 | ARCHITECTURE AUSTRALIA-UNBUILT The AA Prize for Unbuilt Work had a significant role in Australian architecture
in the 1990s. As a prelude to announcing our revitalized prize for unbuilt work,
we present winning entries from the past along with our plans for the future.
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Redevelopment of
Lower Concourse Level,
Sydney Opera House,
by Alex Popov, the
inaugural winner of
the AA Prize for Unbuilt
Work, described by juror
Shane Murray as
“a true design
investigation in that
there is an observation
of an existing state of
affairs, a hypothesis and
a speculation”.
Architecture Australia
January/February, 1993.
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Cover of Architecture
Australia January/
February, 1994,
announcing that year’s
winners of the AA Prize
for Unbuilt Work.
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Opening spread from
Architecture Australia
January/February, 1994.
The year’s winner, Port
Adelaide Housing, by
Michael Markham and
Abbie Galvin, described
by juror Ian McDougall
as “alternative concepts
for living to those
sponsored by the
ignorant real estate
industry”.
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Opening
spread from
Architecture Australia,
March/April, 1995. The
winner was The
Embrace, by Also
Architecture Studio,
Alice Hampson and
Sheona Thomson.
“A family house of
sensual experiences.”
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Opening spread from
Architecture Australia
March/April, 1997, with
the year’s winner, Knot
Building, by RMIT
student Nicholas
Koulouras. “An
audacious, exploratory,
well-researched and
unusually creative
attempt to literally tie
up architecture’s
unravelled strands of
theory at the end of
the millennium”.
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Opening spread from
Architecture Australia,
March/April, 1998,
showing the winning
project, Incision, by
Martine Merrylees of
Deakin University.
“It does enlighten
your imagination.
I haven’t got a clear
picture and I prefer to
leave it that way.”
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Commendation for
Urban Design, 1994,
Camberwell Housing,
by William Orr, Ronson
Lui and Siew Ling Wong.
“A useful model for the
necessity of denser
urban infill.”
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Commendation for
Urban Design, 1994,
Perth Foreshore, by
Donaldson + Warn/John
Sunderland. “A singular
attempt to engage the city
with the water”.
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Commendation for
Building Design, 1994,
“Pool Pavilion” by
Edmond and Corrigan.
“Architecture meets the
carnival.” All from
Architecture Australia
January/February, 1994.
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Winner of the
Architectural Concepts
category, 1996,
Kookynie Pied-A-Terre,
by Richard Black.
“A romantic notion
ruthlessly abstracted.”
Architecture Australia
March/April, 1996.
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Commendation
1997, Ode to the
Lingering Garden, by
Zahava Elenberg and
Kelly Ratigan.
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Commendation 1997,
Minimata Memorial, by
Anton James. All from
Architecture Australia
March/April, 1997.
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Architecture has an important tradition of “paper
architecture” – projects that are unbuilt, and
sometimes unbuildable, but which nevertheless
make significant contributions to the development of
the discipline. Think of the many projections of ideal
cities over the centuries – works by Piero della
Francesca, Filarete and others of the Renaissance,
Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, Frank Lloyd Wright’s
Broadacre City, Ludwig Hilbershiemer’s Vertical
City, Constant Nieuwenhuys’s New Babylon, the
Smithsons’ Golden Lane scheme, Léon Krier’s
postmodern cities and so on. Think of the
Neoclassical proposals of Étienne-Louis Boullée,
Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Jean-Jacques Lequeu; the
etchings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi; the futurist
speculations of Antonio Sant’Elia; El Lizzitsky’s
Prouns? and the work of the Constructivists; the
imagined worlds of Superstudio or Archigram; the
utopian visions of Buckminster Fuller; and the
dystopian ones of Lebbeus Woods. The list could go
on and on. Consider the drawings of Zaha Hadid and
Daniel Libeskind, which had such an effect on
recent architectural culture long before either
architect started building. And then there are all the
explorations, formal and otherwise, of the potential
of digital technologies over the last decade or two.
Drawn works (whether made using pencil and
pen or mouse and keyboard) offer an opportunity
for speculation, polemic and theoretical exploration.
There is an idea that such work thrives in times of
economic downturn, but economic prosperity also
leads to a large number of unbuilt projects
languishing in the architects’ plan drawers or on the
server – endless competition entries, works that did
not go ahead for myriad reasons, financial, political
and otherwise. This is a different kind of work to
the polemical projects listed above, but the ideas
explored in proposals for apparently concrete
projects might also make important contributions.
(Remember the impact of Diller + Scofidio’s Slow
House in the early nineties, a project that was not
built beyond its foundations, but which was highly
influential due to its wide circulation through a
variety of publications, including Progressive
Architecture as the winner of the 1991 Progressive
Architecture Design Award.)
But to have this kind of effect, unbuilt work
needs to be known in the architectural community
and beyond. It needs to go into circulation, to be
considered, discussed and debated. To this end,
Architecture Australia is reviving the AA Prize
for Unbuilt Work, which ran through the 1990s.
As Ian McDougall, inaugural prize convenor,
explained, this award was intended to enable work
be seen while it was still contemporary. As he wrote,
“Architectural ideas often have a currency as
evidence of a convergence of cultural and aesthetic
sensibility.” He was interested in generating
conversation around such ideas at the time of their
production, not years later and on the condition
that they turned into a building. He argued that
thoughtful, unrealized architecture should not be
“looked down on as the stillborn product of an
enervating process”, and he reminded readers that
Seidler’s proposals for McMahon’s Point and Sydney
Cove, and Edmond and Corrigan’s proposals for
Parliament House or the Australian Pavilion at the
Venice Biennale are as interesting as the projects
that were indeed realized in built form.
The inaugural AA Prize winner, Alex Popov’s
scheme for the redevelopment of the Sydney Opera
House Lower Concourse, met the ambitions of the
awards programme neatly. Juror Jackie Cooper
described it as demonstrating “the necessary
qualities of architectural thought, research,
resolution and presentation that the award seeks
to celebrate and foster.” But things were not always
so rosy. In 1996 no award was given, and the jury
commented that, “Like past juries, it was looking
for more than the kind of excellence likely to earn
a building and architecture award; it sought
theoretically and aesthetically exceptional
propositions, not necessarily resolved.” The jury
was, however, encouraged by the entries in a new
category, Architectural Concepts, that year won by
Richard Black. This emphasis on investigating ideas
through the medium of architecture was consistent
throughout the life of the award.
During Davina Jackson’s editorship, the awards
coverage also playfully indicated the subjective
nature of awards generally, with the declaration of
“this year’s bias”. In 1994 it was “towards those
entries which express sparks of innovation,
imagination and design skill, with relevance to
issues of current and potential social impact, but
not necessarily well-resolved schemes”, while in
1995 it was “towards humanist proposals concerned
with emotion as well as amenity”. That year, the
jury also made a political statement by giving a jury
citation to an unentered work – Jørn Utzon’s
proposals for the Sydney Opera House interiors.
Looking back over the issues of Architecture
Australia that present the winning and commended
schemes is intriguing for other reasons also. The
prize certainly recognized well-known practitioners
– Alex Popov, Edmond and Corrigan, Donaldson +
Warn, to name a few – but it also brought younger
architects, graduates and students to national
attention. Many of these “unknown” winners are
now respected figures in Australian architecture and
landscape, both as academics and practitioners –
Adrian Iredale, Anton James, Zahava Elenberg, Tony
Chenchow and Stephanie Little, Alice Hampson,
Sheona Thomson, Anthony Moulis and others. Such
early recognition was a vital aspect of the prize.
The coverage is also interesting for what it
suggests about the media of architectural
production. It reminds us that drawing and
modelling are means of exploration as well as modes
of communication. And that as these media shift
over time, the possibility of what the architect can
think and show also shifts. The role played by
modes of representation in the development of
architectural ideas is often elided in architectural
publications, which almost inevitably focus on a
finished product. Publishing inventive unbuilt
projects allows some kind of reflection on this also.
So what now? The AA Prize for Unbuilt Work
fizzled out due to an apparent lack of interest and
the 1998 jury’s sense that none of the entries
warranted the prize. Will it be any different a decade
on? We hope so. The architectural environment has
changed, and once again an enormous amount of
work is being produced that is not realized. The
earlier award is remembered fondly by our readers,
as an important part of architectural culture. We
hope, therefore, that the architectural community
will enthusiastically support this new phase of the
awards programme by once again entering
compelling work to engage, intrigue and inspire.
A call for entries will be included in the next
issue of Architecture Australia (March 2007), with
the winners published in January 2008. In the
interim, we will whet appetites by bringing to our
readers a selection of earlier unbuilt Australian
projects that we think are worthy of further
discussion. Together, the prize and the retrospectives
will occasion a new phase in the consideration of
unbuilt architecture in Australia.
JUSTINE CLARK IS EDITOR OF ARCHITECTURE AUSTRALIA.
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