Sydney Architecture Images- Inter-War Stripped Classical

	Sydney Architecture Images- Search by style Inter-War Stripped Classical c. 1915—C. 1940

	14 Transport House 99 Macquarie Street	036 David Jones	040 Gowings Building

To the architect committed to modernism in the early twentieth century, radical art movements such as Cubism and de Stiji provided powerful aesthetic stimuli, exploding traditional preoccupations with static symmetry. Any ‘style’ was considered abhorrent, none more so than a classical style (modernism was naïvely thought to be style- free). ‘Sterile symmetry’, ‘meaningless, nonfunctional ornament’ and other such derogatory phrases were used to denigrate buildings that made reference to any aspect of the classical past. The fact that some significant modern architects (for example, Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Peter Behrens and Gunnar Asplund) had drawn strength from the classical tradition was ignored or explained away as an aberration which had somehow been corrected or eliminated. Architects not at the centre of the new movement but vaguely sympathetic to some of its apparent aims sometimes responded by embracing ‘simplicity’, which usually meant starting with a basically classical carcass and omitting or reducing the ornament. An Inter-War Stripped Classical building therefore tends to look like an INTER-WAR ACADEMIC CLASSICAL building from which the columns, entablatures and pediments have been peeled off or (which really amounts to the same thing) a starkly functional, symmetrical building to which the classical orders could easily be added. Rarely, however, was ornament completely eschewed, and a few touches of Art Deco were not uncommon. The Stripped Classical style was often used in America and Britain for public and institutional buildings which in earlier times would have worn the full panoply of classical detail. While there is no evidence that practitioners of the style were more attracted to extreme right-wing politics than were architects who favoured other styles, it may be noted that both Hitler and Mussolini found the idiom very palatable for public buildings glorifying their regimes. Well before the rise to power of the two European dictators just mentioned, Australia had already committed itself to an Inter-War Stripped Classical ‘temporary’ Parliament House in Canberra [411]. The clarity of shape, the regular composition, the dazzling whiteness and the pleasantly human scale of this building make it a success story in Australian public architecture which deserves greater acknowledgement than it has received. Sydney University Tennis Pavilion Example Former Perth Girls’ School (now Police Traffic Branch), Wellington Street, Perth, WA. A. E. Clare, Public Works Department architect, and L. J. Walters, project architect, 1936. Compelling Palladian form, with roof shapes adding to an Art Deco effect.

	Quoted from: "A Pictorial Guide to Identifying Austrlian Architecture; Styles and Terms from 1788 to the Present" RICHARD APPERLY, ROBERT IRVING, PETER REYNOLDS. PHOTOGRAPHS BY SOLOMON MITCHELL. Angus & Robertson Sydney 1995 ISBN 0207 18562 X Copyright © 1989 by Richard Apperly, Robert Irving and Peter Reynolds.

	Old Parliament House, Canberra; opened 1927

	AMP building in Albury, New South Wales
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