Victoria’s health minister Mary-Anne Thomas has revealed designs for the $48.7 million redevelopment of Swan Hill District Health emergency department in the northwest of the state. Designed by Silver Thomas Hanley, the proposed emergency department and associated clinical spaces were developed through consultation and workshops with the staff and community stakeholders who use the hospital […] More
Melbourne’s heritage-listed Comedy Theatre is set to be redeveloped with designs for a 23-storey tower by Architectus lodged with the Victorian government. The Melbourne Comedy Theatre was built in 1928, but the site, on the corner of Lonsdale and Exhibition streets, has been home to entertainment venues since 1842. The venue was built as the […] More
The NSW government has released a revised masterplan for a significant redevelopment precinct in on Sydney’s foreshore.
The Blackwattle Bay precinct, masterplanned by FJMT, is an urban renewal area on the current site of the Sydney Fish Market, which will be relocated to a new $750 million facility designed by Danish architecture firm 3XN in association with BVN and Aspect Studios.
The redevelopment of the existing fish market site will complete the missing link of the otherwise continuous 15-kilometre waterfront promenade from Woolloomooloo to Rozelle Bay.
More than 2,400 submissions were made in response to the the original plans for Blackwattle Bay during the public exhibition period held from 2 July to 20 August 2021, including from the City of Sydney, which claimed the plan was a “gross overdevelopment”.
Lord mayor Clover Moore’s expressed concerns about the lack of affordable housing in the masterplan, which only made up five percent of the proposed residences, as well as resulting densification and overshadowing from the proposed towers, and the likelihood of increased noise and pollution.
The original masterplan called for 1,500 apartments across 12 towers of up to 45 storeys. The revised masterplan proposes a reduction in building heights to 35 storeys, a reduction in density which would result 29 percent reduction in population, with 840 fewer than in the former plan, and a 37 percent reduction in carparking.
The proposed foreshore and promenade boardwalk has also been widened under the new proposal from 10 to 20 metres. While double its previous proposed width, it is still 10 metres shy of what was recommended by the City of Sydney.
Open space will also be increased from to 30,000 square metres under the new designs, and affordable housing now targeting 15 percent of all residential space – triple the state-wide target.
Infrastructure Minister Rob Stokes said the government responded to community feedback on the earlier proposal by reducing building height and density, as well as increasing the availability of public space.
“This vision, alongside the construction of the new Sydney Fish Market will completely transform Blackwattle Bay from a patchwork of industrial uses to a stunning stretch of Sydney Harbour open to the public for the first time in 150 years,” Minister Stokes said.
“We want this precinct to stand the test of time, which is why we’ve listened to feedback from the community and doubled the width of the boardwalk, created more open space and reduced building heights to create a more sustainable place.”
However, Moore is still not satisfied with the government’s response, stating that while council supports a harbour foreshore renewal, it should not be at the expense of community benefit.
“This is public land,” Moore said on Facebook on 29 July. “Minor tweaks to the initial plan won’t adequately address the community’s concerns about a wall of residential development located hard up against the noisy, polluted motorway, overshadowing existing apartments and public spaces.”
The revised masterplan will be on public exhibition with feedback welcome until Friday 26 August. More
Designs for City of Melbourne’s newest library in the historic Queen Victoria Market precinct have been revealed as part of the city’s $500 million Munro development. Six Degrees Architects has revealed schematic designs for the Munro Library and Community Hub ahead of the Future Melbourne Committee meeting on Tuesday 2 August. Councillors will consider the […] More
The custodians of the legacy of Robin Boyd, the Robin Boyd Foundation, have launched the Walsh Street Archives: a culturally significant collection of artefacts and treasures belonging to the Australian architect, educator and cultural commentator. Since 2014, a group of dedicated volunteers have collated, catalogued, researched, digitised and conserved relics of Boyd’s life and career […] More
Architect and new parliamentarian Elizabeth Watson-Brown has used her maiden speech to call for an end to privately delivered public infrastructure.
The member for the inner-Brisbane seat of Ryan was elected as a Greens candidate and is only the second representative of that seat not from the Liberal-National Party.
In her maiden speech, Watson-Brown reflected on her more than 40-year career in architecture marked by historic Queensland flood events.
“We arrived at UQ in the month of the 1974 floods. Much of the campus had been under water. Our first project as fledgling architects was to go and document the flood damage to houses. Of course, what we really saw was huge damage to people, to lives. That was heartbreaking, that was salutary. And since then, I have experienced two more ‘unprecedented’ major Brisbane river floods in Ryan.”
Watson-Brown established her own architectural practice in 1981 as one of only a handful of women to do so at that time in Australia.
“Throughout this whole time, whether in my own projects or on government advisory panels and juries, my design and lived values have always been to prioritize the needs of individual people and their community, and the specifics and the environment and the place.
“I have always said to my students and staff, what we’re doing is really important. We’re building the infrastructure of the lives we share. We’d better do it well. We’d better do it responsively and responsibly,” Watson-Brown continued.
The parliamentarian designed the first purpose-built refuge in Queensland for women and children escaping domestic violence.
“It’s these values – prioritizing the needs of the community and the sustainability and amenity of life, of our climate and environment – that I bring to represent my Ryan community in this chamber.”
Watson-Brown was appointed the Australian Greens spokesperson for infrastructure, transport and sustainable cities on 17 June. She told the House of Representatives, “In my career I’ve seen first-hand the problems caused by the belief that public infrastructure should be developed and owned by private corporations.
“This has a profoundly negative effect on our ability to deliver for everyday people and communities.
“My experience of public-private partnerships is that the private is what undermines the benefit to the public, as do planning regulation that favour private developers and profits.
“So I’m here to say that public infrastructure should be in public hands, and that we need a public-led approach to the way we develop our cities.
“This is particularly urgent in the context of the climate crisis – and the inequality crisis [that are] – so closely integrated.
“Australia’s cities actually house about 85 percent of our population and generate the majority of our carbon pollution. Without exception, Australian cities were established at places of great natural resources and beauty. Our reliance on private cars is rapidly obliterating these natural assets with unsustainable outward sprawl and inward traffic congestion and concrete chaos.”
She continued, “The climate crisis, caused by the greed of coal, oil and gas industries, now continually tosses up unheard-of temperatures, floods, fires, droughts and heatwaves.
“Our buildings and cities should protect us from these attacks, but they only make them worse. Urban hardening multiplies flash-flooding effects, while de-vegetation accelerates urban heat island effects that amplify deadly heat waves.
“We must design our settlements to accommodate and nurture everyone to resist natural hazards, but also to allow us to flee safely when the catastrophe inevitably strikes.
“In our last unprecedented devastating flood, whole suburbs in Ryan were trapped – people with nowhere to go, and no help when they needed it most. We need to do better and we need to do it fast.”
Watch Elizabeth Watson-Brown’s full maiden speech here or read it here. More
After a lengthy recovery, the artist comes back with the most vigorous work he’s made: “It took me a really long time to understand what had happened to me.”DETROIT — During the three months last year that the artist José Parlá was in a medically induced coma after contracting Covid-19, he had vivid dreams that he later found difficult to process: managing a Miami hotel circa 1980 and navigating a kidnapping plot involving his brother and the Hong Kong triads. “I was perceiving these dreams not as dreams but as memories,” he said. “Events that I believed had happened but weren’t real.”The intensity of those visions, experienced unconscious and close to death, are metabolized in Parlá’s new body of work, completed since his recovery, titled “Polarities,” at Library Street Collective, an art gallery here. Seven large-scale paintings on canvas and two on wood, at human scale, can be read as a body scan, and their dense networks of lines radiating outward from a central node can appear arterial, conjuring the intricate workings of the respiratory system, or the firing synapses in the brain.But as personal as they are, they avoid much of the solipsism that characterized artists’ work during the pandemic. Instead they take an expansive, world-historical view, reaching much further back, as Parlá’s work tends to do, to trace the psycho-geographic effect a place, and the memory of it, can have.José Parlá, “Degree,” 2022, acrylic and oil paint on canvas, from “Polarities” at Library Street Collective, Detroit.via José Parlá and Library Street CollectiveJosé Parlá, “Resistance,” 2022, acrylic and oil paint on canvas.via José Parlá and Library Street CollectiveParlá, who lives in New York City and whose work is in the permanent collections of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana and the British Museum, first visited Detroit in 2006 not knowing anyone here, simply looking to walk around and take photographs. He returned in 2018, after meeting JJ and Anthony Curis, owners and founders of Library Street Collective, who invited him to witness the changes the city was working through. Parlá decided then to devote a body of work to Detroit, which probably would have debuted in 2020 if not for the pandemic. The idea was further waylaid when Parlá contracted Covid-19 in early 2021, becoming so ill that he was hospitalized, intubated, and put in an induced coma for three months. Halfway through, he suffered a stroke and significant brain bleeding. His doctors told his brother, Rey, they didn’t expect him to survive.“It’s a miracle that I’m here talking to you,” Parlá, 49, told me last month, his voice still a strained rasp from the damage done by the breathing tube, though flying at its usual excited clip. “When I woke up it took a really long time to understand what had happened to me.”Memory and resurrection are both at front of mind here. On a weekday afternoon, the hum of construction drones steadily downtown, the rapid development of the last decade continuing to revive central Detroit from decades of bankruptcy and population flight. A Gucci store is slated to open on a corner where even five years ago the thought of it would be absurd (it still is, though the absurdity now has a different flavor). But just five miles east, entire neighborhoods remain pocked by abandoned homes and ruinous storefronts — tracts of lots distinguishable only by the height of their overgrown weeds. Stretches of its avenues bear scars of Detroit’s dispossession: crumbling brickwork, weatherworn concrete, sun-bleached advertisements seized in time.José Parlá, “Polarity,” 2022. His skill is finding dignity in the accidents of time, the stalactitic surfaces and loping marks of a city’s streetscape.via José Parlá and Library Street CollectiveYou don’t have to be from Detroit to know what this looks like. It’s familiar to anyone who lives in or has moved through places that exist on the periphery, neglected by its center. It’s certainly familiar to Parlá, who absorbs the visual signatures of dilapidation into his paintings, murals and sculpture. Threaded with calligraphy, they read as abstraction but can also be understood as landscapes, or an anthropological excavation of them.He has located these textures around the world — in the Bronx, New York; Naples, Italy; Havana — translating these degraded environments into deeply felt portraits of human movements. Like Julie Mehretu, Parlá challenges the historical parameters of abstraction, but he works in a realist style, a focus that goes back to his earliest days of painting burners — large, elaborate wall works with aerosol — in Miami and Atlanta in the late 1980s and early ’90s. In terms of visual information, the wall, for Parlá, is of as crucial importance as the line or brush stroke or any other mark.“Polarities” is the first body of work he has completed and exhibited since his hospitalization. In its mere existence, it defies his doctors’ prognosis that he would likely not be able to paint again. Not that his recovery was easy. Known for his dynamic style of mural making — leaping off scaffolding while keeping his brush in contact with the canvas to achieve continuous, loping arcs, as he did for “One: Union of the Senses” (2015), a 90-foot mural in the lobby of One World Trade Center, in Manhattan — Parlá found himself barely able to walk a few steps without being exhausted.“Eventually one of the doctors brought me watercolors and watercolor paper, and I was able to do these tiny landscape paintings, and that really helped me to feel, ‘OK, I can still color and I can still make lines,’ but I had atrophy — my brother and one of the doctors would help me grasp brushes or pens because my hands didn’t have the strength,” he said. By the time he was discharged, in 2021, Parlá had been inside a hospital in New York for five months.José Parlá, “Detroit / La Habana,” 2022, acrylic and oil paint on wood. “Surfaces, whether they’re walls or canvases or sculptural objects, work as palimpsests for him,” said Michael Rooks, a curator, adding that “they bear witness to history” like segments of the Berlin Wall.via José Parlá and Library Street CollectiveThe day Parlá returned to his studio happened to be July 11, 2021, when huge anti-government protests erupted in Cuba, the first there in 27 years. Parlá, who was born in Miami to Cuban émigré parents, grew up moving between the United States mainland and Puerto Rico with an early awareness of political strife. Since 2020 he has worked with the artist-led activist group the Wide Awakes.“It brought me back to the protests we were all part of in New York in 2020 and everything we were fighting for,” he said. “You saw an opposite side of that in Cuba where young artists were fighting for their freedom of expression. It was very emotional for me.” Detroit and Cuba represented, in his view, the extremes of capitalism and communism, systems that have colored Parlá’s life since childhood.“One of my aunts was imprisoned in Cuba in the 1970s when a lot of political prisoners were given 10-, 15-year sentences,” he said. “It was always part of the culture; you knew you couldn’t say certain things. That hasn’t changed.” Indeed, one of the first places Parlá journeyed after his recovery was Cuba, in January 2022, and he returned in June. There he spoke with artists who have decided to remain, and who carefully make artworks to evade censorship and punishment.José Parlá, “Breath,” 2022, acrylic and oil paint on canvas.via José Parlá and Library Street CollectiveJosé Parlá, “Position,” 2022, acrylic and oil paint on canvas.via José Parlá and Library Street CollectiveParlá was concerned he wouldn’t be able to paint with the energy and agility that has come to characterize his output. But the work in “Polarities” is at points the most vigorous he’s ever made. They thrum with riotous color and restive movement, the paint thick and drippy in places, rippling and gouged in others. In their fields you can locate any number of churning cataclysms — the 1967 Detroit Riots; the highway system that displaced Black neighborhoods years earlier; waves of displacement and migration.There’s a sense of all the anger and frustration coursing through the paint, an accelerative thrust that feels impatient, as if time is running out. Parlá worked on the canvases simultaneously, arranged side by side, mixing colors without stopping. “It’s the concept of oneness, of interdependence, how we all rely on each other,” he said. “The paintings rely on each other to be a good body of work.” They are paintings that are alive to political resistance, but also resistance to death.That quality of refusal can be traced to Parlá’s beginnings in art making. In many ways his mature work internalizes the graffiti tradition: its style, of course, but also its embrace of language (the work in “Polarities,” as in much of Parlá’s oeuvre, is layered with calligraphic glyphs and snatches of writing); its understanding of the way cities function as modes of communication; and, potently, its capacity to antagonize power structures.Still, Parlá chafes at what he refers to as “the G-word.” He often invokes the storied writer Phase 2, a mentor, who suggested that referring to masterful forms of color and expression as “graffiti” was as inadequate as “calling a meteor a pebble.”José Parlá in downtown Detroit, where he found inspiration for his exhibition “Polarities.”Elaine Cromie for The New York Times“Surfaces, whether they’re walls or canvases or sculptural objects, work as palimpsests for him, and I think that’s where his practice as a writer, as a painter, these calligraphic, gestural marks have meaning,” said Michael Rooks, the curator of modern and contemporary art at the High Museum of Art, in Atlanta, and the curator of the 2014 exhibition “José Parlá: Segmented Realities,” Parlá’s first major museum show.“You can trace that impulse back to ancient wall writing,” Rooks continued. “If we think about other objects that evoke a similar social and cultural upheaval and transformation, like segments of the Berlin Wall, for example, they bear witness to history, with marks inscribed in their surface that had specific meanings for the viewer, for the maker, that may be lost.” Rooks considers Parlá a realist in this sense “because he is excavating our own experience” and invoking objects that are familiar, “that have layers of history.”Parlá’s skill is finding dignity in the accidents of time, the stalactitic surfaces and loping marks of a city’s streetscape, the things that accumulate over time and are eventually lost to it.Unsurprisingly, the restlessness that characterizes his paintings also translates to his schedule. He’s already at work on his next projects, presentations at the Brooklyn Museum and at Gana Art, in Seoul, as well as curating shows in Istanbul and Italy. Perhaps somewhat expectedly, he rejects that term, too: “I wouldn’t say a curator,” he laughed. “More like an anti-systematic operative.”José Parlá: PolaritiesThrough Aug. 24, Library Street Collective, 1274 Library Street, Detroit, (313) 600-7443; lscgallery.com. More
