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RADAREXHIBITION
PART OF THE ENORMOUS STEPHENSON & TURNER ARCHIVE IS
REVEALED IN A RECENT EXHIBITION AT THE STATE LIBRARY OF VICTORIA. HANNAH
LEWI CONSIDERS THE ROLE OF THE EXHIBITION AND THE ARCHIVE.
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Images from the
Stephenson & Turner Archive, which forms the basis
for the exhibition.
Long Room, Melbourne Cricket Club, Melbourne
Cricket Ground, 1927, by Stephenson & Meldrum.
Gelatin silver photograph by Commercial
Photographic.
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Australian Pavilion,
New Zealand Centennial Exhibition,Wellington, NZ,
1940, by Stephenson & Turner. Gelatin silver
photograph by Russell Roberts.
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Porte-cochére at the
main entrance of the King George V Memorial Hospital
for Mothers and Babies, Camperdown, Sydney, 1941, by
Stephenson & Turner. Gelatin silver photograph by
Milton Kent.
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Patients on the balcony
ward at the Children’s Orthopaedic Hospital,
Frankston, 1936, by Stephenson & Meldrum. Gelatin
silver photograph by Commercial Photographic.
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Perspective of the rear
of the Freemasons Hospital, Clarendon Street, East
Melbourne,1936, by Stephenson & Meldrum.
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THE STAGING OF architectural exhibitions is
often problematic because they are generally not considered (in
Australia at least) to hold sufficient public interest to
attract an audience. Thankfully this appears to be changing and
there has been a wave of exhibitions about architecture and
architectural photography around the country in the last year.
This is in part due to a renewed interest in architectural
histories, particularly local ones, and to the ever-wider
acceptance of conservation. Exhibitions and catalogues can play
an invaluable role recording buildings and places and
interpreting archival documents in ways that may help to shift
the sometimes bankrupt debates surrounding preservation or
demolition towards conservation through scholarly documentation
and public education. (The international conservation
organization DOCOMOMO has as its primary aim just this: the
conservation of modern movement places and buildings via
documentation.) The increased prominence of exhibitions is also
due in part to institutions such as universities and libraries
now lending significant support and recognizing the value of
this form of architectural research.
The current exhibition at the State Library of Victoria,
Australian Modern: The Architecture of Stephenson & Turner,
is the most recent example of the value of the didactic
historical exhibition. It draws on the archive of the firm’s
work, which was given to the State Library of Victoria in 1994.
This is the largest of the library’s architectural collections,
containing some 283 drawers and over 200 tubes of drawings, 15
boxes of photographs, and 389 metres of specifications and
correspondence.
Curated by Rowen Wilken, the exhibition is ordered around
two themes of health and prosperity and a chronology of the
firm’s output. A number of types of images are displayed
including presentation photographs and sketches, site plans,
working drawings and details. (A favourite is the detail for a
soap tray, towel rail and smoker’s tray of 1941.) Choosing a
mode of exhibition for such a range of representations that had
quite different original purposes is always a dilemma. Here,
they are displayed in a fairly conventional way – neatly framed
“originals” elegantly and sparsely arrayed on white walls. The
result is coherent, informative and accessible for a wide public
audience. This is the right curatorial position for the venue of
the State Library, but many other aspects of this immense
archive could also be explored and displayed – like the messy
and contingent process of architectural production from sketch
to completed building, and the materiality of the types of
architectural documents in the archive. This physicality of both
documents and process is rather cleaned up by the formal
framing.
The accompanying catalogue is written by Philip Goad, Rowen
Wilken and Julie Willis, and published by Miegunyah Press in
conjunction with the State Library of Victoria. The fine quality
of the individual essays and the image production, in an elegant
grey tone, elevates the catalogue to a substantial and lasting
publication. The book is meticulously referenced and provides
essential additional information for future research including
an extensive selection of images, a key buildings reference, an
exhibition checklist, selected bibliographies and catalogue
notes. The inclusion of full-page photographs to break up the
sections of the book goes some way to convey the faith in
modernity inherent in a number of the buildings. (Although it is
a shame to interrupt the archival value of these fantastic
photographs with title overlays.)
Rowen Wilken’s opening essay “For Health and Prosperity: the
Colossus of Australian Architecture” provides a general
introduction to the output of Stephenson & Meldrum (1921–1937),
followed by Stephenson & Turner, across a number of fields
including health, commerce, education, residential and
exhibition buildings. At its peak Stephenson & Turner was the
largest practice in Australia with some 300 to 400 staff in many
offices across Australia, Asia and New Zealand. Architectural
production on this scale is by no means a singular effort, and
Wilken acknowledges, both in the essay and the exhibition
interpretation, the strong input of many individuals over the
years, including a number of women.
The subsequent essays, like the exhibition layout, develop
the two major spheres of impact of Stephenson & Turner’s work:
health and prosperity. The second essay, “The Health of
Modernism: Expression and Efficiency in Hospital Architecture
1955–1967” by Julie Willis, is an important account of the
pivotal role Stephenson & Turner played in the development of
hospital and healthcare architecture in Australia and
internationally. Willis outlines the reciprocal relationship
between innovations in healthcare knowledge and practice and the
language of Modernism, and figures this as critical to
understanding broader trends in twentieth-century architecture
in Australia and elsewhere. The images reproduced in the essay
illustrate the direct effects of Stephenson & Turner’s research
travel on Australian healthcare design. For example, on his
1932–33 trip to Arthur, Stephenson was particularly impressed
with developments in European Modernism including the work of
Mendelsohn, Aalto and Döcker.
This essay could easily be the subject of a larger account
that would tease out many issues – including the tantalizing
statement, “If Le Corbusier built houses that were ‘machines for
living’, Stephenson & Turner built hospitals that were machines
for healing.” And although it is perhaps a relief not to find
the almost obligatory references to Michel Foucault’s The
Birth of the Clinic, it would be revealing to locate the
firm’s hospital oeuvre in a broader spatial history of
twentieth-century health technologies, and the changing
relations between patient and expert. In a topical aside, Willis
also describes how Stephenson & Turner were invited, alongside
Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright, by the Kingdom of Iraq to
advise on modernizing their infrastructure in the late 1950s. It
would be intriguing to follow the fate of such Modernist
structures in Iraq today and the current attempts by a European
group of conservation architects to document them.
Philip Goad’s essay, “The Business of Modernism: Propriety
and Process in Corporate Architecture”, charts the growth of the
firm’s commercial work and client base from the modest
beginnings of Stephenson & Meldrum’s alterations to Collins
Court and the Wattle Tea Rooms (1921), to large-scale
commissions in the 1960s including the Colonial Mutual Life
Assurance Building (1963) and the IBM Centre (1962–64). He
examines the delicate balance sought between the constant quest
for technical and pragmatic innovation, and the longstanding
sense of architectural propriety towards the continuity of the
urban context.
The catalogue locates the firm’s work within the broader
themes of modernization and progress in Australia. Hence the
term “Australian Modern” is coined to reinforce the significance
of Stephenson & Turner’s architecture, which – as both Robin
Boyd and Goad suggest – has almost been overlooked because of
its very ubiquity. That is not to say that Stephenson himself
was not recognized for his achievements in hospital design,
recognition which culminated in his being awarded the Royal
Institute of British Architects’ Gold Medal in 1954 – hot on the
heels of Le Corbusier, the previous winner.
Australian Modern provides a great model for
potential collaborations between the resources of state
libraries and architectural researchers across the country. This
exhibition and catalogue give, both together and separately, an
accessible account of the work of Stephenson & Turner. As the
authors readily acknowledge, many aspects of the archive remain
unexamined. For example, further investigation into Stephenson’s
travel could reveal a lot about how architectural exchange and
influence operated in the mid twentieth century, both interstate
and between Australia, the Americas and Europe. The power of any
public visual archive for telling stories about ourselves has
been dramatized in Stephen Poliakoff’s play Shooting the Past
in which he writes of an enormous photographic collection that
is in danger of being broken apart. The argument is poignantly
mounted for holding the collection together through the unique
possibility of making endless and serendipitous connections
between images that will allow for any number of future
historical stories to be told. Similarly, due to the immense
size of this archive of built history, there are many subsequent
interpretations that may be made around the fluctuations of
future historical and conservation interests.
DR HANNAH LEWI IS A SENIOR LECTURER IN
ARCHITECTURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE. |
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