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The winning entry by Johnson Pilton Walker, as seen on arrival.
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Models of the shortlisted
entries. Top to bottom:
the winning scheme by
Johnson Pilton Walker;
Francis-Jones Morehen
Thorp; Denton Corker
Marshall; Peddle Thorp
and Walker Sydney;
Nicholas Grimshaw and
Partners; rendering of
scheme by Sean Godsell
Architects and Peddle
Thorp Melbourne.
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Francis-Jones Morehen Thorp
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Denton Corker Marshall
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Nicholas Grimshaw and Partners
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Sean Godsell Architects and Peddle Thorp Melbourne
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Peddle Thorp and Walker Sydney
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Johnson Pilton Walker
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Laura Harding considers the competition for the new National Portrait Gallery.
At the existing home of the National
Portrait Gallery, in the former library of
Old Parliament House, Clifton Pugh’s
Australians are temporarily reunited. The
portrait of Sir John Kerr, painted by Pugh in
the year of the Dismissal, smirks knowingly
across the room towards the wall occupied
by Pugh’s 1972 Archibald Prize-winning
portrait of the Hon. Edward Gough
Whitlam. Whitlam’s face emerges from the
portrait’s abstracted background into sharp
focus, fixing the viewer with a steady,
provocative gaze – forbidding you to
turn your back on him to contemplate
his nemesis.
The lively interplay of portraits with the
viewer, their architectural setting and each
other is the essence of the National Portrait
Gallery. Its collection forms an energetic,
unscripted and evolving cultural narrative.
To wander the rooms of the gallery is to
assemble a highly personalized historic
account, refreshingly free of didacticism
and constructed meaning. To lock eyes with
the portraits in the collection is to discover
a surprisingly moving national history,
replete with the contradictions, complexity,
strength and frailty of those depicted. The
primary role of the new National Portrait
Gallery is to set the mise en scčne for the
potent encounter of viewer and subject.
Locating the new National Portrait
Gallery in the Parliamentary Triangle, on
the edge of the Griffin Land Axis, between
the High Court, the National Art Gallery and
Reconciliation Place, poses a fascinating but
complex architectural proposition – it asks
a single work of architecture to reconcile
the intimate scale of the engagement of
portraiture with the nationalist grandeur of
the capital. The six finalists in the recently
concluded international design competition
have positioned themselves decisively
in relation to this central question.
Denton Corker Marshall and
Francis-Jones Morehen Thorp (FJMT)
separated the intimate expression of the
gallery spaces from the iconic presence of
the institution, each providing a series of
self-contained gallery boxes, clustered
beneath an oversailing roof canopy. FJMT’s
roof is a crisp, white field of Beyeler-esque
aerofoil sections, formed to reflect light into
the gallery spaces below. The inflated scale
of the large blades unfortunately tends to
smother the more finely worked, vertically
striated glass and timber-clad galleries
beneath. The language of these more
intimately scaled elements evokes Auguste
Perret’s dictum that vertically oriented
openings frame the human proportion –
capturing the viewing public in thin
windows that transform their silhouettes
into animated portraits on the facades of
the building.
Denton Corker Marshall proposed an
exquisite moire pattern of gridded
punctures in their filigree roof – peeled up
at the corner to signify the building’s entry
on King Edward Terrace and supported by
a fringe of densely spaced, needle-like
columns. Its speckled light and shimmering
surface are visually arresting, but favour an
aerial vantage point. From below, only the
interstitial and peripheral spaces in the
building enjoy the playful articulation and
stunning light quality of the canopy.
The gallery spaces are housed in more
environmentally controlled timber forms,
necessarily protected from the highly
patterned light drawn from the
signature roof.
The reliance on artificial lighting in many
of the proposals is curious. The National
Portrait Gallery has a strong curatorial
preference for the use of indirect natural
light in their gallery spaces – Director
Andrew Sayers firmly believes that its vital
and changeable quality is essential for, quite
literally, bringing to light the vitality and
vividness of their collection. Contrary to
this, two proposals investigated the
excavation of gallery spaces on the site.
Nicholas Grimshaw and Partners posited
an in-between scheme – a monumental,
ramped forecourt tapering into a
subterranean base, unified by a floating roof
poised at the level of the natural tree
canopy. Despite the lyrical quality of the
sectional diagram, the realization of the
canopy lacked an appropriate fineness,
having instead an imposing institutional
weight more readily associated with
transport infrastructure. The gallery spaces
appear to be a secondary concern when
measured against the overstated drama of
the inclined landscape and entry court.
Sean Godsell/Peddle Thorp Melbourne
set their proposal within a wrinkled
landscape carpet. Its extensive excavated
structure is sheathed in a rusty, punctured
carapace of oxidized steel cells that skims
the surface of the site in a manner
reminiscent of Dominique Perrault’s
Olympic velodrome and swimming hall in
Berlin. The shell is a beautifully considered
climate-modifying skin, neatly described
by its authors as having “an element of
bush mechanic” in its tectonic. Despite
this, it feels gestural to revel in the tectonic
magnificence of a light filtering element
that is divorced from the building’s raison
d’ętre, the gallery spaces themselves, which
are inset and isolated from the building’s
luminous perimeter.
Peddle Thorp and Walker Sydney offered
a cellular gallery arrangement, encrusted
with a thick layer of supporting rooms and
services. The top-lit and well-proportioned
galleries offered a range of spaces that
seemed well matched to the diversity of
the National Portrait Gallery’s collection.
However, the scheme’s enclosure lacked
the vitality and architectural quality of the
other proposals. The decision to reduce
the scale of the building to a symbolic
“Australian domicile” complete with
single-storey verandah and garden on its
north-east edge was an incomprehensible
response to the scale of the Land Axis and
Lake Burley Griffin foreshore.
Johnson Pilton Walker’s winning proposal
occupied solitary territory among the six.
With a nod to its High-Modernist neighbours
it evokes the definitive work of Louis Kahn
– the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth,
Texas. Deftly arranging its parallel bars
perpendicular to the Land Axis, JPW’s
proposal effortlessly resolves the tension
between the competing elements of
Reconciliation Place, the King Edward
Terrace frontage, the High Court and the
National Art Gallery link – creating a range
of understated and subtle connections
between the building and its surrounding
civic elements.
Arranging its gallery spaces on a single
level, the building’s primary formal
expression is defined by its vaulted roofs,
and specifically the transmission of light
into the gallery spaces themselves. A series
of folded plywood trusses support tapering
roofs that gently arc in their longitudinal
direction, subtly varying light levels along
the length of the galleries. The rigour of its
diagram valorizes the gallery spaces,
rendering the servicing and support
elements of the building almost
imperceptible. Small openings on its
eastern and western edges provide
intermittent glimpses of the landscape
beyond, offering moments of respite and
recovery for gallery patrons.
The proposal’s civic scale is yet to find
its full expression in the powerful linear
elevations facing King Edward Terrace and
Lake Burley Griffin. The thin blade walls
extending from the building to mark the
forecourt and entry space jar with the
tectonic force and sophistication of the
scheme proper, but as a whole the weight
of the scheme is a decidedly comfortable fit
for the National Portrait Gallery. The
question of the institution’s relationship to
the nationalist identity of the capital remains.
Many of the entrants’ written submissions
are littered with hackneyed references to
the creation of “a uniquely Australian
architecture” interpreting the “egalitarian”,
“open” and “larrikin” character of
Australians. Despite its rhetoric, the
strength of JPW’s scheme is that it
understands that the National Portrait
Gallery’s Australians can quite ably and
eloquently speak for themselves. It astutely
insists that the provision of a quietly
dignified and reflective place in which to
commune with them is simply enough.
LAURA HARDING IS AN ARCHITECT WITH HILL
THALIS ARCHITECTURE + URBAN DESIGN.
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