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RADAR
FEATURES
COMMENT
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| | RADARBIENNALE MICRO-MACRO CITY
| Going to Venice! Shane Murray and Nigel Bertram, creative directors of the Australian Pavilion at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, outline the themes, issues and projects they will explore in this year’s exhibition. |
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The inhabitation of Australia is often
portrayed through romantic images of
isolated dwellings located in its vast
interior or at its spectacular coastal beaches.
In reality, only seven percent of Australia’s
enormous land area is arable and more than
eighty-five percent of its population lives
on the thin coastal fringes of the continent.
The result is one of the most highly
urbanized societies in the world.
Conversely, Australian cities demonstrate
some of the lowest urban densities in the
world and this has led to very particular
forms of urban settlement, which elude
many of the conventional categorizations of
urban form. A range of urban relationships
and corresponding architectural responses
have evolved in response.
These urban conditions, and architectural
responses to them, are the subject of the
Australian exhibition for this year’s Venice
Biennale, with its theme of “Cities.
Architecture and Society”. The exhibition
will look closely at the conditions of the
Australian urban environment and focus on
its specificity and differences. It will ask
what unique attributes and possibilities are
to be found in Australia’s peculiar
combinations of density, extreme
spaciousness, cheap land, relative affluence
and widespread access to technology. It
will establish a framework for seeing and
understanding the contemporary Australian
urban condition through case studies of
precise moments within that condition.
Called Micro-macro City, the exhibition
presents the Australian urban condition as
a matrix of interrelationships between
urban cores, suburban sprawl, regional
centres and rural hinterland. Understanding
this field as a continuum of inhabitation
across a range of densities and settlement
types bypasses traditional distinctions
between city and country, town and suburb,
centre and periphery, metropolitan and
non-metropolitan. This idea of a dispersed
urban continuum highlights connections and
interrelationships rather than separations.
The workings of complex economic,
demographic, social, governmental,
environmental and cultural forces are
revealed at certain precise moments within
this framework. Through the close study of
such distilled environments useful applied
knowledge about our cities can emerge.
The exhibition will present eight case
studies, or micro-systems, of particular
urban environments from a wide range of
contexts. Together they will form a
cumulative and comparative macrorepresentation
of our cities. Each case study
will reveal and provoke the latent potential
within our broader urban situation. In
parallel, the exhibition will present twelve
significant works of architecture, coupled
with these micro-systems in a dynamic
relationship. These works represent a range
of scales, programmes and locations and all
understand and engage their urban field.
The eight themes and related projects are
as follows. “Shrinkage” concerns rural
reinvention and post-industrial
diversification, and will be presented with
Donaldson + Warn’s International Art Space
at Kellerberrin.
“Expansion”, the second theme, will look
at suburban diversity and homogeneity, and
will be explored with the Poll House by
Gary Marinko, the Wherehouse by Simon
Anderson and the D House by Donovan Hill.
“Interface” will investigate the industrial
and residential fringe, and the potential of
abrupt physical and functional adjacencies
on a large scale. Presented adjacent to this
will be the Deepwater Woolshed by
Stutchbury & Pape.
“Overlap” will look at multi-use,
mixed-zone pockets, exploring the
opportunistic reoccupation of formerly
redundant industrial precincts. The related
project is the Kaurna Building at UniSA by
John Wardle Architects with Hassell.
“Absorption” is concerned with satellite
city expansion and regional sponges. It will
look at increased pressure triggering the
development of previously ignored
ambiguous and interstitial space. The
accompanying architectural project is the
Micro-Health Laboratory, UQ Gatton
Campus, by M3 Architecture.
“Exchange” concerns the interactive and
real public domain, looking at the suburban
shopping centre car park as the location of
social, communal and intercultural
exchange. The architectural project linked
to this will be the Marion Cultural Centre
by Ashton Raggatt McDougall and
Phillips/Pilkington.
“Re-use” investigates migration,
renovation and regeneration and is
presented with two projects at Sydney
Olympic Park – the Brickpit Ring by
Durbach Block, and Shipwreck Lookout by
Neeson Murcutt.
The final theme is “Oversupply”, which
looks at phenomenal precincts and the space
of entertainment, and will be presented
alongside QV2 apartments, by McBride
Charles Ryan + NH Architecture, and Harry
Seidler & Associates’ Riparian Plaza.
Our curation of the pavilion involves two
strategies: the atmospheric and the specific.
The “atmospheric” is conceived as an
environment that immerses the visitor in a
range of experiences, providing a general
understanding of the urban environments
under consideration. These elements,
including image, video and sound, are not
intended to be the subject of intense study;
as an ensemble they evoke, visually and
aurally, the qualities and differences of
these specific environments.
The “specific” involves a series of
irregularly shaped tables distributed
through the exhibition space. It is here that
the details of each micro-system and its
urban–architectural engagement are
presented. Each table is dedicated to an
urban micro-system and presents
representations of a particular aspect of that
situation: drawings of the selected
architectural works that demonstrate how
their relationship to urban context is
analogous to, or provokes an interesting
adjacency with, the chosen micro-system;
and commissioned photographs and models
depicting the projects, to foreground this
particular relationship.
To develop the exhibition content we
have commissioned photography from Max
Creasy, Paul Knight, Matthew Sleeth and
Selina Ou, and videography from Richard
Raber and Naomi Bishops, Danius Kesminas
and Anna Jeffries. Aural environments from
the eight urban locations will be recorded
by Nicholas Murray.
In presenting the Australian city as a
series of complex urban conditions, we
hope to help generate a more sophisticated
understanding of Australian architecture
internationally, and to offer an opportunity
for Australian architects to reflect on the
latent potential of our immediate, everyday
urban environments.
DR SHANE MURRAY IS A PRACTISING ARCHITECT
AND ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR AT RMIT UNIVERSITY.
NIGEL BERTRAM IS A DIRECTOR OF NMBW
ARCHITECTURE STUDIO AND SENIOR LECTURER
IN ARCHITECTURE AT RMIT UNIVERSITY.
ARCHITECTURE AUSTRALIA IS THE OFFICIAL
MEDIA PARTNER FOR THE AUSTRALIAN PAVILION
AT THE 2006 VENICE ARCHITECTURE BIENNALE.
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