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O’Connor + Houle have won a competition to marry the Heide Museum of Modern Art with neighbouring Banksia Park in Melbourne. Michael Wright considers the challenges and finalists’ concepts.
The winning entry for the Museum of Modern Art at Heide and Banksia Park Masterplan Design Competition establishes an important and inspirational new precedent for the creative fusion of architecture, landscape architecture and art in Australia.
The restrained and precisely envisioned design by O’Connor + Houle Architecture emerged as a clear winner in the two stage competition process, attracting a field of 42 in the first stage. The other second-stage finalists included David Luck Architecture/Bruce Marshall Architects, Bligh Voller Nield, and Lab Architecture Studio. Initiated jointly by the Museum of Modern Art at Heide (MOMA) and Parks Victoria, the competition was funded by Arts Victoria, Department of Premier and Cabinet. Organised by project managers Berkrey Smith Consulting, the highly detailed brief and clearly-structured process also set a new benchmark for integrated building and landscape procurement.
The competition sought to select a design team to address the proposed expansions to the museum, and also the need to form a closer physical connection with the neighbouring and highly popular Banksia Park. Sited deep in suburban Melbourne at Bulleen on the Yarra River, Heide enjoys a unique and highly accessible position as a cultural institution, close to the recently extended Eastern Freeway and a very large population catchment.
Much has changed around Heide since Sunday and John Reed first established their former homestead, Heide I, as an open house for young artists and radical thinkers in the 1930s. The bush character of the Heidelberg flood plain survives, much as it appeared to the school of artists who found it such an inspiration, but the city-edge landscape of orchards and market gardens has long gone, replaced in its turn by the familiar matrix of large villa lots, cul-de-sacs and supporting infrastructure.
The Reeds added the exceptional Heide II in 1968. Designed by McGlashan and Everist, the award-winning building was conceived as a “gallery to be lived in”. Constructed from Mt Gambier limestone, this building pinwheels out to embrace the river terrace environment in a series of levels, captured views and courtyards. Heide II stands as built testament to the Reeds’ contribution to modernism in Melbourne, and reveals the potential for a studied synthesis of building and landscape.
The Museum of Modern Art at Heide, founded on an independent endowment left by the Reeds, opened in 1981; since then, the Museum’s popularity has continued to grow. In 1993, MOMA added substantial new gallery spaces and visitor facilities, which were executed by Andrew Andersons as a neo-traditional response to the Heide homestead form.
The next phase of MOMA’s development takes the museum into new territory. Picking up where McGlashan and Everist left off, O’Connor + Houle propose an ensemble of spaces that share a similar designed exploration, or blurring of the conventional boundaries between building and landscape. While the planning of McGlashan and Everist’s house/gallery reads as an Australian extrapolation of iconic European projects such as Mies’ unrealised Brick Country House of 1923, the O’Connor + Houle project elevates landscape to a primary element of their parti.
 O’Connor + Houle’s presentation
This takes the scheme beyond the figure and ground limitations of high modernism. These have lingered long and hard in Australian architecture, relegating the landscape to neutral datum status (Murcutt et al) or invoked merely as an image or myth (Cox / Giurgola).
The apparent reluctance of architects in Australia to engage fully with landscape, architecturally, is well represented in the other three finalists. This places them at odds with both the stated intentions of the brief, and the fundamental spatial principles established by the Reeds at Heide. While this strategy may have been intentional, it was unlikely to win the competition. This factor alone sets the winning scheme apart from the others, which, in landscape terms, either did not propose anything other than incidental integration (David Luck/Bruce Marshall), apparent denial (Bligh Voller Nield) or a transportable idea in search of a site (Lab).
 Luck/Marshall’s proposed sculpture walk.
The O’Connor + Houle design, conceived with a creative design team of 12 architects, landscape architects, and interior designers in Stage 1 of the competition, grows out of the specifics of the grounds at MOMA, adeptly reinterpreting existing site typologies, and building on the qualities of the site as a living landscape and complex topographic form. This succeeds not only in blurring architecture and landscape, but also in enabling particular and much-loved Heide elements to be retained, rebuilt, or reconfigured. For a jury of strategic thinkers (none of whom were practicing architects), this is a sensible move.
The resolved design, with Stage 2 input from landscape architects Paterson + Pettus (brought in to bolster the team’s credentials for the non-anonymous second stage), brings the visitor through a controlled arrival sequence starting at a new shared entry with Banksia Park; creating an appropriately processional arrival in the manner of a great country estate.
The new car park is the first in a sequence of visitor spaces created very simply by creasing the ground at a contour to create a long tilted plane, forming a pristine new temenosthat is itself an intriguing work of land art. Cut at the line of the Heide I property boundary, the plane rears up at a low angle, eventually capturing sufficient volume beneath to create a connected series of large gallery spaces at the lower level, as well as a restaurant looking over the park. A new foyer is proposed, with a void to the public spaces below, while the textured landscape of local plants and native grasses continues over as roof.
The proposed car park above, adjacent to the public entry, is a creative reconfiguration of the existing Heide ‘car forest’, a casual space where, according to the design report to the jury, “the parking layout, while regularised, appears to be inconvenienced slightly by the location of trees, suggesting light-heartedly, a change in priority from car to tree”. This light-hearted approach is characteristic of other elements of the design, creating restrained sophistication from simple things.
While the car park may seem of little interest architecturally, the detailed design of these usually banal elements is crucial in the context of a masterplanning competition. Such was the case with O’Connor + Houle’s resolution of the inevitable need for a loading dock, which in this case forms one side of the tilted plane. Suppressing this beneath the formative ‘ha-ha’ created by the tilted plane is of paramount importance to the success of the public spaces of the scheme, which unfold in a series of ramps and promenades architecturalesthat convincingly link buildings and landscape, and MOMA with Banksia Park.
An intriguing element in all of the schemes was the required inclusion of a ‘sculptural landform’, signalling again the strong landscape interest invested in the brief. O’Connor + Houle chose to out-source this design element for Stage 2, engaging Peter Walker & Partners, landscape architects of Cambridge, Massachusetts, to come up with an idea. Producing one of the more lyrical of these elements among the final four schemes, Walker conceived a 14-metre-high ovoid bulge, connected at its apex by a lightweight bridge to the upper level of the car parking roof of the new galleries and public spaces. Successfully integrating park and MOMA circulation, the proposed landform has a real on-site presence. Able to engage visitors to Heide and Banksia Park in new and exciting ways, this element proves that a big pile of soil can be good value, even at the cost of one million dollars from a project budget of six.
David Luck/Bruce Marshall also engaged Peter Walker & Partners to prepare their sculptural landform, with Tract Consultants to work on the second stage. This proved to be a simplification of the architects’ Stage 1 conception, at that point a dense bar code of terraces. Reduced by Peter Walker (in his faxed final design instructions) to “an identifiably singular landform element”, this reads as a tilted series of stone-faced terraces, very much in line with the Earthworks Art thinking in the United States of 30 years ago; the basis of Walker’s work. Typologically, this element is suggestive of little more than 19th century settler grape-terracing in Central Victoria.
 Presentation by David Luck and Bruce Marshall.
Bligh Voller Nield, working from Stage 1 with Hargreaves Associates, landscape architects of San Francisco, took a slightly different tack on this issue; instead distributing the land form as a series of discrete leaf-like objects throughout their scheme. These shapes make intriguing plan-forms, and as three-dimensional ‘objects’ first achieved realisation in the Hargreaves oeuvre at Guadalupe River Park, San Jose, California, conceived in 1988. There, massed together, they form the vital ecological function of reducing peak flood water velocities. Brought to Melbourne and placed without regard for topography or their own inner meaning, these land-form elements stand forlorn, as generic, empty gestures.
 Bligh Voller Nield’s MOMA model.
The landforming proposed by Deep End, in-house landscape architects for Lab Architecture Studio, is by contrast much more sophisticated, proposing a dramatic and complex serial array of subtly attenuated wave-forms, integrated with the proposed expanded car park. Lab’s scheme for Heide, essentially a miniaturisation of the smash-skew planimetries of their extraordinary Federation Square, is very much in sympathy with recent thinking on ‘the new museum’, most notably Daniel Libeskind’s project for the Felix-Nussbaum-Haus, Osnabruck, Germany of 1998 [published in Towards a New Museum, Monacelli Press, New York, 1998]. Essentially a strategy for imploding the urban energy of the European city form, one wonders what this has to do with suburban Melbourne.
The dramatic accompanying landscape by Deep End, however, was obviously out of step with the subtleties of the eclectic but much-loved landscape at Heide. As an ‘idea in search of a site’, this scheme deserves a wider audience. Perhaps the best outcome would be to effect a timely transplant to Melbourne’s new Riverside Park, rescuing the “weak appendage” to Federation Square that this important—but as yet undesigned—new park seems otherwise destined to become.
Considered together, these competition entries display some powerful signals for architecture in Australia at the turning of the millennium. Not least among these is the exhaustion of the imported idea and the success of the local discourse. Most importantly, however, the schemes flag the urgent need for real integration of architecture and ‘landscape’; for this to take us beyond purely formal gestures, flat architecture, and art statements, and for the new, constructed ecologies, like the Deep End landscape and O’Connor + Houle’s scheme, to begin to be built.
Michael Wright is a landscape architect who teaches in the Department of Architecture and Design at RMIT. After this article was commissioned, he established a new practice in Melbourne, Rush Wright and Stutterheim. Cath Stutterheim was a landscape architect on the O’Connor + Houle design team during both stages of the competition
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