Tabla de contenidos para May 2019 en Architecture Australia

The Holy Family Catholic Church in Indooroopilly was designed by the Brisbane-based architectural firm Douglas and Barnes in 1961, and constructed between 1961 and 1963. Noticeably influenced by Pier Luigi Nervi’s unrealized scheme for a cathedral at New Norcia, Western Australia (1957–61) as well as other, international modern concrete church designs – most notably Marcel Breuer’s St John’s Abbey Church in Minnesota, USA (1953–61) and Oscar Niemeyer’s chapel at the Palácio da Alvorada in Brasilia, Brazil (1958) – it combined expressive forms with novel materials and relied on innovative construction methods that had never before been tested in Queensland. Holy Family was built at the height of church construction in the state. Between 1955 and 1965, more churches were built in Queensland than in any decade prior or since. In…

The tiny Victorian town of Katamatite sits in the vast flat landscape of the Murray Valley agricultural district, 205 kilometres from Melbourne, forty-three kilometres north of Shepparton and within fifteen kilometres of the New South Wales border. On the edge of town is an extraordinary modern church constructed in 1961 to a design by architectural practice Muir and Shepherd.1 Arthur R. Shepherd and John Muir met in the 1930s while working in the office of influential modernist architects Stephenson and Turner. In 1947, Muir and Shepherd opened offices in Melbourne and in Ballarat, where Muir was born.2 The firm worked mainly on residential commissions, but in 1953 also designed Victoria’s first purpose-built postwar funeral parlour, now demolished, in Carlisle Street, St Kilda.3 In 1955, the firm’s engagement to design the…

Sydney’s Kings Cross in the 1960s was an eclectic cacophony of tourism, entertainment, a red-light district and illegal casinos and drugs. When Reverend Ted Noffs established the Wayside Chapel in 1964, it provided a small but much-needed support facility for the disaffected youth who had gravitated toward the Cross and to whom society had turned a blind eye. The Wayside, as it is affectionately known, quickly became a vital institution for the community in and around Kings Cross. Originally occupying two rooms in a low-rise apartment block at 29 Hughes Street, it quickly grew to accommodate a chapel, a coffee shop, a crisis centre, the first office for the Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs and a theatre designed by celebrated Sydney architect John James. By the 1970s Wayside had expanded into…

The postwar religious building has been largely overlooked in histories of Australian architecture. The reasons for this are not clear and the lacuna is not justified, especially as in the 1950s, the design of these buildings – which encompassed ideas of faith – intersected with increasing global attention on themes of monumentality, symbolism and formal expression. This is not to say that there was no discussion of religious buildings at the time in Australia’s professional and popular press; there was. But the subsequent significance of these buildings has not been recognized in terms of their contribution to Australian architecture nor their role in the construction of culture and community, where they served as pivotal foci in Australia’s postwar rural and suburban expansion. This Dossier offers a glimpse into that rich…

In October 1967, Tasmanian Catholic Archbishop Sir Guilford Young consecrated the Church of the Incarnation in Lindisfarne on Hobart’s eastern shore, the state’s first new, post-Second Vatican Council church. Commissioned by the parish priest, Father Michael Flynn, and designed by parishioner and architect Lindsay Wallace Johnston, the church has been overlooked in the slight histories of modern architecture in Tasmania. The state’s postwar ecclesiastical developments have typically been represented by the technological and metaphorical form-making of J. Esmond Dorney’s Pius X Catholic Church in Taroona (1957) and Cooper and Vincent’s St Patrick’s College Chapel in Launceston (1959). The design of the Church of the Incarnation presented an economical brutalist alternative. For Young, Flynn and Johnston it was a radical attempt to realize a liturgically driven, non-monumental, modern church architecture that…

The Australian Islamic Centre in Newport, an inner-west suburb of Melbourne, eschews the architectural strategy of most recent mosques built in Australia – it features none of the readily recognizable signifiers of dome, pointed arches and minarets that typically signal “mosque” in urban peripheries around the country. Instead it confidently assumes a cool, contemporary language of glass and concrete, enlivened with pools and a surprising roofscape of gold-painted sheet-metal lanterns. The architects of the complex are Glenn Murcutt and Hakan Elevli. In my meeting with Elevli, he notes that it was Murcutt who “took the community on a journey” that resulted in such a radical design. It was also Murcutt who questioned how necessary the conventions were and who found alternatives and realized them in a contemporary manner. Thus, instead…

Completed in 2014, the Garma Cultural Knowledge Centre sets an architectural precedent based on two-way knowledge transfer, a long-established Yolngu1 practice of combining Indigenous customs with introduced ways to negotiate a creative synthesis. Here, that synthesis was with architect Simon Scally of Build Up Design, and the result is a powerful and distinctly Yolngu place – a building that expresses Yolngu’s interconnected approach to politics, social identities, ancestral law, kinship relations, education and religion, and exerts their ownership of the land. While joyful and light, the project exudes gravitas, highlighting the significance of place, sacred knowledge and knowledge transfer to Yolngu. The Knowledge Centre is located at Gulkula (known as Djalkiri Wanga in Yolngu Matha, the Yolngu linguistic family) in Miwatj (North East Arnhem Land). The late Mungurrawuy Yunupingu, a…

With fewer and fewer people identifying as belonging to a faith community or having any religious affiliation, and even fewer admitting to attending regular worship services, Australia appears to be growing increasingly secular. Church buildings across the country are being merged, closed, abandoned, sold or razed. The Australian Bureau of Statistics’ 2016 data reported an accelerating incidence of Australia’s population reporting no religion. Christianity, the largest religious group in the country, has fallen as a religious affiliation from 88.2 percent in 1966 to 52.1 percent in 2016, while those reporting no religion has risen from 0.8 percent to 30.1 percent in the same time period. However, the data also reveals an increasing diversity of religious affiliation among the population, with Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Sikhism all on the rise.1 Aboriginal…

In the June 1960 issue of Australian Architecture Today, a feature article announced that Australia was to receive its “first Nervian structure.”1 Pier Luigi Nervi was Italy’s most influential modern engineer and architect, and was renowned worldwide for his daring and elegant reinforced concrete hangars and sports arenas. It would have come as a surprise to readers of the issue to learn that Nervi’s first commission in Australia was for a cathedral in a remote location: the monastic town of New Norcia, 132 kilometres north of Perth, Western Australia. The Benedictine community at New Norcia (established as a mission in 1847 by the Spanish monk Dom Rosendo Salvado) was unable to raise the appropriate funds for the project and the building never materialized. However, the plans and models, which now…

On a plane tree-lined suburban street not far from Melbourne’s St Kilda Botanical Gardens stands a physical reminder of the turbulence and horror of world events in the twentieth century. Themes of migration, refuge and the rebuilding of community by European Jews find material expression in the design of the Elwood Talmud Torah, which reveals influences of European architectural modernism. The synagogue was designed by Viennese émigré architect Kurt Popper between 1953 and 1957, and later expanded, then substantially remodelled, in 1972–73. Today the monolithic yet meticulous peach-blond brick panels of the synagogue stand amid Federation houses and six-pack apartments. Faded azure ceramic tiles surround an exuberant copper relief Star of David on the facade atop a sunburst aureole by another Viennese émigré, sculptor Karl Duldig. Founded in the 1930s…