Davina Jackson - Australian Architecture: A History

FROM FIRST NATIONS GUNYAHS AND FIRST FLEET HUTS TO 21ST CENTURY ECO-PAVILIONS AND SKYSCRAPERS, DAVINA JACKSON SURVEYS THE EVOLUTION OF ARCHITECTURE IN AUSTRALIA.

Dr Jackson explores how early colonial building designers like James Bloodworth, Francis Greenway and John Lee Archer interpreted classical European styles using local stone and timber. She examines how medieval and Renaissance monuments influenced leading architects during the 19th century, until the fresh winds of modernism and demands for a unique Australian style took over in the 20th century, with environmental challenges and technological innovations driving change in recent years.

Over two and a half centuries, our architects and builders have responded to the fierce Australian sun with verandas, porticos, colonnades, screens and Asian-inspired shade pavilions. Jackson explores these and other distinctive aspects of Australian design, why gold-boom architecture consistently impressed Victorian visitors, and the achievements of modern luminaries like Walter and Marion Griffin, Harry Seidler, Jrn Utzon, John Andrews, Glenn Murcutt and John Wardle.

Illustrated throughout, Australian Architecture traces our distinctive and internationally acclaimed domestic, commercial and institutional buildings, with overviews of the main design influences and key examples to visit. This is the essential guide for designers, architects, students and anyone interested in the story of Australias unique and fascinating architecture.

Comprehensive, fascinating and inspiring

Tim Ross, presenter of ABC TVs Designing a Legacy

Davina Jackson delights with characteristic clarity

Peter Murray OBE, Curator-in-Chief, New London Architecture

Gleams with insights into the buildings that shape our lives

Emeritus Professor Grace Karskens, author of The Colony

LONG OVERDUE Luigi Rosselli, award-winning architect

AN IMPRESSIVE AND EXHAUSTIVE SURVEY

Karen McCartney, author of Iconic Australian Houses

A must read for every lover of Australian design

Raj Nandan, Chairman and CEO, Indesign Media Asia/Pacific

GEOMETRICAL STAIRCASE AND OVAL OCULUS AND DOME AT ELIZABETH BAY HOUSE, SYDNEY.

Contents

INTRODUCTION

Australias history of architecture is widely recorded for projects, places and exceptional practitioners, but is rarely compiled as a comprehensive, national chronicle. Max Freelands outstanding Architecture in Australia: A History appeared in 1968, more than half a century ago. Long out of print, it remains essential to survey how the continents buildings evolved from flimsy tents and huts in the late 1800s to the modernist skyscrapers that began to spike his Sydney skyline in the late 1950s.

Freelands sentences sparkle with insights and ironies; his facts remain mostly reliable despite recent reinterpretations; and his detailed explanations of vintage building materials and methods complement early construction manuals by First Fleet officers in the late 1780s and Melbourne architects Leonard Terry, Percy Oakden and George Addison in 1885 and Robert Haddon in 1909.

Australian Architecture: A History follows Freeland to tell a broader and longer story about the cultural evolution of Australian architecture, beginning with recent evidence and speculations about the structures of Indigenous Australians; the stone redoubt desperately cobbled by shipwrecked Dutchmen off Western Australia in 1629; the colonys first architectural drawings that were quill-inked by William Dawes aboard the Sirius in Sydney Cove in 1788; the first verandas built by Lieutenant-Governor Francis Grose; and the brickmason, James Bloodworth, and the stonemason, John OHearne, who preceded Francis Greenway as Australias first colonial architects.

Thanks to a mountain of research by many historians since Freeland, we can highlight excellent architects and their landmarks that define cities, towns and pastoral estates around the continent. Although only a few dozen architects were mentioned by Freeland and two other mid-20th century historians, Malcolm Ellis and Robin Boyd, Australia was developed in the late 19th century by several hundred immigrants from Britain with excellent training and often exceptional talents in building design. From John Verge and John Bibbs Georgian mansions, admired by Charles Darwin during his visit to Sydney in 1836, to the marvellous Melbourne monuments spruiked by London journalist George Augustus Sala in 1885, Australias architecture consistently impressed Victorian visitors.

Expressing a singular Australian style of architecture was far more difficult. This aspiration emerged in the late 19th century, as the nation engineered its convict and goldrush societies towards more independence from Britain. Before and after the declaration of the Australian Commonwealth of federated states and the death of Queen Victoria in January 1901, some architects demanded that their peers should stop copying antique European monuments and start designing modern buildings that avoided elaborate ornamentation and included practical responses to Australias sun and weather.