Architecture and Urban Design

Technology and 9/11: aircraft vs skyscrapers

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Gift of representatives of the NYPD and FDNY to the Premier of NSW the Hon Bob Carr MP, presented to the Powerhouse Museum, 2002.

Sunday 11 September is the tenth anniversary of that horrendous and highly symbolic event, the ramming of two aircraft into skyscrapers in New York City and one into the Pentagon in Washington DC. This portion of a girder cut from one of the World Trade Center buildings, distorted and blackened by fire, serves as a poignant, physical reminder of the event.

The relic was brought to Australia by a group of New York fire fighters and police officers who took part in the rescue and clean-up. They visited Sydney in February 2002 as guests of the NSW government and donated this object to the Premier in honour of the ten Australians who died alongside 3000 others that day. Its value as a museum object is symbolic, commemorating not just those ten but all who died, including those on board a fourth plane that did not reach its target, and all who took part in the rescue and recovery operation.

The hijackers aimed to create carnage, havoc and fear. Symbolism determined their choice of targets: the centre of world capitalism and the nerve centre of US defence. Symbolism also determined their choice of weapon: three airliners carrying large quantities of jet fuel, perhaps sourced from the Middle East’s massive oilfields.

The two skyscrapers were symbols of American technological leadership and economic success, soaring above the land and casting shadows on the water. They were made of steel, concrete and glass, all materials known and used since ancient times. They were clad with aluminium, a material that only became widely available in the twentieth century – thanks to Charles Martin Hall, the American who devised a process to separate it cheaply from its ores.

Powerhouse Museum Collection. Gift of Coles Myer Pty Ltd, 1997

Skyscrapers embody a good deal of engineering know-how. A key technology is the elevator with safety brake, invented in 1853 by another American, Elisha Otis. The Otis style governor above spent its working life in a shed perched on top of a Sydney retail building, ready to activate a brake if the lift it was connected to started falling too fast. Buildings could not be built more than a few storeys tall before the advent of the safety lift.

Powerhouse Museum Collection. Gift of Scott Czarnecki, 2004.

The electric lift motor is another key enabling technology for multi-storey buildings. This lift motor with integrated winch spent its working life in a shed at the top of another Sydney retail building, reliably starting at full load whenever someone pushed a button and unerringly stopping the lift level with the required floor. It was made in England around 1915, but the firm that made it was eventually taken over by Otis Elevator, the world’s largest lift company.

Powerhouse Museum Collection. Gift of Mr and Mrs E.A. and V.I. Crome, 1984

The first successful powered flight was achieved by two Americans, brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright, in 1903. Many other researchers had been trying to develop flying machines, including Australia’s own Lawrence Hargrave, whose box kite (below) probably contributed to the design of the Wright flyer’s wings. Hargrave also investigated animal movement and experimented with model ornithopters, making several different engines and a turbine to power them. Having put so much of his time and energy into pursuing the dream of flight, he expressed the hope that aircraft would not be used as war machines.

Powerhouse Museum Collection. Gift of Lawrence Hargrave, 1915.

Of course, it was not long before planes were used in warfare. They grew bigger, stronger and faster, but there was a limit to how fast reciprocating engines could spin propellers. In the 1930s and 40s in England, Frank Whittle was the first to develop gas turbine engines, which could move planes much faster than piston engines. Engineers in Germany and America also developed turbine engines. The engine below was made by Whittle’s company, Power Jets Ltd, in 1943.

Powerhouse Museum Collection. Gift of the Ministry of Supply, United Kingdom, 1951.

The American-made turbo-engine aeroplanes hijacked on 9/11 were not sinister war machines bristling with gun turrets and bombs, but sleek civilian craft similar to the Boeing 767 depicted by the model below. Their fuselage and wings were clad, like the twin towers of the World Trade Center, with that modern, lightweight, corrosion-resistant product of American ingenuity, aluminium.

Powerhouse Museum Collection.

Just as we rarely think about the technology that enables skyscrapers to exist, we rarely worry about the civilian planes whizzing around our skies. Bringing the two together on that day in 2001 was a shocking act that changed the world, opening new fault lines and accentuating old enmities. Ten years later, the fault lines have stretched around the world and destroyed or disrupted thousands more lives. And while technology has made our lives more interesting, healthy and comfortable, it is certainly a two-edged sword in the hands of those with enmity in their hearts.

Winners and losers: the Venice Biennale pavilion

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Photograph by Oleg Sidorenko. Shared by Creative Commons License

A far swag of the world’s most famous buildings are the result of design competitions – completed winners include Florence’s Duomo, the White House, the Paris Opera, the Westminster Houses of Parliament, the Reichstag (twice) and the Centre Pompidou.

Closer to home, winners include Federation Square, both Australian Parliament Houses, the Sydney and Canberra War Memorials and the Sydney Opera House. Compared to these, the just-announced competition for a new Venice Biennale pavilion is small cheese. But it has already generated plenty of heat, including a well-subscribed petition that the competition should be open to all Australian architects rather than merely those with an international pedigree.

A typical response came from Don Bates, one of the architects responsible for Fed Square:

We had never built anything before Fed Square…Had Fed Square gone down that [experience-only] route – and it’s a much more complex project than Venice biennale pavilion – then we wouldn’t have been selected…Coming up with something that really makes us rethink what an exhibitions space can be is about imagination. It’s not about previous history and background and a big CV and a big portfolio of projects that may seem similar.

There’s no question that numerous successful architects have gained their big break via competition. Among design archives held by the Powerhouse those of John Andrews and Ken Woolley document careers sparked by this way. Andrews was shortlisted in 1958 for the Toronto City Hall contest and worked with the successful entrant, setting off his glowing North American career. At the same time Ken Woolley was already involved with major projects for the NSW Government Architect, but in terms of public profile this achievement paled compared to his and Michael Dysart’s success in the 1958 Australian Women’s Weekly’s ‘Australian Family Home Competition’.

Photography by Jean-Francois Lanzarone, Powerhouse Museum

The Sydney Opera House is the best known Australian example of a competition career breakthrough. In contrast to Joern Utzon, Walter and Marion Griffin had already established careers in Chicago when the Canberra competition was won in 1914. But all three had ample opportunity to reflect ruefully on the pitfalls of ‘success’. They are far from unique, as politics frequently trump competition success and many of architecture’s biggest names – including Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Zaha Hadid – have seen their competition winners by-passed.

Open competitions for public buildings remain the norm in many European nations; in France competition is compulsory for public projects of significant value. Jean Nouvel, like Utzon a serial competition also-ran until his 1981 breakthrough with the Institut du monde Arabe, is an example of the talent that can be unearthed this way. However the French system is often criticised for focussing architecture towards juries rather than clients.

In Australia and other Anglophone societies this career path is under threat as limited competitions a la Venice Biennale become common. One reason is the possibility of an open competition producing no commercially, politically or aesthetically appropriate winner. As building regulations, approval processes and finance become more complex design is only one of the factors to be considered by competition juries. Big names and established firms have experience at negotiating these tangles.

But even established architects aren’t necessarily good at this sort of thing: Daniel Libeskind made his name with his winning design for the Berlin Jewish Museum, but his reputation or skills haven’t stopped him being sidelined in the rebuilding of the World Trade Centre site in New York, despite his Freedom Tower concept being chosen from an initial ideas contest.

Photography by MArinco Kojdanovski, Powerhouse Museum

At a less exalted level the Powerhouse’s neighbour the Ian Thorpe pool initially went to an open competition although none of the shortlisted entrants were judged to meet the required ‘functional and budget criteria’. The disappointed architects were even less impressed when a competition of three invited firms (none of which had entered the open contest) chose the Harry Seidler design.

However the main factor is Australian governments’ current preference for privately funded design and constructs contracts, removing the financial risk (and design) from the public sphere. Both the Sydney Olympics and the Barangaroo contests saw winners ignored in favour of private contracts. Of the Olympic venues only the Dunc Gray Velodrome design was a competition winner, while Barangaroo saw the corporate charms of Lend Lease triumph over the competition victor (dismissed as a ‘sub-division plan’ by Paul Keating). Barangaroo may yet prove the failings of this approach.

None of these considerations are relevant to the Australian pavilion, a small (320 square metres, only slightly larger than McMansion size) but prestigious project. On the face of it, perfect for an open competition.

Cities Reborn

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Photography by David Mist. David Mist Archive, Powerhouse Museum

There’s been some comment lately about the fact that for the first time, more than half of the human race lives in cities. At the same time, cities are being seen again in a generally positive light. Some, including London and New York, are growing once more after a few decades of decline.

It hasn’t always been so: a century ago town planners and politicians were arguing that crowded, polluted, slum-ridden cities should be replaced by low-density ‘Garden suburbs’, pub-less, factory-less expanses of cottages. Sydney has some of the world’s first planned garden suburbs – Haberfield, parts of Kensington and Botany – though they are now barely distinguishable from the rest.

During the 1920s Le Corbusier advocated a ‘Radiant City’ of parks and apartment blocks connected by freeways. This idea was not as absurd as it seems today; much of Modernist architecture was developed from the design of 1920s social housing estates in central Europe and many of these have been socially as well as architecturally successful – Siemensstadt and five other Berlin Modernist housing estates are now World Heritage sites. But this housing/planning model was not an adequate basis for a complete city.

The Museum’s collection holds an archive from an advocate of the Modernist city: Charles Frederick Beauvais was a designer for Singer, Crossley and other British car makers before moving to Sydney in 1937. During the 1940s Charles Beauvais became a newspaper and magazine favourite and in numerous illustrated articles he extolled the potential of transport technologies to transform city life. In 1947 the Atlantic Union Oil Company asked Beauvais to create a model city of the future for the Easter Show. Like most such concepts, Beauvais’ ideal metropolis consists of high-speed transport freeways connecting tall buildings and parks.

Atlantic Union Oil 'City of the Future' exhibition at Royal Agricultural Show, designed Charles Frederick Beauvais, photograph Russell Roberts, Sydney, 1947

By the 1960s and 1970s grand scale town planning was on the nose, and the future of cities was widely viewed with pessimism expressed in media as different as Jane Jacobs’ The death and life of great American cities and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.
The dystopian city fantasy is a resilient literary and cinematic genre, but at the moment it is lacking a little potency thanks to a wave of feel-good celebrations of city life. This phenomenon is not unconnected with the middle class colonisation of the inner city; in Sydney the start of this movement can be dated with precision to 1968, the publication date of Rob Hillier’s book Let’s buy a terrace house.

The most prominent cities advocate of recent times is Richard Florida whose book The rise of the creative class argued that agglomeration of artists, curators, writers and boho types generally was the key to successful cities. Around the mid-000s Florida became something of a travelling circus, touring the world to pronounce on the creative buzz of city after city – I can’t remember his judgement on Sydney’s creative class. Still, it was brilliantly successful concept, if only because it made everyone in possession of a laptop or smart phone feel as if they were surfing the wave of history.

And Florida was correct in many ways, if misguided in his definitions of creativity. Cities are fundamentally economic entities. They succeed by bringing people together so that ideas, strategies, jobs, markets, alliances and enterprises can flourish as nowhere else. It’s sometimes proclaimed that the internet will make cities irrelevant, that people can be just as connected and creative on a farm or a boat. But the evidence so far is that today’s increased connectivity is making cities even more attractive and efficient, building on their inherent strength in connectivity and unplanned association.
The biggest cities used to be a Western phenomenon, but are mostly found today in the developing world. Sydney is barely a village compared to Sao Paolo (20 million residents) or Shanghai (23 million), cities which have redefined urban scale. And we still have the luxury of debating the relative merits of city versus country living, while across the world migration to cities is recognised as the only chance of escaping grinding rural poverty and subserviance.

The urban ideologies of the 20th century were focused on creating architectural monocultures, whether modernist or suburban. Yet part of the appeal of cities is their layering of eras and building types embodied in their architecture. Even a relatively young city like Sydney can give a buzz of juxtaposition and variety.
The planning policies of today are still largely focused on creating consistent urban and architectural scale. It’s arguable that this is a denial of the essential quality of cities and one of the reasons that Sydney and Melbourne suffer from a mismatch of demand and supply in dwelling types.

An appropriate response doesn’t have to involve large scale rebuilding (though this was part of the repeopling of Sydney’s CBD). The mansions and large terrace houses of Sydney were abandoned by most of their owners during the early 20th century when servants became scarce and the suburbs more fashionable. Most of the big houses were recycled as boarding houses or flats; they’ve since been recycled yet again as homes, share houses or offices.

A similar career could await today’s McMansions and other suburban buildings. Walk-up flats, for example, for a long time the most-reviled of building types have recently been identified as one of the most sustainable. Low energy design and high thermal mass construction makes the red-brick ‘six-pack’ an unlikely exemplar of green suburban living and a design resource for sustainable urbanism.

If people feel good about cities, all sorts of things are possible.

Don’t renovate, detonate!

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Photography by Charles Pickett, Powerhouse Museum

You might have seen in Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herald a piece about the Knock Down Rebuild (KDR) phenomenon. Across Sydney’s middle-ring suburbs – from Strathfield to Granville, Earlwood to Hurstville, Manly to Avalon – old timber, fibro and brick cottages are being purchased for ‘land value’, demolished and replaced with new homes.

I’d been looking out for some research on KDR; you don’t have to spend much time in the burbs to notice it. The basis of the Herald story was a study by the City Futures unit at the Faculty of the Built Environment, University of NSW. Led by Bill Randolph, City Futures has for some years been producing unique insights into urban change in Sydney. Its investigation of building applications in several municipalities shows that the KDR phenomenon is biggest in Bankstown (627 applications for KDR between 2004 and 2008) followed by Ku-ring-gai (616), Warringah (580), Hornsby (408), Canterbury (388), Hurstville (385) and Fairfield (353).

Photography by Charles Pickett, Powerhouse Museum

The district with the highest proportion of KDR dwellings is Strathfield, with 5 per cent built between 2004 and 2008. I know Strathfield a little (my kids attend school and preschool there) and the transformation of this former ‘Old money’ suburb is striking. Federation-period houses are being replaced by McMansions and other monster dwellings. Of course, it is central to the KDR phenomenon that the new homes are larger than the ones they replace, a big part of the reason that Sydney now boasts the largest new houses in the world.

In her new book (and exhibition) 52 Suburbs Louise Hawson gives a jaundiced summary of Strathfield: ‘Turns out the suburb is covered in mansions, built in the early 1900s when Strathfield was country and wealthy families required rural retreats. They are handsome but what really sent my camera snapping were some of the ridiculously grand old institutional buildings – Santa Sabina College and the Australian Catholic University in particular.

Aside from the beauties, Strathfield has its fair share of crappy old apartment blocks and crappy
new million-dollar homes’.

Despite all this the political and media focus has remained on the long-running argument about urban consolidation – the thirty-year old NSW Government policy to encourage medium and high density development in established suburbs, while restricting the growth of new suburbs on the city fringe. The rationale for urban consolidation is economic, social and environmental; higher density housing in old suburbs reduces the need for new transport, social and commercial infrastructure while containing the city’s environmental footprint. However it is not universally popular. Our new Premier Barry O’Farrell is member for Ku-ring-gai, site of the loudest recent protests against apartment development despite its aging and unusually dispersed population. (From the figures above it seems that the burghers of Ku-ring-gai don’t mind McMansions however). So it is not surprising that the Premier has promised to shift the development balance back towards the urban fringe.

Photography by Charles Pickett, Powerhouse Museum

Yet the popularity of KDR means that most new houses are being built in established areas rather than far flung new suburbs like Kellyville, a long established focus for design and media commentary due to its concentration of large project homes. Shortage of building sites is less of a problem than proclaimed by the advocates of endless suburban expansion. In any case, large houses are declining as a proportion of new dwellings, simply because families with children are also a shrinking demographic.

However KDR is also undermining urban consolidation; blocks in older suburbs are often very large, up to 600 square metres, easily big enough for two new dwellings under dual occupancy laws, townhouses or terraces . Instead they continue to be occupied by one family. In addition, KDR is maintaining property values; how you feel about that probably depends on whether you are one of the slowly shrinking proportion of Sydney’s population who have scrambled onto the real estate escalator. And of course the new monster houses have the usual McMansion issues of energy and water hunger.

KDR has become a large part of the project home market. Blocks which are frequently deep but narrow are difficult when combined with the compulsory large garage in the front of the house. Bizarre floor plans are a common result, as is the usual project home problem of poor relation to aspect, sun etc. And finally there is heritage: councils (including Strathfield) assiduously list notable local structures. Even my house in Canterbury has a local heritage listing. But unless these houses graduate to the more exclusive state or national listings, a local listing does not guarantee protection. Unless you live in Ku-ring-gai, perhaps.

A covering uncovered

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Copper sheeting from St James Church, Sydney (1819-24)

H4731, Copper sheathing of around 1822 taken from the 1894 repair of St James Church Spire, Sydney Collection: Powerhouse Museum

H4732 Circular hand-beaten copper coping of around 1822 taken from the 1894 repair of St James Church Spire, Sydney Collection: Powerhouse Museum

Occasionally we happen upon the previous lives of objects in our collection. Two pieces of roofing copper have been in the Powerhouse Museum’s collection since 1946. They are recorded as having come from the steeple of St James Church in Macquarie Street, Sydney, designed by Francis Greenway and completed in 1824. The copper had been given by a Mrs Watson of Gladswood House, Double Bay in 1946 and the steeple had been last renovated by Wunderlich Limited in 1894. Until recently this was all we knew.

(A7437-31/2/22/22) St James Church 1894 spire restoration (on right side of page) from 'The Wunderlich Manufactures 1912 catalogue 'Section IV Metal Roofing and Exterior Decoration, Wunderlich Limited, Redfern, New South Wales Collection:Powerhouse Museum

One of the Museum pieces is a roofing sheet or tile, and the other a circular portal. Through the green patina of each can be seen ‘convict’ broad arrows stamped into the metal by the Board of Ordnance. These symbols effectively identified the material to be government property and would have made them more easily recognisable had they been stolen (and recovered prior to melting down!). Over the last couple of years the steeple has been undergoing its first renovation since 1894. Research was undertaken by the architects and archaeologists to make the current work as authentic to the original 1820s as possible. Suddenly the Powerhouse’s intriguing but otherwise unremarkable roof pieces were important and informative survivors of use to the architects. In return for our help, one of the researchers, Dr Rose Annable, gave the Powerhouse some copies of information from the St James archives. This included a cutting of a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald written around 1930 by Frederick William Watson, who we now know to have been the custodian of the copper pieces prior to his death in 1945, and their donation in 1946.

H 4732 Broad arrow symbol on edge of portal Collecton: Powerhouse Museum

In his letter Frederick Watson laments the potential loss of many of Sydney’s colonial buildings, and he describes how his thoughts were prompted by the presence of the two objects now in the Powerhouse Museum,

Certainly some features [of St James] were changed about 40 years ago. As I write there hang in front of me a large sheet of copper and a moulded copper porthole (so to speak), covered with broad arrows to prevent theft. These form part of the old roof and one of sixteen holes in the steeple, removed [he wrongly speculates] because exception was taken to broad arrows on the roof of the church.

Frederick Watson (1878-1945) was a medical doctor and historian of note – editing the initial volumes of the Historical Records of Australia. Expecting to be appointed government archivist, Watson moved to the Canberra district in 1927 where he contemplated these copper pieces from St James that spurred his letter to the Sydney Morning Herald. Thankfully buildings such as the Mint and Hyde Park Barracks that he feared would be lost to development have survived, and so too have his pieces of St James church …

References:
Wunderlich Limited catalogue pages, 1899, 1901, 1904, 1912. (A7437-31/2/3/79; A7437-31/2/5/104; A7437-31/2/7/89; A7437-31/2/22/22)

Ann M. Mitchell, ‘Watson, James Frederick William (1878 – 1945)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 12, Melbourne University Press, 1990, pp 398-399. http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A120448b.htm?hilite=frederick%3Bwatson

Osama’s lair

Published by Charles Pickett 4 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Osama's hideout. Image from United States Department of Defense, public domain

The demise of Osama bin Laden is certainly the news story of 2011. Among the torrent of analysis, news stories and blogs this event has generated, bin Laden’s home of the past five or six years has attracted considerable comment.

Apparently part of the reason that this 3-storey concrete villa attracted the suspicion of the CIA was the building’s design, notably its tall surrounding walls and small number of windows. A White House spokesman was widely quoted: ‘Intelligence analysts concluded that this compound was custom-built to hide someone of significance.’

One doesn’t wish to query what is already received journalist wisdom, but my reaction on viewing photos of bin Laden’s hideout was admiration for its utter anonymity. Far from generating suspicion, it seems more likely that the generic character of bin Laden’s pile was a significant part of the reason that he could reside undetected in a Pakistan garrison town.

The building may have been larger than its neighbours, but similar ponderous villas can be found in great numbers across most of the world, especially its less prosperous parts. Concrete may appear non-domestic to Australian eyes, but it is the popular construction material of today’s world. Its materials are cheap and widely available, its labour intensive construction is not a problem in low-wage economies, and it is easy to add extra floors and rooms to concrete structures; the ends of reinforcing rods are often left exposed for this reason. Of course, it’s also easy to build very thick concrete walls.

Architectural flourish is seldom a feature of such residences but enclosure within a compound is, especially in areas where public space can be dangerous. Bin Laden’s mansion would not look out of place, for example, in the outskirts of Naples. To this one can add Pakistan’s highly patriarchal society, where domestic life is routinely hidden behind walls. There is no reason to disbelieve the spokeswoman for the Pakistani Foreign Minister, that such compounds are common in Pakistan.

Hideouts are an exotic sub-genre of architecture. Slate this week published a gallery of famous ones; bin Laden’s is modest compared to that of Pablo Escobar, the Colombian drug warlord assassinated in 1993. But the real Escobar showpiece is his Hacienca Los Napoles, a massive theme park and mansion constructed for his family featuring a zoo, lake and airport; it’s now a public park and tourist attraction.

Escobar’s Hacienca belongs to the architecture of power, as analysed by Deyan Sudjic in his book The Edifice Complex. Through violence and bribery, Escobar was able to humiliate Colombia’s civil authorities; the Hacienca was a means of flaunting both his wealth and immunity. Bin Laden never had this opportunity. He attempted to build a grand residence incorporating a mosque at Kandahar, Afghanistan. It was bombed before he could move in.

However bin Laden’s anonymous hideout shares features with the homes of the very rich. An ostentatious mansion was once a necessity for any self-respecting magnate, but the enclosed compound is now the favoured option. The main Sydney example is the Bellevue Hill compound of the Packer family, formed since the 1930s out of nine different properties. Examples elsewhere include the homes of Bill Gates, Michael Dell and George Lucas. The only available photos of such places are taken from prying helicopters. Fugitives aren’t the only people prepared to pay up for anonymity.

Inspired by an Incinerator

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Pyrmont Incinerator. Image Powerhouse Museum 1992

Well not just any incinerator. The Pyrmont incinerator was rather special, it was one designed by Walter Burley Griffin (1876-1937) in 1935. Memorable on the Pyrmont skyline for fifty years the incinerator or reverberator has inspired responses from a variety of artists even after its removal from the landscape.

The Pyrmont incinerator was one of the largest and grandest in design and one of the last designed by Griffin before leaving Australia for India in 1935 where he died in 1937. The Griffin Mahoneys (Marion Mahoney 1871-1961) played an important part in bringing new and individual design ideas to Australia, specifically to Sydney (and of course Canberra) in the 1920s and 30s with the Castlecrag development and the municipal incinerators.

At the incinerators demolition in 1992 the Museum was there filming, photographing and collecting the tiles that covered the incinerator and the massive gates.
Recently a Melbourne artist Nicholas Mangan has been attracted to record the tiles as part of his own art work scheduled for an exhibition at Artspace in April 2011.

Filming a Pyrmont Incinerator tile at the Castle Hill Discovery Centre

Nicholas says

My attraction to the Walter Burley Griffin Pyrmont incinerator began with an image from the Powerhouse Museum archives of the building in a state of severe decay. Although I knew the building was situated in inner Sydney on the once industrial waterfront it appeared displaced.

Only hours before the building was demolished staff from the Powerhouse Museum were able to pry some of the ornamental elements from the buildings façade.

Detail of the Pyrmont Incinerator tiles, Powerhouse Museum 1992

I began to think about a project concerned with the history of this building departing from this one particular image. I photocopied the image and pinned it to the wall of my studio. There was something very Romantized/picturesque about the image in the way the building was framed, it also spoke to me about lament – About the attempt to capture the passing of a moment, out of context and somehow out of time.

My original idea was to tell the story of the demolition of the Pyrmont incinerator though the photocopied achieve material and through the function of a photocopier itself; drawing a connection through carbon -the incinerator reducing matter to carbon and a photocopier using carbon to reproduce.

The ornamental relief of the Pyrmont incinerator was heavily inspired by pre Columbian architecture of Meso America.
Architectural historians have tied Griffin’s references to the “Mayan Palace of the Governor” of Uxmal in Yucatan, Mexico. Griffin had in fact traveled to the Yucatan on a field trip. In its last days before being demolished the Pyrmont incinerator’s resemblance to a Mayan ruin is uncanny. Overgrown in tundra shrubs and trees, crumbling and covered in it’s own sacrificial soot and ash.

Pyrmont Incinerator. Image: Powerhouse Museum, 1992

Another artist who was inspired by the Incinerator was jeweller Nicholas Rohan, who looked at the delicate patterns and embellishments on the concrete tiles of the surfaces of the incinerator. Rohan created created a series of brooches and cuff links

2005/181/1 Brooches (3), 'Marion and Walter Burley Griffin Reverberatory Incinerator Series', bone / metal, designed and made by Rohan Nicol, Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, Australia, 2004 - 2005 Collection: Powerhouse Museum

The incinerators sculptural form is reflected in the shape of the pieces. The material used is animal leg bone referring to the trail of cattle which were herded past the incinerator on their way to the abattoirs on Glebe Island

Artist Jane Bennett whose paintings documented the industrial landscape of the Pyrmont peninsula from 1986-1996 comments on the rapid changes in the area, including the demolition of the Incinerator.

The bulldozers arrived on a public holiday, I still thought someone was going to stop it because I knew it was so controversial I couldn’t believe what’s happened. I did a large charcoal drawing showing the first bite of the bulldozer. When I came back from overseas in 1988 everything had been scraped clean. Not just a case of a couple of apartment blocks being built. The whole topography had changed. It started with the Walter Burley Griffin incinerator being pulled down.

Pyrmont Incinerator painted by Jane Bennett, 1991

Ruined

Published by Charles Pickett 4 Comments Tags: , , .

Painting by B. Barzotti. Collection: Powerhouse Museum.

I love ruins, and I’m not alone in this taste. A fair swag of the world’s most visited tourist sites are ruins: the Forum, the Great Wall, the Pyramids and so on – it’s an impressive list.

A ruin is not a building damaged by storm, flood or earthquake. A ruin is a building abandoned to decay and neglect, sometimes before it was completed. In the West the passion for ruins reached a peak during the 1700s and 1800s, when the ruins of classical antiquity sparked a tourist craze and a belief that history was cyclical, a chronicle of the rise and fall of civilisations and empires. Architects produced elevations of their new buildings as the picturesque ruins of the future; others designed fake ruins, creating a false history for their clients.

Ruins demonstrate the potential transience and folly of every project or industry. The newer the building the more poignant is this fate. Hence modern ruins have a particular allure.

The disused Paddington Reservoir has been converted into a submerged public park, a project which has won its architects several awards and created a space which is both relaxing and ruined. However such projects are rare in Sydney, where buildings are seldom given a chance of becoming ruined. Recently I acquired an artwork from the Skygarden shopping centre; built at Pitt Street Mall in 1989, Skygarden survived less than twenty years before being demolished for the new Westfield Centre.

Modern ruins are more plentiful elsewhere. As well as its historic ruins, Italy also does an excellent line in modern ruins. A recent study documented more than 360 public buildings left uncompleted in Italy. The greatest concentration of these ruins was found in Giarra, a town of 27,000 people in Sicily. Giarra’s ruins include a polo stadium with seating for 20,000 spectators, a motorway bridge which ends in mid-air, an abandoned municipal swimming pool and a crumbling open-air theatre. With the townscape dominated by ruined structures, Giarra initiated a Festival of the Incomplete, inviting artists, film-makers and performers to interpret and celebrate its ruins.

Another hotspot for ruins is the USA. While Italy’s modern ruins are primarily products of political failure, deindustrialisation is the force in the US. Several cities have suffered dramatic losses of industry and population, leaving behind not only disused factories but department stores, churches, office towers, hotels, schools and other major buildings. The most spectacular example is Detroit, former capital of the US car industry, now increasingly famous for abandoned public buildings including its former railway terminal, Michigan Central, as imposing as New York’s Grand Central. About one third of Detroit’s city area is now ruined and abandoned.

Detroit’s cityscape of deindustrialisation has produced a small boom in photography and documentary making, as well as special-interest tourism.

International movements of industry and expertise are not new, but are certainly more common and fast than ever before. Detroit is far from unique. In its heyday Cadillac or Mercury cars were the most sought-after consumer products in the US. Today’s equivalents would probably be the products of Apple, designed in California but manufactured in decidedly less glamorous circumstances in China.

The moment when Detroit was truly doomed was not when it became cheaper to build cars elsewhere. More crucial was the moment when better quality design and production was also happening elsewhere. It might seem as preposterous as the Japanese and Korean car industries once did, but the odds are that Detroit’s fate will one day be that of Silicon Valley.

Old power station site pre Museum. Collection Powerhouse Museum

The future of every civilization lies in ruins. The Powerhouse was a ruin for twenty years. Are you prepared to bet that it will never return to that state?

The Fibro frontier

Published by Charles Pickett 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , .

House at Monterey, Sydney. Photo by Andrew Frolows. Collection:Powerhouse Museum

The NSW Ombudsman Bruce Barbour has just released a report about asbestos and its terrible legacy. According to the report asbestos-related disease will soon be killing more people in Australia than car and traffic accidents. Although production of asbestos products was discontinued during the 1980s, decades can pass between exposure to asbestos dust and the onset of cancers. By 2020 it is expected that more than 13,000 people will have been diagnosed with the lung cancer mesothelioma, which is invariably fatal.

I have an interest in this subject because in 1997 I published a book titled The fibro frontier: A different history of Australian architecture. Fibro was a good book for me. It wasn’t the first book I’d written but it was the first to give me a real reputation outside the Museum. It was also a good book for the Powerhouse, which co-published it with Transworld Publishers. Along with Australian Dream, Beyond architecture and others, we had a good decade of titles which engaged with design and culture in unusual ways. Unfortunately detours into vanity publishing eventually killed all that.

Wunderlich ‘Durabestos’ catalogue, 1955. Collection: Powerhouse Museum.

Fibro is not primarily about asbestos and its consequences. It focuses on the architectural and social impact of fibro, arguing that the fibro house is the most distinctive expression of Australian domestic architecture. When I was working on Fibro we considered calling the book ‘Fabulous fibro’ though fortunately we changed our minds, aware that fibro is anything but to people suffering from asbestos diseases.

But I’ve had plenty of occasions to ponder the relationship between fibro – asbestos-cement – as the building material which by the 1960s clad one third of houses in NSW and fibro as the material which condemned thousands to a painful death. I’ve spoken at conferences of asbestos disease lawyers and I’ve written expert witness opinions for law firms acting for and against James Hardie, Australia’s main manufacturer of asbestos products and the company which for decades avoided its responsibilities towards cancer sufferers, setting a new low in corporate behaviour. Many careers have been built on the basis of asbestos-induced suffering, not a comfortable thought even for someone on the fringes of that bonanza.

Gideon Haigh points out in his award-winning investigation Asbestos House: The secret history of James Hardie Industries:

‘Fibro has a rightly honoured place in Australian life, history, culture, even aesthetics – Charles Pickett’s 1997 book The Fibro Frontier is a splendid introduction’. But Haigh also argues that fibro’s cultural and architectural significance is not necessarily dependant on the suffering it produced: ‘That asbestos has improved lives and taken lives are separate propositions’.

The amount of asbestos fibre in fibro was reduced during the 1950s and 1960s because of rising costs and a need to increase the material’s flexibility. But James Hardie did not seek to completely replace asbestos until the company’s future was on the line during the late 1970s; until then the company preferred to cajole, obfuscate and threaten its critics and plaintiffs.

Today there are still thousands of houses clad or lined with fibro. In addition many brick or timber homes have fibro used under eaves, in gable ends and ceilings while asbestos often turns up in unexpected places such as tiles, floor coverings and insulation. Fibro is generally safe when left alone but as the Ombudsman points out, no coordinated warning or inspection system exists to reduce the risk of people unintendedly releasing asbestos dust when renovating or altering their homes. There are no laws preventing home owners from working on their homes regardless of the presence of asbestos.

Mesothelioma is not just incurable; it is also capricious and pitiless. Many people (including my father) frequently exposed to asbestos dust suffered no adverse consequences; others were condemned from fleeting encounters. After picking off many who mined asbestos, made asbestos products or worked as builders, mesothelioma now ravages home renovators who carelessly meddled with fibro. In its terminal stages mesothelioma is brutally painful, rendering every breath a struggle against pain. As a judge of the Dust Diseases Tribunal wrote:

‘Those who suffer it reach a stage where it is necessary to fight for every breath, with every breath accompanied by pain so dreadful that the only way to avoid it is not to breathe. The choice between breathing and not breathing is no choice at all’.

If you have renovation ambitions, remind yourself of that frequently.

Two cities, two breweries, two designer projects

Published by Charles Pickett 3 Comments Tags: , , .

Photography by Charles Pickett

By coincidence, two major city brewery sites are currently being redeveloped in both Sydney and Melbourne. The venerable Kent Brewery on Broadway, founded in 1835, is being transformed into Central Park, a new residential precinct. A similar transformation is taking place with the Carlton Brewery site at the top end of Swanston Street in central Melbourne.

Brewing was the first manufacturing industry to reach industrial scale in most European countries, and breweries were among the first factories established in Australian cities. Hence they often occupied prime inner city sites. In 1985, about 20 years before Kent Brewery closed, the Powerhouse acquired a huge collection of brewery and hotel artefacts from its long-term owner Tooth & Co.; I’ve been the curator responsible for this collection for most of the time since. In 2004 I curated an exhibition for the City of Melbourne titled Melbourne Breweries: the First & Last factories, highlighting Melbourne’s still extant brewing heritage.

Collection: Powerhouse Museum

Some of Melbourne’s old breweries and maltings had already been converted to other uses notably the Victoria Brewery, remade as a residential and lifestyle development with the aspirational title of Tribeca. The legendary Philippe Starck was involved as a design consultant, so this brewery makeover helped to set the mould for today’s generation of urban renewals. Kent Brewery’s impending reconstruction as Central Park calls on a similar list of high-profile names to both design and promote the development; these include Sir Norman Foster, Jean Nouvel, Richard Johnson, Alex Tzannes and Tim Greer.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the main urban regeneration projects were ‘slum clearance’ –demolition of inner city houses and construction of public housing. In the inner suburbs of Melbourne, especially, tower blocks replaced terraces but Sydney also saw much of the same benevolent ruthlessness. Brewery sites, along with docksides and other former industrial sites are the focus of today’s boom in urban redevelopment. The slum clearances were justified on social grounds. This has been replaced by is the ubiquitous evocation of designer names and credentials to justify and promote these developments. According to its developers Frasers Properties,

The very first stage of Central Park sets the scene for what is to come: two iconic residential towers rising above a retail centre, connected by terraced gardens to the main park beyond. World-class architecture, richly veiled in living green walls, this first residential stage encapsulates all that Central Park has to offer: bold, beautiful and globally significant new directions for 21st century living. Designed by award-winning Parisian architect Jean Nouvel, ‘One Central Park’ reminds us that nature can thrive in the city. Its façade is the canvas for a collection of breathtaking vertical gardens by French artist Patrick Blanc, delivering what architect Bertram Beissel describes as “a flower to each resident, and a bouquet to the city”. The French do have a way with words.

The Carlton Brewery site will host Pixel, Australia’s first carbon-neutral office building, as well a residential tower and a new design school for the adjacent RMIT campus. Here the designer evocation takes a quaintly Melbourne twist. The architect of the Design Hub is RMIT alumnus Sean Godsell:

The former brewery site has been a missing piece in this part of town. Its re-development, starting with the RMIT Design Hub, is fantastic for Melbourne. Melbourne is the design capital of Australia and considered one of the world’s pre-eminent design cities. The Design Hub brings together in one building postgraduate design researchers in fields as diverse as aeronautical engineering, industrial design, fashion, furniture, architecture and more.

Melbourne’s Second City syndrome ensures that ‘design capital’ joins ‘sporting capital’ and ‘most liveable’ among other self-awarded titles.

In an industry dominated by development and property companies its easy to be cynical about the role of design. Using the design and construct formula companies such as Lend Lease, Meriton, Mirvac, Australand and Multiplex control the design agendas closely. Project managers delegate the design process as well as the construction, marketing and other elements of major urban projects.

Property companies are among political parties’ most generous donors; the price appears to be privileged access to decisions over prominent sites. Meanwhile, architects are chosen as part of the builder/developer package, and employed by the developer or builder. Governments can sign a contract with a developer who offers the best deal for public land. In the process they sign away financial risk and design decisions for an agreed payment and delivery date. Only star architects such as Renzo Piano and Nonda Katsilidis have a greater chance to control their designs. These high profile names also create a more sympathetic consideration of proposals at odds with building and urban ordinances.

Melbourne Docklands, Eric Sierins, © Max Dupain and Associates.

None of this means that the architectural and urban outcomes will necessarily be poor, though there’s also no doubt that the role of designers is sometimes to justify and ameliorate financially-driven outcomes. Melbourne’s Docklands project created a climate of cynicism for this reason and so has Sydney’s Barangaroo project. The economics of creating Barangaroo’s northern park (aka Point Keating) virtually demands that the southern end will be overdeveloped.

But this debate is also an international one. Architecture writer Owen Hatherley has declared that the current generation of urban renewal has produced ‘the new ruins of Great Britain’:

‘Here in the UK, with a tiny handful of exceptions, we’ve been keen to parcel off these spaces to the cheapest available firms, and to let the property developers lead the way on what was, for the most part, publicly owned land, out of the fear that they and their money might disappear if they were in any way challenged…the result is astoundingly cheap-looking architecture, with the developers assuming we wouldn’t notice the meanness and cheapness if they put a wavy roof on top and plenty of contrasting materials on the façade’.

You could argue that a few developments in Sydney and Melbourne are similarly disappointing, with the important difference that the GFC has left few of them uncompleted and unwanted by buyers and tenants. No one doubts that new residential developments here will find a market; to the contrary their main failing is arguably their creation of well-heeled monocultures, rather than the inner city diversity featured in their marketing.