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Specifier Magazine Issue 84

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  Collard Clarke Jackson

  Grace Chapel, Burgmann Anglican School
  
  While Canberra may not be known as the City of Churches (that’s Adelaide), the new Grace Chapel at Burgmann Anglican School certainly lift its chances of claiming that mantle. The chapel occupies a large site on the sweeping Territorian plain. Rangy grasses and hardy perennials dot the countryside, and blend seamlessly into the chapel’s contemporary Australian architecture. It is from this landscape, at a perfect eastwest orientation, that the burnt-orange citadel of the chapel rises. read more »
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  Neeson Murcutt Architects

  North Avoca House
  
  The Spotted Gum is a timeless feature in Australian iconography. Its characteristic mottled bark and graceful shady limbs are a powerful feature of our country’s rugged landscape. As are the rustic timber panels that characterised so many grand colonial homesteads and downtrodden miners’ shacks. read more »
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  Fox Johnston

  Kensington House
  
  Home alterations and additions tend to operate around the common theme of old versus new: the conflict of classic and contemporary design; the dramatic contrast of traditional finishes and modern materials. Juxtaposition seems to be the rule of late, which must make the Kensington House the obligatory exception. Instead of following the trend, Fox Johnston decided to buck it, by avoiding the typical expression of contrasting new with old, and choosing instead to graft on new volumes in the same language as the existing home. And it does seem to make sense. After all, when you’re onto a good thing, why not stick with it?

  read more »
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  Bligh Graham Architects

  Samford House
  
  Beyond the context of Camelot or maybe Ming-Dynasty China, it’s not often that a client requests that their home be built as a ‘fragment in the city wall’, much less ‘an occupied ruin’. But that’s exactly what the clients for this suburban Queensland project envisaged, and it’s exactly what the architects created in the Samford House. Let it be said, however, that this is no tumbledown shack. Nor is it even shabby chic. Indeed nothing could be further from the truth. read more »
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  Steven Holl: At New York’s MoMA

  Delving into the creative process of a great mind is illuminating. It allows an observer to unpack the end product, to see beyond the blindingly impressive result, to pierce the veil of awesome completion. It’s the stuff of countless self-help books – how to nurture an abstract idea into full-flowering reality. Bookshop shelves are littered with titles such as ‘The Power of Now’, ‘The Artist’s Way’ and ‘The Secret’, each seeking to unlock the reader’s own potential by providing a spiritual, creative or financial plan of action. Would it surprise us if, in the age of computer assisted design, the central elements in the creative process of one of the world’s most acclaimed architects... were the humble pencil and pad? read more »
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  Oslo Opera House by Snøhetta

  How to gauge the value a country places on culture? The amount of public funding to the arts is one measure. Another is the public’s engagement in institutional art – that is, bums on seats. Attempting to gain United Nations recognition is another: the usual suspect in Europe recently applied to have ‘la cuisine française’ placed on the UNESCO World Heritage list. In Norway, however, at the opening of the Oslo Opera House’s first season in August, Defence Minister Anne-Grete Strom-Erichsen said that “without culture we have nothing worth defending”, thereby elevating culture to an issue of national security. read more »
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  The NEW Green Wall

  The ubiquitous green wall – and let’s face it, they’ve been popping up everywhere lately, from the Qantas Lounge at Sydney’s International Airport to the Musee d’Orsay in Paris – is usually a lush vertical garden bed, a vertiginous undergrowth of damp moss and dripping ferns. Not this green wall. GreenPix is Beijing’s first zero energy ‘media wall’: a building-sized movie screen that collects energy while the sun shines, using it to display digital media art by night. More razzle-dazzle than rainforest. read more »
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  The University of Toronto's Multifaith Centre

  When Moriyama & Teshima Architects were commissioned to design a multifaith space within the existing Koffler Centre at the University of Toronto, they were given what might have been an impossible brief. While keeping to the University’s secular mandate, they were to create a refuge and place of worship which was programmatically and liturgically flexible enough to accommodate all spiritualities; celebrating the creeds of the roughly 30 religious organisations on campus without bias, and providing a forum for debate. read more »
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  World Architecture Festival

  From October 23-25 this year, at the inaugural World Architecture Awards in Barcelona, an international jury of architecture luminaries performed an impressive number crunch. Three days, 63 countries, 722 entries, 96 building types, and only 18 awards to announce: 17 category winners, from which they would then choose the big one, 2008 Building of the Year. The task was immense, the field competitive and the standards high, but in the end, the victors emerged. We take a look at some of the first ever World Architecture Festival award winners. read more »