Built, Unbuilt, and Imagined Sydney Extract (original) (raw)
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Built, Unbuilt and Imagined Sydney
Built, Unbuilt and Imagined Sydney is a humble collection of essays based on built and unbuilt works (residential, commercial, interiors, and so on) of interest in Sydney, inclusive of public art, object or furniture design, key invited or public lectures, studios, current projects in making, competitions, collaborations, exhibitions, installations, and outreach work. The focus is on the innovative and the original not the ordinary and the functional. The purpose of this is to reveal the expanded field of architecture, and that the practice of architecture exceeds the work legally defensible under the title of the architect. The emphasis is placed on practice as an intellectual activity and on contemporary practice of architecture as the meaningful exercise of social, political, and critical knowledge, skills, and mindset in an urban, spatial, and tectonic condition. The book reveals that all or most architects either adopt as their own or have an interest in an(other) field, such as visual art, urbanism and landscape, virtual reality and three dimensional imaging, installation art and lighting design, and so on. The book aims to reveal therefore the multidisciplinary, urban orientations, and fluid forms of practice. The essay format as opposed to a monograph or historical survey on a place or period in Australian architecture is deliberate. The aim is to capture not the formal outcome of the architectural practice but to capture the vitality and intensity of architectural thought behind it all. The collection will pick out the creative DNA of the city, as it represents a snapshot of the intensity that marks the critical and creative culture and enterprise informing the architectural scene in Sydney.
Australian Architecture: The Misty Metropolis
Fabrications, 2020
Since the nineteenth century a physically distant Metropolis has been invoked to determine the validity of Australian architectural projects and their ideas, and the assumption is this Metropolis sends out resolved principles to a provincial culture. This view assumes that actual immigration to Australia equals cultural erasure. It assumes Australia’s architectural culture is infantile or child-like and must accept a continual and necessarily painful education- the pedagogical focus-to animate local architecture. It is frequently asserted that architects whose capacities do not seem adequately recognised in Australia would always fare better in this Metropolis. The Metropolis proves, on closer inspection, to be nebulous and varied in location. Its constituent countries and cultures, usually associated with “age” and cultural power, have warred with each other constantly, and have consistently driven architects from its perceived membership. Its principles are frequently changing and...
Unearthed Golden Nugget: Australia in Modern Architecture since 1900
In his Modern Architecture since 1900 (1982 ff.) William J.R. Curtis attempts to present a "balanced, readable overall view of the development of modern architecture from its beginning until the recent past" and to include the architecture of the non-western world, a subject overlooked by previous histories of modern architecture. Curtis places authenticityat the core of his research and uses it as the criterion to assess the historicity of modern architecture. While the second edition (1987) of Curtis's book appeared with just an addendum, for the third edition (1996) he undertook a full revision, expansion and reorganisation of the content. The new edition, it will be posited, does present a more 'authentic' account of the development of modern architecture in other parts of the world, presenting a comprehensive view of Australian architecture. Compared to the additions and modifications of other post-colonial examples, there is scant difference in Curtis' account of Australian modern architecture between the first (1982) and the third (1996) editions. Even in the third edition (1996) the main reference to Australian modern architecture is confined to the Sydney Opera House as well as a brief commentary of the work of Harry Seidler, Peter Muller, Peter Johnson, Rick Leplastrier and Glenn Murcutt. In the years separating the two editions, regionalism in architecture was debated and framed in different ways by Paul Rudolph, Kenneth Frampton and Curtis, among others. In analysing the absence of Australian architecture as a 'golden' example of regionalism, this paper presents a critical overview of Curtis' understanding of the notion of an ‘authentic’ regionalism.
Practising architecture in Global Sydney: Re-theorising the Architecture of the Global City
2015
Architecture is located at the confluence of international capital flows, urban hierarchies and national discourse, constructed according to the globally oriented agendas of local bureaucrats, against measures of 'the global', including design excellence, competitive processes, and international expertise. Under such perceived conditions of globalisation, academics and policy makers alike have often been preoccupied with defining norms to frame how we understand architectural forms in global cities. As a consequence of reductive understandings, any substantial acknowledgement of the complex relations and interdependencies that shape the process of constructing global architecture is typically negated. Understandably, some researchers have cautioned against accepting and deploying rationalised views of globalness, arguing that urban researchers need to adopt innovative approaches to understand the complexity of the city and its forms (McCann et al., 2013). Assemblage thinking...
The dynamism and mobility of architects in their approach to architectural design practice provides a context that emphasises that architecture, like culture, is not static or rooted in place, but is intricately configured through the dual processes of locality and mobility – both physical and theoretical. The production of architecture in Australia, as in other immigrant-rich societies, provides a case for reinforcing the theory that architectural mobility and travel are integral to the architecture of place. This issues paper sets out to re-examine the contribution of geo-cultural influences upon Australia’s architectural lineage and considers a diverse range of themes across an equally broad timeframe; British colonial transpositions; the dissemination of Modernism in Australia; the latent contribution of mid-twentieth century European émigré architects; and the secreted history of Australia’s Asian architecture. Common to all, however, is the notion of architectural translation as a process of influences transmitted, transposed or adapted to other contexts. It uses Australia as the focus from which to consider how global criticism, ideas and theories have travelled and continue to travel transversely across time and place, from the late-eighteenth century well into the twenty-first. This paper investigates translations through narratives, processes, networks and traces of architectural manifestations and begins to draw lines of influence.
Fabrications, 2018
In May 2015, a new Australian Pavilion was inaugurated at the Giardini dell Biennale in Venice. Designed by Denton Corker Marshall, it has been described as moving beyond the issues of Australian identity that were the concern of its predecessor, designed by the architect Philip Cox and opened in 1988 to mark Australia's bicentenary. This paper revisits the work of the Australia Council's Design Arts Board in the 1980s in promoting Australian architecture through exhibitions, international design journals, and finally the first Australian Venice Biennale pavilion. During this period, a concern with identity preoccupied Australian architecture, manifest in an idiom of exposed steel frames and corrugated iron and a concern with landscape. This view aligned with one of the period's prevailing international orthodoxies in architecture: Kenneth Frampton's concept of "critical regionalism. " Countering this was the position put by the Italian design journal Domus, in a 1985 special issue on Australia, which depicted Australian architecture as contested, fragmentary, and citational-in a word, "postmodern. " While the Design Arts Board's engagement with the international design media could lead to unanticipated outcomes such as Domus's radical view, it is apparent in readings of the 1988 Biennale pavilion design that mostly engagement continued to be on the basis that Australian architecture should proffer images of identity.
Putting Architecture on Show: Two Recent Exhibitions in Victoria, Australia
Fabrications, 2018
The question of how best to represent significant places and buildings within the conventions of the museum and gallery has been a contested one since the nineteenth century. One of the first architecture museums in a modern guise was Alexandre Lenoir's Musee des Monuments Français, established in Paris for a short period from 1795 to 1816. Lenoir collected together historical and recreated architectural fragments, sculptural copies, images, interiors, and monuments in deliberate and didactic arrangements complete with a catalogue and explanations. These strategies have been refined and deployed throughout the twentieth century in the quest to bring the existing outside world inside the walls of a cultural institution. Architecture exhibitions today might include the creation of oneto-one facsimiles of buildings and parts of buildings (often used in the Venice Architecture Biennale for example); scale models and casts (collected in major galleries); or the display of fragments of historical materials that carry meaning and authenticity in a more archaeological mode (like collections of building materials in vitrines). An array of visual media has also been collected and displayed from historical architectural drawings to contemporary architecture's re-evaluation of the design sketch. Then, of course, there are photographs-whether singular large-format images, serial explorations, archival collections, or street reportage. Many exhibitions have combined some or all these tactics to explore and understand aspects of the everyday world, for example made infamous by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour's "Signs of Life" exhibition of 1976, as a by-product of their Yale-based studio programme "Learning from Levittown" which brought together in a startlingly honest way the detritus of the American suburban environment in large cluttered dioramas. Two recent exhibitions in Melbourne and Geelong are evidence of this vital mode of architecture and urban research and communication that can bring, often unruly and real places into the ordered white space of the gallery and museum.