Architecture

The final leg of the Australian Institute of Architects’ 2023 Dulux Study Tour was like an architectural amazing race from Zürich to the Alpine Rhine Valley, back to Zürich, ending at the Venice Architecture Biennale.
The tour bus, carrying five of Australia’s best emerging architects, wound its way past glistening lakes and rivers with the limestone peaks over the horizon. By this point of the tour, their architectural cups were full, and a day of Alpine air, fields of wildflowers and refreshing Valser water was a welcome interlude.
The final destination of the day was Peter Zumthor’s Therme in Vals, about two hours’ drive from Zurich, with several pitstops along the way to tiny villages where revered Swiss architects Peter Zumthor and Valerio Olgiati have made their mark among the untouched mountain chalets.

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Therme Vals by Peter Zumthor. Image:

Ellen Buttrose

“I just kept thinking at every project, I wonder what the locals think of this?” Sarah Lebner said. “Because most of the projects that we saw that day, even though they were an interpretation of traditional form, they were quite confrontingly different.”
Valerio Ogliati’s Atelier Bardill project, while volumetrically the same as an old barn it replaced (thanks to local controls), stands wedged between two almost identical timber barns with green shutters, under the watchful eye of Piz Hünzu. Even in its vast courtyard, its context is inescapable.

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Atelier Bardill by Valerio Olgiati. Image:

Linda Cheng

“There was so much regional tectonics,” Lebner continued, “and such a maintained tradition in the materials they used and how they built.”
“I really like the animal structures in the landscape,” said Bradley Kerr. “They were like little boulders sitting down the hill, and they aged like a boulder as well.”
Tiffany Liew observed, “There was more texture in the regions, like the landscape, the shape of the hills and the mountains, and the textured materials. It was a complete contrast and how rigid the city felt.”
In Zürich, the study tour winners found themselves in a very formal city with an orthogonal, gridded and rule-based architectural language. At the Kunsthaus Zürich Museum Extension by 2023 Pritzker Prize laureate David Chipperfield, the gridded language of the city was also extended vertically onto the facade.
“I liked how the Chipperfield Kunsthaus sat within the context,” said Edwina Brisbane. “He really understood the expectations of the city and its inhabitants. It was a good mix of ‘I am Chipperfield’ and ‘I am Zürich.’”

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Kunsthaus Zurich Extension by David Chipperfield Architects. Image:

Linda Cheng

“The only building that we saw that didn’t have a grid on the facade was the social housing project that we went into, and it had a bit of a disrupted grid,” she continued.
Haus G, designed by Pool Architekten, is one of 13 apartment blocks in the Hunziker Areal precinct – a flagship project for the “Mehr als Wohen” (More than Living) housing cooperative, founded in 2007. The masterplan by Duplex Architekten and Futurafrosch set out a number of “rules” for the architects of the 13 buildings, principally that each architect was assigned three buildings to design – a “couple” neighbouring each other, and a “satellite” – and the articulation of the buildings subtracted the extruded volume of the buildings’ footprints.

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Haus G at Hunziker Areal by Pool Architekten. Image:

Linda Cheng

While the group of on site, a resident spontaneously – and proudly – invited the group into her home, which, even to the architects’ surprise, had remained remarkably unchanged over the past decade.
“I really like what Pool Architekten said about creating possibilities for the inhabitants and how their designs do that both in the urban space around the buildings and the dwellings themselves,” Brisbane said.
Finally, the study tour arrived at the Venice Architecture Biennale in the middle of National Reconciliation Week in Australia ­– the timing made more poignant with tours of the Australian and Canadian exhibitions, which each examined their respective countries’ relationships with First Peoples in their own ways.

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Unsettling Queenstown, the Australian exhibition at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale. Image:

Linda Cheng

Australia’s Unsettling Queenstown explored the legacy of colonialism via a process of “demapping” to reveal erased Indigenous inhabitations and histories, while Canada’s Not for Sale addressed issues of housing alienation for its Indigenous peoples.
“It was interesting to see them next to each other – the way they were both talking about working with community,” said Ellen Buttrose. “But I found the Australian exhibition to be a little bit hierarchical, in comparison to what was happening in the Canadian exhibition. Literally what they were talking about was completely reflected in their occupation of [their pavilion]. The reconfiguration and the ad hoc nature of it and the fact that it didn’t have to be an object.”

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Canada’s exhibition Not for Sale at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale. Image:

Linda Cheng

Bradley Kerr (Quandamooka) found the Australian exhibition lacked context, particularly for international and non-architect audiences.
“It’s really hard to have these conversations without a general understanding of Australia,” he said. “We can’t present this type of information without understanding first very complex ideas like Country. If you ask any First Nations person what Country is, there’s a familiar response like we might all have some kind of understanding that Country is family, Country is kin, there’s a responsibility to care for Country, look after Country, there’s all these things. But it’s a very personal relationship.
“There’s also the context of understanding that there are hundreds of Countries within Australia so the conversation isn’t about one homogenous group with one culture and one language, and one relationship to Country. It’s far more of a complex relationship, and before you can get into some of the complexities of the exhibition is talking about, you need to have an understanding of that kind of context.”

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Unsetting Queenstown, the Australian exhibition at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale. Image:

Pete Wood

Kerr also observed that the exhibitions reflected the sociopolitical undercurrents in their respective countries. “We’re in the throes of a political debate over whether or not the First Nations Peoples in Australia have a constitutional right to have a say over matters that impact them directly. Politically we’re going hear a lot of horribly unjust and factually inaccurate things, just to establish a position where we can then move to discuss the other parts of the Uluru Statement from the Heart and a treaty.
“And while I’m not super familiar with Canada’s history and their situation is not perfect, they’ve had a treaty since 1982.
“We’re just trying to define what architecture of Country is – what does that look like, feel like, smell like, and how does that change for each Country in Australia. We’re still trying to discover that and combining Indigenous ways of being, knowing, seeing and relating to things with colonial ways.”
Linda Cheng travelled with the 2023 Dulux Study Tour. Follow #2023DuluxStudyTour on social media and the blog. More

SJB has lodged plans for a five-storey apartment building in Gurrajin (Elizabeth Bay), Sydney that would echo the “evocative” forms of its Art Deco neighbours.
The proposed building at 4 Barncleuth Square would include nine large apartments with two, three and four bedrooms. Located on the corner of Ward Avenue and Barncleuth Square, behind Darlinghurst Road, the property is surrounded by brick apartment blocks built in the 1930s whose facades display an array of unique patterns and textures.
“Playful brick detailing references the facade treatment of its Art Deco neighbours,” SJB says of the new buidling, in a design statement.
“The horizontal datums that run throughout Ward Avenue, and especially along the facade of No. 2 Barncleuth and Marlborough Hall, continue in the rounded facades of the proposal.”

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4 Barncleuth Square by SJB. Image: SJB

“Curved solid banding wraps the facade in reference to the Art Deco horizontal datum lines of Ward Avenue. This banding is accentuated by patterned brick coursing and recessive window detailing.”
The building meets Ward Avenue with a tripartite of soft, rounded forms, with the middle section featuring open balconies.
“The transparency of its southern edge, allowed through large curved windows, softens its visual intersection with its southern neighbours,” SJB states.
“The material palette references the Art Deco tones that underpin the built environment of Elizabeth Bay, in [a] softened, contemporary manner. Pale brick is chosen, in combination with fine steel detailing and lush planting.”
Black Beetle is responsible for the landscape design, which includes planting at ground and roof level, with the garden “spill[ing] from the parapet of the roof terrace.”
The $17 million development application has been lodged with the City of Sydney and is currently on public exhibition. More

On 2 June 1973, then-prime minister Gough Whitlam officially opened the Adelaide Festival Centre, establishing the South Australian capital as a major arts city and marking a “major step forward in modern architecture.”
On that night, the Festival Theatre – the complex’s main building, and the first to be finished – played host to a performance of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony and Fidelio (Act Two, Scene 1). Fifty years later, the Festival Centre is an established icon of arts and architecture on the banks of the Karrawirra Parri/River Torrens, and it will mark its anniversary with a gala concert.
The Festival Centre was designed by Hassell and Partners and built in three stages from 1970 to 1980. It comprises the multipurpose, 2000-seat Festival Theatre; the drama theatre The Playhouse (now the Dunstan Playhouse); the experimental theatre The Space (now the Space Theatre) and a number of smaller galleries and function spaces.

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Festival Theatre interior. Image:

Peter Bennetts

Leading the design was the late John Morphett, an architectural rebel who brought the lessons of Walter Gropius and other leading modernists to Australia. In his obituary for Morphett, Gordon Kanki Knight relates how the architect prepared for the commission by visiting the world’s best theatres, taking in 42 halls in 42 days.
Following this whirlwind tour, Morphett “designed the building quickly, opting for two white octagonal shells in concrete.”
“I didn’t do many designs for the place,” Knight has Morphett saying. “It was remarkably simple. I went home one night and built a little cardboard model and I thought that it might work. We refined it, but initially it was essentially as it came out.
“The design encloses fairly logically the functions inside,” he explained. “You need an auditorium, you need a stage, so you put a different shell over each one and where they join is critical – the proscenium line is expressed where the volumes meet.”
The design was, for the most part, applauded. In a 1997 Architecture Australia review of the centre, Ian Brown concluded that the centre was designed “in the right place at the right time for a right price.”

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Ian Brown’s review of the Festival Centre in Architecture Australia, November 1977. Image:

Architecture Media

(The entire centre cost $21 million, compared to $102 million for the Sydney Opera House, completed in 1973.)
Brown praised the functional aspects of the three performing spaces, as well as the siting of the centre’s steel-framed “mushroom caps.”
“In fact the setting is so appropriate that the scale of the city-scape seems larger than it is, but complements entirely the proportions of the Centre,” Brown writes. “By which ever way you approach the Centre, from the River Torrens, bank, from the main traffic corridor of King William Street, from the Adelaide Railway Station, the sweep of the plaza provides exciting vistas with a surprise around every corner.”
The centre was added to the SA Heritage Register in 1997. Its heritage listing describes an “unashamedly modern complex notable for its bold structuralist approach to form” whose architecture “may be regarded as progressive while reflecting the period in which the concept was first mooted.”
The most controversial aspect of the centre has been the vast concrete plaza that surrounds it, punctuated by a large-scale environmental sculpture­­­ by West German artist Otto Hajek.
In his review, Ian Brown commented on “the entire bleakness of the Plaza area,” which he said offered no protection from extreme weather.

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Aerial view of Adelaide Festival Centre. Image:

Tom Balfour

Hajek’s sculpture, comprising a series of colourfully painted concrete forms that camouflage the airconditioning vent from the carpark below, was awarded a “brickbat” by the Civic Trust in 1977, while in 1986 its distinctive form was emblazoned on a commemorative stamp­­­. When it was announced that the sculpture would be decommissioned as part of the $90 million redevelopment of the plaza in 2015, some welcomed its removal, while others decried the move as “vandalism.”
The latest redevelopment of the Festival Centre and its plaza has been led by original architect Hassell, with ARM Architecture and landscape architects TCL and Aspect Studios responsible for the outdoor areas.
Of the new works, Hassell described a “restrained approach” that “will enhance the existing fabric and enable the elegant geometry to maintain its presence within an increasingly complex urban precinct.” More

Fender Katsalidis has designed a 23-storey dual-tower build-to-rent development in Brisbane’s Hamilton, which is poised for major development as the site of the 2032 Olympics’ main athletes village. The proposed development, submitted for approval to state government planning authority Economic Development Queensland, would include 560 apartments, including studios and one-, two- and three-bedroom units. They […] More

Smart Design Studio is continuing with its experiments in parametric modelling and curled brick facades in Alexandria, Sydney, revealing designs for another sculptural office building next to the firm’s own office on Stokes Avenue.
Dubbed Stokes 18, the new building would house five levels of office space at the transition between Alexandria’s heritage conservation area and the taller North Alexandria Enterprise Area and Green Square City to the southwest. The open-plan offices would be flexible spaces that were designed to be repurposed.
In planning documents before the City of Sydney, Smart Design Studio states that the $26 million project would “raise the architectural bar in Alexandria,” setting a benchmark for quality sustainable design.

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Stokes 18 by Smart Design Studio. Image:

Smart Design Studio

Echoing the earlier Stokes 14 development, the design takes inspiration from the industrial character of the local conservation area, incorporating standard building materials and brick facades that curl out to collect water and provide shade.
“On entering the building, you are greeted with a dramatic five-storey void, 21 metres in height and full of natural light,” a design statement reads. “A sculptural stair connects all five office levels and includes curved detailing that continues the external curved language internally, however in concrete. The entire space uses one material to create a monolithic form, which has peeling curves that allow light to enter the space.”
The office floors will each feature generous 3.7-metre ceilings.
“Robust materials are used to create dramatic office interiors, including octagonal columns, sand-blasted concrete, and sculptural ceilings with integrated lighting and industrial ceiling fans,” the design statement reads.

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Stokes 18 by Smart Design Studio. Image:

Smart Design Studio

The project includes a number of sustainability measures, including a large-scale solar array that would make the building’s operations “energy positive”, hydronic heating and “massive” fans to cut down on airconditioning needs, and end-of-trip facilities to encourage cycling.
Council requires that the development leaves 1,270 metres of land to be dedicated for the future extension of Stokes Avenue, and Smart Design Studio has proposed that the space be used for a lawn in the interim. The landscape design is by Fieldwork.
The project would require the demolition of an existing warehouse.
Planning documents are on exhibition until 5 June. More

Finland considers itself a “young” country. It only emancipated itself from centuries of Swedish and Russian rule in 1917, and for most of the twentieth century, the country’s efforts in nation-building and expressing its national identity have been palpable through its arts, culture, architecture and urbanity.
Helsinki Central Railway Station by Eliel Saarinen was completed just two years after Finland declared independence. Its monolithic granite structure and vivid copper roofs epitomize Finnish materiality. Commissioned in 1904 through a design competition, the station was set against a backdrop of Finnish nationalism and opposition to Russian rule among the country’s cultural circles. Paintings protesting restrictions on autonomy were popular, and Sibelius’s rousing tone poem “Finlandia” was composed to add voice to the national uprising.

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Helsinki Central Railway Station by Eliel Saarinen. Image:

Linda Cheng

Red granite can be found everywhere across Helsinki, from boulders to cobblestoned streets to buildings. They call it “helsingite” here because it is unique. Copper too is abundant, thanks to the Finnish mining industry, as is the spruce that fills the forests surrounding the city.
“I think that’s really clear in Helsinki, and they have a really strong material identity. It’s very textural and very grounded in the materials they have,” observed Bradley Kerr, one of five winners of the Australian Institute of Architects’ Dulux Study Tour.
“The strongest identifier in Helsinki on all of the architecture was the consistency of the very textured red granite and copper, and the way that they use those materials in so many different ways on buildings over the last 100 years just tells a really nice story of that place.”
Ellen Buttrose added, “We didn’t see any plasterboard, we didn’t see any composite materials – we saw materials that were very specific to this place, and I think that has naturally generated a particular language. And it’s been used in so many different ways.”

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Temppeliaukio Church by Timo and Tuomo Suomalainen. Image:

Linda Cheng

Post-war building in Helsinki has also accelerated a distinct feel to the city. Sarah Lebner remarked that “the periods of austerity [post-war] and needing to be frugal [have] taught the Finnish how to use pattern, repetition and layout of really simple materials very well, which has seeded part of their design culture.”
“You see a lot of brick, but it’s often a different bond to standard, so it’s the same material but used differently,” Lebner said.
“There’s a lot of national pride in the way they have developed identity through public buildings,” Tiffany Liew added.
The group’s Helsinki tour guide, Marianna Heikinheimo, estimated that approximately 60 percent of architects’ work comes from the public sector, the majority of which is awarded through design competitions. Museums, galleries, concert halls and public libraries have all been procured through design competition.

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Helsinki Central Library Oodi by ALA Architects. Image:

Linda Cheng

In a high-tax, progressive country such as Finland, public infrastructure on the public purse is to be expected. Nonetheless, “the amount of investment from the public policy side to the point of extreme debt is quite impressive [compared with] a parallel timescale of the past 100 years in Australian public infrastructure and community spaces,” Liew said.
The €100 million Helsinki Central Library Oodi, designed by ALA Architecture, was commissioned to celebrate the centenary of Finnish independence. Facing the Finnish parliament and a public square, the library occupies an important place in Helsinki’s cultural-political precinct.
Again, a competition was held in in 2012, and from more than 500 entries, ALA Architects was chosen as the winner. The project has been celebrated all over the world and draws in millions of visitors a year.
It shows that “there’s a real commitment to the delivery of the detail,” said Edwina Brisbane. “It’s not just if you win the competition, you have to provide a lot of detail. The project gets built, but it also gets delivered with the amount of detail that was intended in the first place.”
The legacy of Aalto looms large over the city, not only in the buildings dotted across the city but also in the zeitgeist of contemporary practise. “My professor in architecture always said Finland is an outdoor museum for modernism,” said Kristiina Kuusiluoma, CEO of Collaboratorio, which the group visited on the tour. She also said the Finnish are brave and like to experiment with new things.

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Collaboratorio developed a concrete alternative made of compacted clay mixed with aggregate made using discarded materials such as marble from Alvar Aalto’s Finlandia Hall refurbishment. Image:

Linda Cheng

Collaboratorio is taking the spirit of bravery and experimentation even further, developing its own materials such as a concrete alternative made of compressed clay (sourced from building site excavations) and aggregates that come from marble discarded during the refurbishment of Alvar Aalto’s Finlandia Hall. In fact, the group was most in awe of the Collaboratorio’s commitment to material exploration.
“I think there’s a new wave happening. We’ve seen a few practices who are moving away from the hyper-rational,” said Buttrose. “Aalto has started to give small gestures of moving away from that, and it’s almost like the current contemporary architects feel like they’re taking that to the next level again but using the same values of light, space and air in a new articulations.”
Linda Cheng is travelling with the Australian Institute of Architects’ 2023 Dulux Study Tour. Follow along on social media and the Institute’s blog. More

Designs for a Western Sydney mental health hospital that will become New South Wales’s largest have been placed on public exhibition.
The $460 million Westmead Integrated Mental Health Complex, announced by the state government in May 2022, will replace the existing mental health facilities at Cumberland Hospital.
Across 10 storeys, the hospital will house acute beds for young people, adolescents, adults, older persons and people living with eating disorders, as well as intensive care and high dependency units. There will also be sub- and non-acute beds, along with ambulatory and outpatient services.

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Westmead Integrated Mental Health Complex by Jacobs Australia. Image:

Jacobs Australia

The centre has been designed by Jacobs Australia to reflect contemporary models of care, connecting to the public realm and public transport to support the de-stigmatization of mental health care, while embracing biophilic design principles to create a therapeutic environment.
Aboriginal storytelling, histories and identities are also reflected in the design, developed in consultation with Traditional Custodians, consultant Cox Inall Ridgeway, and an Aboriginal psychologist.
The design includes graphic representations inspired by the eel and its stories, as well as three surrounding rivers: Parramatta River, Toongabbie Creek and Darling Mills Creek.

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Westmead Integrated Mental Health Complex by Jacobs Australia. Image:

Jacobs Australia

The primary facade is adorned in blue aluminium shingles that represent the “bubbling water” of the river streams, while the walkway between the entry forecourt and the northern landscaped area tells the story of mature eels going out to sea to have babies and younger eels coming back on the currents to fresh water.
Landscaped areas, including those in the courtyards and balconies, will include Aboriginal bush medicine plants such as emu bush, flannel flowers, waratahs and the snake vine. The hospital will sit on the land of the Dharug people.
The project is on public exhibit until 21 June. More

Kerstin Thompson Architects (KTA) has unveiled designs for an apartment and townhouse development in St Kilda, Melbourne that offers a “new take on the mansion block.”
Together with landscape architect Myles Baldwin Design, the architecture firm has developed a design that maintains a sense of the existing scale of the neighbourhood while offering a greater diversity of housing options. The project at 97 Alma Road will include 21 townhouses and 41 apartments, just across the road from Alma Park.
KTA director and 2023 Gold Medal winner Kerstin Thompson said the project paid tribute to St Kilda’s architectural heritage.
“97 Alma Road offers a graceful return to treasured memories, forging a connection with a valued part of Melbourne’s urban history while offering a new approach to multiple housing,” Thompson said.
The building is characterized by unique details and materials, including the expressive use of stucco, metalwork, textured glass, coloured tiles and ornamental sun screens. Each apartment has its own distinguishing architectural element: a bay window, an arch, a sunroom, an oddly shaped window, or a Juliet balcony.
“We really considered what it means to arrive home, celebrating the ‘homecoming’ with civic-scaled entries to the apartment building and activating differentiated laneways between the townhouses,” said Thompson.

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97 Alma Road by Kerstin Thompson Architects. Image:

Kerstin Thompson Architects

Toby Pond, principal at Kerstin Thompson Architects, said the project represented a unique response to infill development on a brownfield site, providing a variety of housing options. He noted that the design embraces the landscape, with the block divided by landscape pockets, providing garden areas, natural light and ventilation to all apartments.
Outdoor shared spaces include linear gardens with native planting, a garden spine to the east, a barbecue area, an apartment rooftop terrace that supports communal food production, and a courtyard that protects significant existing trees.
The building will incorporate passive design principles to maximize natural light and ventilation and reduce the need for airconditioning – there are no south-facing apartments. It will also feature solar panels, rainwater harvesting systems and high-efficiency appliances.
The project is being developed by Neometro. The developer’s design director, James Tutton, said the project was all about creating a “healthy building.”
“Entries are welcoming, stairs and corridors are imagined as a social and joyful path to everyone’s front door – open-air, light-filled with glimpses to garden, encouraging healthy and incidental engagement with the neighbours,” Tutton said. More