ArchitectureAU – Reviews

Porosity: The Architecture of Invagination

Endriana Audisho — Wed, 15 May 2013 23:46:32 +0000

Richard Goodwin has dedicated over thirty years of research to speculating on the boundary between art and architecture and the complex relationship that exists between the two professions. He sees current urban architecture as failing humanity. Cities shape social and political bureaucracies as well as each and every individual, and with this in mind, Goodwin repeatedly states that we must accelerate change: we don’t have time for current architectural styles because they are redundant by the time they evolve. Goodwin sees public space as the oxygen of the city and in Porosity: the Architecture of Invagination (2011) he presents research on an architecture driven by interiority and its direct connection with external public spaces. Goodwin’s porosity paradigm thus views this spatial act, which he calls public art, as a very powerful mechanism for change in the city. Goodwin’s theories become something beyond architecture but something not quite urban planning.

His work is also beyond visionary. As Lebbeus Woods defines it, the term “visionary” generally refers to a person who exists somehow apart from the real world – as in “having visions.” Goodwin doesn’t believe he is practising speculative or visionary architecture. He states: “Some of us just can’t build what we want to but we are serious about what we theorize. I’m an artist architect – I like to make stuff, some of my parasites take six years to go through court. I’m not a paper architect.”

WOOD: Art Design Architecture

Christina Waterson — Mon, 06 May 2013 22:47:00 +0000

WOOD: Art Design Architecture celebrates our long relationship with wood and presents its diverse properties and qualities, along with the multiplicity of ways it can be worked.

The exhibition includes work from twenty-eight Australian exhibitors who either work directly with wood, or with skilled crasfts-people. The pieces relate to each other on several levels to form an overall vision for the exhibition based on figure and form; pushing material limits; craftsmanship and our eternal connection to wood – through place, nature, use and memory.

The oeuvre of Edmond and Corrigan

Rory Hyde — Mon, 06 May 2013 04:00:00 +0000

This time last year, a colleague from MVRDV sent around an email with pictures from a recent trip to Melbourne with the subject line “How much fun can you handle?” It included projects by ARM, Lyons, Elenberg Fraser, Fender Katsalidis, Wood Marsh, Minifie van Schaik, DCM, Lab, John Wardle and, of course, Edmond and Corrigan. With no small amount of pride, I replied to say it “made me feel homesick,” which was greeted with the instant retort from a Dutchman: “It makes me feel sick alright!” Internationally, and even interstate, the work of Melbourne’s architects – in all its brash colours, formal inventiveness, narrative lyricism, explicit references and apparent complexity – is seen as an affront to well-mannered sensibilities. It is mocked as a provincial over-compensation for the “tyranny of distance,” or even feared, like a dangerous virus mutating in a forgotten petri dish.

What the Dutch think of our work over here matters little, but it does highlight how divisive Melbourne’s architectural culture is. This divisiveness is articulated by the practice of Peter Corrigan and Maggie Edmond more than any other. In a career spanning five decades, Edmond and Corrigan have carved out a rich new vein of distinctly Australian architecture, which all the practices mentioned above, and many others, have continued to mine, with prolific results.

Peter Corrigan: Cities of Hope

Ricky Ricardo — Thu, 02 May 2013 03:40:48 +0000

Anyone who has ventured to the colourful northern stretch of Melbourne’s Swanston Street will be familiar with the work of seminal Melbourne architect, set and costume designer Peter Corrigan.

After spending several years studying in RMIT University’s iconic Building 8, designed by Corrigan with Maggie Edmond (together, Edmond and Corrigan), I can say I’ve had quite a lot of time to ponder their style and attitude towards architecture. It is both brave and exuberant, teeming with explicit references and intriguing narratives. Yet sometimes, the abundance of ideas results in confusion rather than clarity.

Kangaroo Point Park’s artwork

Amy Saunders — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 01:00:00 +0000

Every landscape will only improve with time: trees will mature, creating shade, vines will climb, forming a screen, flowers will bloom, filling the air with their sweet scent, and people will experience a space and imbue it with their memories. But in the beginning, before all this happens, our landscapes are often barren.

The Green Room and Afforest are two land art pieces at Kangaroo Point Park in Brisbane by Nicole Voevodin-Cash, a Maroochy land artist, that go a long way towards improving and enriching the area. The Green Room, located at the entry to the park, is a striking, rippling mass of mounded grass intersected by a winding path and stone retaining walls, which seem utterly pristine when compared to the aged, eroded stone cliffs of Kangaroo Point. The scale of the mounds creates a playful experience. Voevodin-Cash describes experiencing her works as akin to being in a room, because they bring people together to play, interact and relax.

Unfold: an exhibition by Phoebe Porter

Christina Waterson — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 02:00:00 +0000

Like a growing family tree the collection of works within Unfold has evolved over time. Their tectonic language is a function of Phoebe Porter’s intimate experience of the material, the making process, the bracelet and necessity of fit and above all comfort. Her knowledge of 1 mm titanium sheet spans ten years. Each bracelet is an expression of geometry that directly reflects the properties of titanium and the precision, accuracy and method needed to work such a strong metal. The strength of titanium makes it hard to work, but means it will retain each bracelet form and finish through the future life of the piece.

Phoebe’s steady hand is needed to guide the tools and custom-adapted machines to cut, fold, file and finish each bracelet. For this family of bracelets she envisioned complex tooling to automate her painstaking process. What was found instead was that simple combinations of hand and hammer meant she could change material thickness and width quickly, allowing her to work directly and test each individual piece without relying on complicated tooling.

Designer Suburbs: Architects and Affordable Homes in Australia

Keith Cottier — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 23:00:00 +0000

Well researched and well illustrated, Designer Suburbs primarily tells the story of the project home in Australia, from its earliest prewar influences until its demise in the 1980s. Major postwar labour and material shortages forced many would-be suburbanites to become owner-builders, who, “looking ahead to the promise of the future,” were easily influenced by the media’s considerable focus during the 1950s on the “ideal home.” The role of the popular press at this time is well documented here, with major newspapers and magazines sponsoring “homes competitions,” and featuring the work of architects such as Walter Bunning and Arthur Baldwinson who were driving a new modernist approach to suburban living.

The 1960s saw a different, wealthier society. The brick cottage was losing its grip in the suburbs, and buying a house “off the hook” was suddenly a possibility. The AVJennings and Sunline Homes were the beginning of a movement that culminated in Lend Lease Homes, Pettit & Sevitt, Merchant Builders, Civic and Habitat: the glory days of the 60s and 70s project home.

Representations of home

Oliver Watts — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 03:00:00 +0000

Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro elevate and reclaim the mundane. In a recent work, Drunken Clarity (2011), broken bottles of beer are painstakingly pieced together by a “weld” of gold and lacquer, like a cloisonné in reverse. Like poets at a suburban barbecue, the artists stand a little apart from everybody else. Where they find beauty and interest they also find points of critique and rupture.

Two installations shown in photographs in a recent survey of the duo’s work, held at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, represent their most serious forays into the architectural and the home: Cordial Home Project (2003) and Not Under My Roof (2008). The Cordial Home Project is a large neat pile of building material made from one demolished suburban cottage requisitioned by Healy and Cordeiro on the proviso they would take the material away. The material was taken to Sydney’s Artspace gallery.

Public Sydney: Drawing the City

David Holm — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 04:00:00 +0000

Since the time of European settlement Sydney’s history of public architecture has been one of rich collaborations and accumulations. Verge and Greenway have built lasting memorable forms off the same raw urban pallet as had the early Colonial architects Mortimer Lewis and James Barnet.

Fast forward to the present and Peter John Cantrill and Philip Thalis represent a fresh and current Sydney collaboration in the disciplined assemblage of their much awaited and intellectual book Public Sydney: Drawing the City (published jointly by the Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales and Content , the journal of the Faculty of Built Environment, University of New South Wales).

Peter Hall Architect: The Phantom of the Opera House

Anne Watson — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Has Peter Hall’s star finally risen? Not quite perhaps, but with the publication of Ken Woolley’s Reviewing the Performance: The Design of the Sydney Opera House in 2010 and now Peter Webber’s biography, momentum is clearly building. Writing of his former friend and colleague with warmth and empathy, Webber explores Hall’s life and career, from his early scholastic successes, to the great promise he showed in the Government Architect’s Branch in the 1950s and 60s – including winning a Sulman Medal at age 34 – to his arguably “wrong turn” as the architect who completed the Sydney Opera House. Private practice in the 70s and 80s and an unsatisfying stint in Canberra as Director of Architecture for the Commonwealth Department of Construction and Housing preceded a personal and professional decline in the mid 90s that ended in Hall’s early death at the age of 64 in May 1995.

It was perhaps no accident that Hall’s demise coincided with the staging of the Unseen Utzon exhibition at the Sydney Opera House, a presentation of Utzon’s final drawings that bitterly reawakened old controversies and hostilities. Webber’s chapter on Hall’s work at the Sydney Opera House is concise, factual and sympathetic, but it is accorded little more weight than other chapters. The inescapable reality is that the Opera House defined everything else Hall did. Undoubtedly the high point of his career, it was also the cause of his subsequent downward spiral. It contributed to the collapse of his first marriage and the destabilisation of his second.

Margaret Olley: Home

Peter Salhani — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 23:31:21 +0000

For Margaret Olley, painting was like breathing,” wrote Sydney artist Ben Quilty in his tribute to the late great painter, published in the catalogue to the Margaret Olley: Home exhibition. Olley was born 1924 in Lismore, in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales. One of Australia’s most revered and prolific painters, hers was a life devoted to art. Of the ninety-plus exhibitions of Olley’s work – spanning a career of more than sixty years – this was the first to focus on her home as the subject of her work.

Olley’s home of more than sixty years was Duxford Street, Paddington, in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. She had bought the rambling property in the 1960s, renting its larger terrace house and the garden rooms for income while she annexed herself between them in the Hat Factory – a former milliner’s workshop. This allowed her the financial security to paint and entertain as she pleased.

Crescent House: Fugitive Structure No. 1

David Neustein — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 01:51:00 +0000

One of the great unsolved mysteries of architecture is precisely how Dr Who manages to conceal his vast TARDIS teleporting spaceship within a 1960s London police box. Attempting to understand the optical illusion created between the tiny police box and the cavernous TARDIS interior, you might draw a small arc of vision intersecting with a broader arc, with the threshold between the two arcs revealing a much larger space than was first perceived.

Not coincidentally, that drawing would also precisely describe the floor plan of Crescent House, a pavilion recently completed by architect Andrew Burns as the inaugural Fugitive Structure at Sydney’s Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation.

Sculpture by the Sea – Bondi

Freya Lombardo — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 05:00:00 +0000

Sculpture by the Sea’s founder David Handley smiles when asked about the relationship between artists, architects and designers, and the exhibition. “There’s definitely an element of professional jostling. A lot of architects think of themselves as artists, and a number of artists appear to want to be architects,” he says.

Each year from mid-October to early November, Sculpture by the Sea transforms the 2.5-kilometre Bondi to Tamarama coastal walk into an outdoor sculpture park enjoyed by half a million visitors. One of its sister events arrives on Cottesloe Beach in Perth each March, and another expands biennially to Aarhus in Denmark. Given the spectacular locations, it’s not surprising that the event attracts a growing number of architects and designers keen to explore the possibilities of site-specific installations.

Valerio Olgiati and the cult of architecture

David Neustein — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 03:00:00 +0000

Two weeks before I was due to interview Valerio Olgiati in Sydney, I received an email from his studio. Set out in the email was a list of interview conditions.

I have interviewed a number of architects, none of whom issued preconditions. The first condition was that I attend Olgiati’s talk for the Australian Institute of Architects’ International Speaker Series. No problem there. Another condition was that I read a couple of attached articles (more on that below). One condition stipulated that I focus my questions “on Valerio and his work/architecture.”

Perth Fringe

Hayley Curnow — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 18:00:00 +0000

Forget your preconceived notions of white fabric stretched heedlessly over metal frames, and picture instead enchanting circus tents bustling with eager audiences and adrenalized performers.

The Fringe World Festival, coordinated by Artrage, brought cabaret, comedy, burlesque, circus, live music and performance art to Perth from 25 January to 24 February 2013. With sixty-three venues, some temporary, others permanent (though repurposed to temporarily host performances), this annual event is progressively redefining the face of performance spaces in the city.