 | MILLENNIUM ARTS Two very different new public facilities now
grace Brisbane’s Queensland Cultural Centre
– the new Gallery of Modern Art and the
redeveloped State Library of Queensland.
| STATE OF THE ARTS |
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Gallery of
Modern Art, by
Architectus, left,
and the State Library
of Queensland, by
Donovan Hill and
Peddle Thorp, right.
Photograph
Jon Linkins.
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What makes a public building?
John Macarthur refl ects on
differing perceptions and
constructions of the public realm.
Queensland’s Millennium Arts projects have opened to great public and
professional acclaim. The extension to the State Library, by Donovan Hill
with Peddle Thorp, and the Gallery of Modern Art addition to the Queensland
Art Gallery, by Architectus, are the most interesting public buildings to be
completed in 2006 in Australia, and the most prominent in Queensland since
Robin Gibson’s Cultural Centre of 1982–88, to which they are an addition.
Queensland governments of both colours have strongly supported the
projects, and they are clearly flagship buildings intended to mark a coming of
age for Queensland. The economic prosperity and increasing lifestyle profile
of the Sunshine State is now matched by some serious cultural credentials.
The buzz at the GoMA opening was all favourable comparison with Sydney
and Melbourne – a sense that legitimated culture in Australia might have
developed a third corner. In short, both buildings are highly successful as
public buildings in the broadest and most important meaning of the term.
However, the ways in which the two projects constitute the public realm
are quite different, and having the two projects built together and opened a
week apart leads to inevitable comparisons. Some of the differences between
these buildings are matters of architectural value on which architects and the
public seem to have radically divergent opinions.
Briefly, the majority (but certainly not all) of the architects to whom
I’ve spoken prefer the library to GoMA, while every layperson I’ve spoken
to has it the other way around. Myself, I prefer the library, but not without
reservations. Doubtless other reviews will put the case for both projects, and
readers will make up their own minds. More interesting, though, is the clash
of interests and values inevitable in prominent public buildings such as
these, and how much the distance of professional and public taste in
buildings is productive.
G0MA’s biggest success lies in its undoubted grandeur and huge scale
still being perceived as somehow welcoming, friendly and domestic. Vast
and apparently weightless cantilevers, shiny metal cladding and curtains
of glass might look like money and power, but the dominant roof and the
verandah-like elements hint at the space and lifestyle that draw southerners
from their dank narrow terraces to the leafy Brisbane suburbs. These
apparently regionalist elements also make an occupiable edge in this very
large object and fit it to the site. However, some architects find it excruciating
that these same architectural moves are so over-invested in symbolism that
Rod Welford, Queensland Minister for the Arts, and Premier Beattie can claim
the building’s success is in being an emblem of Queensland-ness or, as it is
now called, “subtropicality”. All architects should want the building to be
seen on the international stage, but the popular and political reception of the
building limits that by insisting on architecture as the realization of place
qualities. The screw of this little paradox turns more tightly for architects
who know that the form of the building and particularly the flying roof
and the box-like irregular protrusions are greatly inspired by Jean Nouvel’s
Lucerne Cultural and Congress Centre. Does it matter that the public don’t
know that the identifications with the local that they desire are actually a
part of highly internationalized architectural discourse? Certainly the Clares’
design achieves this double take of speaking to the popular expectation of
buildings while also developing their own clever response to the protruding
roof and deep shadow line that interests a whole section of the international
architecture scene. Are these two levels of engagement articulated at GoMA?
Should they be? I’m not sure, but something like an attempt at a thorough
articulation of architectural discourse with the local is going on at the library.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be working wonderfully well from the
public point of view.
Donovan Hill’s design for the extension to Robin Gibson’s library is
based around a public room that is open to the elements and through which
passers-by wander. A kind of internet lounge, a creche and a cafe open off the
same shaded but open court that houses the library’s front desk and security
line. The main spaces of the library are then organized and secured at the
upper levels, overlooking the public room. The address system and routefinding
in this quite complicated institution are thus all apparently informal
and contingent, picturesque we might say, but, in fact, based around some
well-judged arrangements of lines of sight and some soft thresholds that come
largely from manipulating the ceilings and upper volumes. But the simpler
point here is that this main lobby space is actually open, which simply
would not be possible in a colder or windier climate. This low definition and
ambiguity of inside and out actually is a quality of place and the manner of
using buildings in Queensland, and is, I think, a significant achievement in
making a public space specific to a place. However, the library does not look
like Queensland; it looks like Architecture, and many people do not like that.
Let’s put aside for a moment the question of what kind of architecture
the library looks like. This comparison of the two projects is not only a game
for architects – at the Asia-Pacific Triennial opening at GoMA, I was teased
by numerous members of the art community demanding to know which I
preferred (and with a sharp nose for faint praise). Invariably, I was corrected
and told that GoMA was the better building because architecture did not get
in the way of the art or of using the building and that, in general, it did not
ask to be paid attention – unlike, for instance, Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim
or the library. When I protested that one could not put those two together,
my friends insisted that they would – both were too architectural. At this
point, one tired and emotional senior curator suggested, to great hilarity, that
any architect one met should be punched in the face. Now this was largely
the boisterous rivalry between architecture and the visual arts that we all
enjoy, but I think it has a darker side. My intelligent, culturally aware friends
were basically saying that architecture should be anodyne, and should be
made so through familiarity and cliché. This position is equally insulting to
Architectus, to Donovan Hill and to us all.
Now, I am not going to even attempt to think how the State Library
of Queensland might be like Bilbao (a building that I heartily dislike), but
I think I can see how it could be judged too architectural. The building is
very decorative – there is some applied decoration, a polycarb shading wall
printed in a floral pattern, and the concrete is painted green in a simple
pattern – but most of the decorative effect comes from constructed elements.
This is the truly challenging thing about the building. Using relatively
arbitrary pattern choices, like the floral wallpaper at the entry, encourages
the public to make their own aesthetic judgments about the aspects of the
building that are under much more serious determination. For architects,
this blurring of decoration and expression of construction opens the old
Ruskinian controversy of ornamented construction/constructed ornament.
There are walls of composite plastic and copper sheet, batten screens cut
to patterned profiles, and large pieces of concrete that spring out for no
purpose but to layer an edge or support a streetlight. Where one might
expect a window, boxes that might be kitchen appliances or car tail-lights
burst cheekily through the wall. This level of identifiability of parts lends
a strange creatureliness to the building elements, like the slightly animal
character of Gothic or the vegetal of the baroque. I particularly like the main
element on the riverside, the Red Box. Its red inverse section steps out where
Gibson’s beige concrete tiers step in. It is almost cute, like a puppy sitting
between its mother’s legs. None of this is gratuitous – it all has a spatial logic
and use – and for an architect, there is a lot of pleasure in figuring out the
constructional logic. There is a strong logic of construction and, although it
regularly passes over into delirium, it’s no more extreme than more clichéd
forms of ornamental construction, such as structural glazing. All of this
is extraordinarily inventive. While Donovan Hill’s form vocabulary still
has visible roots in the practice’s interest in Schindler and Scarpa, in the
library they have developed a fairly coherent formal language essentially
of their own. It is idiosyncratic and not to everyone’s taste, but then it is
odd to aim for any kind of “style” (in the authentic sense) in these days of
cool “appearances”. The problem is that the public treat the building as
idiosyncratic – the forms are unfamiliar, they appear to be arbitrary, without
giving a clear understanding of how they articulate construction and a spatial
condition. The public tend to read this as the wilfulness and contrariness that
all architects are thought to be struggling to suppress. I suppose Donovan
Hill thinks that through use and familiarity the public will come to associate
the visible character of the building with their spatial experience and learn
about architecture beyond their preconceptions. If GoMA has the problem of
being over-determined by preconceptions of building in Queensland, then on
this issue we could say that the library has the opposite problem by ignoring
popular ideas of the appropriate appearance of august institutions.
However, what strikes me most about both projects is what they have in
common, and what they share with the public – a distaste for Robin Gibson’s
buildings. On this point I think everyone is misguided. Gibson’s original master
plan was effectively broken for the Millennium Arts projects with the Strategic
Planning Framework for the Queensland Cultural Centre precinct prepared in
2002. Explicitly and implicitly, the government did not want more late-Brutalist
megastructure that was organized around grade-separated circulation and that
largely ignored the river. There has been a lot of careful speech-work about
honouring Gibson (and his moral rights), and he was also commissioned for a
new entry to the main Queensland Art Gallery. There is little of interest in this,
other than the fact that the new entry also seems to make an implicit criticism
of the aloofness of Gibson’s first design. This is the further context to GoMA’s
monumental roof. Many of the phases of architectural fashion can be diagnosed
from visibility of the roof. Regionalism is roof architecture; International Style
is wall architecture. Christopher Wren had a neat theory – in the grandest
buildings parapets hide the roof, in the humblest eaves are visible, while
middle-class buildings show their ridges and hide their eaves. Hence the
modern tone of the butterfly roof, which shows eaves and not ridge. The library
continues the critique of the pomposity of wall-parapet architecture that GoMA
is running. Being an actual extension, the library corrects Gibson’s exposed
aggregate walls by appliquéing them with patterns of stainless steel wire and
complicating them with batten screens casting shadow. In different ways both
buildings follow the local dictum that one should “layer the edge-condition”.
Perhaps this is a value to uphold, but it is quite an aggressive thing to say to a
proud suite of buildings, only decades old, which thinks that it is a “magnificent
play of masses brought together in light”.
I’m not saying the new buildings should have been designed to
complement the forms of the older suite, but rather that they should
have made some kind of account of them as a real context of the cultural
investment that Queenslanders made in a past architectural idea. I think the
library achieves that at one point with the Red Room. There are lots of things
wrong with Gibson’s buildings, mostly the address system, but they are a
remarkably large and coherent suite of buildings that exhibit, with some
skill, the architectural values of late modernism, and do so with a serious
construction budget of the kind that was not afforded to GoMA or the library.
What is more, both the architects who learnt at university that modernism
was over and the politicians who think that it is still unpopular are wrong.
Now that inner-city apartment buildings hide their roofs, few think of the
Cultural Centre as oppressively, didactically modern as it was considered
when built. One way to gauge the timeliness of the Millennium Arts projects
is not to measure GoMA against Bilbao or the new MOMA, but against the
renovation of that other South Bank, the Hayward Gallery in London, against
the revaluing of the architecture of Gibson’s generation, and a shift in public
taste toward the 70s and a certain brusqueness in all things, including building.
The Millennium Arts buildings are successful for the public and will
come to be loved and to make up the sense of public space in Brisbane. But
will this have much to do with the architecture? Or will it be an effect of the
facilities they provide coming to be associated with the buildings? Similarly,
each of the buildings and the contrast between them provide much for
architects to think on. It may be hubris to think that architectural discourse
could ever really articulate with the broader discourse on what public
buildings are and what they mean. But if there were an angle on this issue,
I think it would need to be a wide one – it would mean dealing with the fact
that the public realm is already made up of investments and identifications
with architectural ideas about public space on which architects disagree.
Dr John Macarthur is reader in architecture at the University of Queensland.
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