Australian Pavilion – Augmented Australia The Capitol, Canberra, Walter Burley Griffin & Marion Mahony Griffin, (1911-1912) Project 1914 File: <Augmented Australia_Capitol Building>

Image Credit: Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin, The Capitol, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia. Competition (1911-12) Project 1914. Digital Reconstruction by Craig McCormack. Courtesy: felix.

Description

At the heart of their international competition winning scheme for Canberra, the American architects Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin did not place a house of parliament as is the case now in the realised national capital. Instead they placed an archives building to contain the culture of the Australian people. Conceived as a pyramidal ziggurat of decidedly non-Western origin, this temple of culture foreshadowed the desires of the nation to create an inclusive yet global architecture for an ambitious and modern multicultural Australia.

Australian Pavilion – Augmented Australia ANZAC Memorial, Hyde Park, Sydney, Raymond McGrath & Maurice Lambert, Competition entry 1930 File: <Augmented Australia_ANZAC>

Image Credit: Raymond McGrath (Architect), Maurice Lambert (Sculptor), ANZAC Memorial, Hyde Park, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Competition entry 1930. Digital Reconstruction by Tim Mettam, Elliot Lind and Leo Showell. Courtesy: felix. Description

A dramatic and futuristic design for a memorial to commemorate Australians who had fallen in the Great War, Sydney architect Raymond McGrath and sculptor Maurice Lambert’s proposal was for a huge reinforced concrete sculptural form that would shoot a beam of light vertically into the night sky. McGrath had just recently moved to England and would soon become one of England’s most visible champions of modernism, not just for his sleek interior designs for the BBC’s Broadcast House but also his best-selling modernist primer, Twentieth Century Houses (1934).

Australian Pavilion – Augmented Australia Adelaide Boys’ High School, Adelaide, Frederick Romberg. Competition Entry 1939. File: <Augmented Australia_Adelaide-Boys-High-School>

Image Credit: Frederick Romberg. Adelaide Boys’ High School, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia. Competition entry 1939. Digital Reconstruction by Hannah Bartlett-Wynne. Courtesy: felix.

Description

A radical competition proposal for a modern school in Adelaide, like a Swiss gymnazium complete with mini-lecture theatres, this building would have brought the unquestioned stamp of European modernism to South Australia. Not just because it was proposed to be of concrete, but also because of its architect émigré Frederick Romberg, a Chinese-born German national, trained in Zurich under concrete expert Otto Salvisberg. He was part of a new wave of émigré architects, artists and designers who, fleeing Europe, would have a profound effect on postwar Australian culture, its education system and its cities.

Australian Pavilion – Augmented Australia Melbourne Olympic Stadium, Harry Seidler – 1952 Competition Entry File: <Augmented Australia_Melbourne Olympic Stadium>

Image Credit: Harry Seidler, Olympic Stadium, Princes Park, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Competition Entry 1952. Digital Reconstruction by Daniel Giuffre and Paul Sawyer. Courtesy: felix. Description

The first large-scale competition entry for an Australian public building since his arrival in Australia in 1948, émigré architect Harry Seidler’s design for an Olympic stadium in Princes Park for the 1956 Olympic Games was a tour-de-force of structural bravado – a saucer-like dish of spectator seating with its covered section held aloft by a single cigar-shaped prop angled in support of a spray of steel cables held in tension. In the end, the winning entry by Frank Heath was never built as the main stadium was shifted to the existing Melbourne Cricket Ground. However Seidler’s entry, while unpremiated, caught the attention of local Melbourne architects, and the clarity and dynamism of its architectural section was to inspire Kevin Borland, Peter McIntyre, John and Phyllis Murphy’s prize-winning entry later that same year for the Olympic Swimming Stadium.

Australian Pavilion – Augmented Australia Cathedral, Abbey and Benedictine Monastery,Pier Luigi Nervi, Antonio Nervi, Carlo Vannoni and Francesco Vacchini – 1958 File: <Augmented Australia_Nervi Cathedral>

Image Credit: Pier Luigi Nervi, Antonio Nervi, Carlo Vannoni and Francesco Vacchini, Cathedral, Abbey and Benedictine Monastery, 1958, New Norcia, Western Australia, Australia. Digital reconstruction by Matt Delroy-Carr, Keith Reid, Scott Horsburgh. Courtesy: felix.

Description

New Norcia is a tiny and unique Australian town. Firstly for being founded by the Benedictine Order in 1847, and secondly for being the proposed location for a major work by the Italian engineer Pier Luigi Nervi, one of the leading twentieth century designers in reinforced concrete. Nervi and the Order proposed a startling 1500 seat cathedral and adjoining abbey in the small religious community with the thin concrete cathedral roof rising an improbable 50 metres above the surrounding wheat fields. Designed in the era immediately preceding the announcement of the Second Vatican Council, the Cathedral and Abbey were not realized in the post-Council era making it one of, if not the last, great Australian religious building project.

Australian Pavilion – Augmented Australia The Great Hall, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Stuart McIntosh, Competition entry 1962. File: <Augmented Australia_Great Hall>

Image Credit: Stuart McIntosh, The Great Hall, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. Competition entry 1962. Digital Reconstruction by Daniel Giuffre and Paul Sawyer. Courtesy: felix.

Description

A successful competition entry that was never built, Stuart McIntosh’s design for the Great Hall for the University of Queensland was for a transparent pavilion, held aloft by shapely columns supporting a floating parasol roof – it was a project worthy of Italian engineer Pier Luigi Nervi. In many respects this was the first of Queensland’s ‘big’ roofs of the postwar era. McIntosh was a brilliant designer, having made his reputation with a series of ES&A Banks built across Australia in Darwin, Canberra, Melbourne and regional Victoria that all demonstrated a new sculptural dynamism for the post-war public building. Sadly, McIntosh fell out with the university authorities and his project was never built.

Australian Pavilion – Augmented Australia Public Office Buildings, Perth, Western Australia, GW Finn, EH Van Mens & PC Maidment. Competition entry 1961.

File: <Augmented Australia_Perth-Public-Offices>

Image Credit: GW Finn, EH Van Mens & PC Maidment. Public Office Buildings, Perth, Western Australia, Australia. Competition entry 1961. Digital Reconstruction by Matt Delroy-Carr. Courtesy: felix.

Description

Designed by three Western Australian Public Works Department architects as a result of winning an

Australia wide design competition in 1960, the Public Office Buildings were imagined as five rectangular

towers, all slightly different in height, length and position within a strict cardinal geometry engulfing an

entire city block. Forming an abstract Cartesian citadel above the state parliament house, the Offices

elevated the public service to a boundless plateau of northern sunlight, fresh air and pedestrian links all

sitting above a service and parking basement. Supremely rational and utopian, the Offices required the

demolition of significant Colonial and Federation buildings on the site. With the rise of the conservation

movement of the 1960s, only one tower was ever built.

Australian Pavilion – Augmented Australia Australian World Exposition, Melbourne, Robin Boyd (Romberg & Boyd). Project 1965. File: <Augmented Australia_World-Expo>

Image Credit: Robin Boyd (Romberg & Boyd), Australian Wolrd Exposition, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Project 1965. Digital Reconstruction by Tim Mettam, Elliot Lind & Leo Showell. Courtesy: felix.

Description

This design was a ‘flyer’, a proposition as part of a bid to secure the rights to hold a World Exposition in Melbourne in 1976. Robin Boyd who would be involved as exhibits architect for Australian pavilions in Montreal (1967) and Osaka (1970) was invited to produce a hypothetical layout and physical form for the bid. His response: a vast ‘space envelope’, like a plastic bubble, complete with national pavilions, a model ‘Australian suburb’, a miniaturized Australian outback landscape, and sub-Griffin allusions to Canberra in the layout of its streets, as well as at the Expo’s centre, a tall abstracted ‘theme’ structure of the double helix of DNA. Mad but definitely in the spirit of all 20th century exposition architecture before and after.

Australian Pavilion – Augmented Australia State Library of Victoria and Museum of Victoria refurbishment, Melbourne, Edmond and Corrigan with Clive Lucas and McConnel Smith and Johnson. Competition Entry 1985-6. File: <Augmented Australia_State-Library-Vic>

Image Credit: Edmond and Corrigan with Clive Lucas and McConnel Smith and Johnson, State Library of Victoria and Museum of Victoria refurbishment, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Competition entry 1985-6. Digital Reconstruction by Matt Delroy-Carr. Courtesy: felix.

Description

The seminal Australian architects Edmond & Corrigan have, almost single handedly, convinced Australian architects to look inwards at lived experience and ideas for design inspiration rather than outwards to international architectural precedent. Their unbuilt submission for the State Library and Museum of Victoria competition is rich in monumentalized local context, spatial surprises and breathtaking juxtapositions of design elements. The intense localism of this and other projects has inspired a next generation of important Australian architects like Lyon and ARM, attracted worldwide critical acclaim and helped brand Melbourne as an international design centre.

Australian Pavilion – Augmented Australia No.2 Bond Street, John Andrews, 1984-6 File: <Augmented Australia_Bond Street>

Image Credit: John Andrews, No.2 Bond Street, 1984-6, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Digital Reconstruction by Matt Delroy-Carr. Courtesy: felix. Description

A typically bold response by John Andrews to the idea of architecture as a ‘problem to be solved’. In this instance it is the competing interests of heritage and the commercial skyscraper that need to be solved. This design presents a radical vision for the consolidation of a future city. Instead of deferring politely to context, Andrews uses a giant cylindrical lift and service core as a support and prop for a series of connected polygonal floor plates that rise skyward. The heritage-listed buildings are spared below but above a vision of the city as megastructure rules.

Australian Pavilion – Augmented Australia Silver City Museum, Broken Hill, New South Wales, Glenn Murcutt, Project 1987-8. File: <Augmented Australia_Silver-City>

Image Credit: Glenn Murcutt, Silver City Museum, Broken Hill, New South Wales, Australia. Project 1987-8. Digital Reconstruction by Eliza Langham and Ara Casella. Courtesy: felix. Description

A brilliant but unrealized scheme for a museum to commemorate Broken Hill’s mining history, Glenn Murcutt’s design was one of his rare incursions into public building design. What is significant is its exploration of architectural techniques to modify extreme climatic conditions particular to arid regions, especially the use of wind-scoops (or to use the Egyptian term, malqafs) and the floating and tilting of the thinnest of gabled roofs above a 300 metre-long zigzagging linear rammed earth form. This design epitomizes Murcutt’s aim to “necessarily build with a link to both the land and the traditions of building on the land.”