AA Prize for Unbuilt Ideas 1998 winners revealed

This year’s competition attracted 45 mainly student entries, judged by Virginia Kerridge, Peter Stutchbury, James Weirick, Nikolas Koulouras and Davina Jackson. Despite their perceptions of a generally low standard of aesthetic innovation and cultural analysis, the jury awarded one Commendation and three Jury Mentions along with the Prize. It was also agreed that two other schemes, each strongly supported by one juror as worthy of note, could be published.

AA Prize
Incision-Martine Merrylees, Victoria
With 1:1 model-building and documentation support from many fellow-Deakin students and tutors (too many to list here), Martine Merrylees proposes a three metre-wide, nine metre-high and 100 metre-long art gallery and public artist-in-residence studio between two train tracks at the historic Geelong Railway Station.
This glass-sheathed sliver would be weather-protected by the station’s existing trussed roof and supplemented at the north end by a hydraulic platform providing access for disabled visitors and equipment. As initially conceived, the building was to be fitted with a stack of three ribbons of steel, each divided along its length to form six floor platforms separately waving in a cross-section pattern reminiscent of biorhythms and honeycombs. These platforms would support progress through the building to view artworks visible in the round from both outside and inside.
Because the rippling floors later were seen as impractical, stairs were substituted. Nevertheless, the Prize jury overlooked that hitch to honour the poetics. According to Virginia Kerridge, “it’s an exciting concept … you can see the way a society which supports its creative talent could build something like this … almost as an extension of its street furniture. I like the flux of life going past and being involved with the artist-in-residence”. Peter Stutchbury said: “it does enlighten your imagination. I haven’t got a clear picture, and I prefer to leave it that way, but I can see a beautiful new object which complements the old space to create a new architecture entirely”.

Commendation
La Fenice: Opera House for Venice- Justin Phillips, Victoria
“Achieving something in spite of itself”-as suggested by juror James Weirick-this scheme proposes to reconstruct Venice’s Opera House through a study of ideals, myths and possibilities. Inspired by a 15th century ‘Civil Competition’ suggested by engineer Alvise Conaro, the project occupies a site bounded by narrow canals and connected to the rest of Venice by stone bridges. The building is a circular amphitheatre-“that symbolic space that echoes the larger context of the universe”-contained by a seven storey stone structure formed by “detaching the masses from the whole and rearranging their composition”. The building is punctured by lightwells through all floors, which are interrupted by walk-ramps cantilevered from walls offset from one another. Said Peter Stutchbury: “it’s a beautiful change of place … very gently done”.
Click to see enlarged photo.

Jury Mention
Royal Flying Doctors Base at Tennant Creek-Jane Castle, New South Wales
Judges’ chuckles greeted this entrant’s boxed stack of custom-crafted and wittily hand-written postcards apparently posted off by interstate and foreign visitors to the just-built outback headquarters of the Royal Flying Doctors Service. The postcard images suggest a complex of buildings arranged roughly in the shape of a sextant, while a postcard from bureaucrat ‘Mervyn Peake’ to ‘Senator Natasha Scott-Despoja’ announces that the base is “truly green” and comprises hangars, a control centre, crew accommodation, a restaurant and a museum and visitors centre … “a beautiful series of spaces integrated into the landscape”. Peter Stutchbury noted that “the postcards didn’t communicate a building at all but the letters generated an image of what it would be like”.

Jury Mention
Daintree Viewing Platform-James Fox, Iain Maxwell and Ryan Theodore, Canberra
Proposed by three UniCanberra students for delicate insertion into Queensland’s sensitive Daintree rainforest is this observation structure planned as a student project. The concept was inspired by the aphid-a parasitic beetle that “obtains its food supply by sucking nutrients from green-leaved plants” and has a “solid body thinning down through its legs until it no longer exists”. James Weirick supported this scheme because “I’m seduced by its biomorphic form and a fundamental issue for architects is the natural world as a source of inspiration. What’s missing, however, is a real investigation of the structure”.

Jury Mention
Two Worlds: Bombay-Andrew Ian Maynard, Tasmania

Based on a reading of Bombay, India, as a place of “fractured, chaotic combinations”, this scheme proposes a “social whirlpool” containing 80 various units of housing, a 350-seat cinema, a bazaar and basement car parking, with many interstitial public spaces, including balconies and skycourts. The curvilinear structure, with floors swirling and raking down towards a landscaped central court on the roof of the cinema, is screened from the main street (named Dr Dadabhoy Nowroji Marg) by an intensively fenestrated film set-style wall elevated on a colonnade. This contrast of jumbled rectilinear geometry and assymetrical curves symbolises the “two worlds” (East and West) named in the project title. James Weirick crystallised the jury’s response by noting that “while it’s a serious investigation of architectural issues, it contains a lot of Western aesthetic clichés. Is that assumed to be alright for Bombay?”.

Editor’s Choice
Parasite-Benjamin Duckworth, Tasmania
Only one juror voted for this “clumsy, derivative, overworked- look at the staircase” scheme to clip a non-profit community centre atop the Myer department store in Launceston. However, AA editor Davina Jackson argued that this proposal creatively explores a bold idea with potential to add new aesthetic, cultural and tele-technological overlays to Australian cities. The scheme provides a lecture hall with a liquid crystal display (LCD) screen and ancillary functions within a structure of rubber-coated concrete, blue steel, timber and mirror aluminium. Parts of that frame are wrapped with a skin of LCD panels and transparent membrane-materials capable of flashing computer-controlled images out to the populace.

Last Year’s Winner’s Choice
Mosman Park Residence-Tom Lemann, Western Australia
Immersing himself in sixties-seventies nostalgia despite winces around the judging table, Melbourne juror Nikolas Koulouras, who won last year’s AA Prize, argued for recognition of this third-year UniWA student scheme for suburbia a go-go in Perth. Inspired by Robert Venturi’s 1966 manifesto Complexity and Contradiction, which argued that architectural works should acknowledge and include the character of their often-messy contexts, this concept collages turn-of-the century cottages, Spanish Colonial residences of the 1930s, quasi-Modernist numbers from the 50s and 60s, and a plethora of rooflines.