Once upon a time, Canberra was the home of some fine geometry. The City had a pretty good start, with the Griffin’s putting in place some serious groundwork with the radial geometry and the land and water axes of the city. Architects such as Roy Grounds, Sydney Ancher, John Andrews embraced these conditions and produced buildings of lasting significance, like the Shine Dome and the Cameron Offices.

All of the orthographic transformations; repetition, rotation, symmetry, and so on, were put to good use and Canberra acted as a kind of playground for the exploration of modernist principles. Somewhere along the way, however, Canberra got tired of all this geometry and is now seemingly doing its best to replicate the typology of suburban industrial parks within the City centre. (Aside from the fine work undertaken by the NCA of course to reinstate the intentions of the Griffin Plan and one building on Northbourne Ave that is under construction as we speak…)

Following are some images of places discovered while floating around in Google Earth and represent a snapshot of some of the best examples of this kind of work in Canberra - at least those that I could find. I may have missed a few and I confess that I don’t know what some of the ones that I found are, so if you know, then feel free to let us know in the comments.

Benjamin Offices - McConnel Smith and Johnson

Shine Dome - Roy Grounds

Northbourne Housing Group - Sydney Ancher

Capital Hill

The inner circle is City Hill, the outer hexagonal road is London Circuit. At 2 o’clock on London Circuit there are opposing square buildings with central court spaces. These are the Civic Offices -Yuncken Freeman, 1961. (Thanks Martin)

Arthur Circuit

The Coombs Building at ANU (Thanks Michael)

Callam Offices in Woden - John Andrews

Cameron Offices (now partially demolished) - John Andrews

Canberra University student housing - John Andrews

Trade Union Offices - Harry Seidler

Apache, a 1:2 scale plywood model of an Apache attack helicopter, by Jasper Knight:

From the current exhibition on at the moment at Chalkhorse just around the corner from our office.

I found this fantastic book last weekend at Ariel:

Unable to read Japanese, any background to this publication remains mysterious. There are however two URLs in the book that lead to a small amount of information -
One points to some kind of baseball field/publishing house(?) the other to another publisher’s site. I think. Anyway, this is not important, other than to repeat the words we find here:

“What you see above isn’t a virtual-reality image created on a computer. It’s a ‘Fotomo’ — a three-dimensional object you can pick up and hold in your hand.”

Fans of Pet Architecture - Atelier Bow Wow’s study of Tokyo’s vernacular architecture - will find instant gratification here. It is essentially a do it yourself model making kit for that excellent piece of research. There are street scenes, tiny buildings, crowded corners, a photomart, vending machines.

So, Sunday night in front of the telly was spent making up a couple of the scenes. There are still a whole lot to make, so I might try to post more next week…

This link to the Japanese Amazon store will lead you to similar books in the series that you can buy.

Pecha Kucha Volume 10
June 5th 2008
Commercial Travellers Association
MLC Centre, Martin Place
(Under the mushroom)
6:30 for 7pm start
 Free

Featuring:

+ more!

Pecha-Kucha.org
Facebook group and event page.

The UTS School of Architecture has undergone a massive change in focus over the last few years. It has changed from a part-time, mostly night time course with a focus on practice where the students worked in offices full time during the day. It was known as the school in which practice took precedence.

The school still positions itself as the school that best prepares its students for practice, however their definition of what constitutes practice has changed from that of churning out the workhorses of the local industry to practice as an amalgam of contemporary industrial practices. As Head of School, Sandra Kaji O’Grady states;

“At the most rudimentary level of preparing graduates for careers, we are confronted with the knowledge that divergent forms of practice require different capacities and approaches. Industry engagement, a core mandate of The University of Technology Sydny, is a challenge for the School of Architecture at a time when the architecture profession is not merely heterogeneous, but internally divided.”

and

“Our decision has been to prepare students for globalised practice and for the largest urban projects. Only in this realm can architects become more powerful advocates for cities and their citizens.”

While, it has not been received universally as a positive move - some large practices see the move as depleting an essential part of the workforce, long serving staff members with ongoing research projects were forced to move on - it is undeniable that of all the school’s currently operating in NSW, they are the most vocal, the most visible and the most successful in attracting visiting international teaching staff.

The recent publication of selected projects and studios from 2007 gives a good outline of the direction that the school is travelling in. The large format publication presents a very clear agenda of the exploration of manufacturing techniques, formal experimentation and an engagement with the city. The studios are run largely by collaborative networks of academics, practising architects, researchers and students; such as OCEAN, Vector Guerillas, and L.A.V.A. and the publication reflects this with the students themselves in 8 point grey type in the corner of the page and the school’s thesis at the fore. At this point in time where the school is finding its feet and presenting its agenda to the profession this is understandable, but it would be nice to see the students that produce the work on equal standing with the course convenors.

A couple of the projects:

Pixel.Nest - a studio run by Adrian Lahoud - was a second year construction exercise, looking at digital fabrication and parametric design environments.

An installation undertaken by students in a studio run by Chris Bosse.