Built, Unbuilt and Imagined Sydney is a humble collection of essays based on built and unbuilt works (residential, commercial, interiors, and so on) of interest in Sydney, inclusive of public art, object or furniture design, key invited or public lectures, studios, current projects in making, competitions, collaborations, exhibitions, installations, and outreach work. The focus is on the innovative and the original not the ordinary and the functional. The purpose of this is to reveal the expanded field of architecture, and that the practice of architecture exceeds the work legally defensible under the title of the architect. The emphasis is placed on practice as an intellectual activity and on contemporary practice of architecture as the meaningful exercise of social, political, and critical knowledge, skills, and mindset in an urban, spatial, and tectonic condition. The book reveals that all or most architects either adopt as their own or have an interest in an(other) field, such as visual art, urbanism and landscape, virtual reality and three dimensional imaging, installation art and lighting design, and so on. The book aims to reveal therefore the multidisciplinary, urban orientations, and fluid forms of practice. The essay format as opposed to a monograph or historical survey on a place or period in Australian architecture is deliberate. The aim is to capture not the formal outcome of the architectural practice but to capture the vitality and intensity of architectural thought behind it all. The collection will pick out the creative DNA of the city, as it represents a snapshot of the intensity that marks the critical and creative culture and enterprise informing the architectural scene in Sydney.

Since the nineteenth century a physically distant Metropolis has been invoked to determine the validity of Australian architectural projects and their ideas, and the assumption is this Metropolis sends out resolved principles to a provincial culture. This view assumes that actual immigration to Australia equals cultural erasure. It assumes Australia’s architectural culture is infantile or child-like and must accept a continual and necessarily painful education- the pedagogical focus-to animate local architecture. It is frequently asserted that architects whose capacities do not seem adequately recognised in Australia would always fare better in this Metropolis. The Metropolis proves, on closer inspection, to be nebulous and varied in location. Its constituent countries and cultures, usually associated with “age” and cultural power, have warred with each other constantly, and have consistently driven architects from its perceived membership. Its principles are frequently changing and...

In his Modern Architecture since 1900 (1982 ff.) William J.R. Curtis attempts to present a "balanced, readable overall view of the development of modern architecture from its beginning until the recent past" and to include the architecture of the non-western world, a subject overlooked by previous histories of modern architecture. Curtis places authenticityat the core of his research and uses it as the criterion to assess the historicity of modern architecture. While the second edition (1987) of Curtis's book appeared with just an addendum, for the third edition (1996) he undertook a full revision, expansion and reorganisation of the content. The new edition, it will be posited, does present a more 'authentic' account of the development of modern architecture in other parts of the world, presenting a comprehensive view of Australian architecture. Compared to the additions and modifications of other post-colonial examples, there is scant difference in Curtis' account of Australian modern architecture between the first (1982) and the third (1996) editions. Even in the third edition (1996) the main reference to Australian modern architecture is confined to the Sydney Opera House as well as a brief commentary of the work of Harry Seidler, Peter Muller, Peter Johnson, Rick Leplastrier and Glenn Murcutt. In the years separating the two editions, regionalism in architecture was debated and framed in different ways by Paul Rudolph, Kenneth Frampton and Curtis, among others. In analysing the absence of Australian architecture as a 'golden' example of regionalism, this paper presents a critical overview of Curtis' understanding of the notion of an ‘authentic’ regionalism.

Architecture is located at the confluence of international capital flows, urban hierarchies and national discourse, constructed according to the globally oriented agendas of local bureaucrats, against measures of 'the global', including design excellence, competitive processes, and international expertise. Under such perceived conditions of globalisation, academics and policy makers alike have often been preoccupied with defining norms to frame how we understand architectural forms in global cities. As a consequence of reductive understandings, any substantial acknowledgement of the complex relations and interdependencies that shape the process of constructing global architecture is typically negated. Understandably, some researchers have cautioned against accepting and deploying rationalised views of globalness, arguing that urban researchers need to adopt innovative approaches to understand the complexity of the city and its forms (McCann et al., 2013). Assemblage thinking...

The dynamism and mobility of architects in their approach to architectural design practice provides a context that emphasises that architecture, like culture, is not static or rooted in place, but is intricately configured through the dual processes of locality and mobility – both physical and theoretical. The production of architecture in Australia, as in other immigrant-rich societies, provides a case for reinforcing the theory that architectural mobility and travel are integral to the architecture of place. This issues paper sets out to re-examine the contribution of geo-cultural influences upon Australia’s architectural lineage and considers a diverse range of themes across an equally broad timeframe; British colonial transpositions; the dissemination of Modernism in Australia; the latent contribution of mid-twentieth century European émigré architects; and the secreted history of Australia’s Asian architecture. Common to all, however, is the notion of architectural translation as a process of influences transmitted, transposed or adapted to other contexts. It uses Australia as the focus from which to consider how global criticism, ideas and theories have travelled and continue to travel transversely across time and place, from the late-eighteenth century well into the twenty-first. This paper investigates translations through narratives, processes, networks and traces of architectural manifestations and begins to draw lines of influence.

In the latter half of the 1970s the field of Melbourne architecture was widely recognised as ‘contested terrain’ as the emergent flag-bearers of architectural renewal struggled to establish their position independent-from and perhaps in opposition-to, the hegemony of late-modern brutalism. The two main agents of architectural change at this time were Peter Corrigan and Gregory Burgess who – thirty years later – followed one another as RAIA National Gold Medallists in 2004 and 2005 respectively. This essay addresses the nature and significance of the profound differences, hitherto glossed over, between the ideas underpinning the work of these two important Australian architects. The process of renewal that they instigated was broadly associated, in the discourse of the time, with the writings of Robert Venturi and accordingly allocated the title ‘postmodernism’ . Corrigan clearly articulated a position with much in common with Venturi’s writing at the time and, on the evidence of a shared rejection of the aesthetic characteristics of late modernism evident in their work, it was widely assumed, that Burgess and Corrigan occupied common ground philosophically; that the work of both was in line with the postmodern revision of contemporary architecture then sweeping the world.

This issue of the RMIT Design Archives Journal brings together diverse essays on Melbourne post-war and more recent architecture and architectural education. It is bookended by first-person narratives that in contrasting ways reflect on architectural education at RMIT over a 35-year period. Michael Spooner opens with an investigation of Edmond and Corrigan’s office in Little La Trobe Street which was the site not only of the architects’ labour but also of Corrigan’s teaching. Using research devices that are both empirical and creative, Spooner offers a new way of communicating architecture. Spurred on by the shock of entering the offices vacated after the death of Peter Corrigan in 2016, Spooner sets himself the task of reanimating the space before it is lost to history; it is indeed a heritage project. Corralling his memories as well as those of others who worked there, he brings together formal architectural analyses of the building’s modernist lineage, a first-person account of moving through the space, a sort of animated architectural section, analysis of the architects’ design process in forming the interiors and, a reanimation of the space through architectural studios he has conducted there. This text is accompanied by a set of remarkable drawings carried out by Spooner, Jack Murray and William Bennie; plans, sections and four ‘capriccios’ which are dense compendia of the research underpinning the text. Peter Downton, by contrast, consults his own memory, the recollections of others and various notes and diagrams to put together “a speculative memoir” of the 1985 RMIT Architecture course which, I must confess, I particularly admired. Downton and Tom Emodi wrote a proposal for a new architectural course in 1982, and after development and refinement by the architecture staff it was operational by first semester 1985. Downton’s article, like Spooner’s, exists as a first-person textual account, but also as a set of illustrations, the alluring 1985 flow chart for the course being a magisterial pedagogical diagram. Downton’s act of historical recovery and reconceptualisation affirms a particular view of the university’s role in student education. It was an experiment in student-focussed design pedagogy where each student could, and did, design their own pathway through the course offerings, negotiating core and elective subjects to suit their needs. The course unfortunately did not survive the rigours of RMIT bureaucracy for more than a few years. It lives on, however, as an elusive and compelling idea whose day might come again through digital means. The three internal essays in this collection also have some common characteristics. Each focuses on one architectural practice during the 1950s and 1960s and foregrounds the agency of the client - corporate, personal and institutional in the design process. Stuart King’s essay is broadly conceived, spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ activities of one corporation, the Van Diemen’s Land Company in Tasmania founded in 1825, and its Victorian agents Alan and Blyth Ritchie. It is in this historical context that he positions Geoffrey Woodfall’s Woolnorth homestead, deftly spinning around this architectural object the threads of colonial and postcolonial Tasmanian histories, dynastic ambition and architectural form. The latter is important for, while Woodfall’s work has been discussed in terms of Melbourne’s Wrightian legacy, this is the first major architectural study of one of his key buildings that includes a close analysis of its spatial and tectonic form and Woodfall’s “increasing rationalisation of space, structure and construction”.King thus draws Woodfall out of the historiographical niche in which he has rather languished and placed him firmly in important architectural discourses of the late 1960s,including that of “regionalism”. Roger Benjamin’s recovery of an almost unknown work by Czech émigré architect Alex Jelinek foregrounds the architect’s relationship with Melbourne painter and client Lina Bryans and her role in promoting Jelinek’s architectural practice, through her family and other connections. While Jelinek’s Benjamin house in ACT is a celebrated example of experimental modernism, the small studio that he designed for Bryans in Richmond, which still exists, has never been published. It is in its own way, original and striking and surprisingly contemporary, especially in the way the architect distinguishes his new work from the Victorian mansion to which it is attached. With access to correspondence between Jelinek and Bryans and photographs from the time of their occupation of the house, Benjamin offers an intimate account of the studio’s creation. Finally, Harriet Edquist’s essay on Frederick Romberg, delivered at a conference on religious architecture convened at Melbourne School of Design in 2018, brings to attention the architect’s work for the Lutheran community in Victoria, ACT and Northern Territory. Through this case study the impact of religious communities on the development of Australian modernism can be seen as “a pivotal component in the construction of culture and community in rural and suburban expansion”.1 Each of the five essays published here is richly supported by archival evidence, relying for its argument on maps, drawings, diagrams, correspondence and fallible, but potent, memories. Harriet Edquist Editor