Australia square tower max du pain biography
•
Australia Square was Sydney's first high-rise office tower. It established new principles in design and construction through its distinctive circular struktur and the creation of a large public open space at ground level. At the time it was built, 1962-1967, the tower was the world's tallest light-weight concrete building. In 1967 it won the prestigious Sir John Sulman Award from the Royal Australian Institute of Architects.
Plan - Australia Square, 1961-1967 / Harry Seidler and Associates
“The circular form eller gestalt of the 50 storey building was arrived at by a process of elimination, rejecting rectangular solutions which would create narrow canyon-like spaces against surrounding buildings. Better circulation and open plazas resulted.”
-Harry Seidler, notes, PXB 237
The public space is established by a plaza that is set above street level and steps down throughout the site. Usable outdoor space includes seating with trees, sculpture, fountain and outdoor restaurants, all o
•
Exhibition dates: 21st March – 12th July 2009
Roy de Maistre (Australian, 1894-1968)
Colour Composition derived from three bars of music in the Key of Green
1935
Oil and pencil on composition board
Private Collection
Despite some interesting highlight pieces this is a patchy, thin, incoherent exhibition assembled by the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney now showing at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne. Featuring a hotchpotch of work ranging across fields such as drawing, architecture, photography, painting, film, graphic design, craft, advertising, Australiana and aboriginal works the exhibition attempts to tell the untold story of Modernism in Australia to little effect. Within the exhibition there is no attempt to define exactly what ‘Modernism’ is and therefore an investigation into Modernism in Australia is all the more confusing for the visitor as there seems to be no stable basis on which to build that investigation. Per
•
Completed in 1967, six years before Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House, Australia Square was the first truly modern skyscraper on the continent and, arguably, the world’s tallest lightweight concrete building. The 50-story cylindrical tower once stood alone as the focal point of a full city-block development in Central Sydney and with a popular plaza that made the complex the first successful large-scale commercial project in Australia. Vienna-born emigré architect Harry Seidler (1923-2006) brought his Harvard GSD and Black Mountain College training and experience in the offices of Marcel Breuer and Oscar Niemeier to his adoptive Australia where he became the country's leading postwar modernist from 1948 on. Australia Square also began Seidler’s creative collaboration with Italian structural engineer Pier Luigi Nervi, with whom he worked on a number of large projects.
Vladimir Belogolovsky, author of Harry Seidler: LifeWork (Rizzoli, 2014) and curator of Harry Seidler: Painting T