A Short History of Melbourne Architecture
Philip Goad, Katrina Place and Patrick Bingham-Hall, Pesaro Publishing, $27.50.
This slide-show history is written by architectural historians Philip Goad and Katrina Place and edited by photographer Patrick Bingham-Hall. It provides a chronological summary of significant Melbourne buildings, each illustrated with a single photograph. With the briefest of captions and a short historical overview, it has the feel of a guide-book – but hardcover and without maps. Aimed at least in part towards a tourist market, it probably comes closest to a bound album of postcards.
What does come across strongly through the photographs is the high quality of the work and the richness of Melbourne’s built history. These are all very “good” buildings, and readers who aren’t already familiar with them will no doubt be inspired to investigate further. The images would make an excellent basis of study for local first-year students, or an impetus to get around town for those willing to engage with the many traditions and “intensely self-aware” architectural discourses in this city.
As with anything that puts itself forward as an overview, there is the inevitable question of what exactly has been included (and excluded). Not an easy task, to choose 101 buildings over 16 decades, but, given that it has been attempted, here is a statistic: by far the highest number of buildings are from the two “boom” periods of the 1990s and 1880s – making up more than one quarter of the book. Apart from the logical connection between a growing economy and building output, Goad’s essay makes stylistic links between the two periods in terms of exuberance and attitudes towards embellishment and decoration. The book could also be seen to be promoting contemporary Melbourne’s rising artistic mainstream through this association.
But from an architect’s point of view, the real shock of this collection is that the 1970s seem to have disappeared. With the exception of BHP house (1967-72, but really with a late-modern soul), there is not a single example. Where did they go? Seminal architectural works such as Edmond & Corrigan’s Keysborough school and Chapel of St Joseph in Box Hill are omitted, as are works by Kevin Borland, Max May, Graeme Gunn… Goad’s text rightly points to the importance of these buildings in terms of the development of subsequent architectural thought in Melbourne, but they are curiously absent. Are they somehow too difficult? Or a little too plain to sit amongst this glamorous group?
Nigel Bertram
A Short History of Perth Architecture
Geoffrey London and Patrick Bingham-Hall. Pesaro Publishing, $27.50.
A carefully photographed and pithily narrated survey of architecture in Perth and its surrounds, this book is a continuation a series covering similar issues in Melbourne and Brisbane. Using the discipline of a single photograph and minimal discursive text, the authors manage to convey the key issues of each building. And, while a brief summary, this text is important as it is the first general account of architecture in the west since Ian Molyneaux’s Looking around Perth of some twenty years ago.
Surveys such as this – 100 buildings over 170 years – are invaluable as they give the reader the opportunity to examine the transit of local, national and international trends through the architectural community. In this respect Perth’s physical isolation has been used to great effect by its architects to increase the intensity with which questions of external influence versus local tradition are played out. This situation tends to telescope the effect of any departure from the norm – the work of Hawes, Temple- Poole, Iwanoff and a number of recent practitioners all show this clearly.
Of course selections had to be made and it is worth noting that there are a number of fine and influential buildings by current and past practitioners, White, Anderson and Hislop, Overman, that may easily have made the survey but for pragmatic reasons had to be omitted. In this respect, if I have a criticism of the book, it is that we are left hungry for a more comprehensive coverage of recent work. 100 hundred buildings since 1945 might have offered a different type of analysis.
But what stands out is the development of architecture in Perth as a critical practice.
Moving from the pragmatics of managing a colony to celebrating the culture of the frontier, the book shows, in the better work, a “raw, tough different-ness” to Perth architecture that distinguishes it from the culture of elegance and esoteria of the eastern states.
Sean Pickersgill
Glenn Murcutt: A Singular Architectural Practice
Haig Beck and Jackie Cooper. Images Publishing, $99.95.
This especially handsome book, beribboned with a red sash proclaiming Glenn Murcutt as the 2002 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, is the outcome of a sustained study of Murcutt’s work by the editors of the journal UME, Haig Beck and Jackie Cooper. They continue their wellarticulated admiration of Murcutt, of his clearly defined and rational design process, his structural clarity, and his linear development from concept to resolution. In line with the major editorial focus of UME, Beck and Cooper are fascinated with the way Murcutt makes legible the “processes that produce architecture”.
Resulting from an effective collaboration between the authors and their subject, with Murcutt nominating the buildings for inclusion, preparing a significant amount of the text, and providing a number of his own photographs, the book is divided into three sections: “Theory”, “Practice”, and “Technique”. The “Theory” section has three short essays by Murcutt, with flanking essays by Beck and Cooper. It concludes with an extended “forensic” analysis of the step-bystep process that led to the design of the unbuilt Minerals and Mining Museum, Broken Hill, previously published in UME 1, 1996.
The projects are presented under the heading, “Practice”, with Murcutt providing illuminating written descriptions of each building and numerous informative development sketches. Additional commentary is by Beck and Cooper, linking the individual projects to the larger body of work. The projects are all familiar but, here, together with very fine photographs, they are presented in a fresh and more informative light: there is a real sense of entering Murcutt’s inner sanctum, of looking over his shoulder as he designs.
The working drawings are placed in the third section, “Technique”, and form a kind of appendix. This has a clear logic to it, but it causes much page turning – resulting from the desire to relate final drawings to the photographs and earlier sketches. These drawings are significantly reduced and are challenging to most eyes, but their inclusion demonstrates, importantly, the density, the development, and the consistency of Murcutt’s singular work.
This is a scrupulously well-produced, high-quality book, marked by Garry Emery’s distinctive aesthetic. It is sure to become the standard for Murcutt’s work to this date.
Geoffrey London
Utzon: Inspiration Vision Architecture
Richard Weston, Edition Bløndel, $360.
Initially, the most remarkable thing about this book is its scale. It is a heavy volume of almost monumental proportions – 300 mm x 340 mm x 40mm. With a dramatic cover derived from Utzon’s “Red Book”, it is visually striking, but the size and weight also demand a certain physical response. This is not a book to curl up with intimately on the couch, nor to carry about to read on the tram or train. These proportions require the reader to sit, back straight, at a table, with the book positioned squarely in front. The large pages, smooth and heavy to the touch, need to be turned with care, not flicked. The scale of the type and the beautifully reproduced images are easily read in this posture; the reader does not need to peer at the drawings, nor crane her or his neck to access the content. This relationship between book and body encourages certain ways to approach the content. Sitting and reading in this way inspires a kind of reverence and awe for the work presented. Of course, one might read against the grain but, it is also rather a treat to be absorbed in the careful pleasures – both physical and intellectual – of the volume.
This reverential engagement parallels the approach taken by author, Richard Weston, and editor and publisher, Torsten Bløndel. Of his ambition to publish a book on Utzon, Bløndel writes, “No other architect could be a better model for how, in a highly developed technological society, on the basis of simple means and principles, it is possible to create architecture founded on the virtues of good craftsmanship and a generous nature in a continuous dialogue with untiring genius”.
While Weston explains in his forward that, he “writes unashamedly out of love for the work”. His text is engaging and detailed and well supported by the rich array of drawings and photographs and by reprints of Utzon’s own significant texts.
The content is roughly chronological, with particular chapters organised in terms of period (“Beginnings”, early work, late work), project types (housing, furniture design), particular projects (Sydney Opera House, Silkeborg Museum, Bagsvaerd Church and Kuwait National Assembly) and key thematic ideas (“Platforms and Floating Roofs” and “Additive Architecture”). The final chapter, “Sun, Stone and Architecture”, concerns Utzon’s houses on Majorca.Weston weaves careful connections among all this material and concludes that Utzon’s legacy is “ethical not formal: a way of working not a repertoire of forms”.
Although a full critical assessment of Utzon’s remarkable oeuvre is still to come, this beautiful, carefully compiled book admirably meets the intentions of its author and publisher and provides the most complete record of Utzon’s work to date.
Justine Clark
Eight Great Houses
Guy Allenby and Patrick Bingham-Hall. Pesaro Publishing, $60.
With big type, lush photographs, a catchy title, and easy, amusing prose, this book is explicitly aimed at a broad audience. It is about the joys and pleasures of architecture, as experienced through the stories of a series of extraordinary houses.
The eight greats – the Hackford House by Greg Burgess, the Fishwick House by Walter Burley Griffin, the Addison House by Rex Addison, the Rozak House by Troppo, the Israel House by Peter Stutchbury, the Chadwick House by Harold Desbrouwe- Annear, the Carpenter Hall House by Russell Hall and the Murray House by Clinton Murray – are each described in terms of their relationship to their clients, owners and architects, rather than, say, in relation to formal architectural qualities, or to some putative history or theory of Australian architecture. Yet this is not an innocent book.
Put together, these eight remarkable houses, do, perhaps, suggest a certain kind of architectural tradition. Collectively they seem to imply some kind architectural ideal – one that concerns craft, and the expressive and spatial qualities that might come from the way buildings are put together. Patrick Bingham-Hall’s warm rich photographs, printed on cream matt paper, enhance these qualities. They also depict very liveable houses. Although the housekeeping is picture-perfect here, these spaces do look as if they could mostly accommodate the mess of everyday domesticity.
There is, then, a particular eye and mind at work in this selection of fabulous eccentric houses – a certain idea of what a “great” house is. But, aside from two introductory quotations which point to an interest in the “heart” rather than “abstraction”, this is not articulated explicitly. Of course, the book is not a manifesto, nonetheless a pithy, amusing introduction which discussed the selection, might have further enhanced the publication.
This book will satisfy its broad intended audience, but with its careful attention to clients and to the long-term, ongoing life of houses it may also prove to be a salutary read for many architects – especially those who might, perhaps, loosen their grip on their egos just a little.
Justine Clark
Social Housing, Innovative Architecture – Harry Seidler:
Neue Donau Housing Estate, Vienna
Wolfgang Förster. Prestel, $65.
Vienna’s enthusiasm for public housing is fascinating. The Social Democrats were elected in 1919, “Red Vienna” was born and the City initiated its housing program. By 1934, when fascism put the program on hold, more than 60,000 apartments had been built including the iconic Karl-Marx-Hof.
The programme was resumed after World War II. Today the city owns 220,000 rental apartments and 60% of the city’s 1.7 million inhabitants live in subsidised accommodation.
Wolfgang Förster uses this history to contextualise Harry Seidler’s recently completed Neue Donau Housing Estate. He then documents the scheme, discussing its location, planning, facilities, environmental measures and financing. The text is well illustrated with plans and many photographs of the exterior of the complex. The only apartment illustrated is that occupied “by the architect himself”.
It is odd to stumble across photographs of Seidler’s stylish roof-top apartment because the text gives scant attention to his life history, his career, his oeuvre or how he came to have an apartment here. For example, it mentions that the family fled Vienna in 1938, that Seidler was awarded a Medal of Honour of Vienna in 1990 and that this contact led to the Neue Donau commission, but it does not consider how Seidler might have felt about working in Vienna after so many years based in Australia or the significance that this project might hold for him personally.
This, then, is not a book about Seidler. But nor is it a full account of recent social housing in Vienna. Jean Nouvel, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Herzog and de Meuron, Zaha Hadid and Norman Foster are among other well-known architects who have recently completed, or are currently completing, housing schemes in Vienna. Discussion and illustrations of these schemes are limited.
Would all of them together not have made a richer story than Seidler’s scheme alone?
That Förster works for the Vienna Land Procurement and Urban Renewal Fund and the City of Vienna and that developers involved in the Neue Donau scheme sponsored the publication of the book might explain the focus, but the resulting book is less satisfying than it could easily have been.
Julia Gatley
