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The Sidney Myer Music Bowl is of considerable historical, social, scientific (technological) and cultural significance.
The Sidney Myer Music Bowl was the first major purpose-built outdoor venue to be constructed in Melbourne and was designed to accommodate a completely new scale of live outdoor performance events. Since opening in 1959, the Bowl has been the scene of a wide range of memorable events and performances for large numbers of Melburnians.
The Sidney Myer Music Bowl has important historical associations with Sidney Myer and the Myer family. Named for its benefactor, the Sidney Myer Music Bowl is amongst the best-known projects of the Sidney Myer Charity Trust, and the one which is perhaps most strongly associated with its founder. Its planning, design, and construction were overseen by other members of the Myer family, most notably the late Kenneth Myer, Sidney's son, and the Myer family has had an ongoing role and interest in the building.
The Sidney Myer Music Bowl is also of outstanding aesthetic and technological significance. Structural expression and material experiment were popular amongst Melbourne's more avant-garde architects in the 1950s, but this interest was expressed mainly through residential buildings. In terms of larger scale public buildings, only the Olympic Swimming Pool, designed by John and Phyllis Murphy, Kevin Borland and Peter McIntyre (1953-6) can be compared with the Sidney Myer Music Bowl. Along with the hinged, trussed Swimming Pool building, the Bowl- designed by long-time partner at Yuncken Freeman, Barry Patten, together with his assistant, Angel Dimitroff - is a notable experiment in the use of structural steel, and in the architectural expression of structure through form, and both buildings drew national acclaim.
In the international context, the Sidney Myer Music Bowl differed from the concrete shell structures which may have partly inspired its designers, and which offered a challenge to traditional architectural forms during this period. Its structural design appeared to echo the thinking of German architect/engineer, Frei Otto, whose book on the subject, Das Hangende Dach, (The Hung Roof) was published in 1954, yet it predated experiments in tensile-stress construction by Otto and others by almost ten years.
At the time of its construction, the Sydney Myer Music Bowl was one of a small number of structures in Australia to combine a tensile structural system with a free-form roof, and was by far the most important in terms of its scale, sophistication and boldness of structural expression. The project represented an enormous achievement for its architects and structural engineers, and involved input from a number of technical and scientific consultants, including members of the Aeronautical Research Laboratories and CSIRO Forest Products Division.
The Sidney Myer Music Bowl is a rare example of a large scale sound shell in the Australian context.
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Project Team
Project Design:
Yuncken Freeman Bros Griffiths & Simpson
Structural Engineering:
WL Irwin & Assoc
Construction:
John Holland
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