Philip Goad

A Bigger Picture: Reframing Australian Architectural History

The written architectural history of Australia is limited: its foundation relies particularly on a series of publications written after the second world war that examined broad trends in Australian architecture, namely Boyd (1947; 1952), Freeland (1968) and Johnson (1980). More recent efforts have examined Australian architecture in focused ways, including Taylor (1990), Howells and Nicholson (eds., 1989) and Apperly, Irving and Reynolds (1989). The earlier publications, mostly stemming from a strongly modernist base, were at pains to demonstrate appropriate international connections and pedigree for Australian architecture, particularly favouring that which could be considered proto-modernist. Later publications, while still making international connections where appropriate, have tended to develop a more regional focus, documenting and demonstrating movements of influence and relevance to the development of architecture within Australia. Such a regional focus is also extended by a multitude of conference, symposium and journal papers that offer close examination of particular areas or aspects of Australias architectural history. The results of such a range of publications is a history that is somewhat piecemeal and uneven in its intensity of focus: much remains under-researched, including indigenous architecture. Correspondingly, broad issues affecting the national or major regions over different eras have received scant attention. The dilemma in contemplating a new history of Australian architecture lies in the need to consider and balance factors both internal and external to its development over the last two hundred years. This paper sets out a rationale for framing a new critical history of Australian architecture, centred on a series of themes that plots a path between the many influences on its development.

‘A chrome yellow blackboard with blue chalk’: New Education and the new architecture: modernism at Koornong School

This paper examines, through one school’s location in Australia, the international reach and nature of the networks associated with New Education; the aims and ideals of Clive and Janet Nield, the main protagonists behind the venture of Koornong School; what transformations they brought to progressive education; and the deliberate assembling of a specially selected teaching staff, governance structure and broad‐based curriculum that was enhanced by an unusual educational setting, the site specifically chosen and buildings specially designed by architects whose ideals aligned with those of their clients and facilitated the pursuit of progressive education. The community of residential and school buildings and a series of designed outdoor spaces in combination with a virtually untouched landscape wilderness played a pivotal role in complementing an educational experience that had been shaped by beliefs in the importance of psychoanalysis to the nurturing of a child’s body and mind.

Invention from War: a circumstantial modernism for Australian architecture

Between 1942 and 1945, Australian architects and engineers within the Allied Works Council and the US Army Corps of Engineers undertook a vast programme of building works to assist the campaign to drive Japanese forces northward through the Southwest Pacific and avoid invasion.1 Huge distances, lack of time and the need to wage a campaign from the air lay behind US General Douglas Macarthur’s phrase that it would be an ‘engineer’s war’. By necessity, buildings such as airfields, hospitals, camps, warehouses, and other structures had to be light weight, constructed quickly, and inevitably dropped in by air as easily handled pre-cut packages. With the lack of American and European softwoods in the Australasian region, an unlikely local material was pressed into war service – unseasoned or ‘green’ Australian hardwood. It was a material choice that would have profound implications for two reasons. First, in the years of conflict, circumstances dictated the unprecedented innovation and experiment in light-weight timber structures. Second, in an echo of Lewis Mumford’s poignant maxim that ‘war is the health of the machine’2, the systematisation and ruthless economy inherent in wartime timber buildings would influence the development and practice of a particular form of modern architecture in Australia in the late 1940s and the 1950s.

Canada: Modern Architectures in History

To date, the Reaktion Books series, “modern architectures in history” has been a refreshing and timely recasting of the account of modernism’s sway over architectural production in the twentieth an...

Reading Images of School Buildings and Spaces: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue on Visual Research in Histories of Progressive Education

School space is not merely a backdrop to the ‘proper’ work of schooling. The classroom or the school itself is much more than a simple container in which learning and educational experiences happen, as if indifferent to the spatial and material environment (Burke and Grosvenor 2008, p. 8). The design of schools, from classrooms and school buildings, to play areas and outdoor zones, has been integral to the history of educational provision and in conveying ideas about the purposes and ambitions of schooling. In this sense, the architecture of school buildings and the organisation of school space mediate the experience and aspirations of schooling. They shape — both hinder and enable — pedagogies and classroom dynamics as well as interactions and learning, even in the seemingly unstructured space surrounding school buildings. Acknowledging the significance of space, however, calls for more than attention to the instructional efficacy of learning environments (Leander et al. 2010). It also calls for an account of the kind of student subjectivities and dispositions the space of schooling invites and makes possible (Burke and Grosvenor 2008; Gutman and de Coninck-Smith 2008). In addition, the very look and feel of schools feed into the symbolic and reputational meaning they have in their local communities and beyond. A focus on the design of school environments underscores the significance of the visual and representational dimensions of schooling, across public and community settings as well as in the lived experience of being in school spaces — built, natural, inside, outside — for teachers, students and families.

Importing Expertise: Australian-US Architects and the Large-scale, 1945–1990

Abstract After World War II, Australia turned – politically, socially and culturally – more and more to its strongest ally across the Pacific, the United States of America. In architecture, this turn was not only aesthetic but also based on the deliberate gaining of expertise to achieve large-scale projects like factories, skyscrapers and international chain hotels. Australian architects actively sought out American corporate firms, forming associations that would help their practices capture ever-larger commissions as part of Australia’s galloping US-styled post-war urbanisation. This acquisition of ‘expertise’ was one way, a relatively uncritical but focused business strategy and it was a habit that continued into the 1970s. While many Australian architects were designing buildings for Pacific nations and Australian presence in Southeast Asia was growing, no Australians were designing or building in the United States outside the completion of the Australian Chancery in Washington DC (1968). The exception was Canadian-Australian architect John Andrews, whose ‘expertise’ and reputation were key to his 1969 return to Australia. This paper charts the trans-Pacific relationship between Australian and American architecture during the Cold War as one part of a much longer connection that had been proceeding since the early nineteenth century.

Bringing It All Home

The emergence in late 1950s Australian architecture of what has come to be known historically as Brutalism was complex, diffuse and, across a vast continent, regionally split. This was due partly to Australias geographic isolation and long-standing Commonwealth ties, partly to the arrival of British and European émigré architects already steeped in modernist critique and partly to local architect–critic Robin Boyds reflections on Brutalism in his buildings and writings, both of which explored the implications of New Brutalism from an international perspective and were complemented by his two books on Japan, Kenzo Tange (1962) and New Directions in Japanese Architecture (1968). It was diffuse also because of long-standing professional traditions of working in England and the Americas made influential by shared experiences gained by cohorts of young Australian architects often working in the same architectural offices. On the whole, these experiences were not overly theoretical, but instead took the form of received knowledge made tangible through design, documentation and the physical experience of material and detail within the offices of others, but always on “bringing it all home”, repurposed for the local. This article outlines how, in “bringing it all home”, the translation of these experiences was made complicated by changed circumstances “at home”: Robin Boyds overview of the Australian scene, a concomitant embrace of the indigenous Australian landscape, reaction against suburbia and discovery of the inner city; the dramatic expansion of existing universities and the creation of new ones; and a government-sponsored program of monumental public buildings in Canberra, the nations capital, that would see that city become, by the late 1970s, a showpiece of Brutalist architecture, but of a distinctly Antipodean strain.

Architecture in the South Pacific: The Ocean of Islands

Jennifer Taylor and James Conner’s Architecture in the South Pacific is a pioneering work. The result of more than ten years of painstaking research, dedicated bouts of selffunded travel and dogged persistence in tracking down drawings and images from disparate and sometimes disorganised archives, their book is the mapping of a mostly twentieth-century architectural history of the South Pacific. It is the first of its kind. Like Bernard Smith’s seminal European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768-1850: A Study in the History of Art and Ideas (1960), such breadth has its challenges and acknowledged limits. But it is also necessary. To have focused on just one archipelago would have overlooked the interwoven connections of landscape, climate, islanders and expatriates, migration, the significance of air travel and the delicate balance of nationalism and power in a place where the ocean is everything – its life source and in the next century, possibly its death knell. Overlooked too would have been multiple interlopers in the form of invaders (both local and foreign), colonisers, proselytisers, a World War and the buffeting by not just the weather but also the pounding waves of tourism and imported construction cultures, alien but often inevitable. Briefly stated, Taylor and Conner’s book covers the architecture and urbanism of Oceania, which, from west to east, means the Solomon Islands, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Fiji, Wallis and Futuna, Tonga, Samoa, American Samoa, the Cook Islands and French Polynesia. It is not a linear historical account but a series of eleven thematic essays supported by maps, drawings, archival images and a multitude of photographs (the bulk of them taken by Taylor and Conner). The approach is inclusive and, visually, almost deliberately overwhelming. Taylor and Conner seem intent on impressing upon the reader that no singular impression can be gained and also, that the volume of architecture (even if not all of it is notable) demands assessment. Most valuably, for each series of islands, there is important documentation on the historic development of urban form in places like Port de France (Noumea), Papeete, Suva and Honiara. There is significant research on indigenous islander architects (like New Caledonian-born modernist Gabriel Cayrol) and their training either within former colonial works offices or in countries like France, Great Britain, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and Australia. There is also acknowledgment of expatriate architects who came and settled on the islands as well as the substantial number of architects and practices from the original colonising countries and the contemporary Pacific Rim, which have in turn contributed much to the last sixty years of architecture within Oceania. Importantly, Taylor and Conner also highlight the considerable funding aid for recent public and institutional buildings from countries like Japan, Taiwan and China. What is clear is that the story of architecture culture in Oceania is not easy to describe and like the waters of the Pacific, subject to constantly shifting currents. At all times, Taylor and Conner highlight the tension between indigenous formal (most commonly represented by the fale), decorative and construction traditions and contemporary design. This tension is revealed in the three

The metaphorical expression of Nature in Jørn Utzon's design for the Sydney Opera House

Both before and after his forced resignation from the charge of the Sydney Opera House (1956–66)in 1966, Danish Architect Jorn Utzon (1918–2008) has cited Chinese architecture as one of the most important inspirational sources of his unfinished masterpiece. However, the significance of Chinese building culture has largely been overlooked in historical accounts of Utzons Opera House design. This is despite ample evidences suggesting several direct analogies of Chinese architecture in Utzons design proposals. The evidence also indicates that one of the key Chinese sources for Utzon comes from the written works of Finland-born and Sweden-based art historian Osvald Siren 喜龍仁 (1879–1966). Accordingly, this paper aims to identify Utzons perception of Chinese architecture from Sirens interpretation of this subject, and Utzons eventual reinterpretation of this notion in his design of the Sydney Opera House. The article poses four questions. First, what were the socio-political contexts both of Siren and Utzons approach to Chinese architecture? Second, how did Siren interpret Chinese architecture in his scholarly work? Third, what was the interrelationship between Siren and Utzon? And fourth, how did Utzon reinterpret Sirens concept in his design for the Sydney Opera House? To respond to these questions, the authors surveyed the literature associated with Siren and Utzon, reviewed their private collections, and undertook interviews with their friends, colleagues and followers. On this basis, the authors constructed a series of ideological analogies between Siren and Utzons work, with particular emphasis on Utzons design for the Sydney Opera House.

Designing Woodleigh School: educator and architects in context

– The purpose of this paper is to examine the professional context of the educator and architects who designed and conceived Woodleigh School in Baxter, Victoria, Australia (1974-1979) and to identify common design threads in a series of schools designed by Daryl Jackson and Evan Walker in the 1970s. , – The research was derived from academic and professional publications, film footage, interviews, archival searches and site visits. Standard analytical methods in architectural research are employed, including formal, planning and morphological analysis, to read building designs for meaning and intent. Books, people and buildings were examined to piece together the design “biography” of Woodleigh School, the identification of which forms the basis of the papers argument. , – Themes of loose fit, indeterminate planning, coupled with concepts of classroom as house, and school as town, and engagement with a landscape environment are drawn together under principal Michael Normans favoured phrase that adolescents might experience “a slice of life”, preparing them for broader engagement with a world and a community outside school. The themes reflect changing aspirations for teenage education in the 1970s, indicating a free and experimental approach to the design of the school environment. , – The paper considers, for the first time, the interconnected role of educator and architect as key protagonists in envisioning connections between space and pedagogy in the 1970s alternative school.