives on Architectural Design Research, edited by Jules Moloney, Jan Smitheram and Simon Twose. It brings together thirty short, snappy pieces that explore design research in practice and in the academe, under the themes What Matters? Who Cares? And How? Design research is in its middle age: we have successfully navigated the early years when academics felt the need to  define design research and defend its existence, but it is not yet mature enough to have become a clear and agreed on research methodology. This book goes some way toward teasing it out. “What Matters?” takes two tacks – one exploring autobiography,…

“Building close to the ocean demands a strong, durable building material – concrete provides that strength and durability while also having the ability to ‘flow’ and form sculpted structures.” Concrete has been used with artistic flair to create a sculptural dream home in North Bondi, Sydney. Deepwater House by architecture practice Tobias Partners is located right by the ocean and offers spectacular views of Bondi Beach. The design “shows off the beauty of off-form concrete in a soft home abode,” says founding principal Nick Tobias. Nick says he set out to make a building that was “very quiet from the outside,” utilizing concrete to create balance with the natural seascape and neighbouring urban environment. Situated at the high tide level of the Pacific Ocean, the site presents an aggressive, abrasive and corrosive environment. Concrete was selected as…

Worldwide, a wave of temporary pavilions commissioned by art organizations and cultural philanthropists is presenting delightful intersections between art, architecture and urban design. Recent pavilions in Australia, such as those commissioned by the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation in Sydney and by the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in Melbourne, as well as the Naomi Milgrom Foundation’s MPavilion, have followed in the footsteps of a range of international projects. These pavilions provide settings for varied cultural activities, as well as offering spaces for repose and contemplation. While site specific, each also explores ideas that relate to broader social, cultural, technical and ideological contexts.  The third iteration of Melbourne’s MPavilion, designed by Bijoy Jain of Studio Mumbai, was built as a collaboration between Kane Constructions, teams of craftspeople in India and the local community in Melbourne. Located on the edge of Queen Victoria Gardens from…

As a newcomer to Tasmania, exploring its byways and highways in a quest to put down architectural roots, I have found my imagination captured by the roadside architecture of Cumulus Studio. It is enjoyable to experience this firm’s architecture for the first time – a good excuse to linger awhile and eat and drink a little more, before hitting the road again. Willie Smith’s Apple Shed at Grove in the Huon Valley (2013) and Devil’s Corner Cellar Door for Brown Brothers at Apslawn (2015) are at different ends of Tasmania’s east coast – servicing the island’s thriving tourist industry and celebrating its reputation for organic produce, microbrewing and wine. Cumulus Studio was established by Todd Henderson and Peter Walker in 2011 in the midst of a severe economic downturn that persisted in Tasmania…

Exit is a video installation by Diller Scofidio and Renfro (DS+R), Mark Hansen, Laura Kurgan and Ben Rubin, in collaboration with Robert Gerard Pietrusko and Stewart Smith, currently showing at the Sydney Festival. The Voynich manuscript is hand-painted on vellum and carbon-dated to the early fifteenth century. What’s the connection? Voynich, heavily illustrated with watercolour drawings that range from botanical diagrams to nude bathing scenes, is regarded as the world’s most mysterious document. Although intensively studied and considered by most cryptographers to hold genuine linguistic content, it remains anonymous, unsourced and untranslatable – because its language is entirely unknown. Such documents are the defining mark of a Dark Age. In the eighth century, outside the monasteries, they were commonplace. In the future – if Exit’s predictions hold – they’ll be commonplace again. Indeed, the world may become a regular Babel since…

Healthcare facilities are characterized by constraint, required to organize complex systems, services, movements and processes. Disrupting existing models of practice necessitates that we find new ways of responding to old problems. Plenary Health led the project team that delivered this challenging project and asked a bold question: what happens when you invite a healthcare newcomer into your design team? The Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre (VCCC) was delivered by a consortium that included two architectural practices with strong track records in the delivery of healthcare facilities, Silver Thomas Hanley (also responsible for Monash Children’s Hospital, Bendigo Hospital and Box Hill Hospital) and DesignInc (Bio21 Institute, Royal Adelaide Hospital and Royal Women’s Hospital). The newcomer was McBride Charles Ryan (MCR), a firm known for projects that border the spectacular and for whom conventions exist to be…

After sustainability, regionalism is the dominant morality in Australian architectural discourse. Each city, each community, each place is exhorted to find and express its distinctive architectural identity. Architects routinely scour the context and history of a site for patterns, materials and images to weave into the design of any new intervention. And if through incompetence, insensitivity or aesthetic bloody-mindedness the architect somehow doesn’t do this, local planning codes will do it for them, dictating built form, fenestration ratios, roof pitches, material palettes. The underlying premise is that the character of a place should be distinct, and drawn out from the specificities of that particular location on the planet. House in Hamilton is a project that explores and questions this dominant morality, even as it partakes of it. The hybrid offspring of an unusual Japanese–Australian design collaboration, the project is both of its…

Toward the end of the 1970s, Stephen Ashton lived in the Perseverance Hotel in Fitzroy, Melbourne. We would meet in the front bar to roughhouse the recent architectural work the gang of us were involved in. To me, having grown up in a Housing Trust house on the outer edge of a town in South Australia, this was some cool urban situation. It was April 1979 and the Perseverance was everything that Melbourne was. The front bar was gloomy and decrepit with the faded glory of days when we were the national capital. Regulars, old lags who combined detailed knowledge of football tactics with astute lefty rants on what the government should do, livened up the not-much-happened-here ambience. In the autumn afternoon, the sun beamed through the stained glass onto the screen, making it difficult to see…

A drama lies at the heart of architecture: the eternal struggle between utility and beauty. Le Corbusier, the paragon and avatar of modernism in architecture, expressed it as follows: “You work with stone, with wood, with concrete; you make them into houses and palaces; this is construction. Ingenuity is at work. But suddenly you touch my heart, you do me good, I am happy, I say: ‘It is beautiful.’ This is Architecture. Art is present.”1 In Le Corbusier’s formulation, construction, involving ingenuity, is distinguished from architecture, involving art. The architectural dimension of the constructed environment is encountered when the emotions are triggered and an aesthetic experience occurs. But while this aesthetic experience can be distinguished from the satisfaction of the function or purpose of a building, it cannot be separated or rendered…