Dream Factory
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Dream Factory: Curator Dream Factory: Dream Factory: GMH Design at Harriet Edquist is a curator and historian, and Emeritus GMH Design at GMH Design at Fishermans Bend Professor in the School of Architecture and Urban Design Fishermans Bend Fishermans Bend 1964–2020 at RMIT. She was founding director of the RMIT Design 1964–2020 1964–2020 Archives 2007–20 and inaugural president of Automotive 17 May to 31 August Historians Australia 2015–19. 17 May to 31 August 2021 2021 Thanks City Gallery Thank you to Stephen Banham and Hilary Ericksen, City Gallery From Aussie classics to Melbourne Town Hall as well as Rickie-Lee Robbie and Simone Rule from the Melbourne Town Hall RMIT Design Archives for their expertise in helping me contemporary concept cars, melbourne.vic.gov.au/ realise this exhibition. Norm Darwin, as ever, shared melbourne.vic.gov.au/ this small exhibition captures citygallery his knowledge generously. I owe a debt of gratitude to citygallery Richard Ferlazzo, John Field and Holden for the depth the unfinished story of design ISBN 978–1–74250–916–7 and range of drawings exhibited here as I do to those designers whose conversations enabled me to tell a story and innovation at General Motors of great significance and resonance: Peter Nankervis, Holden (GMH) Fishermans John Schinella, Phillip Zmood, Peter Hughes, Andrew Smith, Justin Thompson, John Field, Michael Simcoe and Bend, home to Melbourne’s Richard Ferlazzo. Thanks also to Richard Ferlazzo, Michael most successful city-based Simcoe and David Hurlston for facilitating the loan of the Holden Hurricane model, and Jia Jia Chen and Lawrence automotive factory. Focusing Johnston for their contributions to the exhibition. on the Technical Centre, which Outer Cover Inside Front Cover Inside Back Cover opened in 1964, Dream Factory Peter Nankervis Photograph of main Faulkner Ireland, Holden styling studio LH Torana and LC Torana takes a tour through 60 years showing stages in hatchback variant, three-quarter design, c.1975 January 1974 of design by way of original front view, early concept proposal, RMIT Design Norm Darwin drawings, models, photographs, July 1967 Archives Collection Collection Pencil and marker The activities film and memories of key with gouache high depicted in this lights on Canson staged photograph designers. paper usually occupied separate studios. RMIT Design They include Archives Collection sketches, scale drawings, small model, seating buck, clay model, interior trim and exterior detail. Dream Factory: Curator Dream Factory: Dream Factory: GMH Design at Harriet Edquist is a curator and historian, and Emeritus GMH Design at GMH Design at Fishermans Bend Professor in the School of Architecture and Urban Design Fishermans Bend Fishermans Bend 1964–2020 at RMIT. She was founding director of the RMIT Design 1964–2020 1964–2020 Archives 2007–20 and inaugural president of Automotive 17 May to 31 August Historians Australia 2015–19. 17 May to 31 August 2021 2021 Thanks City Gallery Thank you to Stephen Banham and Hilary Ericksen, City Gallery From Aussie classics to Melbourne Town Hall as well as Rickie-Lee Robbie and Simone Rule from the Melbourne Town Hall RMIT Design Archives for their expertise in helping me contemporary concept cars, melbourne.vic.gov.au/ realise this exhibition. Norm Darwin, as ever, shared melbourne.vic.gov.au/ this small exhibition captures citygallery his knowledge generously. I owe a debt of gratitude to citygallery Richard Ferlazzo, John Field and Holden for the depth the unfinished story of design ISBN 978–1–74250–916–7 and range of drawings exhibited here as I do to those designers whose conversations enabled me to tell a story and innovation at General Motors of great significance and resonance: Peter Nankervis, Holden (GMH) Fishermans John Schinella, Phillip Zmood, Peter Hughes, Andrew Smith, Justin Thompson, John Field, Michael Simcoe and Bend, home to Melbourne’s Richard Ferlazzo. Thanks also to Richard Ferlazzo, Michael most successful city-based Simcoe and David Hurlston for facilitating the loan of the Holden Hurricane model, and Jia Jia Chen and Lawrence automotive factory. Focusing Johnston for their contributions to the exhibition. on the Technical Centre, which Outer Cover Inside Front Cover Inside Back Cover opened in 1964, Dream Factory Peter Nankervis Photograph of main Faulkner Ireland, Holden styling studio LH Torana and LC Torana takes a tour through 60 years showing stages in hatchback variant, three-quarter design, c.1975 January 1974 of design by way of original front view, early concept proposal, RMIT Design Norm Darwin drawings, models, photographs, July 1967 Archives Collection Collection Pencil and marker The activities film and memories of key with gouache high depicted in this lights on Canson staged photograph designers. paper usually occupied separate studios. RMIT Design They include Archives Collection sketches, scale drawings, small model, seating buck, clay model, interior trim and exterior detail. 2 3 seddon west melbourne The GMH Technical Centre: a place for design melbourne In June 1964, General Motors Holden (GMH) opened the Technical Centre at its Fishermans Bend site in Melbourne, Victoria, the 1 company’s headquarters since 1936. An extension to GMH yarraville docklands Previous engineering’s Plant Nº.3, the centre was designed by Stephenson & Jia Jia Chen Turner, an architectural firm renowned across the region for its interwar (b.1986 China; fishermans bend 1989 Melbourne) and wartime hospital designs. It is less known for its contemporary Dream My Monaro, Ford manufacturing and assembly plant in Homebush, New South 2020 Wales, designed in 1936. Indeed, Stephenson & Turner’s contribution, CNC-milled polystyrene, like that of Australian architects in general, to the architecture of cobalt glaze beads, gmh sand, paint manufacturing in this country is a story yet to be told. As Philip Goad 67 x 26cm has recently argued: City of Melbourne newport Art and Heritage In Australian twentieth century architectural histories, the trajectory Collection of modernism has been a key focus as has the documentation of Opposite residential architecture as a banner of progressive design ideas ... But a Stephenson foundational icon of modernism in architecture – the factory – and the & Turner GMH Technical trope of the so-called ‘factory’ aesthetic intrinsic to modernism’s rise Centre exterior and its Australian appearance has been – remarkably – little studied.2 perspectives and interior views carried out in Australia’s booming postwar manufacturing sector demanded new exemplary corporate plants, specialised facilities and head offices, and Stephenson & Turner mid-century modern style, was commissioned to design GMH’s new manufacturing and research 1963 facility on Princes Highway, Dandenong, which opened in 1956. The Holden Collection smaller Technical Centre came a few years later, and both buildings were conceived in Stephenson & Turner’s well-tuned idiom of rationalist modernism. While the centre was not a factory – being a specialised facility for the design and engineering of industrial products – it belongs in the category of industrial architecture discussed by Goad. The folio of drawings prepared by the architects for the three-storey building shows a sequence of carefully designed spaces, from the 4 external courtyard with an abstract modernist fountain through to the more private but still accessible spaces of auditorium, dining rooms, Unknown 3 conference room and so on. photographer Opening of the The centre is a modest work for the firm, scarcely known outside GMH Technical the world of GMH. Yet for nearly 60 years it was the powerhouse of Centre, June 1964 Nankervis Collection one of the most successful industrial design studios in Australia. Its The setting was significance thus is twofold: an architectural object representing a the rooftop viewing courtyard and the manufacturing sector that underwrote Australian postwar prosperity vehicle next to the model was the 1964 and the home of the GMH design studio. EH Premier sedan. The car was set on The design studio a turntable above a shallow ‘pond’, The launch of the Technical Centre in June 1964 was arranged by and the tall screen General Motors (GM) to coincide with the opening of its Opel Technical behind the car was a miniature version of Centre, in Rüsselsheim am Main, Germany. GMH at Fishermans the entry to the GM exhibit at the New Bend and Opel were the offspring of GM’s technical centre at Warren, York World Fair. Michigan, designed by Eero Saarinen a decade before. For the first time, the design ambition of GM, the world’s largest auto manufacturer and one of its largest corporations for much of the 20th century, was embodied in its architecture – not in one building but in the spectacular campus of more than 20 buildings. The Opel design studio was, at its opening, ‘the largest design studio owned by an automaker in Europe’, and, like at Fishermans Bend on that June day, the public was allowed to visit the building and freely walk among its exhibits. The studios were then forever sealed off from prying eyes. The ambition of the enterprise and the excitement of the occasion were captured in Peter Nankervis’s futuristic murals painted on the walls of the design studio for the opening, projecting an imagined ‘autopia’. Like its German counterpart, the Melbourne facility mirrored, on a small scale, the work of its parent company, grounding the design staff in the skills and competencies that allowed them to participate as