TY - ADVS
T1 - Spectres of Architecture in Canberra
AU - Farrah, Sally
AU - Louw, Mike
AU - Ennis-Butler, Ben
A2 - Phillips, Emma
N1 - Project title
Spectres of Architecture in Canberra
Date
15-26 April 2024
Authors
Sally Farrah, Mike Louw, Ben Ennis-Butler, Emma Phillips / UC
Rob Henry / AIA ACT Chapter
Canberra Modern (Edwina Jans, Amy Jarvis)
GML Heritage (Rachel Jackson)
ACT Heritage Library
NTRO category (ARC)
Curated or produced substantial public exhibition and event (exhibition)
Recorded/rendered creative works (website)
Fields of Research (FOR Codes)
1201 Architecture
1299 Other Built Environment and Design
Others?
Five Criteria (1 page max.)
1. Research Question
This research explored the rate of demolition of significant buildings in Canberra. Given the capital’s newness compared to other Australian cities, Canberra’s urban timeline is both condensed and asynchronous. Our findings reveal that building stock from the decade of the 1960s is witnessing the highest rate of demolition in Canberra (20 of 50 case studies located), followed by buildings from the 1950s and 1970s respectively. Working with advocacy group Canberra Modern, who have a substantial and dedicated following, demonstrated to us that mid-century architecture that is cherished by the public, is being lost in both Canberra and other Australian cities.
This ongoing project aligns with the aims of ACT Government’s Art, Culture and Creative Policy 2022-2026 in promoting Canberra as a design city, and the ACT Heritage Assessment Policy (2018), where a core theme is NCDC and post-NCDC history as essential to the pattern of ACT’s cultural history. This research revisits many lost places from this NCDC post-war era. Where most of Canberra’s built landscape belongs to mid-century and post-war modernism, this research evidenced that this current rate of demolition of post-war architecture is a huge threat to Canberra’s heritage, identity, and legacy.
2. Relevance and significance of the project
The documenting, researching, and mapping of lost heritage in the capital is relevant to several disciplines. The project’s significance leads to research into embodied energy and environmental sustainability on the one hand, and the ongoing housing crisis and socio-economic sustainability on the other. It highlights the importance of adaptive reuse in existing building stock for both sustainable and heritage benefits, and at the same time, starts to reveal potential shortcomings of current ACT heritage protection policies. This project is also of relevance to the heritage space and those interested in the social history and transformation of Canberra. Finally, we consider this project to have impact in raising awareness for buildings currently at risk in Canberra.
3. Methodology of the project
The project consisted of traditional archival research, and literature research in various archives across the ACT, NSW, and Victoria, and then integrated visual art and craft, and maps, for the exhibition output.
The mapping process, that relates these individual buildings in urban space, also indicates the historical, social, and economic transformation of the character of Canberra suburbs. For example, it was revealing to discover that Northbourne Avenue was lined with many motels in the 1950s and 1960s.
The project also included empirical research and site visits. We constructed perspective machines of lost buildings by artistically integrating the rules of perspective. By staggering and changing the sizes of archival images, and experimenting with the semi-transparent medium of trace paper, and techniques of spacing and cutting, we overlaid these lost buildings into their present-day context.
Finally, the research was compiled and disseminated in a physical exhibition for the ACT Heritage Festival, and a publicly accessible website.
4. Reach of the project (appropriateness of venue, process of peer-review, response for the community)
The exhibition was held at the prestigious AIA HQ, designed in 1967 by Bryce Mortlock of the Sydney firm Ancher, Mortlock, Murray and Woolley. This building is on the Register of Significant Twentieth Century Architecture, and the Heritage Register, and considered a nationally significant building to the history of Australian architecture.
Sally Farrah was invited by Georgia Stynes to speak about the exhibition on ABC Canberra (12 April, 2024). Georgia Stynes invited listeners to text in their favourite lost buildings in Canberra, and the response from the community was overwhelming. In fact, listeners alerted Sally to 3 more demolished projects that had not yet emerged in the research.
In addition to this response from the public, the exhibition was well received by members of the academic community, with strong overall impact across diverse audiences. In addition to the exhibition, the ongoing website designed by Ben Ennis-Butler is accessible to a wide audience (https://cbrarchitecture.com). This website centralises a public record of these archival images and drawings which are currently scattered across various ACT institutions, but also, in NSW and Victoria.
5. Scale of the project
This project followed on from a physical and digital mapping venture with the AIA that commenced in 2023 for the Australian Architecture Conference. During this research, we uncovered a startingly amount of archival content on disappeared buildings in Canberra’s urban fabric. This research, along with further mapping and writing, could constitute a peer-reviewed article that illustrates Canberra’s urban transformations and history, and continues this research into related areas of adaptive reuse, and heritage, and planning policies.
This NTRO also contributes to another research project that emerged from UC’s 2023 symposium, entitled ‘Making a City by Design’, focusing on the contribution of the National Capital Development Commission (NCDC) to Canberra’s architectural and urban legacy. Many of the demolished projects were built by the NCDC, or the Commonwealth Department of Works, so this research contributes to this ongoing project. This project (pending grant approvals) includes another exhibition of original content for the 2025 ACT Heritage Festival and a book publication in 2026.
PY - 2024/4/15
Y1 - 2024/4/15
N2 - Welcome to an architectural wake.
Fifty projects that have been lost in Canberra’s urban development.
As featured in the 2024 ACT Heritage Festival.
AB - Welcome to an architectural wake.
Fifty projects that have been lost in Canberra’s urban development.
As featured in the 2024 ACT Heritage Festival.
UR - https://docomomoaustralia.com.au/maps-spectres-of-architecture-in-canberra/
UR - https://canberramodern.com/spectres-of-canberra
UR - https://www.environment.act.gov.au/heritage/heritage-festival/nested-content/event-details?eventId=2417328&referredBySearch=true
M3 - Exhibition
PB - Australian Institute of Architects
CY - Red Hill, ACT
ER -