 | RADARBOOKS Noting new books at Architext
Unattributed reviews by Justine Clark.
Architext bookshops are at Tusculum,
Sydney, ph 02 9356 2022 and
41 Exhibition Street, Melbourne,
ph 03 9650 3474
The Art Movement In Australia:
Design, Taste and Society
1875-1900 |
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Andrew Montana. Miegunyah Press, $88.
This new book takes a long-overdue look at
an important phase in Australian design
history – the last quarter of the nineteenth
century. “Australian” is perhaps too generous
a word, as the concentration is firmly on
Melbourne and Sydney. Montana’s main
interest is in the decorative arts and interiors
of the period, and the society and taste that
brought them about. He gathers them up
under the rubric of the “Art Movement”,
although his emphasis is primarily on the
Aesthetic Movement.
He opens with an overview of some British
post-Pugin design reformers such as Bruce
Talbert and E. W. Godwin, and the
development of aestheticism, the Anglo-Japanese
and associated styles and the great
nineteenth century trade exhibitions that
promoted and displayed them. While this
material is well known in a European context,
its impact on Australian habits of production
and consumption is less well understood. The
second chapter focuses on the position of
women who, largely confined at home,
exercised their taste and will in the acquisition
and display of ornaments and in the
production of needlecraft, art pottery, tile
painting and fashion. In my view the best
portions of the book are the detailed and
lengthy studies of some of the grand interior
schemes of the decades under review. One of
the most significant was the British firm
Gillows’ scheme for the Toorak mansion
Mandeville Hall, and Montana spends some
time tracing its genesis in the same firm’s
interior for G. G. Scott’s Midland Grand Hotel
in London 1876 and the 1878 Paris
Exhibition. He then follows its impact on
Melbourne’s boom houses – Kamesburgh,
Villa Alba, Clivedon – and the decorating firms
such as Patersons, in a fascinating study of
taste in the late seventies and eighties. There
are some wonderful colour reproductions of
these interiors. He fills in the context by
examining the emporia which sold the goods
that filled these houses (Rocke’s, Cullis Hill),
their advertising outlets and their influence on
metropolitan taste. The Sydney firm Lyon,
Cottier & Co, with its British parent, has a chapter of its own and its interior of Wardell’s
E S & A Bank in Melbourne is rightly afforded
a detailed discussion.
While the main thrust of the book is
towards interior decoration and the decorative
arts, with architecture as a necessary
backdrop, the final chapter attempts to deal
with architecture more closely and the
development of the Arts and Crafts
movement. This is the least successful part
of Montana’s thesis, for the work discussed
is still Queen Anne or aesthetic or at best
transitional. He does not appear to have
taken advantage of the scholarship available
on this period, his bibliography in the area
being very meagre and some of his
observations muddled.
The key figure in Melbourne in the late
1880s was of course English-trained Walter
Butler. By the late 1880s his strongly held
views were widely known and hotly debated
in architectural circles in Melbourne. By 1891
Butler and Ussher had designed Blackwood,
one of the seminal houses of the Arts and
Crafts movement in Australia and the whole
discussion about interior design, from the
architect’s point of view, had changed. Given
Montana’s evident interest in the social
factors that propelled the reformist
developments in art production in the
nineteenth century, it is a pity a chapter was
not spent exploring the role of technical
education, schools of design and mechanics
institutes in the creation of reformed taste,
particularly Sydney Technical College and
Melbourne’s Working Men’s College. In spite
of these reservations however, The Art
Movement in Australia is a very valuable text
on a still little understood period.
Harriett Edquist.
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| Millennium: Cox Architects,
Selected and Current Works |
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Edited by Renee Otmar. Images
Publishing, $105.
The Cox Group of architects is one of the
most prominent practices of the last forty
years of Australian architecture. Beginning
with work by Philip Cox in Sydney in the
1960s, it developed through a series of
projects for the National Capital Development
Commission in Canberra in the seventies and
early eighties and expanded through Australia. In recent years there have been
an increasing number of large overseas
projects. The breadth of work is impressive
– from houses to hospitals, bus shelters to
urban planning. Impressive, too, is the
assurance of the work, and how much of it
reflects and has influenced what has come
to be regarded as characterising recent
Australian architecture: steel and glass and
masonry articulated in bright light, with a
spirit of informal but controlled
inventiveness and sometimes complex but
always carefully coordinated geometry.
This is a large and attractive book, well
written with many illustrations. It contains an
introduction by Philip Cox and Michael
Rayner outlining the origins and aims of the
practice, a series of ten illustrated essays on
aspects of the group’s work (such as
“sport”, “living”, and “urban planning and
design”), descriptions of 31 projects from
the period 1995-2000, and a brief “firm
profile” which includes a chronology of
selected projects and useful bibliography.
The text is written in the voice of the
practice, playing down individual authorship
of words and pictures as well as designs.
While not self-critical or highly theoretical
(that is better authored by independent
critics), it sets out how the practice sees
itself as responding to contemporary issues
of regionalism, globalisation, technology,
environmental concerns and economics,
and provides a narrative about how these
are played out in projects. It is a fine record
of a body of work of which the practice is,
and should be, proud.
Antony Radford.
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| Touch This Earth Lightly: GlennMurcutt in His Own Words |
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Philip Drew. Duffy and Snellgrove, $33.
Philip Drew’s 1999 edited interviews with Glenn Murcutt, conducted during Drew’s research for Leaves of Iron, has been re-released in a smaller format. The content and book design remain the same.
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