Architectural Design Competition New Building for the Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning Nationalmuseumofaustralia

ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN COMPETITION NEW BUILDING FOR THE FACULTY OF ARCHITECTURE BUILDING AND PLANNING NATIONALMUSEUMOFAUSTRALIA We liked to think that the story of Australia was not one, but many tangled together. Not an authorised version but a puzzling confluence; not merely the resolution of difference but its wholehearted embrace. We hoped to make a place vividly local, rooted in Walter Burley Griffin’s garden city, rooted in the local country. But also we hoped to make something projective, to make a sign to mark our longing. The centrepiece of the National Museum of Australia became a great open space called the Garden of Australian Dreams, like the field of a sports stadium becoming a new cultural arena, a palimpsest of times, of myths and dreams, demarcation and tragedy. This is what we see immediately, this is what we can touch, but there is also that invisible tangle, that impossible journey, that mere reflection of object, that reverse, that subtractive force, that residual interpretation cast, that negative that struggles to give witness to that unseen. As if made present in virtual guise, in passionate narrative, like a prolific vine, now in a seething confluence caught up, as if in a strange cacophony of songs, as if no longer waiting. This was our hope, a work-in-progress, a place of scholarship, research and learning, a place disarmingly inclined to celebration, but as if also of mourning, a place as if to concentrate our hopes or even give us warning, a place to test our every condescension. BUILTPEDAGOGY occupies must be a teaching tool, a New forms of class rooms are emerging enormous energy is spent in getting Buildings that Teach catalyst for research and a clear beacon that are laboratories for learning, the brief exactly right when perhaps the “Here at last is a about what the Faculty is and does. whether they be studios, computer brief is best deployed not as sacred text building that combines “We shape our buildings, and We see the opportunity for the new rooms or traditional classrooms, each but as a starting point for an evolving utility with beauty and afterwards our buildings shape us.” Faculty building not only to serve as needs to support the educational process. inventiveness. It sits on Winston Churchill, 1943 an address and spatial provision, but journey where learning is about the Acton Peninsula like rather a transformative space, at once experiences rather than the traditional The brief must find interpretation and Classrooms, as we know them are contributory and inseparable from the didactic learning models of the past. even critique; its exegesis probably an inviting playground almost obsolete. Certainly those with experience and process of learning. Students will use a variety of learning best achieved less in isolation as for the mind and the rows of desks and a someone lecturing technologies, from teacher led at round-table, engaging diverse memory. It has an overall from the front are less and less suitable The educational spaces of the Faculty instruction to self-directed learning – participants from around the University unity, whose core is the in an era where students are engaged must be understood as a design sometimes simultaneously! – as they and even beyond. Perhaps it is this giant welcoming hall. It’s with group and problem based learning. solution for an active university chart their educational journey. kind of engagement with the University very much a metaphor Instead we need buildings that stimulate campus environment, a change towards community which best promotes for Australia, really.” and invigorate, that prompt enquiry “student-centred” approaches to innovation and transformation, such and spark curiosity. We need buildings Innovation learning. that the faculty building is more Joseph Quigley, Visitor at the that speak to us at different levels – of a workshop or laboratory than a National Museum of Australia emotionally, spiritually, cognitively. Real innovation is no flash-in-the-pan. University buildings are ‘learning Instead, perhaps it is a kind of inspired warehouse. spaces’ - layered transactional settings integration of research, judgments Importantly we need to ensure the for liberating our thinking and our physical environment supports what and imagination. At the beginning, approach to spatial design in order to it might be the brief which inspires goes on inside the building. The social achieve dynamic learning environments is inseparable from the physical. The a commitment to innovation but it able to meet current and future needs of is not always necessary. Sometimes built environment that the Faculty teacher and students. MACQUARIEUNIVERSITYLIBRARY For a long time epistemologies visited architecture as a source of analogy or metaphor for what became a structure of knowledge often built on the foundation of classical thought, creating an edifice, something like a new Babelic Tower. Since then we have been watching the emergence of a new paradigm with such recent catch cries as post-structuralism or the notorious deconstruction! Here discourses have shaken for ever the once convincing analogies of everyday building, and architecture itself has begun to explore new expectations too. Our ideas for the new library at Macquarie University aim to embed themselves in this new paradigm. Within the genre of the hard- working building our project seeks to examine emergent form rather then structure, meta blobs rather than grids, the infinitely mutable rather then the specific, the fluid, the dynamic, the turbulent rather than the linear, the container or the symmetrical. Instead of the once admired sense of order, hierarchy, progression and conclusiveness, we have aimed to explore the new language of the emergent, the animated, the fluid and the immersive, to be in character with hypertext, with a jumping universe that cannot yet quite be imagined beforehand, but is instead as if self perpetuating or as if contesting the known boundaries of our present imagination. 1082 ARM NMA Book pages.37 12/9/01 2:30 AM Page 104 WHAT TIE PEOPLE AND BUILDINGS TO THE WORLD, ARE CONVENTIONS OF REPRESENTATION. Penrose Tiling STOREYHALLRMIT Our brief was the creation of an international standard exhibition and auditorium facility: one which could make a significant contribution to architectural theory and practice, and to the present and future identity of the university, its technological importance and leadership potential. In short, a major new civic identity for the city campus. Just as important as the complex resolution of levels between the buildings has been the resolution of contextual urban design aspects of the project and its integration into a masterplanning concept for this campus sector, also developed by ARM. The original Classical building accommodates a world-class exhibition space and art gallery, foyers and seminar rooms, student gallery and cafe. The new six storey annex building adjoining the existing building provides foyers and circulation But at its highest stage architecture is seen as imitating The copy enlarged to reabsorb the model. Admission to sees only shadows or mirror images and hence builds space, services, kitchen and conference rooms on the top floor. nature itself, reproducing the cosmic laws, intellectual the parallel world is granted only to what is already codi- and inhabits shadows, of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, analogies, and relationships that nature provides, the fied as representation: copies, signs, emblems, replicas, for example, and reversed shadows, of the Villa Savoye. implementation of nature being the aim. Thus, it was etc. Anything under the sun may be admitted: cosmic Ever y representation, in other words, is debased, but a The completed project includes two multi-purpose theatres: claimed, architecture “does not produce copies but laws, analogies, relationships but only as copy, conscious national museum of the fringe can only be put together models, it produces itself as model. It does not imitate copy. To be unaware that things can only be aped is the from such things. Secondly, because graven and molten the basement lecture theatre in the annex, and the 750 seat an order but constitutes it: whether the order of the world greatest banality of all. What tie people and buildings to images, the “likeness of any thing” and “similitude of 2 Hollier, Denis. Against Architecture: or of society.” 2 the world, are conventions of representation. The architect, The Writings of Georges Bataille. MIT any figure” are “falsehood, and there is no breath in auditorium in the existing building, with a proscenium archPress Cambridge, Mass. p.34. in a white coat, conducts experiments that test, displace, them”, they are to be destroyed. Thirdly, to complete the Post modernism pulled this representational element or otherwise catch conventions off guard, releasing in the aporia, the species hominidae knows nothing about stage, flat main floor and tiered seating on the balcony. Both loose. Only then were the possibilities for a Surrealist process a miraculous absurdity that induces the baffling. architecture exposed. ARM unfolded it. But, once unfold- itself or stones or pieces of string, or anything else. We theatres are designed to cater for very different functions ranging ed, a reign of resemblance and similitude was opened Reality is hollowed. Representations are eaten out by only ‘believe’ we do. Nothing can be said about their that could not quite be reinserted back into the world worms, nothing can ever fill their core. Architecture must individuality. Only a divine knowledge could have access without creating and inhabiting an absurd yet logical par- deal with its own illuminating flaw, its insolvency, and to such things. We are the creatures who turn all to from conferences and one-off guest lectures to events such allel world wher e r epr esentation alone is visible, makes proliferating emptiness. Images are turned against metaphor. Hence the tremendous seriousness of the 3 In Surrealism, the imaginary always strives “to break the framework of the visible and makes human blindness visible.

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