 | GOMA Queensland’s new Gallery of Modern Art, by Architectus.
REVIEW DAVINA JACKSON
PHOTOGRAPHY JOHN GOLLINGS
The Gallery of Modern Art, a new facility for the
Queensland Art Gallery, seeks to draw in new
audiences and to create a “unique cultural experience”.
Architectus has responded with an “open and
democratic urban pavilion”, conceived as a careful
response to the particularities of site, locale and brief. |
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Oblique view of GoMA's south-east entry elevation.
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Kurilpa Park
elevation, showing
the three-dimensional
massing of the building
and the flipped-up roof.
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Oblique view
of the park elevation,
showing the detail of
the timber screen.
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The new gallery
seen from Grey Street.
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View from the
east showing the river
and entry elevations.
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The roof terrace,
looking over Brisbane
River. Photograph
Peter Hyatt.
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The interiors
of the “black box”
cinemas contrast
with the spacious
environment of the
gallery spaces.
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The thick zinc
walls that form the
entries to the galleries
also provide storage
areas for artworks.
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The entry foyer,
with main stair up to
the galleries. The main
entry is to the left,
with the “black box”
spaces containing the
cinemateque beyond.
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Looking over
the stair to the foyer,
from level two. The
mural on the foyer
wall is It’s all about the
Destiny! Isn’t it?, 2006,
by Eko Nugroho,
part of The 5th Asia-
Pacific Triennial of
Contemporary Art.
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The refined
detail of the main stair.
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Gallery 3.3,
on level three, with
artworks from the
collection, including
Problem-Wisdom,
1993–1995, by Kamin
Lertchaiprasert.
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Looking along
the pavilion walk
on level three. The
gallery interior was
conceived as a “street”
and is ordered by the
cruciform pattern of
a street intersection.
Michael Tuffery’s Povi
tau vaga (The challenge),
1999, is seen in the
middle of the space.
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Gallery 1.1, a
temporary exhibition
space on level one,
showing artworks
from The 5th
Asia-Pacific Triennial
of Contemporary Art.
To the left of the
floating wall are
artworks by The Long
March Project, and on
the right a work by
Dinh Q. Lê.
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The Children’s
Art Centre and park
studio, looking
towards Kurilpa Park.
The artwork is an
installation of Kids’
APT activity,
Run run run by artist
Kwon Ki-soo.
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Jane Jacobs, Toronto’s legendary writer on cities,
would have appreciated this Australian regeneration.
Eighteen years after Brisbane’s Bicentennial Expo 88,
Queensland has transformed its former South Bank
wasteland into a splendidly urbane precinct.
South Bank was rescued from serious planning errors
by a late-1990s Denton Corker Marshall master plan,
which now exposes what could have been done to make
Melbourne’s Docklands and Sydney’s Darling Harbour
more integrated with nature, more fun for families, more
stimulating for the culturati, and more neighbourly and
walk-friendly for local apartment and hotel dwellers.
As a Jacobs-style 24-hour village, albeit a subtropical
version, it deserves its applause.
At the north-west end of this strip, Queensland’s new
Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) is yet another reason for
sophisticated visitors to focus on the opposite side of the
river from Brisbane’s CBD. It dramatically counterpoints
Robin Gibson’s early 1980s Queensland Art Gallery of
spreading, part-sunken masonry with a wide-eaved
and elegantly up-curved aerofoil blade roof topping
a generously glazed, four-to-five-storey cubic form.
This Miesian Parthenon also contrasts the spaces and
slices-versus-solids complexity of the adjacent new State
Library by Donovan Hill with Peddle Thorp.
Despite significant design involvement by Tasmanian
architect James Jones when he worked at Architectus’s
Sydney office in the early noughties, GoMA will be seen
as a triumphant Queensland homecoming for Lindsay
and Kerry Clare, the Buderim architects who led, with
John Mainwaring and Gabriel Poole in the 1980s and
1990s, the Sunshine Coast style of light-edged residences
and small pavilions. Forced southwards because they
could not then grow their small office into government
work requiring quality assurance, the Clares now lead
Architectus in Sydney, and are working increasingly on
large national and international projects.
You can’t build a cultural icon without attracting
controversy – GoMA is no exception, although its
architects clearly have sought to avoid the storms of
antipathy (since calmed) which attended the Lab/Bates
Smart design of Federation Square in Melbourne. That
riverside “anti-icon” complex, including the National
Gallery of Victoria’s new contemporary gallery, was
being completed when Queensland’s library and art
gallery competitions were held in 2001. And the design
approaches – at a time of massive, trans-millennial
confusion about the meaning and future of architecture
– couldn’t be more different.
Lab’s Peter Davidson and Don Bates, then based in
London, threw all their Architecture Association-fuelled
artistic passions and critical intellects at a Fed Square
scheme that violently shattered the twentieth-century
modernist-socialist ideal of the glass box. In effect, Lab
was screaming: Modernism is smashed! Create a new
urbanism inspired by recombinance in genetic science.
Architectus, on the other hand, has been accused by
some architects of producing a “boring and conservative” glass box akin to 1990s examples by Norman Foster,
Jean Nouvel and their many large-practice Australian
emulators. GoMA combines the classic principles of
Modernism’s post-1950 International Style with the
Clares’ and Jones’s pragmatic responses to the particulars
of the river-bend site and its subtropical climate.
With their provincial upbringings in areas dominated
by natural landscapes and the ocean, all three of
Architectus’s lead designers also have a natural empathy
with Brisbane’s preference for practical achievements
rather than cranial pretensions.
Given the Clares’ early claims that their work is
not stylistic – and later that their style results from
an astutely considered suite of consistent conceptual
strategies and practical answers to the challenges of
each project – it is reasonable to ask: what makes GoMA
different from, say, Hassell’s similarly proportioned
(albeit smaller) blade-roofed box containing the National
Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney?
One building fronts a busy arterial road, the other
an urban river. The Sydney glass box is elaborated with
a staircase reminiscent of Jacobsen in Copenhagen, a
roof cantilever à la Nouvel in Lucerne, sculptural roof
elements reminiscent of Piano in Noumea and a central
auditorium pod seemingly inspired by Foster’s Reichstag
in Berlin in form and, internally, by the wood panelling
of mid-twentieth-century Scandinavian auditoria.
The Brisbane gallery is elaborated externally by a
range of sun-responsive devices and materials – metal
panels, timber slatting, projecting balconies and a
timber-decked dining terrace – that are markedly
different on every facade for evidently logical reasons.
Considered from a walk around its confined site
(partly due to a government-decreed demarcation line
between the gallery and the adjacent library) and from
the cross-sections, GoMA strongly alludes, at a much
larger scale, to the Clares’ and many other Queensland
houses. Like traditional Queensland public buildings,
these were characterized by light, open edges intended
for occupancy. They were built at a time when many
Australian modernists were quoting the ubiquitous
regional architecture theme: “genius loci … sense of
place.” At GoMA too, at much larger scale, the architects
have incorporated many thoughtful devices that allow
flexible interactions between the architecture and
its atmospheric conditions. For example, roof eaves
incorporate substantial rotating fins to mediate the sun’s
internal impacts at critical times of the day.
Almost impossibly thin-edged, the riverfront illusion
of a flat roof is dispelled by a subtle shift of gradient
along the eaves of the perpendicular facades – an optical
illusion that recalls the almost imperceptible entasis
curvatures of ancient Europe – but which the Clares
describe as a practical response to a change in ground
level (requiring the extended eaves to be raised to avoid
truncated river views from the top floor interior).
Certainly Architectus was responding to local
conditions when it decided to contradict the competition
siting brief and twist the building in plan to open
a vista to the river from nearby Montague Road, to
“coincidentally” align the building to terminate river
views (dramatically foreshortened) from Tank Street in
the city, and to set up a notional axis with the distant
1828 Windmill Tower, Brisbane’s oldest structure, on
the Wickham Terrace ridge. This rotation also opened
up more of the site to enlarge Kurilpa Park between the
north-west facade and the river.
GoMA’s most memorable quality, as unanimously
noted by hordes of astute Australian art patrons at the
opening of the Asia-Pacific Triennial, is its spatially
generous and atmospherically delightful interior.
Compared with most international art galleries of the
late twentieth century, this succeeds as a creative yet
rational integration of floor plans and cross-sections,
with intimate “black boxes” provided for the
cinematheque (two cinemas), media lounge, shop and
storage areas on the south-west side of the building; large,
lofty, white galleries; foyers and vertical voids in the
central zone (all with bright but glare-diffused daylight);
and balconies and terraces to the north-east.
Functionally, the interior includes many intelligent
floor cavity, sliding wall and ceiling-fixture systems
to allow “a secret life” where curators can hang and
illuminate exhibitions, receive and move artworks
in temperature-controlled conditions, and use the
convenient storage areas in wall cavities around the main
galleries – all without being seen by visitors. True to
the Clares’ reputation for meticulous detail, all lighting
tracks are recessed, the floor air grilles and ceilingmounted
sound system components are precisely flush,
and the gallery doors incorporate extremely deep, zinclined
reveals that allow art to be stored in the cavities of
adjacent double walls.
In terms of its external aesthetics and lack of
high-theory allusions, it is possible to deny that GoMA’s
tightly budgeted structure is a twenty-first- century
artistic statement. Except – and this is a crucial exception
– it incorporates two major external walls of Starphire
translucent glass, which allow dynamic light and video
shows to transform the prime north-east and south-east
corner of the building (as seen from the city and adjacent
library). If a proposal to commission American artist
James Turrell to create a work for GoMA’s opening had
gone ahead, then the architecture would have been
recognized as providing literally a digital canvas for
media art that could regularly be refreshed to suit new
occasions and Zeitgeists.
Six years into the third millennium, it seems relevant
for an important cultural monument to anticipate a
future of being dressed in different, flickering, digital
draperies. In a sensible yet technologically advanced way,
Architectus has designed GoMA so that it highlights
today’s shift of conceptual emphasis from mechanistic
structures to digitally-enabled cities … from ostentatious
architectures to sensory and healthy atmospheres.
And, in respecting a highly detailed and intelligent
brief written by gallery experts Doug Hall (director),
William Fleming and Michael Barnett, it’s one of the
world’s few examples of an architect-designed public
art gallery that’s really about appreciating the art, rather
than usurping it.
Davina Jackson is associate professor of New South
Global Design at the University of New South Wales
(supporting research across three faculties), catalyst
of the emerging dCITY data cities modelling research
ecosystem, and author of a forthcoming book
on 16 young Australian practices.
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GALLERY OF
MODERN ART,
BRISBANE
Architect
Architectus—
design directorate
Kerry Clare, Lindsay
Clare, James Jones
project architect
John Norman.
Sydney project team
Adrian Esdaile, Ali
Johnston, Alison
Brookbanks, Aurelio
Marano, Barbara Flynn,
Belinda Pajkovic,
Blair Johnston, Britta
Siggelkow, Christine
McLennan, Darrin
Rodrigues, Deirdre
Coffey, Felix Winter,
Geoffrey Way, James
Jones, James Pilcher,
Jason Jondreau,
Jason Tsai, Jiang Bo
Wang, John Jeffrey,
John Norman, Kathy
Kralj, Kerrie Campbell,
Kerry Clare, Leonardo
Arias Galarz, Lindsay
Clare, Mark Curzon,
Martin Chan, Michael
Harris, Petrina Moore,
Renee Clare, Richard
McEwen, Richard
Travis, Rodd Perey,
Rosemarie Gidaro,
Sandy Strazds, Sarah
Blacker, Simon Zou,
Stefan Van Moll,
Stuart Murchison,
Thilo Nuessgen,
Valeria Buccheri,
Vanessa Gribben.
Brisbane project team
John Grealy, George
Saldais, Ian Thomas,
Clark Ingram, Keith
Allen, Allan Rielly,
Michelle O’Leary, Ray
Smith, Jon Percival,
Michael Ray, Ashley
Beckett, Chloe
Comino, Peter Roy,
Caleb Smith, Kirstin
Tocker, Mark Medcalf,
Clair Keleher, Liz Park.
Structural, facade and
civil engineers
Bornhorst TTW.
Geotechnical
Arup.
Building services and
fire engineers
Lincolne Scott.
Environmental
engineers
Advanced
Environmental.
Quantity surveyor
Rider Hunt.
Acoustics
Bassett Acoustics.
Landscape concept
design
Stutchbury & Pape.
Landscape
EDAW Gillespies.
Signage
dotdash.
Access
Disability Access
Consultants.
Cinema technical
consultant
dBLux.
Wurlitzer restoration/
installation consultant
Tonal Resources.
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