Architecture
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It is a century since Vers une architecture was published […]
May 30, 2023
13 mins
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Art today is an enigma, more a question and a collection of uncertainties. For a building to succeed, the requirements must be stated with clarity. Little wonder then that Sydney Modern failed to find a solution, its mission never having been properly stated. The result, as Paul Keating sneered, is a 'special events complex masquerading as an art gallery'
May 6, 2023
19 mins
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For all her book’s impressive monumentality and thoroughness, Davina Jackson never addresses the question posed by its title, 'Australian Architecture'. Is architecture in Australia genuinely 'Australian' or is, at best, little more than a skilled pastiche of the foreign and familiar executed by imitators who depend on the ideas of others?
April 24, 2022
10 mins
The latest
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Sculpture is not normally the stuff from which acrimonious public […]
December 31, 2021
17 mins
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The Opera House is most often regarded as a high point of European modernism. Yet beyond this, something deep, harking back to antiquity, has always haunted Utzon’s conception of the building as a spiritual venue. Beneath those blindingly white sails resides the ghost of sacred geometry summoned from Mayan and Greek prototypes
May 8, 2021
17 mins
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even years ago I wrote an article in Quadrant on the slow but steady erosion of the suburban church as a centre of community activity and faith. Since then the decline has gathered speed. Fancy a used pew or perhaps a pulpit? You’ll find them for sale on eBay
July 26, 2020
10 mins
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The aspiration of government planners and their architects for the bleak, shoddy towers they erected in post-war Britain was to refashion those at the bottom into pleasant and compliant drones. Those ambitions would collapse, literally in the case of London's Ronan Point housing estate, even as they prompted the dystopian urban novel, 'A Clockwork Orange' not least of all
May 15, 2020
38 mins
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On January 25, 2019, the Swedish sixteen-year-old Greta Thunberg warned […]
February 28, 2020
13 mins
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Utzon's drive to unify architecture with landscape saw him produce what amounts to strong sculpture, the result of which is a unity we call 'a monument'. Thus was he able not merely to reject the overwhelming dullness and banality of global industrial architecture, but to vanquish it
August 10, 2019
12 mins
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Much has been written of the Sydney Opera House, its design, feuds and political storms that surrounded its construction, but no account can match that of Jack Zunz. There almost from the very start, it was he who made Utzon's soaring concept into a workable reality and his book sets the record straight
July 6, 2019
13 mins
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Not since the altar-smashing Protestant reformers in the sixteenth century, or indeed the secularisers of the French Revolution, has there been destruction of ecclesiastical fittings and objets d’art on such a scale as we are witnessing today in Australia.
May 5, 2019
16 mins
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Architects no longer draw but do everything on laptops. They no longer know the sensual touch of a graphite extension of their fingers on white paper. The mechanical buildings that result amply demonstrate the qualitative difference in values between them and Hardy
April 29, 2019
14 mins