Innehållsförteckning för March 2024 från Architecture Australia

What does it mean to design and build on unceded, First Nations land? This question prompts us to reflect on where we’re at as an industry and to begin the dialogue required to understand whose Country we are on. Examining business-as-usual practices and grounding design processes in Country are important steps in moving towards a more equitable built environment. We are always on someone’s Country, and where we are geographically is where we are culturally. What is material specificity? The stranger is much struck by the handsome appearance given by the profuse use of cedar in the fittings of the Sydney dwellings. — Lieutenant-colonel Godfrey Mundy, 1848 On 22 February 2022, Lismore and the greater Northern Rivers region of New South Wales – Bundjalung Country – experienced the worst flood…

My first thought on seeing ARM Architecture’s Little Malop Street Redevelopment for the Geelong Arts Centre (GAC) is: Have they gone too far this time? The building is wrapped in what appears to be a white billowing curtain, complete with twisted cord detail and oversized tassels, like a frozen circus tent. This flowing, folding, swishing surface is drawn back over a glass curtain wall, inset with a shimmering gateway, and crowned with a golden sawtooth roof. Walls are painted in lavender, peach, pale green and purple. There’s a lot going on. I ought to have been prepared. ARM’s portfolio includes a copy of the Villa Savoye in black, a green and purple cave, a 31-storey portrait of Indigenous elder William Barak, an elevation stretched on the photocopier, and, just across…

(CASE STUDY)Automated Architecture (AUAR) Interpreting designs for manufacturing and construction Automated Architecture (AUAR) is a UK-based technology company using data-driven learning and generative design to build a distributed micro-factory network for sustainable timber housing. The co-founder and chief technology officer, Gilles Retsin, is also an associate professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Guest editors: How is AI used in your practice or products? Gilles Retsin: AUAR’s tech stack comprises a building system based on timber blocks; a robotic cell that assembles the blocks from standard timber materials; and software that generates and evaluates fully functional, costed house designs. The software is an ecosystem of cloud-based apps and services that can be called either in the browser or in standard AEC packages such as Revit and Rhino. AI is…

In its first purpose-built embassy building in the United States (1965–69), Australia was presented through a white prism, demonstrating a mastery of international rationalism. The young federation adopted a “palazzo-like” monumentality – a civic modernism, chisel-clad in Tennessee marble.1National calling provokes self-consciousness. As well as giving Bates Smart its mid-century name, principal designer Osborn McCutcheon, along with Hubert Banahan, also exercised the firm’s capacity to combine technical expertise with “material tactility and fine art.” This competence remains evident in the firm’s second Washington chancery, as do certain of the architect’s mid-century tropes – such as featured furniture designs and commissioned artworks, the “textural celebration of surface,” and the interior use of borrowed landscape.2Evolving continuity is the fundamental strength of Bates Smart. The abstract, totemic bronze emblem designed by Tom Bass…

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a very old idea, but the term AI and the field of AI as it relates to modern programmable digital computing have taken their contemporary forms in the past 70 years.1Today, we interact with AI technologies constantly, as they power our web search engines, enable social media platforms to feed us targeted advertising, and drive our streaming service recommendations. Nonetheless, the release of OpenAI’s open-source AI chatbot ChatGPT in November 2022 signalled a game change because it demonstrated to the wider public a capacity for machines to behave in a “human-like” way. ChatGPT’s arrival also reignited questions and debates that have long preoccupied philosophers and ethicists. For example, if machines can behave like humans, what does this mean for our understanding of moral responsibility? Across numerous…

When the bright colours of the big top float above an otherwise ordinary urban landscape, everyone knows that the circus is in town. Blok Modular’s design for the Brisbane Circus Centre at Hamilton Reach, north of Brisbane, expands on an analogy for a circus tent using shipping containers. The building – an instantly recognizable tall, iconic structure designed to accommodate aerial acrobatics and trapeze – can be pulled apart and placed on the back of a truck for relocation if the need arises. The client, Flipside Circus, asked for a scheme that decoupled the building from the site, which is essential for an arts organization that needs to go wherever the funding flows. Temporary structures for arts and cultural programs go hand-in-hand because of the temporary nature of exhibitions and…

Sydney’s “second city,” Parramatta, occupies the land of the Burramattagal people, a clan of the Dharug. It was colonized in 1788, the same year as the first city. The invaders moved along the harbour to the head of the Parramatta River, where the fertile land was claimed as the site for the colony’s farm. Various artists recorded the early settlement in bucolic watercolour scenes from Mays Hill, the ridge that defined the southern reaches of the Governor’s Domain. The city’s contemporary marauders tend to move along train and metro lines rather than waterways. Over the last two decades, Parramatta, city on the make, has sated itself on the largesse of powerful development sponsors. This has brought with it considerable errors of urban judgement but, also, an undeniable sense of dynamism…

Holocaust museums, by their very existence and content, are not for “sissies.” And particularly in these febrile times, when the millennia-long struggles of the Jewish people are yet again in a ghastly daily news cycle. For these reasons, I approach Kerstin Thompson Architects’ (KTA) recently opened and nationally awarded Melbourne Holocaust Museum (MHM) in Elsternwick apprehensive about the sensitive task of critiquing it. I wonder how the responsibility for such a profound commission weighed upon KTA when the practice won the 2014 competition for the project. Partly self-funded by the Jewish community, which has had its locus in south-east Melbourne since World War II, the MHM absorbs and transforms the 1980s adaptation of a 1918 United Friendly Society Hall and allied site. With an ambitious brief to record testimonials, foster…

The most recent addition to Mount Alexander College, a secondary school on unceded Wurundjeri Country in Naarm’s/ Melbourne’s inner-north, is a five-storey, brick-red beacon that establishes a series of meaningful visual and physical connections with the existing campus, wider suburb, and CBD beyond. Responding to the college’s innovative pedagogical approach and values, the mid-rise, vertical-school building also foregrounds a sense of longevity and stability through its materiality and careful references to context. Designed by Kosloff Architecture in close consultation with the school community and project stakeholders, it provides an impressive range of engaging and adaptable learning and administration spaces, while consistently looking past the edges of its condensed campus. One of the oldest state schools in Victoria, Mount Alexander College sits on the site of Flemington National School, which was…

MPavilion 10 is a very beautiful thing. A basically square plan is formed by six concrete walls: two sets of three, offset so that two entries – from the north and from the south – are formed by parallel pairs of walls. Inside, the pavilion has a floor of random bluestone pavers. The northern half of the space is occupied by a shallow pool, beneath which the bluestone continues, and a discreet channel to drain the water. A central concrete cylinder supports a parasol roof – steel-framed and aluminium-clad – that appears to float above the top of the walls. Ripples in the surface of the water are reflected, shimmering, on the parasol’s underside. The north and south walls each feature a narrow opening that spans their length (a technically…