Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2017 i Architecture Australia

Knutsford Stage 1 is the first part of a four-stage multiple residential project by Spaceagency Architects on Fremantle’s eastern fringe. Located on former industrial land, it has been constructed across the back of a large, petrified sand dune. The site cascades toward the ageing, ad hoc but lively remnants of this industrial precinct, where rambling antique stores, recycling timber yards, lunch bars and fabrication shops coexist in a wonderfully scruffy mix. The northern edge of the site abuts older, low-rise worker’s cottages, while to the south lies a disused limestone quarry. The project was won as part of a design-led bid involving a consortium developer client and was rightly awarded, by the Australian Institute of Architects, both the national Frederick Romberg Award for Residential Architecture and the Western Australian state Harold…

In 1972 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour immortalized the Long Island Duck in their seminal work Learning from Las Vegas. A stinging rebuke to orthodox modernism and elite architectural tastes, the book was a manifesto for greater use of iconography in architecture – for buildings that “speak.” If the demolition of Pruitt–Igoe signed modernism’s death certificate, Learning from Las Vegas rose from its rubble like a phoenix from the ashes, pointing countless “anxious modernists” across the globe in a new direction. But it wasn’t Learning from Las Vegas that had the greatest impact on the architectural work of Brisbane architect Don Watson – perhaps the reason why “fuck a duck!” is his catchphrase of choice. It was Venturi’s earlier Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) that struck a chord. “I like the…

Despite the emphasis on the revered architect’s name in its title, the exhibition Glenn Murcutt: Architecture of Faith at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia achieves a rare feat for museum exhibitions of architecture in giving as much prominence to the clients and the building users as it does to the designer’s vision. I think this is to be applauded. In one room, in a recorded interview, Murcutt explains his approach to the design for the Australian Islamic Centre – a mosque currently being completed in Newport, one of Melbourne’s inner-western suburbs. He was approached to be involved because his participation in the Aga Khan Award for Architecture as a judge demonstrated that he harboured no disdain for such a project, or indeed for Islam. Oh, what have we come to that such things…

1985–1995   The practice was consolidated over the next ten-year period, with more public housing and the first major public commission – the Carlton Baths and Community Centre in 1986. At this time we began a decade of small-scale urban interventions at the University of Melbourne Parkville campus, which subsequently led to the RMIT Urban Spaces project. The next big public commission came in 1995 with the conservatory in the Ballarat Botanical Gardens. —— Peter Elliott When working with Peter Elliott, you know that you are in good hands, very good hands. It’s like being in safe waters, navigated by a deep understanding of architectural invention and convention, and with a thoroughly versed critical eye that lands astutely on key issues. He can be forensic in his analyses and is straightforward in calling things as he…

Tornhuset is an extension to the World Maritime University, housed since 1983 in a harbour administration building from 1910 in Malmö, southern Sweden. It was the subject of a three-stage competition won by the Australian/Danish team of Terroir and Kim Utzon Architecture in 2011. Finished four years later, it is now one of the most interesting and provoking interventions in the city, standing at the boundary of the old urban centre and the harbour, which has been heavily developed and gentrified during the last decade. Conceptually intended to mirror the 2,000-square-metre original L-shaped plan of the existing building by Swedish architect Harald Boklund, Tornhuset adds another 3,000 square metres – comprising administration spaces, teaching rooms, a lecture hall and a canteen – while creating a covered atrium between the two volumes.…

The making and remaking of cities inevitably entails difficult and uncomfortable exchanges when surrendering the past to make way for the future. In Sydney, the revamping of the Darling Harbour precinct brought about the demolition of the former Exhibition Centre designed by Philip Cox Richardson Taylor and the Convention Centre by John Andrews, clearing their sites for larger versions of the same building types. Despite the objections raised by the original architects, by the Australian Institute of Architects and by some in the wider community, political and commercial drivers ensured that the remaking of the Exhibition and Convention Centres should proceed as the centrepiece of a strategy to re-energize the whole of Darling Harbour, from Barangaroo through Cockle Bay and Tumbalong Park to the Darling Square project. The extent and rapidity of change…

The cover of this handsomely produced book shows the wooden, box-like facade of a house emerging from a ferny landscape – peering watchfully, almost like a Ned Kelly helmet, from the vibrant fronds. The image suggests remoteness and stillness, self-containment and repose. Later in the book, the story of this particular house is told in one of the twenty-eight case studies, including its emergence from the devastation of the 2009 fires that tore through this area and neighbouring Marysville in Victoria, and the way that that event and its enduring potent threat shaped the architecture’s engagement with this particular site. The ambivalence of the relationship between house and landscape and, indeed, the ambiguity inherent in the term “landscape” is a theme throughout the book and each house featured offers a particular expression of…

In 1982, Brisbane hosted the Commonwealth Games. The effects of preparing the city for the competition were transformative and long-lasting. Now the south-east Queensland region is again transforming itself, this time to accommodate the 2018 XXI Commonwealth Games. While the majority of events will take place in the host city of the Gold Coast, track cycling will be held in a major new building at the Sleeman Sports Complex, in the southern Brisbane suburb of Chandler. The Sleeman Sports Complex is a gathering of several facilities built for the 1982 games’ swimming, gymnastics and cycling events. The newly completed Anna Meares Velodrome by Cox Architecture is an important building that not only anchors and invigorates the southern precinct of the Sleeman Complex for the 2018 event, but is also conceived to have wider effects in the community during the decades ahead. In…

G. W. Pestorius: Eblin Drive and Beyond is a very personal elegy by David Pestorius to his father, the architect Geoffrey Pestorius, and to the house that Geoffrey designed for his brother-in-law Robert Sweeney in 1965. Published by Verlag für moderne Kunst in Vienna, it is exquisitely designed by coeditor Leni Hoffmann and contains essays by coeditor David Pestorius, Jonathan Kopinski and Andrew Wilson. An early photograph of the house by Gabriel Poole appears on the cover against an embossed design replicating, at a different scale, the hit-and-miss brickwork wall in the foreground of the photograph, the perforations of which have the same proportions as the dark, recessed voids in the two-storey brick house behind. A similar level of attention is given to every design detail of this beautiful book. Nevertheless, it poses a problem for…

1975–1985   The foundation of the practice commenced with a number of small-scale commissions that came directly from my student activities with public housing, community and local government organizations in Fitzroy and Collingwood. At the same time I had a three-year design tutorship at the University of Melbourne. Early projects included children’s playgrounds, childcare centres, public housing and a few private houses. All of these projects were located in inner-urban Melbourne. The first large commission was the Knox Schlapp Public Housing project in Port Melbourne, with thirty seven units in a perimeter block format. —— Peter Elliott We need a few more subversive guerrillas to maintain and accommodate a higher level of creativity and grit. We are overrun by a bureaucratic condition more intent on prescription and inflexible rules than nurturing creative invention…

2005–2015+   Public commissions continued with large-scale freeway architecture and bridge designs, including Deer Park Bypass, following onto the M80 Ring Road upgrade, and the William Buckley pedestrian and road bridges across the Barwon River. Education projects covered a wide range of types and scales, including the Melbourne Grammar School Memorial Hall, the Visual Arts Centre for Latrobe University in Bendigo and the School of Performing Arts and Creative Education for Geelong Grammar School. The RMIT University Urban Spaces project continued into its second decade with the completion of University Lawn and Building 11 precincts, along with A’Beckett Temporary Urban Square, rooftop extensions to Building 9 and the refurbishment of the Francis Ormond Building. —— Peter Elliott Peter Elliott’s practice is like no other in Australia. He deftly combines architecture and urban design with modesty and unassuming…