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Winning entry by Kerry Hill Architects (TOP 3)
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John Wardle Architects
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Johnson Pilton Walker in association with Utzon Associates Architects
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Kohn Pedersen Fox in association with Hofman and Brown Architects and Crawford Rattigan & Associates
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PTW and Jones Coulter Young
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Philip Goldswain reviews the recent competition for Perth’s new performing arts venue.
Even without the clarity of hindsight, it is
not foolhardy to suggest that the mid 2000s
in Western Australia will be remembered as
a period of unprecedented investment in
public architecture and infrastructure. The
felicitous combination of a second-term
Labor Government with decisive and
ambitious ministers, a booming
resource-driven economy and a highly
regarded Government Architect with a
mandate to improve architectural quality
in the public realm has resulted in the
initiation of three major projects within
the Perth CBD. More are to follow.
As well as embarking on the largest
public transport infrastructure project ever
undertaken in Western Australia, the
government has commissioned significant
commercial, cultural and sporting projects
such as the Multipurpose Indoor
Entertainment and Sports Stadium (won by
an ARM-led team) and the refurbishment
and extension of the colonial era Old
Treasury Building by Peter Elliott
Architects, Donaldson Warn, Sandover
Pinder, and Palassis Architects. Under
Government Architect Geoffrey London’s
regime new approaches to procurement
have been developed, with the open design
competition and architectural “equisse” preferred over the previous methodologies
based on experience and fee bidding.
The most recent commission is Kerry Hill
Architects’ design for the new Performing
Arts Venue, the first purpose-built theatre in
Perth for thirty years. This was won through
a competition that sought to address Perth’s
impending lack of a lyric theatre as the
Peter Parkinson-designed Playhouse reaches
the end of its functional life. The widely
canvassed brief to cater to a diverse
performing arts community called for two
spaces: a 600-seat Main Theatre and a
smaller 200-seat Studio Theatre as well as
the attendant functional, administrative
and public spaces.
The site is on the south-west corner of the
Cultural Centre containing the Art Gallery
of Western Australia (AGWA), the Perth
Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA), the
State Library and the Western Australian
Museum as well as smaller organizations
such as Art on the Move and the Blue Room
Theatre. Despite the creative and
intellectual vigour of these institutions the
urban space they inhabit is one of the least
inviting in Perth. In addition to the explicit
demand for a theatre to “provoke and
stimulate” there was an overt requirement
for the project to engage in broader urban
design questions, particularly the
engagement of the theatre site with the
Cultural Centre and its role in reconciling
the design issues that beset it.
The two-stage open (rather than invited)
competition initially attracted forty
international and Australian entrants,
all of whom were aligned with a Perth
architectural firm. In the spirit of the open
design competition all stage-one entries
were exhibited on the Department of
Culture and Arts website at the conclusion
of the final judging process. This broad field
was whittled down to five shortlisted
schemes who were invited (and paid
$40,000) to develop their schemes further.
These were submitted six weeks after the
announcement of the finalists.
John Wardle Architects’ developed
scheme sought to engage with associative
as well as the physical qualities of the site
more rigorously than their stage one entry.
Cultural memory is explored with a
programmatic evocation of the
now-demolished Governor Broome Hotel
in the location of the theatre bar, and the
existing nineteenth-century buildings are
literally claimed as backdrops to the
first-level outdoor cinema. The urban
morphology of Perth’s arcades is alluded to
through the use of a new cranked internal
street that cuts through the back of the
existing building and connects Roe to James
Street. This generates a series of tapered
volumes that reoccur in the building above,
projecting the theatre out into the busy
intersection. These fractured geometries are
articulated in the most malleable of spaces –
entries, foyers, bars – while the rectilinear
spaces of the theatres and ancillary facilities
allow a compact plan. The result is a robust
aesthetic, challenging and awkward. It is an
appropriately brute and satisfying response
to the urbanity of the site.
The Johnson Pilton Walker and Utzon
Associates scheme’s linear plan is appealing
in its organizational logic and clarity,
expressed as a stepped platform that links
William Street and the much higher level of
the AGWA plaza. Strikingly similar to the
artificial ground created at Bennelong Point
as the podium for those famous sails, this
new platform accommodates increasingly
larger volumes (such as rehearsal studios)
as it steps up towards the gallery. Its paved
surface then stretches out from inside the
building to claim the ground of the Cultural
Centre. The proposal engages sensitively
with the historic buildings and a central
atrium brings light into the office wing
wedged between the two theatres.
However, the clarity and persuasive logic
of JPW and Utzon’s planning isn’t manifest
formally. An encompassing architecture and
the potential of the “wall” are eschewed for
an unarticulated glass box between the roof
and stepped platform. The softly billowing
sinusoidal roof form, inspired by the
photography of Eadweard Muybridge, is too
subtle a gesture to compete with the context
(or other schemes) and the fly tower resorts
to articulation by pattern.
The scheme prepared by Kohn Pedersen
Fox in association with Perth firms Hofman
and Brown Architects and Crawford
Rattigan & Associates proposes a similar
connection eastward to the AGWA with a
stepped plaza that slowly draws the patron
down from the Culture Centre into the heart
of the theatre. The sophisticated urbanity of
this gesture is undermined by the scheme’s
fundamental misunderstanding of other
urban and climatic aspects of the site.
It proposes a main foyer off the inhospitable
Roe Street, tucked up next to the Art
Gallery multistorey car park, while
locating an open plaza on the south-west
(windward) corner of the busy intersection
with William Street. The scheme’s singular
and iconic “egg” (which contains the main
theatre) overwhelms the scale of the
“pergola”, which otherwise engages subtly
as a thin datum with the site’s varying built
context and levels.
PTW and Jones Coulter Young’s scheme
responds more vigorously to the busy
intersection and articulates the corner by
enclosing it as the main foyer space.
A series of folded sunshades clad this
curved glass box, animating it to the passing
motorist. PTW and JCY introduce linear hard
and soft landscape elements to connect the
scheme from Roe through to James Street.
Like the JPW andUtzon proposal a single
wing contains the artists’ accommodation,
lined with landscape courtyards.
The winning scheme by Kerry Hill
Architects distinguishes itself through a
singular architectural gesture. By stacking
the two theatres Hill liberates the ground
plane and forces the ancillary functions of
the theatres underground. This raises a
series of intriguing spatial and architectural
possibilities that engage with the broader
historical precedents of theatre design
absent from the other schemes. A series of
staircases and voids alludes to the
traditional theatre spectacles of arrival,
viewing and promenades. This allows the
opportunity to indulge in the almost poetic
spatial experience, a theatrical descent
through space illuminated with light cast
across the in situ concrete and timber of the
main theatre and boiler plate of the studio
black box; alternately brute then refined.
The most formally abstract of all the
schemes, it engages with its context through
the formal layering of abstract boxes that
increase in scale from the two-storey street
to that of the institutional buildings. These
abstract cubic volumes are articulated by
light – diffused, striated, absorbed and
projected – and are transformed at night.
The fly tower glows as an incandescent and
minimal lantern. Shadows curl up internal
curved ceilings while the fritted glass
volume announces the entry on a
crepuscular William Street. Louvred
daylight, cast down the timber-clad drum
of the main theatre, is eventually absorbed
by the basement black box of the studio
theatre. The result is space that is abstract
and contextual, luminous and mute,
robust and refined; an empty vessel waiting
to be further articulated by its performers
and audience.
Hill’s scheme is the least concerned with
the urban design issues afflicting the
Cultural Centre. A thin outdoor corridor
and landscape courtyard is all that links the
amphitheatre to James Street while the rest
of the complex turns its unarticulated
back on PICA, AGWA and the Blue Room.
A colonnaded footpath that ameliorates
the potentially hard edge with Roe Street
is compromised by the presence of the
loading dock.
The emergence of the open competition
as a process for procuring significant public
work is a welcome and overdue change in
Western Australia. As well as its potential
to expose new and unexpected design
proposals from a wide range of architects,
it should also be recognized as a method for
interrogating and testing the veracity and
robustness of the brief manifest as a work of
architecture. It is recognition of this fact,
rather than a belief in the absolutism of the
brief, that has lead to a fine building being
proposed for an empty car park on a busy
intersection in Perth.
PHILIP GOLDSWAIN IS A LECTURER IN
ARCHITECTURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF
WESTERN AUSTRALIA.
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