Architecture Downunder, Trip to Australia, Part IV

Contrary to my custom, I have saved the post on architecture on this trip for the last, partly because I knew very little about the history and major figures of Australian architecture before our trip and I wanted to do some more research on what we saw.  The only Australian architect that I learned about in architectural school is Glenn Murcutt, who won the Pritzker Prize in 2002.  I was not able to see any of his buildings on this trip however, for most of his works are residential and are for the most part not open to public. It was a bit hard tracking down information about Australian architecture, that is, architecture by Australian architects.  There's not a lot known about it, it seems, outside of Australia.  Some of the most famous works of architecture in Australia are not, strictly speaking, Australian.  The world renowned Sydney Opera House was designed by a Dane, Jorn Utzon; while its famous National Capital, Canbarra, a planned city from scratch, tabula rasa style, was envisioned by an American architect, Walter B. Griffin.  So to begin.

Souvenir from Sydney

First: the phony souvenir picture of us with the Sydney Opera House in its grandeur in the background!  We failed to resist buying into the whole commercial scheme when a "Memories from Sydney Opera House" package was offered to us after our tour at that iconic building.  At least it gives you a good view of the front of the halls at night.  In any case, it was a real treat to have seen the building and have attended a concert, Mozart's Requiem, in its magnificent Concert Hall.  It is a great pity that we will never know what Jorn Utzon's vision was like for the inside of the building, for he abruptly left the project and the country, after a prolonged and painful series of irreconcilable conflicts with the Australian Authorities regarding its construction time and budget, after only the main structures, the plinth and shells of the building, had been completed.  Here is a retrospective video about Utzon and the Opera House, as well as a link to the Guardian's website about the building - 

The best way to see the whole of the Opera House is to go on board one of the ferries either to Manly or Taronga Zoo.  When viewed from the water side, it looked to me like a line of medieval knights' heads in armour with their visors drawn down.  

It is almost impossible to take a bad picture of the Sydney Opera House.  We took so many pictures of it that you would think there would be some bad ones among them.  But its shape and profile, from every angle, seems to be just perfect. 

Knights in armour

Iconic profile

Silhouetted against the night sky

Mythical creature taking flight

Harbour Bridge all lighted up

Ferry docking at Circular Quay

We went on a walking tour, sponsored by the Australian Architecture Association, of the Central Business District (CBD) in Sydney and saw some historical buildings and skyscrapers designed by eminent Australian architects from the mid 20th Century which we wouldn't have known otherwise.  Here are some of the buildings we saw on the tour -

MLC Center

      

      Australia Square Tower

Capital Center

All three skyscrapers above were by Harry Seidler (1923-2006).  I can't say that I'm enamored of them.  Then, there were some more recent skyscrapers which have sprung up around the hottest commercial property in the northeast quadrant of Sydney's CBD area overlooking the harbour.  I was not able to get a good picture of Aurora Place by Renzo Piano and substituted one from the web -

Governor Philip Tower

  

1 Bligh Office Tower

Aurora Place

I also ventured out of the CBD area of Sydney and went over to the west side to check out the new Law School building at Sydney University.  The students there seemed to have the best of all possible worlds!  The library of the Law School is situated under the plaza with the cylindrical-shaped-but-sliced-on-top-at-an-angle, "light tower" illuminating the reading room below. 

Lounging in style

New Law Building, Sydney U.

Now, to expose my ignorance of Australia's vernacular architecture - on the way to Sydney University, I noticed some striking, so it seemed to me, narrow buildings lining tight up against one another on both sides of the street.  Each had a narrow, perhaps no more than 4 to 5 feet deep, strip of fenced front yard or porch, with a balcony on the second floor above, the space of both, in most cases, was taken up with tired old couches or by trash bins. The last made them resemble poorly maintained apartments like any student ghetto, but on a second look, there was something about them that attracted my attention; each individual building looked quirky and slightly different from each another.  

Student Ghetto

"gentrified"

I thought I had discovered something very special and mentioned it to somebody whom I met at a social gathering.  "Oh, sure," he said, "they are called Terraced Houses, and they are everywhere!"  I must not have been paying attention, for my impression of Sydney was all skyscrapers and dirty streets in popular tourist hangouts.  These terraced houses, I later learned, were the Australian version of Victorian or Edwardian row houses!

Hexagons and circles

Griffin's vision

Fast forward: we spent the last few days of our trip at Canberra, the National Capital of Australia, a little self-governing inland territory, called ACT, Australian Capital Territory, located roughly midway between Sydney and Melbourne.  Like Washington D.C., it is chock full of federal government buildings, foreign embassies, national monuments, museums, gardens, and universities.  While researching about the place before the trip, I noticed the rather unusual grids of the city--instead of the more common rectangles, there are hexagons and circles here.  I have read about examples of large scale urban planning and transformation in the history of human civilization, Haussmann's Paris modernization plan in the Napoleon era comes to mind, but this is something else--some architects from Chicago, Walter Griffin and his wife, Marion Mahony, actually dreamed it up, guided by their Utopian visions and democratic ideals, from empty fields of grazing sheep, when they participated in and won an international competition sponsored by the Australian government in 1913 to design the Capital City.  However, facing many of the same bureaucratic and political obstacles and setbacks as Utzon did for the Sydney Opera House, the Griffins were forced to resign from the project after a few years.  In consequence, their vision for the capital city was never fully realized.  (There seems to be a pattern here: Announce a competition to secure the most visionary architect, sign him or her up, and then sabotage them by substituting one's own more meager vision after the fact.) 

Axial obsession

A man-made lake

Our experience of Canberra, from being driven around a bit, however, was not completely satisfactory.  For one, it is a city built for automobiles.  Though the major landmarks all cluster around the two central foci, City Center and Capital Hill, which are not far from each other, it is actually not possible to walk from one part to the other for they are separated by an artificial lake, Lake Burley Griffin, with only vehicular accommodation across two bridges but with no provision for pedestrians or rapid public transportation such as raised train service or subway.  Furthermore, the city, though rational and geometric in plan viewed from above, was difficult to navigate, even for those who've lived there for a long time; our host, Frank, had a hard time finding his way around.  Another un-pedestrian-friendly characteristic we noticed there was what we called the disappearing sidewalks.  For no particular reason, sidewalks along the streets would just disappear, leaving one no alternative but to risk one's life (especially since they drive on the wrong (left) side of the road, so that we were always looking in the opposite direction from which the cars were coming) to cross the streets to get somewhere.  

The style of public buildings in Canberra are rather too monumental and masculine for my taste and the city planners down there are excessively obsessed about axiality.  The new Parliament House, for example, which you can see in the left-hand side picture above, sits above and is aligned in an axis with the old Parliament House, and across the lake with the Anzac Parade and the Australian War Memorial.  It is a result of another international design competition, this time won by an American architectural firm and an Italian landscape design firm.  Large portion of the compound is buried underground, carved out of the Capital Hill, the soil of which was then re-deposited over the building when it was completed.  We drove around the complex, and saw quite a few tourist buses parked on the outskirt; though the building is mostly open to public, it is not a place that one can just walk to, unlike the U.S. Capital in Washington D.C. which is within walking distance of the subway.

To close our architectural tour of Canberra, we went to visit the National Museum of Australia.  It is located at the tip of the Acton Peninsula, surrounded by Lake B. Griffin, and a short jaunt from the campus of ANU.  You can faintly see it on the right-hand side picture above, marked by a giant roller-coaster like object.  The complex is composed of a collection of buildings in fantastic shapes, volumes, and colors.  To our dismay, it also suffers from the "disappearing sidewalks" syndrome; there is no direct paved pedestrian route or even foot path to its gigantic portal.  The inside of the building, however, is well laid-out, with tons of objects and information about Australian history and culture. 

Portal to the museum

Light-filled lobby

National Museum of Australia

 like a monster from the lake 

This concludes the report on our trip to Australia!

05.23.2012
P.S.: For those interested in Australian architectural history, don't forget to check out Castlecrag, a suburb north of Sydney, when you're in that part of the world.  I regret not having done so on this trip.  Castlecrag, another legacies of the Griffin's, is a planned suburb, influenced by the Garden City Movement at the turn of the 20th Century.