Architecture

March 2013

Cities for people: A lecture by Jan Gehl

By

"Jan Gehl is our greatest observer of urban quality and an indispensable philosopher of cities as solutions to the environmental and health crises that we face" according...

The Best of Australian Architecture 2012

By Shane Murray

At the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale, which opened in August, it appeared that financial gloom had precipitated a new era of sobriety and conservatism in European and American architecture. The biennale was nostalgic for an earlier period of modernist connoisseurship and adverse to architectural experimentation. For Australian architects on the cusp of the Asian century, when China will p

Denton Corker Marshall’s design for Australia’s new Venice Biennale pavilion

A White Cube in a Black Box

By Deyan Sudjic

Ask John Denton, of the architecture firm Denton Corker Marshall, which he likes best of the score or so of national pavilions that fill the shaded landscape of the Venice Biennale gardens, and you get a wistful pause. He skips Russia’s Tsarist gingerbread villa, Britain’s Edwardian tearoom and Hungary’s ethnic fantasy, and talks for a moment about the dignified elegance of one or two of the more refined neo-classical structures b

The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

Sydney Gets a Laneway

By Drusilla Modjeska

Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art on Circular Quay West re-opened on 29 March with a new wing, as the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. Abutting the old building with its whiff of Art Deco, and glancing across to the Opera House, its stepped facade of white blocks creates a shifting pattern of light and shadow, as viewed from the harbour ferries, Ben

The Docklands and the Broken Wheel

The Big Tumbleweed

By Robyn Annear

In the closing scene of Planet of the Apes, there’s that moment of awful realisation for Charlton Heston’s shipwrecked astronaut: “Oh my God … I’m back. I’m home!” Rounding a lonely headland he has come upon the Statue of Liberty, sunk to her arm

Meeting Mary Finsterer

What Happens Next

By Andrew Ford

Mary Finsterer says she wants to write a Mass. As one of Australia’s finest composers, she’s entitled; composers have been making new musical settings of the Mass for the best part of 2000 years. But it is not such a common occurrence in the twenty-first c

Meeting Glenn Murcutt

Fathers & Sons

By Peter Robb

So Architects do square and hew, Green Trees that in the Forest grew. It was a long day on the road. We covered 675 kilometres of highway, city street and dirt track, traversing coastal plain and steep hill, driving among trees and city buildings. The distance was broke

Ten Part Invention - 'Unidentified Spaces', 2001

Jazz Masterpiece

By John Clare

Ten Part Invention is a Sydney band formed more than 20 years ago to perform Australian jazz music. It still has a solid, often ecstatic, following. This album has a wealth of writing from two band members who are among our greatest composers: Sandy Evans and

Lindsay & Kerry Clare - 'Gallery of Modern Art', Queensland, 2006

Architecture Masterpiece

By Haig Beck

Nowadays ‘masterpiece’ refers to a work of extraordinary artistic merit. But it once described a work by a craftsman made specifically to demonstrate mastery of (his) craft and so gain entry to a guild. This older meaning is appropriate to architecture, a practice l

20 Australian Masterpieces Since 2000

By The Monthly

To mark the Monthly's inaugural arts issue, we approached 20 arts critics and asked each to identify the most significant Australian work of art in their field since 2000. FASHION Romance Was Born ‘The Oracle’, 2011 ‘The

James Boyce’s '1835: The Founding of Melbourne & the Conquest of Australia'

Beneath the Boulevards

By Malcolm Turnbull

The beauty of Melbourne’s wide boulevards, its opulent architecture and magnificent parks remind us of the extraordinary wealth and confidence of nineteenth-century Victoria. Melbourne’s edifices are bigger and grander than their counterparts in Sydney, re

Robert Hughes’s 'Rome'

Empire of the Mind

By Peter Conrad

In 1966 Robert Hughes concluded his first book, The Art of Australia, with a sardonic farewell to a country he had already quit. The final paragraph quotes an anonymous painter who told Hughes, “you can’t begin to grow up until you’ve left the place”, after whic

Indigenous Housing

Home Improvement

By Victoria Laurie

On the left of the page, Pholeros draws a broken-down house and underneath, a checklist of things that need fixing – broken window, leaking roof, unsafe electrical switches. On the right, he draws a fixed-up house; underneath, there’s a tick next to each problem fixed and a cost recorded against each item. That’s how it should be, he tells the board me

Expert Appetite: The Plight of the Connoisseur

By Robert Dessaix

I am in Soups and Tinned Veg at my local Coles supermarket, immobilised by an attack of anomie. Why am I feeling like this? I stare catatonically at the rows of tinned soups, quite unable to move. There is no point in discussing Durkheim and the roots of anomie with the staff, I must sort this out myself.The last time I can remember feeling so severely affected was in Foyles bookstore in Charing C

The Destruction of Burrup Rock Art

Into the Beehive

By Robyn Davidson

We all know what justifications, arguments and perspectives are likely to be heard from the competing interests (competing visions of value). But what, ultimately, is being argued for? And is there ground for fair negotiation or is negotiation really just defe

'Brisbane' by Matthew Condon

By John Birmingham

Cities have memories that outlive those who first held them. London will always recall the Blitz, Rome the glories of empire. Some memories are, of course, lost. Time, war, civilisational collapse all take their toll. But how do you explain a city that forgets

Jewel of Melbourne

By Catherine Ford

If ever I’ve been in Melbourne’s CBD and gripped by a raging depression there – the sight of the city’s lonesome downtown mall can do it to me, with its pavement guitarists dedicating themselves to another decade of distorted flamenco music and its trams carving

Coming Of Age

By Peter Conrad

In 1960, when Robin Boyd published his attack on the stylistic cowardice of our suburbs, it took courage to call Australia ugly. The country has never bragged about its beauty, as America loudly does in the hymn that celebrates its azure skies and shining seas and fields of waving grain, but the national spirit inculcated a smug self-satisfaction in the Australians of those days, enforced by their