 | RADARCOMPETITION Cultural infrastructure. The premiated architects in the Millennium Arts competitions for the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art and the State Library expansion have now been announced. Antony Moulis and Sheona Thomson review the competitions, the process, and the results.
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Model of the proposal for the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art by Architectus in association with Davenport Campbell, the selected architects.
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Model by Donovan Hill
and Peddle Thorp, selected architects for
redevelopment and expansion of the State
Library. The scheme for the QGMA is indicated
beyond.
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Overview of the Queensland Cultural
Centre.
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Strategic Planning Framework.
Photos Richard Stringer.
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Queensland Gallery of Modern Art. The winning architects, Architectus and Davenport Campbell, proposed a loose connection between strategy and form. The artwork shown in the section is Family Tree by Zhang Huan, 2000. The river view by night includes images of Saint Sebastian by Fiona Tan, 2001, and River Time in the River by
Tatsuo Miyajima, 1995.
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Fuksas and Hassell’s “shimmering blob”.
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Model of the “prism” scheme by LAB Architecture Studio with B+N Group and Bligh Voller Nield.
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Model of scheme by Durbach Block and Bligh Voller Nield which clearly
organised the project into “front” and “back”
spaces.
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Model of the evocative, interlacing scheme by Benson & Forsyth and Peddle Thorp. Photos Richard Stringer.
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State Library extension and redevelopment.
Winning entry by Donovan Hill and Peddle Thorp: view from the south-east, showing the connection to the rear plaza, and the glazed river room.
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The ARM
Arkhefield proposal seen again Brisbane’s
skyline.
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River view of the MGT/Hassell scheme.
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Proposal by Ken Yeang and Wilson Architects.
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Entry by John Mainwaring and Bligh Voller Nield.
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The Queensland State Government
recently announced the preferred architects
of the Millennium Arts projects for the
Queensland Cultural Centre at Brisbane’s
South Bank. Architectus in association with
Davenport Campbell were named as
architects for the Queensland Gallery of
Modern Art (QGMA), while Donovan Hill and
Peddle Thorp were selected to undertake the
redevelopment and expansion of the State
Library. The announcement heralds the
beginning of a five-year program of design
work and construction costing $228 million.
The Millennium Arts projects present a
significant development for cultural
infrastructure in the region, which has grown
directly out of existing and projected
demands. The Asia Pacific Triennials of
Contemporary Art (APT), begun at the
Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) in 1993, added
impetus to the planning for QGMA – with the
new gallery being seen as the engine room
for the popular APT event (an event which is
now reaching beyond the space resources of
the QAG). Apart from its critical success, the
APT has been a remarkable catalyst for the
public’s engagement with contemporary art.
The QGMA’s charter to create open public
programs should thus be well received.
The redevelopment of the State Library is
no less critical given the current revolution in
information systems. The State Library
facilities are undergoing a period of
significant organisational change and
reinvention as those facilities now become a
critical node in a network serving the various
regions of Queensland. As a result the whole
Millennium Arts agenda, its timing and
processes, reveal cultural ambitions with a
good deal of natural momentum.
The architect selection process for the
QGMA was conducted as a two-stage
competition. The first stage of the
competition was “open” and promoted
internationally, seeking to encourage a
maximum of speculative ideas and
approaches. Projected as the largest gallery
of modern art in the country, and a
consequential addition to the civic
architecture of city, state and nation, the
broad cast of the first stage netted 174
submissions from architects in 24 countries.
From this pool, the jury distilled an interim
short-list of twelve schemes. The identity of
the authors was revealed to the jury and a
process of enquiry into the capability of the
twelve was conducted. Five teams working
in association with local practices were
invited to undertake stage two: LAB
Architecture Studio with the B+N Group and
Bligh Voller Nield; Benson & Forsyth with
Peddle Thorp; Architectus and Davenport
Campbell; Massimiliano Fuksas Architetto
and Hassell; and Durbach Block and Bligh
Voller Nield.
The architect selection competition to
redevelop the State Library of Queensland
was also a two-stage process, beginning
with a call for expressions of interest from
Australian practices. The five short-listed
teams were Donovan Hill and Peddle Thorp,
John Mainwaring Architects and Bligh Voller
Nield, ARM and Arkhefield, Ken Yeang and
Wilson Architects, and MGT and Hassell.
The two competitions were clearly in
search of architects who will work in
collaborative and responsive ways to
produce robust, generous and flexible
buildings; buildings that accommodate (and
even somehow anticipate) developments
within the shifting domains of art and
information. While the competitions were for
the selection of architects not for designs,
the design schemes submitted provided the
architects with their vehicle for announcing
strategies and intentions, and the means to
engage the jury members with their
particular approaches and turn of thinking.
The stand-alone QGMA project offered
the most latitude for the designers. The
Fuksas/Hassell response, to imagine the
facility as an eviscerated, shimmering blob,
sought to take advantage of the prominent
site and to signal “art”. Within the enigmatic
wrapper a proposal was made for a series
of simple, slab viewing decks floating in a
vast hangar-like space. The emphasis on the
building skin, as both signboard and filter,
aimed at generating a unique scale and
effect for the architectural object. While this
emphasis was useful in establishing a
relationship between the overall form of the
building and the city, its consequence for
the immediately adjacent spaces of the
building to the cultural centre complex and
Kurilpa Point was less qualified. The
LAB/B+N/BVN production offered the blob’s
architectural co-conspirator – a prism or
box, forming a singular, legible exterior.
Internally the configuration of the plan was
more complex, with the division and
sequencing of spaces fragmenting and
splintering the “image” of the whole.
The principal strategy of the Durbach
Block/BVN proposal concerned the formal
organisation of the facility in relation to site
and brief. Their parti effectively divided the
building into a “front” for administration and
public functions and a “back” wings for
gallery spaces. The organisation had an
obvious clarity, but offered less flexibility
than was desired.
Architects of the New Museum of
Scotland, Benson and Forsyth (with Peddle
Thorp) produced far and away the most
lyrical scheme, evocatively described in a
wonderfully crafted and careful presentation.
At the broadest level the proposal sought to
fashion an architecture out of a triumvirate
of culture, nature and art. In schematic
terms, like interlaced fingers of solid and
void, the landscape was mortised into the
interior depths and the built form reached
out towards the river’s edge. Their proposal
imagined a facility that needed to enact a
whole series of mediations – between the
plaza space and the river edge, between
captured gardens and gallery spaces,
between the viewer of art and the extended
landscape setting and so on.
The proposal by the preferred designers,
Architectus/Davenport Campbell, was the
one which most obviously achieved a
balance between the enclosed spaces
required for art and the relationships to the
spaces around the facility. In this scheme
we see genuinely loose but effective
connections between strategy and form.
This outcome mirrors the intentions for the
process ahead, as the clients, stakeholders
and designers undertake work on the project
together. That the interior spaces between
the QAG and the QGMA of Architectus share
a similar consistency was noted, yet more
broadly the new presents as a counterpoint
to the existing. While the QAG has long been
decried for a lack of connection to location,
resolvedly removed from the riverbank, it
has for equal time been appreciated for the
quality of the interior experience that it
offers, organised as an array of internally
focused open and closed spaces. Its
adaptable insides have a light-filled,
earthbound languor. Seeming at once
resilient, grand, delicate and generous the
Architectus proposition for QGMA invokes
the best qualities of the existing gallery but
reaches beyond them towards new
conditions of engagement with situation
and circumstance.
The critical question for redevelopment of
the State Library was how to restrategise the
library’s organisation and new space
demands while dealing sympathetically with
the existing fabric. This question invited a
host of strategic responses – from wrapping
the existing in a new environmental skin
(Yeang/Wilson) to clustering forms around it
in a parasite/host relationship (JMA/BVN and
MGT/Hassell). The strategy dominating the
ARM/Arkhefield scheme was the animation
of a new plaza edge on the back of the
existing library. The plaza, envisaged in the
Strategic Planning Framework, is a critical
item for both the Millennium Arts schemes
and the Queensland Cultural Centre complex
as a whole. This space is destined to be the
new hub for a range of cultural facilities
incorporating entry to QGMA, and repositioned
entries for the reconfigured
library, existing museum and art gallery. And
yet the context of this new hub seems less
than promising, being situated on the west of
the complex away from the river edge and
the city view – cool heads and inventive
thinking are needed to steer this space
toward the required outcome.
The library proposal by preferred
architects Donovan Hill/Peddle Thorp sought
to discover latent forms in the existing fabric
rather than to stridently “add” new forms to
it. The new centrepiece of the facility, the
glazed river room, is situated neatly in the
arms of the existing library; a gesture which
contrives to reimagine the whole in its
relationship to the river and city. The river
room facilitates a memorable connection
back to the plaza while also acting as a
counterpoint to it.
The client representatives we talked to
were clearly impressed by the energy of all
the architects invited to present in
competition. They also noted the architects’
capacity for invention and their commitment
to ideas.
While these kinds of observations might
seem incidental, they do count for more.
Principally, they indicate how the process of
review and interview might raise clients’
expectations, not only of what architects
could provide but of what they (the client
body) might imagine out of the process.
While the approach of all parties to the
process may never quite match, there is,
along the way, the possibility of
acknowledging expertise. This is a critical
outcome given the ambition here for an
open process – one in which the client and
architect are effectively being asked to
collaborate in the making of cultural
infrastructure.
Post Script: On 21 June the models and
drawings for the five short-listed propositions
for the QGMA went on public display at the
Queensland Art Gallery. This exhibition is
significant in marking twentieth anniversary
of the opening of the QAG, designed by
Robin Gibson and Partners, in 1982.
Antony Moulis and Sheona Thomson are lecturers in architecture at the University of Queensland and the Queensland University of Technology, respectively. They submitted an entry to stage one of QGMA competition
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