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| | RADARBOOKS
| HUMAN SCALE IN ARCHITECTURE GEORGE MOLNAR’S SYDNEY |
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Jo Holder, Robert Freestone and Joan Kerr. Craftsman House, 2003. $66.
Reading this compilation of Molnar’s life
work is a joy. George Molnar was an
architect, cartoonist, writer and teacher. His
cartoons appeared in the daily press from
the 1950s through to the 1980s and they
comprised a commentary on the issues of
the day. Molnar, with a background and
continuing interest in architecture, used his
cartoons to make particular comment on the
planning instruments that guided Sydney
developments. Much of the charm of this
book comes from these cartoons, and the
continuing relevance and incisiveness of his
observations to the people and events of his
time and today.
The book was inspired by an exhibition
with the same name, in 2001, of Molnar’s
cartoons in the City Exhibition Space at
Customs House, Sydney. The book expands
on the exhibition, placing the cartoons in
chronological order and locating them within
their historical context. Coverage of each
decade is preceded by commentary which
provides background to the issues explored
in the cartoons, supplies further insight to
the creation of the cartoons, from Molnar’s
personal viewpoint, and outlines the external
instruments of power that Molnar worked
within and but also criticised.
The book also includes a selection of
Molnar’s later works where he uses the
medium of watercolour, rather than the black
and white of his cartooning days. However,
even as an artist, Molnar does not discard
the culture of commentary drawn from his
cartooning history and he often includes
captions to his watercolours which give them
an additional dimension, often a fresh jibe at
the ridiculousness of the human condition.
The book ends with a selection of extracts of
essays written by Molnar. What amazes is
the contrast between these two forms of
comment – where Molnar’s cartoons have
continuing relevance to our trials and
tribulations today, his writings seem dated
and their ideas outmoded.
The tone of the commentary is,
understandably, tinged by nostalgia. It is also
slightly apologetic, as it explains the cultural
climate in which Molnar lived and how it was
possible for him to create a strong public
debate about the built space of the city.
This debate is what we, as architects
wish we could engender today. Next year is
the Year of the Built Environment and we
have the Herculean task of trying to inspire
the public in the same way Molnar did in his
30 years of cartooning. My lasting impression
of the book is that I wish that we could have
a Molnar of our time.
TSE-HUI TE
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| ARCHITECTURE ON CAMPUS A GUIDE TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE AND ITS COLLEGES |
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Philip Goad and George Tibbits. Melbourne University Press, 2003. $24.95.
The conceptual isolation of the campus as an
institutional unit within the city developed as
a result of a nineteenth-century growth in
universities outside the traditional university
towns of Britain and Europe. This separation
into a campus brought with it a need to
construct status through displays of wealth
which were made visible through the fabric
of the university environment. Australia’s
early universities emerged from this need.
Buildings, landscapes and residences were
designed not only with a view to their
function but also for their portrayal of an
institutional framework harking back to
Bologna and Perugia. The classical
framework of knowledge became the
underlying re-affirmation that universities
were the visible status of a nation’s
intellectual worth.
Throughout the twentieth century the
universities have continued to play a
changing role in the city and for the nation.
This can be seen and experienced through
their growing urban fabric, the intensity of
their architectural experiences and their re-
affirmation of landscaped environments. The
temporality of this development is often left
as an historical puzzle. One type of puzzle
that brings a specific quality to the older
universities in Australia is the layering of
historical facades with later twentieth-century
attempts at architectural rationalism.
The University of Melbourne is exemplary
for this, with the great conglomerates of the
South Lawn Underground Car Park and the
Bank of New South Wales facade on the Old
Commerce building. (The entry to the car
park is a 1745 entrance door from Dublin on
a car park of the 1970s and the facade to
Old Commerce is a complete classical bank
of 1856 designed in 1938 to form part of the
new building.) In both cases, architectural
donations have meant that the development
of the “new” approach to the university could
never be carried out with the rationality of the
utopian master plan. What results instead is
a wonderful juxtaposition of architectural
temporalities that needs explanation. The
campus becomes both a physical history and
an ephemeral history of politics, personalities
and the serendipitous fortunes of time. This
becomes the narrative of a guide to campus.
Goad and Tibbits have given us a rich look
into the historical development of the
University of Melbourne, allowing us to read
the names, see the chronologies of
development, and understand some of the
architectural and landscape juxtapositions in
the environment on campus. The institution’s
history is vivid with not only the chronology of
what it has meant to be a university but also
the changing role of architecture and its
framing of institutions in the fabric of the city.
If I were to be disquieted over anything it is
the rigorous division of the book into a
chronological sequence, a sequence that has
introduced overly simplistic chapter headings
harking back to the slogans of stylistic
histories of the past. But this is a minor
inconvenience in what is a very worthy
addition to one’s bookshelf. Certainly
Architecture On Campus is a must for a visit
to Melbourne and its campuses.
DESLEY LUSCOMBE
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| ALLEN JACK + COTTIER 1952-2002 |
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Trevor Howells. Focus Publishing, 2003. $95.
Trevor Howells’s tribute to fifty years of the work
of Allen Jack + Cottier is fitting recognition of
that firm’s quiet embrace and negotiation of
Sydney’s competitive architecture culture. As
Keith Cottier observes in his introduction, “the
work of the office has crept into the public’s
subconscious, quietly and without the blowing
of trumpets”. Howells extends and celebrates
this idea. He demonstrates the impressive
quantity and scope of the firm’s work, and the
contribution of partners like John Allen, Russell
Jack, Cottier, Peter Stronach, Glynn Evans, Reg
Smith, Geoff Bonus, and Jeffrey Hokin among
others. What quickly becomes clear, however, is
that one might have had an entire book devoted
solely to Russell Jack’s house plans of the
1950s and 1960s – serene domestic diagrams
which epitomized (and still do) for many
Australian architects, the very idea of easeful
Sydney living in the bush. Or, it would have
been quite appropriate to focus on the firm’s
distinguished series of institutional buildings
like Cottier’s Blacket Award-winning Clubbe
Hall at Frensham School, Mittagong (1965),
one of the defining moments in the mid-1960s
shift in Australian architecture towards a
localized interpretation of monumentality. Or
perhaps, crucial to a much needed discussion
of Sydney’s recent urbanism, a tracing through
the work of Allen Jack + Cottier of their most
substantial (and simultaneously their almost
invisible) contribution: the knitting together of
historic buildings, discreet refurbishment and
well-designed typologically and
morphologically sensitive medium-density
housing. Peter Stronach’s Forbes Street
Housing in Woolloomooloo (1979) was a
revelation in its day for doing just this. Allen
Jack + Cottier made urban consolidation in
Sydney not just respectable but also opened
the doors for others. Thus, while this book is
a tantalizing catalogue of future research
possibilities, its greatest significance lies in
the convincing argument that excellence in
design can be found in collaborative practice.
PHILIP GOAD
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