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      Parliamentary committee approves of war memorial development, but Labor members dissent

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      The Australian parliament’s standing committee on public works has recommended that the redevelopment of the Australian War Memorial proceeds despite considerable submissions against the project.
      The public works committee considered a range of issues including the need for the project, scope of the project and cost effectiveness of the project.
      “The Committee finds that the proposed works are appropriate to meet the identified need, and that these works should proceed,” it said in its report.

      The committee heard that “heritage considerations emerged as perhaps the major controversy in the evidence to this inquiry. Many submitters took serious issue with the proposal to replace Anzac Hall in particular.”
      According to the Australian Institute of Architects, four out of five of the submissions received by the committee opposed or raised concerns about the development.

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      The proposed new southern entrance designed by Scott Carver will be created below the existing forecourt.
      Image: Synthetica
      The committee reported that “the proposed replacement of Anzac Hall is also of concern to the Committee. [However] Anzac Hall was constructed as a bespoke building, intended to serve a specific purpose. As outlined in the identification of the need for these works, the space requirements at the AWM is shifting and the facilities available need to shift along with it.”

      The Institute’s spokesperson for the “Hands Off Anzac Hall” campaign Clare Cousins said, “This final committee report reveals the government is intent on pushing ahead with this development, regardless of the opposition, the cost and the unanimous expert advice that the project, including the demolition of ANZAC Hall, will irrevocably damage the heritage values of the AWM.

      “The Government’s own heritage expert report confirmed the adverse impact ANZAC Hall’s demolition will have on the nationally significant site.”
      The committee also noted that the $498.7 million project was not expected to generate any revenue.
      The redevelopment of the Australian War Memorial has broad bipartisan support from both sides of politics. However, in a dissenting report, Labour members of the committee recommended that the government “consider alternative approaches that do not involve the complete demolition of the existing Anzac Hall.”
      An alternative approach could also mean a significant reduction in the cost of the project.
      Labor noted that a 2019 paper by a former memorial official stated the AWM could meet all of its current and future needs at the Mitchell precinct Treloar Resource Centre site at a cost of around $100 million, or 20 percent of the cost of the currently proopsed project.

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      The proposed new southern entrance with a cone-shaped occulus designed by Scott Carver.
      Image: Synthetica
      The Labor members recommend that the Government “should consider a range of lower cost options that would still meet the stated purpose of the proposed works, while achieving better cost-effectiveness and value for money for the taxpayer.”
      The Australian War Memorial is situated within the Parliamentary Triangle in Canberra which means that the National Capital Authority will also conduct its own assessment of the project.
      “We look forward to the National Capital Authority promised consultation and the opportunity it provides to right the evident wrongs in the approval process to date,” Clare Cousins said. “We will continue to advocate for the project to be rethought and for ANZAC Hall to be saved from demolition.
      “We will not be silenced on the proposed demolition of ANZAC Hall. How could we stay silent when we know without doubt that this unpopular and inappropriate development will negatively impact one of our nation’s most significant monuments.” More

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      An architectural frieze is the icing on the cake, for a building

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      If you have ever approached Termini station in Rome, you may have noticed a frieze on the edge of the slender canopy. It is quiet and subtle, a discreet touch of abstract ornamentation on the leading edge of a slice of otherwise unadorned and exquisitely mid-century modernism.
      Think back to The Godfather Part II, and you may remember a silent, unsettling character who acts as bodyguard and hitman for Michael Corleone. Seen wearing only a black hat and black rollneck, the taciturn assassin cuts a sinister figure. He was played by Amerigo Tot (1909–84), a Hungarian artist (he was born Imre Tóth), part-time actor and one-time Italian resistance fighter who was responsible for sculpting the frieze on the front of Termini.
      There is something flamboyant about a frieze. It seems appropriate that Tot, who also appeared in Fellini’s Satyricon and Mike Hodges’ Pulp, should have had a sideline as an actor. But Tot’s frieze for Termini also gives the lie to the misconception that friezes somehow died out with the ancients and the neoclassicists who built the rest of Rome.
      Photomontage of Amerigo Tot (1909–84) and the plan of his frieze for Termini station in Rome, created by Cosimo Boccardi in 1949. Photo: © Amerigo Tot Foundation

      The frieze has been a recurring feature in the history of architecture. But it is also true that since the end of brutalism, sometime in the early 1980s, it has almost disappeared from modern architecture. The reasons for its disappearance seem obvious. The frieze originated in classical architecture with its trabeation (columns and beams) and decorated the beams above the columns and the tympanum within the pediment. Its appearances on Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Aztec, Mayan, Indian and African buildings suggest that architecture’s flamboyant hatband is an almost universal element. The frieze was the narrative element of the architecture, a sculptural strip that could be read for its mythical themes, or it could just act as decoration. The long controversy over the British Museum’s Parthenon marbles illustrates how the frieze transcends both architecture and art to become a medium in its own right. It can be understood as an artwork yet should probably be rooted in place in a particular architecture and location.
      The conventional narrative is that modernism’s enthusiasm for stripping away ornamentation (and its abandonment of the classical norms of columns and pediments) spelled an inevitable death for the frieze but, as the example of Termini shows, this was far from the case.
      After the historicist excesses of the 19th century, when elaborate friezes were applied to Greek and Roman Revival buildings as well as to new typologies such as the Royal Albert Hall or Louis Sullivan’s skyscrapers in the United States, the frieze came back in a big way. Art nouveau and Secessionist buildings sprouted fanciful friezes of leaves, vines, wilting maidens, tendrils and whiplash lines. Joseph Maria Olbrich’s Secession building in Vienna (1898) features a frieze of golden leaves, a graphic device that presents the building as a frontispiece for a new art movement. Olbrich had in turn been influenced by the British Arts and Crafts architects, notably Charles Harrison Townsend, designer of the Bishopsgate Institute (1894) with its faience tree-of-life motif.
      The Secession building in Vienna, built in 1898 and designed by Joseph Maria Olbrich. Photo: Arcaid Images/Alamy Stock Photo

      The frieze found its apotheosis in the decadence of art deco, the exuberant expression of the Jazz Age and the subsequent, more sober responses to the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Stepped, Aztec-inflected towers, movie palaces and exhibition pavilions were crowned with layers of polychromatic motifs, acanthus leaves, rising suns, machine parts, scrolls and zigzags. The Chrysler Building (1930) features stylised tyres and hubcaps (so high up you can barely see them) and the darkly glamorous Richfield Oil Company Building in Los Angeles (1929) had its friezes picked out in gold to stand out against its oil-black cladding. You can still see the same effect in London’s only authentic splash of US deco, Raymond Hood’s and Gordon Jeeves’ Ideal House on Great Marlborough Street, another building from 1929.
      The Depression didn’t halt the proliferation of the frieze. Cinemas, hotels, department stores and restaurants continued to use decorative strips and fascias to create a landscape of interest above the shopfronts, and the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project in the US employed thousands of artists to create friezes and murals across the country. The buildings were mostly austere but enlivened by strips of vivid carvings with murals inside. With their scenes of powerful workers, agricultural abundance, technology, trains, cars and planes and with the occasional stylised eagle or wheatsheaf they often appeared unsettlingly similar to the socialist realist reliefs of the Soviet Union and the fascist friezes of Italy and Germany. A typical example might be Vladimir Shchuko’s workers in relief atop the Lenin Library in Moscow (1941), but we might also look at the Casa del Fascio in Bolzano, Italy, designed by Guido Pelizzari, Francesco Rossi and Luis Plattner and completed in 1942. The vast, ugly and stiff frieze The Triumph of Fascism has been a feature of the city ever since, but in 2017 it was overlaid by an LED-illuminated quotation from Hannah Arendt. The words ‘No-one has the right to obey’ are a riposte to the frieze’s ‘Believe, obey, combat’ and the foregrounding of words over images is a welcome relief from the fascist relief behind it. It is also, perhaps, a glimpse of the frieze’s future. The words that move across the facade of Christ & Gantenbein’s Kunstmuseum in Basel (2016) function as both frieze and signage. They also nod to Jenny Holzer’s unforgettable scrolling scripts resembling news feeds or Times Square news tickers.
      Post-war reconstruction was rich in friezes celebrating the act of rebuilding itself. Renderings of workers stripped to the waist, cranes, machinery and women carrying buckets of cement can be found in sites from Coventry to Chernobyl. Many of the best are currently under threat, from the brutalist abstractions of William Mitchell in the UK to the crumbling works above museums and monuments in the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.
      Yet despite the apparent favouring of LEDs and mute facades, friezes still pop up in curious places. Richard Deacon’s enjoyably garish work runs across the front of Eric Parry’s One Eagle Place building in Piccadilly, picking up how the colours of the LED advertising in Piccadilly Circus is reflected in rainy London streets. At the Olympic Village in Stratford, Niall McLaughlin turned the Parthenon marbles into a series of repeating friezes for an apartment block, to surprising and amusing effect. The contrast between the cast horses and warriors and the bikes and washing on the balconies is a constant source of visual delight. The frieze is not, perhaps, dead – just a little frozen. It will, surely, defrost again.
      From the February 2021 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here. More

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      Queensland architect Neville Twidale dies

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      Queensland architect Neville Twidale, known for his significant refurbishment projects, has died.
      Twidale began studying a Bachelor of Architecture at the University of Queensland, Brisbane in 1965 and graduated in 1970. He played in the Architectural Revue Band from 1967 until 1970, performing annually at the Avalon Theatre in St Lucia as part of the Architecture Student Revues.
      While studying, he began working for the Queensland State Government Department of Community Works, and was for a time acting principal architect for the Queensland Region, according to the Digital Archive of Queensland Architecture.

      While forking in the department, Twidale undertook design work on refurbishment projects including the Brisbane General Post-Office and buildings by renowned Brisbane architects Robert “Robin” Smith Dods (1868-1920) and John H. Buckeridge (1857-1934).
      In a 2013 interview with Ralph Tyrell, Don Watson and Janina Gosseye, he describes how he developed an appreciation for architectural heritage through his work, despite an education in the 1960s that “completely disregarded” architectural history. “It was treated more or less with contempt, because you weren’t even concerned about keeping old buildings, they could all be bulldozed and something better could be put up,” he said.

      “I spent seven years working in the GPO. But, that was something I garnered through the years of working, respect for older buildings, rather than something I actually learnt at university.”
      David Cox, director of Cox Architects, who first met Twidale as participants in the Architecture Revues, said Twidale left a “wonderful legacy of architectural practice, humanity and the arts.”
      The two worked together as architects and became lifelong friends.
      “Our last collaboration together was our submission for the 2020 Venice Architecture Biennale which, together with another revue participant Lindy Morrison, we attempted to incorporate the essence of these revues in a new production for the Biennale,” he said. “Unfortunately, it never happened but the spirit was still well and truly there despite the passing years.
      “As well as his architectural legacy, his purple velvet suit and wonderful bass guitar sound will be sorely missed by many, together with his great humanity.”
      Twidale died of an aneurysm early on Sunday morning, 21 February. He is survived by his wife Carol and sons Zac and Kel. More

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      Hot springs facility to return to Perth's Swan River

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      A hot springs wellness centre proposed for the banks of the Derbarl Yerrigan (Swan River) would bring bathers back to a site once popular for late-night skinny dipping.
      Tawarri Hot Springs, designed by Plus Architecture with landscape by Aspect Studios, would be built at the western end of the Nedlands-Dalkeith foreshore, halfway between central Perth and Fremantle.
      The proposed site was once home to the Dalkeith Hot Pool, built by locals out of limestone in the 1920s after a pipe burst in a 500-metre-deep artesian well to the Yarragadee aquifer, bringing hot water to the surface. From the 1930s, the pool developed a reputation for attracting nude swimmers and “being ‘hot’ in more than one way.” In 1953 it was closed and filled in due to the “misbehaviour.”

      Plus Architecture’s wellness centre is envisioned as being closer to spa facilities than its steamy predecessor.

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      Tawarri Hot Springs, designed by Pus Architecture with landscape by Aspect Studios.

      The centre would comprise a number of pavilions that incorporate locally sourced limestone and it would include outdoor pools. The architects also note that the site is significant for the Nyoongar people as a traditional hunting ground. Tawarri is a Noongar word that translates as “evening breeze.”

      “Through intensive investigation and design process the masterplan has [been] developed [to] be sympathetic to and build upon opportunities presented in the surrounding landscape and public facilities,” Plus Architecture states in planning documents. “The project aims to create a design that is both elegant and timeless while also being sufficiently robust to withstand future design changes that may be required.”

      In addition to the outdoor pools, Tawarri Hot Springs would include indoor pools, saunas, a restaurant, a café and a two-storey treatment centre.
      The pools would be filled via a bore to the Yarragadee aquifer with the warmth coming from geothermal heating. The groundwater would be injected back into the aquifer.
      The site was a Strategic Tourism Attraction by the state government in 2019, with Tourism WA given oversight of the project. A design competition was held for the project, with Plus Architecture beating out three other firms.

      In a letter of support submitted as part of the planning application, Tourism WA chairman Nathan Harding says the project “builds upon the rich history of the site, which included the community use of hot water pools in the area.”
      “There are numerous public benefits to this development which include construction and operational jobs, the generation of lease revenue to the State and City of Nedlands for maintaining and improving the foreshore reserve, increased length of stay and spend by visitors to Western Australia, and public access to a world class wellness facility,” he states. More

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      Melbourne architects design temporary dining pavilions for NGV garden

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      A Melbourne architecture practice has created a series of temporary pavilions for the National Gallery of Victoria for use during its Triennial exhibition.
      The A-frame-shaped structures, designed by Board Grove Architects, act as picnic and dining pavilions and host the Tonka restaurant pop-up at the NGV.
      The pavilions are located in the Grollo Equiset Garden, adjacent to an installation by the French artist known only as JR. The architects drew inspiration from the installation, named Called Homily to Country 2020, which takes the form of an open-air chapel with stained glass windows depicting portraits and the ecological degradation of the Darling river system.

      “This got us thinking about simple structures associated with camping along riverbeds in the Australian bush,” said Board Grove Architects in a statement. “The casual informality of swags and tents, hung over branches or propped up with poles is a quintessential image of Australian summer ‘escapism’: a desire for escapism particularly craved by many Melbournians post months of intense pandemic lockdown.”

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      Temporary picnic and dining pavilions designed by Board Grove Architects at the National Gallery of Victoria.
      Image: Rory Gardiner
      The pavilions are modular and are prefabricated offsite. They consist of raised decks made from custom timber pallets and A-frames made from pine. “The simple A-frame structure has a visual relationship to the triangulated facade of the existing NGV,” the architects said.
      The raised decks act as benches for visitors to sit on in a picnic setting. When used as a dining space, the frames are also sheathed in canvas slung between the frames.
      “Like being under a tent awning you feel like you are in an interior space but still in close proximity to the trees, long grass and artworks in the garden,” the practice said.
      Due to the temporary nature of the installation, all the elements of the pavilions are designed to be recycled and reused, including the tables which are designed to be flat-packed and stored way for future large-scale dining events.
      The 2020 NGV Triennial is on exhibition until 18 April 2021.

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      Breathe Architecture designed gin distillery expansion underway

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      Work is underway on the Breathe Architecture designed expansion of the Four Pillars gin distillery in Victoria’s Yarra Valley.
      The $6 million project will see a new warehouse built on the adjoining site to the existing industrial space and hospitality venue. Once complete, the addition will double the visitor capacity to more than 200,000 visitors a year.
      “The primary concept ideas revolved around function and presence,” the practice said in a statement. “It was about paying close attention to public spaces, without sacrificing the amenity of the building and its industrial purpose.

      “We embraced the idea of authenticity through natural materials and ‘portals’ into the industrial areas, whilst celebrating the Yarra Ranges location through a strategic landscape strategy.”
      The proposal contains its primary building functions within an efficient warehouse addition, mirroring the architectural type of the current facility, while the addition of the folding copper veil adds intrigue and identity to the distillery, “wrapping the ‘ordinary’ with something ‘extraordinary.’”

      The project includes a semi-basement car park, a large loading area and a new bottling area. The primary hospitality functions will be spread out at ground level across the new and existing buildings.
      Four Pillars co-founder Cameron Mackenzie said that since re-opening over summer the distillery had been busier than ever.
      “When we began making Four Pillars, the Yarra Valley was always intended to be our home and when we found our original site, we couldn’t believe our luck,” he said. “When the opportunity came to buy the land next door, we simply had no choice but to roll the dice and back our Yarra Valley dream to the hilt.”
      The expansion is expected to be completed in 2021.

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      ARM imagines vertical school ‘as a big cloud’

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      The Victorian government has released designs for a new vertical primary school in North Melbourne.
      North Melbourne Hill Primary School, designed by ARM Architecture, will also include a kindergarten as part of its vertical campus.
      To be located on Molesworth Street in North Melbourne, the school will have multi-purpose classrooms, breakout spaces, a kitchen garden, a library and a gymnasium, which will also be accessible to community outside school hours.

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      The proposed North Melbourne Hill Primary School by ARM Architecture.
      Image: Victorian School Building Authority
      ARM Architecture has worked with Bush Projects in masterplanning the site.

      “We have imagined the campus as a big cloud — something dynamic, filled of knowledge, dreams, aspirations and data. Our imaginary cloud hovers over and through the site, and is a bubbling network of interconnected thoughts, themes, and hotspots mapped three dimensionally,” said Andrew Lilleyman, a director of ARM Architecture.
      “It is realized in the building’s architecture as bubble-like entrances at street level; cantilevered forms for the kindergarten space on the top floor; and when sliced through, radiating patterns to the sun shading to the main Molesworth facade. The outdoor spaces are included in this network of patterning, there are swirls and rounded shapes form play areas, topography, soft and hard landscaping.”

      The large, flexible, landscaped playground space will be universally accessible with play equipment, seating and tiered amphitheatre for events and performances. It will also be accessible to the community outside school hours.
      The kindergarten will be located on level five of the building and will include two children’s rooms and an outdoor learning area with a sandpit and a cubby house.
      A tree-lined laneway to the south of the site will provide separate access to the school, kindergarten and sports courts.
      Construction is expected to start in mid 2021 and the school will open in 2023.
      North Melbourne Hill Primary School is the eighth vertical school to be announced by the Victorian government and other states have also introduced similar high rise schools in inner city environments. More