Innehållsförteckning för January 2020 från Architecture Australia

As Australian architects, we have always looked internationally to fill out our learning, whether through overseas study, working abroad, or the pilgrimage that has become a rite of passage for many of us upon graduation. From Robin Boyd’s collaborations with international modernists, to Harry Seidler’s enduring connections with Europe, and Kerry Hill’s with Asia, there is a rich tradition of Australians engaging with architectural culture and practice globally. But these links work both ways. More Australian architects are working globally than ever before and their work is increasingly being recognized. Our most renowned architect, Pritzker Architecture Prize-winner Glenn Murcutt, has led to a burgeoning awareness of Australian design, both locally and farther afield. The Australian Institute of Architects’ 2019 Gold Medallists, Hank Koning and Julie Eizenberg, are known for their…

Rory Hyde: We’re sitting here in the magnificent Royal Academy of Arts in London. How did you end up here as the curator of architecture? Kate Goodwin: I studied architecture at the University of Sydney; I was interested in it as a discipline that crosses so many aspects of life, both creative and practical. In my final year, I went on an exchange to McGill [University] in Montreal, where I got involved with the student gallery. We were playing with architectural ideas and experimenting with different modes of presentation, doing mini exhibitions and installations, which really opened up something for me. I then had an opportunity to come to London and got a job doing architectural programming at the Royal Academy – and sixteen years later, I’m still here. What…

Perth-based architect Nic Brunsdon believes in the capacity of architecture to shape our environment and influence the lives of people who inhabit and experience it. The scale of influence is proportional to the scale of the architecture, both as an intervention in an existing context and in the number of lives that can benefit positively from it. For emerging architects in Australia, it is challenging to realize these ambitions when confronted with contemporary methods of procurement and risk-averse barriers to engagement on larger-scale projects. Since 2011, Brunsdon has been facilitating small-scale interventions in Perth, many of them self-initiated. Spacemarket, co-founded in 2011 with Beth George, activated vacant and undervalued spaces by creating flexible tenancies for emerging and established businesses, while Post Architecture was the design practice that grew from and…

Architecture Australia: This will be the first Australian pavilion to explicitly look beyond Australia’s borders at what’s happening architecturally in Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia. How do you see this internationalist focus shaping your approach to developing the exhibition? Tristan Wong: Our scheme is seeking to embed inclusivity at its core. This strategy aims to foreground Indigenous and community agency as a way of demonstrating the value of meaningful and deep collaboration, to build a conversation around the commonalities that Australia and its near neighbours share. This includes such challenges as climate change, the loss of biodiversity and the unravelling of the colonial experiment, as well as the significance of Indigenous knowledge systems. Looking beyond our shores also speaks to a greater purpose around protection and awareness of the land, people…

In today’s world, distance is collapsing. The battle between the local and the global is something that architects and designers continue to grapple with – in terms of sustainability, local identity, economy structures and architectural competitions. Simultaneously, there is a growing movement against the trend for clients to engage big-name firms from overseas – too often, the results are imposing structures that fail to fit with the local culture and conditions. Of course, exchange works both ways – so what happens when Australians work abroad? This special issue of Architecture Australia aims to describe the outcomes, in many and varied circumstances, of Australian architects working in other places. The last time we focused a whole issue on the export of Australian architecture was September/October 2010. Justine Clark, editor at the…

In one of the gallery spaces of the National Maritime Museum of China there is a small, easily overlooked display of hand-decorated porcelain. It is a grouping of exquisite bowls, plates and tureens made in China in the eighteenth century and destined for grand dining tables in Europe and the USA. In vast banquet halls on the other sides of the world, this armorial tableware would have been laid out in sets comprising hundreds of pieces, the status of the owner written directly onto the perfect, white surface with elaborate gilt crests and insignias. This modest display is an instructive lesson about the contemporaneity of globalism. Twenty-first century globalism undoubtedly has its own special characteristics, but the movement of goods and the exchange of ideas across borders and oceans is…

Minho, a region in the north of Portugal, is a place of rough beauty, where myriad shades of green run up the hills, dotted with watercourses and millennia-old boulders covered in moss and lichen. It’s feral and unpolished, a testament to the unwavering strength of everything that grew there before humankind came along. But humankind did come along, some five hundred thousand years ago, and has sought to dominate this fertile and wild place ever since. It is in Minho, not far from the place where Portugal was founded in 1143, that Australian-born, Bali-based architect Nicholas Burns has recently erected a chapel and a meditation room, the first in a number of commissions he is developing for the same client. “One of the initial intents was that it wasn’t a…

Liam Young Speculative architect and director; Coordinator SCI-Arc Fiction and Entertainment, Los Angeles; Founder of Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today and Unknown Fields How we perceive the cultures and spaces around us is largely determined by mediums of fiction and entertainment. These extraordinary shared languages are the vehicles through which we exchange ideas and engage with our environment. It is impossible to underestimate the importance of media in the production of culture. In film, video games and literature, we have always imagined alternative worlds as a means to understand our own world in new ways. Architects once speculated on the impacts of industrialization and then mass production. Now, the forces that shape our cities and spaces fall, to a large extent, outside the remit of what we traditionally understand as architectural practice.…

A modest townhouse with a celebrity address in Tribeca, New York, uses its facade as a strategy to disrupt heritage. The twisted and undulating wall of corbelled bricks structures the interior program and connects the residence to the street, while formally adding a layer to Tribeca West’s urban story. Ironically named Unhistoric Townhouse, System Architects’ recently completed project will no doubt make rather than distance itself from history. Tribeca West is one of Lower Manhattan’s most vibrant and popular historic neighbourhoods. Unhistoric Townhouse is a residential addition to and renovation of a building that has been transformed several times throughout its history. It began as a single-storey blacksmith’s shop in the nineteenth century, which in the twentieth century became an auto repair shop, which was demolished in 1995 to make…

The opportunities for Australian architecture practices working internationally are huge and more should be tackling it. This is true not only because the best of Australian architecture can stand up to the best in the world, but also because Australians’ way of doing business – our culture – is appreciated everywhere. How does an Australian practice begin to consider working internationally? In order to succeed, it is vital that firms are strategically, organizationally and financially prepared. Strategy Practices must have a clear strategy to which all of the leadership team adheres. This is crucial. Leaders wavering in their commitment to a strategy, especially for international work, is fatal. Clearly define what you stand for and what you are good at; your sense of purpose as a practice. Most markets worth entering…

The recently opened Amanyangyun, a most remarkable project, is one of a chain of Aman resorts designed by Kerry Hill Architects. Most of these projects are distinguished by their exotic or otherwise extraordinary locations. Contrarily, this Aman is situated in a kind of no-man’s-land, forty-five minutes from the centre of Shanghai and forty-five minutes from Shanghai Pudong International Airport, in a flat, unremarkable, mixed industrial and residential landscape. The project – vast, and with a plan reminiscent of the order in the plan of the Forbidden City – has as its point of focus an ancient and giant camphor tree. This and the thousands of other camphor trees in the vicinity provide the reason for the location of the resort and the very different world that has been created. The…

Machiya are the townhouses that historically housed the merchants and artisans who crowded into the densely packed urban quarters that today make up the commercial heart of Japanese cities. Constructed in timber, plaster and tile, typically two storeys high and set on deep but narrow plots, these residences often included a semipublic zone, adjacent to the street, bounded by lattice screens for commercial display or artisanal manufacture. They gave traditional Japanese townscapes their finely wrought, softly porous quality. In the latter half of the twentieth century, this typology was rapidly abandoned. Sometimes erased through disaster or war, but more typically through property economics and changing planning and construction codes, machiya were replaced by multistorey constructions in steel or concrete, often within the tight confines of the original plot to form…

Improv “Improv” seemed like the right title to relay a career arc in which offhand decisions became jumping-off points for opportunities. As improv requires, we have embraced the “yes, and” (as opposed to the “no, but”) philosophy in our practice. The following – adapted from the A. S. Hook Address we delivered at the University of Melbourne on 29 October 2019 – outlines where that philosophy has taken us. We start with our roots, describe what drives our practice and, finally, share some projects. Roots (Hank) I wanted to be an architect since I was three years old. My father was a builder – a hardworking, sometimes stubborn, Dutchman. He tendered for houses designed by architects who gave him sets of blueprints for the purpose. I would pull out my…