Letters: Architecture Australia, January 1996

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1 Jan 1996

This is an article from the Architecture Australia archives and may use outdated formatting

Flaws at the Edges

Recently I visited the newly completed Children’s Hospital for Sydney at Westmead (AA July/August 1995). I struck me as a highly promising model for future group and urban projects in that it successfully demonstrates the possibilities of bringing tightly together buildings from different architects to form a diverse yet visually coherent and functionally related composite. Chris Johnson and the NSW Public Works are to be applauded for adopting this approach. In addition, the exterior form of Lawrence Nield and Partners’ main building and the central interior space of McConnel Smith and Johnson’s outpatients’ wing contain significant innovative ideas which should contribute positively to the evolution of Australian architecture. Regrettably, the limits of my praise coincide with the boundaries of the four main buildings, as the evident co-ordination within the hospital breaks down at the periphery.

It is difficult to comprehend how the clients, contractors, masterplanners could have given such little thought to the design of the surrounding service structures and other subsidiary buildings, the road works and landscaping and how they are all connected. Why has the exterior appearance of the hospital been of concern while that of the immediately adjacent multi-storied car parking stations has not? Why is there such little accord between adjacent buildings recently completed. or now under construction, with the hospital itself? (A lesson might well have been learnt from the complementary juxtaposition of the new hospital and Ken Woolley’s previously completed research institute).

Why has the circulation within the hospital been considered a matter of importance while that between it and the surrounding buildings would seem to have been given little consideration? Why does the path to the main hospital entrance from the carpark towards the tail of the main building simply not exist in any identifiable form? Instead, one has to negotiate a series of unrelated levels, surfaces, steps, slopes and direction changes, resembling more an obstacle track than a route for a visitor—let alone a parent with small children (please do something to help the parent with a stroller who will be forced to divert up to a busy road with no footpath in order to reach the main hospital entrance!).

Why is there no connecting footpath between the medical centre and the hospital? In this instance, those without, as well as those with, strollers will have to take to the road. Why has such attention been paid to co-ordinating the aesthetics and functional connections within the hospital while the landscaping, not the main plazas and outside of the complex and that between the main and the clinical services buildings appears clumsy, inconsequential and incongruous? (The former including expanses of various pastel-coloured concrete paving; the latter being a long slither of Chinese pretensions complete with stones, waterfalls, lanterns an arched concrete apology for a Chinese bridge, and a gleaming red pagoda, no less! (Paul Reid described the same as “a stroke of genius” (Architecture Bulletin, August 1995) which shows that you can’t please everyone!)

The principal buildings of the new children’s hospital demonstrate that Australians actually are capable of good design, given the 80 opportunity. To have this effort negated by what can only be a breakdown in overall site co-ordination seems to me to be a very serious matter. All those concerned about, and/or charged with responsibility for the current contractual arrangements for major projects in this country need to take stock of such lamentable outcomes and take steps to put more responsible and potentially creative frameworks in place to allow for the emergence of functional and enjoyable environments on a holistic sense. Until that happens, we will be left with further Westmeads, where the major design talents would seem to have been cut off at the edges and consequently divorced from playing any meaningful part in the total organisation of the immediate context.

From Associate-Professor Jennifer Taylor, University of Sydney
AA encourages reader critiques of recent projects—Ed.

Advertising Brochure Gone Mad

Architecture Australia in the old days used to be a good magazine. Now it appears to be a mixture of a student’s magazine and an advertising brochure gone mad, it is using coloured papers at random for black printing and therefore is not pleasant to read. It is questionable whether it shows significant work by top designers. There seems to be a preponderance of stick and corrugated iron buildings. The photographs are often disfigured by huge lettering across them or stringing down them like Chinese trade signs.

I have subscribed for many years to Constructional Review, which is beautifully laid out and outstanding photographs, a pleasure to read from first page to last and only $40 for a 12 month subscription. I would advise you to get one and compare it with Architecture Australia. I think that the Constructional Review knocks Architecture Australia and all the other architectural magazines on the newsstands into cocked hats. I am not going to renew my subscription to Architecture Australia.

From J.H. Aston, Katherine, Northern Territory

Need for Further Thought

Current Dilemmas (AA July/August 95) with Week, Jeffreson and your good self was pithy, thought-provoking and marvellously free of [the] obsfucating semantics so loved by too many AA writers.

We still need some further thought on what we are seeing and selecting from our imagineering on the monitor. Who will introduce the first digitally active design catalogue for our relaxed viewing of choice? John Citizen is inexorably moving toward his quasi-architectural hat on the wall rack. Small `a’ Architects are going to need some fancy footwork in the years ahead.

From Brian Jessep, Lindfield, NSW

We welcome your concise views on issues of interest to architects. Please provide fax and phone numbers—we may need to edit. Only letters to the editor, not copies of letters to others, will be published. The RAIA’s chief executive officer has right of reply to criticism of the Institute. Address to 4 Princes Street, Port Melbourne 3207. Fax (03) 9646 4918.