Innehållsförteckning för March 2020 från Architecture Australia

This summer, we shared a sense of despair at the frightening images emerging from bushfire-impacted communities across Australia, from rainforest regions in Queensland not known to have burned before, to historic townships in New South Wales’ Southern Highlands and south coast holiday destinations, to Victoria’s Gippsland and Alpine regions. At the time of writing, bushfires have destroyed more than six thousand buildings, including two thousand homes, and 28 people have died. An almost inconceivable one billion native animals have been killed and more than 10 million hectares has been razed. The events of this summer were covered in international media and, in our national response, we have the chance to show leadership. But this leadership must be rolled out in a coordinated way and involve government, local communities and all…

Our voices: Indigeneity and architecture begins as its title signals, calling to its reader in chapter-long verses that share research findings, practice observations, lived experiences and creative modes at the confluence of Indigeneity and architecture. Published by Oro Editions in 2018 and co-edited by Rebecca Kiddle (Ngati Porou and Nga Puhi), luugigyoo patrick stewart (Killerwhale House of Daaxan of the Nisga’a Village of Gingolx) and Kevin O’Brien (Kaurareg and Meriam peoples of the Torres Strait Islands), Our voices is an extensive survey comprising twenty-five chapters contributed by Indigenous thinkers working as academics, activists, architects, artists, conservationists, designers, educators, policy analysts, urban planners and researchers invested in Indigenous architectures. The book opens with a tribute to Maori architect Rewi Thompson (Ngati Porou, Ngati Raukawa), authored by Deidre Brown (Nga Puhi, Nga…

The new Rail Operations Centre in Alexandria, in Sydney’s south, recently completed by Jacobs and Smart Design Studio, centralizes rail operations from multiple Sydney locations in one room, making incident responses more efficient, collaborative and personal. The ROC, as the building is known, recalls a little bygone grandeur to make a public architecture of rail infrastructure. For an architect, the first observation of ROC’s huge red-brick arches and tie beams, and its geometric monumental singularity, might echo Louis Kahn’s National Assembly Building of Bangladesh, with its geometric shapes, or the deep offset facades of his Exeter Library. But for the rest, it reflects the architecture of infrastructure: bridges, viaducts and tunnels from Cronulla to Lithgow in brick from the State Brickworks. These touchstones are made familiar by daily commutes, walks…

With Architecture Studio and its predecessor, Donaldson and Warn, have built up an extensive portfolio of educational projects at all levels, from preschool to tertiary. Of the primary and secondary schools the studio has worked with, two are historic private schools and two are new public schools. But densification in the face of an increasing student population is the overarching theme. There could be a monograph on this portfolio, but a focus on the architects’ latest building at Christ Church Grammar School, currently educating more than 1,500 boys in the Perth suburb of Claremont, gives insights into their general approach. For more than 20 years, the masterplanning of this school has exercised the studio’s architectural intelligence. The practice has tackled traffic congestion at the school gates and carved out a…

In June 2017, I was invited by Western Sydney-based Urban Theatre Projects (UTP) to design a pavilion that would enable a deep listening experience. The purpose of the public art project was to connect visitors to concepts of Indigeneity through sound and form via a series of commissioned sound pieces comprising music, poetry and language. The commission required a “room for sound” as well as a construction methodology that would ensure it could be easily assembled, disassembled and relocated around Australia with minimum labour and cost. Country The intent of Blak Box is to travel throughout many Countries on this continent. When Indigenous people in Australia speak of Country, it is understood in a special way. This is not limited to spiritual and sustainable relationships but, in the context of…

The old manufacturing areas of southern Sydney are intriguing pieces of inner urban fabric. Emphatically industrial in urban scale and character, their proximity to the city centre has made them an obvious target for the city’s recent growth. The infiltration of parts of this industrial grain with new housing, public spaces and institutions has seen it acquire a charged ambivalence, with the coexistence of contrasting types and uses forming a very particular, and under-appreciated, transitional urban character. Alexandria was selected by Judith Neilson as the site for the Dangrove Art Storage Facility, designed by Tzannes. The label “art storage facility” strains ironic credulity as soon one begins to confront the cultural ambition of both the institution and its architecture. The facility is extraordinary in every sense: 10,500 square metres of…

In the context of greenhouse gas emissions and our climate emergency, the building industry has much to answer for. Although good design has always been about responding responsibly to climate, what is happening to our world will profoundly affect what and where we build in the future. This is especially pertinent in light of Australia’s recent horrific bushfire season. It is heartening to see architects taking a stance against regulatory failure and committing to initiatives such as Architects Declare, which has led to more than 100 practices in Australia (at the time of printing) committing to becoming carbon neutral by the end of 2020. Of course, how this translates into a mass reconsideration of the way our built environment responds to our planet’s complex environmental challenges is the next question.…

When I graduated in the late 1990s as the first Indigenous woman from Queensland to complete an architecture degree, the pace of Indigenous recognition in Australia seemed slow in comparison to international shifts. Renzo Piano Building Workshop had recently completed the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Center in New Caledonia (1998) and, at the time, Indigeneity in architecture was only contemplated as a fringe experience, riding a new wave of commodifying difference in cultural tourism. After Tjibaou, the shift from fringe to hyper-scaled centre began, moving us towards an inclusive future in which Indigenous rights in land and design were made possible. In Australia, Brambuk – the National Park and Cultural Centre in Victoria’s Grampians National Park – was struggling to meet the needs of state visitors on shoestring funding, but there…

1. luugigyoo patrick stewart, “Architecture as Indigenous voice soul and spirit,” in Rebecca Kiddle, luugigyoo patrick stewart and Kevin O’Brien, Our voices: Indigeneity and architecture (Novato: Oro Editions, 2018), 30–43. 2. Samuel Medina, “The cold rush: Designers begin looking to the Arctic,” Metropolis, 22 December 2014, metropolismag.com/architecture/ cold-rush-designers-look-arctic (accessed 3 January 2020). 3. According to a report prepared by the Architects’ Association of New Brunswick, there were 9,556 architects registered in Canada in 2014. Report provided to the author by the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada. 4. Unceded: Voices of the Land showcased 18 Indigenous architects from Turtle Island, representing Canada and the USA at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. The team was as follows: Douglas Cardinal (presenter); David Fortin and Gerald McMaster (co-curators); Harriet Burdett-Moulton, Chris Cornelius, Jake Chakasim,…

Richard Goodwin’s recent book, God in reverse: Art, architecture and consciousness (Uro Publications, 2018), is about Sydney in a way that is similar to how Fellini’s film Roma was about Rome. The final chapter is an account of driving Wolf Prix, co-founder and CEO of Coop Himmelblau, around Sydney in Goodwin’s car (an event that actually did occur) that cleverly morphs into an imagined remaking of that Fellini film. Both God in reverse and Roma are semi-autobiographical, episodic, radically open in structure, inherently political, philosophical, and attentive across scales, from the intimate to the macrocosmic. In holding up a multifaceted mirror to Sydney, the book might be seen as a call to architecture to respond to the growing global barbarism of our times through the central idea of “the expansion…

As I approached the entrance of Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), I was struck immediately with thoughts about the relationships between Australian art institutions and First Nations peoples and their cultures: broken and exploitative relationships governed by the colonial imperative through 230 years of theft, dispossession and silence. Walking through Sir Roy Grounds’ building towards the garden, a monolithic form, in both stature and structure, immediately confronted my senses. The form appears as an imposing eucalypt, burnt by the wrath of fire – yet resilient and strong to its core, its black and charred skin protecting it from the fury – healing and regenerating from within. The 2019 NGV Architecture Commission, In Absence, is a collaboration between Kokatha and Nukunu artist Yhonnie Scarce and Melbourne-based architecture studio Edition Office.…

Melbourne’s Capitol theatre is one of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin’s most notable buildings. The disciplined exterior of a ten-storey office block hides within it what is surely one of the most compelling rooms in Australia. Nothing outside hints at the extravagant decoration of the theatre within: a vast plaster ceiling of v-shaped boxes housing lights that can be varied in colour and intensity. The copiously repeated prismatic forms extend some way down the theatre walls, especially on either side of the rectangular proscenium arch. Entering the space when it is lit takes your breath away. It’s a crystalline cave. The plaster prisms are ranked around tiered plaster rectangles at the scale of the entire room, higher at the middle of the ceiling, so that the whole is…