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Sydney Architecture
Images-Sydney Architects Stephenson and Turner |
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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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| Thanks to http://www.archmedia.com.au/aa/ |
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www.sydneyarchitecture.com
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