15th June 2009 – Australian Institute of Architects - Victorian Chapter Student Design Competition
When you are a student there ought to be very few rules to exploring ideas for yourself. It is the luxury and challenge of not having a client, even inventing the programme.
The jury read the same Brief as those competing: historic conservation a fundamental value
How to complete Peter Kerr's well loved nineteenth century Victorian Parliament House; in itself an unfinished classical design from a competition of 1855. Sitting astride the Bourke Street axis, and customarily seen from the valley below the House anchors one end of Melbourne's grid plan, a companion piece to the Victorian Treasury further along Spring; an elegant urban crown to the vista of Collins Street.
It should be remembered that in the 1850's Kerr himself was probably younger than many of the senior year student entrants of today.
Kerr worked on the building for forty years or so; the end of the land boom bringing the project to a halt, without its yet to be constructed Brunelleschi-like dome above the commanding colonnade and massive basalt staircase, and with two sides still incomplete. The task for this new competition was to create a 21st century completion.
Thirty-five students embraced a litany of mysteries: symbolic, communal, civic and operational. Classical style confronted by renewing modern: past, present and future needing now to conciliate, collide, transform.
Public architecture is never for the faint hearted. particularly for those with expressive, progressive talent, and it is this aspect of provocative adventure that the jury persons, Shelley Penn, Kai Chen, John Wardle and Daryl Jackson were themselves confronting; finding the winner(s) and allocating $3,000.00 of prize money provided by the Heritage Council of Victoria.
Students from Deakin, Melbourne and RMIT Universities, all undertook the programme. The jury could not identify a particular 'school style", or over-riding scholastic theory; it did not have names or known attachment; and, as it turned out, recognised none of the authors on the prize list following the assessment.
For the record, Deakin presented 3 entries; Melbourne 19 and RMIT 12
The work evidenced significant assurance, investigative talent and competence; a detectable bravura and an awareness of current global, universal modernity in all its philosophic complexity and free-style authorship.
Without setting any composite 'rules of assessment". the jury reviewed the anonymous entries as individuals separately, noting their numbers, and allocating respective design values as to merit.
Naturally the entries evidenced their own categorisation; ranging from exuberant all guns firing, heroic, (some over-scaled) urban transformations. to understated resolution, inspired by poetic, even confronting urban interventions. Others envisaged a different dialogue; the one between landscape and built form, where the positioning of open space is as necessary as the massing of buildings.
Those entrants with excessive zeal (appearing to act like a developer seeking to maximise the plot ratio), offered wall to wall retrofit of the site such that Kerr's original appeared as an afterthought. Forget the past; we are moving on into a bigger bolder future was their heraldic cry! One or two others went literally over the top with the garden, like the Parliament House in Canberra, fortunately they left the colonnade alone and the stairs in place at the front.
Within such extremes there were relevant 'other' compositional tactics, from urban 'theatre' to further 'incompletion'; to inventive 'urban completions", including a highly poetic twenty-first century garland like carapace, which in lieu of Kerr's unbuilt dome became a community theatre, located against the sky, well above the Queen's Hall below, As in Delphi this is where only the Gods could dwell.
The jury, with their feet on the floor unanimously agreed (in the end) to offer four equal prizes, a recognition of individual architectural authorship being present and applauded accordingly, for each represented one edge of the visionary.
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