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Sydney Architecture Images- Contemporary Non-Commercial
New Museum of Contemporary Art |
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architect
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Sauerbruch & Hutton Architects |
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location
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Circular Quay |
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date
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Architecture competition 2001: 1st prize Client: City of
Sydney |
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style
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Millennium Minimalist Modernism |
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construction
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glass and steel |
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type
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museum, cinemas, offices, retail,
restaurants & function rooms |
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RADARCOMPETITION
MCA in mid-air. James Weirick outlines the complex and controversial
foundations of the latest MCA competition, assesses the entries and
speculates on possible futures.
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Scheme two, replacing
the Maritime Services Building with a totally
new structure, by the winning architects
Matthias Sauerbruch and Louisa Hutton.
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Scheme two, replacing
the Maritime Services Building with a totally
new structure, by the winning architects
Matthias Sauerbruch and Louisa Hutton.
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Scheme one, additions
to the existing MSB Building, by Matthias
Sauerbruck and Louisa Hutton.
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Scheme one, additions
to the existing MSB Building, by Matthias
Sauerbruck and Louisa Hutton.
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Additions to the MSB
Building by Francesco Venezia.
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The competition for the redesign of
Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art on West Circular Quay has
ended, somewhat courageously, in mid-air – with the selection of
the architects, not a scheme.
Matthias Sauerbruch and Louisa Hutton, of London and
Berlin, have been selected on the basis of two schemes – one
which adds to the Maritime Services Board building (the MCA’s
current home ) and one which replaces it with a totally new
structure. In the competition aftermath, neither has won
unqualified support. The question which hover around this
project is whether these proposals can form the basis for a
considered redevelopment of the MCA on its Circular Quay site.
The confusion and controversy generated by the competition
originate in decisions made decades ago. The MCA is located at
the landing place of the First Fleet on the western shore of
Sydney Cove. This highly charged, highly modified site attracted
attention at the time of the Sesquicentennial in 1938 and the
Bicentennial in 1988. The 1938 plans centred on an elevated
structure which became the Circular Quay Railway and the Cahill
Expressway. The old head office of the Maritime Services Board,
on the centreline of the proposed viaduct, was a casualty. In
1937, a special planning committee, with a vision of a “building
in a park setting”, provided a site for the MSB in the centre of
First Fleet Park, a new open space on West Circular Quay
created, ironically, by the erasure of history – the demolition
of colonial structures. The most notable was the Commissariat
Store, a substantial pile of sandstone designed by
Lieutenant-Colonel Joseph Foveaux in 1809.
The demolition of this major work of the pre-Macquarie era
was the first mistake on the site. The second was the design
which replaced it. The six-storey, stripped-classical edifice
exudes an air of monumental mediocrity. Symmetrical and
sandstone-clad, the building’s scale and siting overpower the
urban fabric of The Rocks while just failing to give spatial
definition to the Quay.
Designed in 1938 by William Henry Withers, the chief
architect of the MSB, construction was delayed by World War II
and post-war material shortages. The building was finally
completed in 1952 by Withers’ successor, W. D. H. Baxter. An
instant anachronism in style and function, its only interior
space of note was the double-height Wharfage Hall, finished in
marble-patterned scagliola and burnished aluminium and unified
by the impressive sweep of a continuous counter in Queensland
maple.
By the time of the Bicentennial, the MSB had departed for
a corporatised future in a sheer glass skyscraper on Kent
Street. In 1986, the NSW Government embarked upon a
comprehensive reconstruction of Circular Quay in a program of
works, overseen by Andrew Andersons, which drew heavily upon
ideas competitions conducted by the RAIA in the early 1980s. The
parkland surrounds of the MSB building were augmented by the
closure of Lower Pitt Street, the construction of a waterfront
promenade, and the replanting of First Fleet Park with a strange
selection of Lasiandras, Jacarandas and Gymea Lilies. Then, in a
remarkable gesture, the hermetic mass of the MSB building was
made available for the Museum of Contemporary Art – a new
institution based on the collection of contemporary art
assembled by the University of Sydney under the Power Bequest.
The MSB building, converted to gallery functions by Andrew
Andersons, opened as the Museum of Contemporary Art in November
1991.
From the start, the office configuration of the building,
and its profoundly conservative architectural expression, worked
against the subversive, experimental agenda of the art
displayed. The conversion (achieved with limited funds) turned
the Wharfage Hall into a function room sponsored by American
Express. The room was stripped of its extraordinary counter, and
the building lost its main claim to architectural distinction.
Stripped of its authentic atmosphere and “Port of Sydney”
purpose, the building seemed adrift in a world of its own.
The only external artwork to bridge the gap between the
dullness of the building and the ambition of the MCA’s cultural
program was Neil Dawson’s site specific sculpture, Steps, first
installed above the quayside forecourt in 1994. Its stepped,
spiralling elements took the stepped mass of the MSB building
into the gravity-defying realm of space defining space, for the
first time charging this corner of the Quay with something of
the exhilaration of the Opera House and the drama of the Bridge.
The interior spaces generally proved intractable for the
display of contemporary art as a confrontation, as a commodity,
or as a cultural critique. Almost every show had the feel of a
dutiful assemblage. However, behind the MCA’s special moments,
its dross, and its predictable moves – Andy Warhol, Yves Klein,
Mapplethorp – there has been one constant reality, a dire
shortage of funds. Apart from the gift of a 50-year lease on one
of Sydney’s best located buildings, the NSW government has
contributed little to recurring costs. Some support has come
from the University of Sydney’s Power Bequest, but most has come
from the museum’s own activities: private patronage,
sponsorship, admissions, and commercial operations. This
situation, unequalled in Australia, makes the MCA’s first decade
a remarkable achievement – but funding shortages doomed the
museum’s first attempt at a major expansion.
From the early 1990s, the MCA’s foundation director, Leon
Paroissien, campaigned to create a cinémathèque on the site of
the museum’s car park and a small adjoining building at the
corner of George and Argyle Streets. Conceived as a centre
dedicated to the moving image and interactive media, the
cinémathèque was also an opportunity to create a more effective
entry to the MCA, along with new foyers, restaurants,
circulation space, and a rooftop sculpture garden. Initial
studies were undertaken by Andrew Andersons, in 1993, then in
1997 a competitive process was launched to select an architect,
based on briefing papers by Graham Jahn.
Seven eminent architects were interviewed: Andrew
Andersons (Sydney) in partnership with Atsushi Kitagawara
(Japan);
Peter Corrigan and Maggie Edmond (Melbourne); Mikko
Heikkinen and Marku Komonen (Finland); Steven Holl (United
States); Enric Miralles (Spain); Kazuyo Sejima (Japan); Tod
Williams and Billie Tsien (United States). The selection
committee consisted of John Reid, then chairman of the MCA
board, director Leon Paroissien, chief curator Bernice Murphy,
NSW Government Architect Chris Johnson, and filmmaker George
Miller.
The winner, announced in June 1997, was Sejima. George
Miller captured the panel’s enthusiasm, declaring that Sejima
combined “tremendous technical rigour… with the ability to
enchant. Like all great art her work is clear, potent and
ineffable. I have no idea how she does it, but the magic is
unmistakable.” This was the last Sydney heard of the Sejima
scheme.
The abandonment of Sejima is the tragic prequel to the
current competition. How it happened is not entirely clear, but
funding problems and management changes were undoubtedly major
factors. Archaeological investigations of the cinémathèque site
also revealed remnants of Australia’s oldest naval docks, dating
from 1797, under the museum’s car park, which introduced a
significant heritage constraint to the project.
In October 1999, the new director Elizabeth Ann Macgregor
appealed to the Sydney City Council for financial support. In
February 2000, the NSW Premier and Minister for the Arts, Bob
Carr, announced that the State Government would not provide
substantial funds; at the same time he invited Frank Sartor and
the City of Sydney to consider assuming a long-term role in
maintaining the MCA at Circular Quay. This important move
prevented the surrender of the site to commercial interests, at
least for the moment.
At the Town Hall, a new team headed by E. M. Farrelly
began to investigate the MCA issue, with Keith Cottier
commissioned to prepare schematic studies. Sejima was forgotten
– and Sydney had another compromised competition on its hands.
This was indeed a tragedy. Sejima first came to Sydney in
1995, at the invitation of UNSW students, to speak at the
Landscape on the Pacific Edge conference. Her public lectures,
given at the height of the East Circular Quay controversy,
revealed an architecture of exquisite lightness and
transparency, mesmerising in its spatial illusions – utterly
unlike the stolid bulk and over-blown effects of the East
Circular Quay scheme. Sejima’s cinémathèque proposal, developed
with Ryue Nishizawa for the opposite shore of Sydney Cove,
distilled the MCA’s program of galleries, cinemas, art archive,
restaurant, cafe, function area and foyers into the pure form of
a glass cube, inserted with precision in the slot of space to
the north of the MSB building.
By July 2000, the Farrelly feasibility study had
determined that the MCA’s funding problems and expansion plans
could be financed by adding revenue-generating space to the MSB
building. Approximately 3,000 square metres of commercial,
retail and function space were proposed, in addition to the
cinémathèque. A new invited competition was announced. Sejima
discovered that this competition was under way, and – in light
of the fact that she had won the commission in 1997 – clearly
could not believe the actions of the City and the MCA. Sydney’s
response was a belated invitation to participate in the new
contest.
Sejima treated this proposition with the contempt it
deserved, and the City Council’s MCA adventure proceeded without
her.
The invited participants, selected on the advice of Chris
Johnson and Graham Jahn, consisted of Richard Francis-Jones
(Sydney); Nonda Katsalidis (Melbourne), José Rafael Moneo
(Madrid), Matthias Sauerbruch and Louisa Hutton (Berlin and
London), and Francesco Venezia (Naples).
The jury, as initially announced, was Renzo Piano, Frank
Sartor and Edmund Capon, director of the NSW Art Gallery. This
was subsequently enlarged to include Elizabeth Ann Macgregor and
George Miller. Renzo Piano withdrew due to illness and was
replaced by Wilfried Wang, Adjunct Professor of Architecture at
Harvard and former director of the German Architecture Museum in
Frankfurt.
Farrelly left the project about this time and has since
advocated removal of the MCA to another location and conversion
of the MSB building to a luxury hotel. The competition may yet
turn out to be the long way round to achieve this.
When the jury met in November 2000, none of the schemes
was deemed appropriate. The competition was then extended to an
unplanned second stage, with the architects given the option to
demolish the MSB building and to propose a new structure on the
site. In February 2001, the investigative journalist and
cultural commentator David Marr revealed this change of plan in
a well-informed feature article on the front page of the Sydney
Morning Herald. The Marr scoop raised a storm of protest at the
loss of a “heritage” Art Deco building and prompted the Premier,
Bob Carr, to announce that its demolition would not be
permitted. The second stage entries had been submitted at this
point, placing the Design Jury in an almost impossible
situation. Under the circumstances, the only course of action
was to select an architect, not a scheme.
Two of the architects, Francesco Venezia and Rafael Moneo,
chose not to explore the demolition option. The Venezia scheme
took the outlines of the 1797 graving docks and extruded them as
rectangular elements, raised at right angles to the MSB
building.
These accommodated new gallery spaces and cinemas in high
level projections, expressed in a design language strangely
reminiscent of Paul Rudolph’s work of the 1960s. The strength of
the scheme was a podium set at the George Street level, which
extended through the complex as a great urban pavement. At the
waterfront, the modulation of sunlight and stone may have
invested the idea of Sydney’s colonial ruins with a certain
grandeur, but the scheme lost its sense of proportion in its
domination of the Quayside promenade.
Moneo paid homage to Utzon and the Opera House by
compressing the diagonal energies projected from Bennelong Point
into a jewel-like polyhedron. This was strategically off-set
from the static forms of the MSB building and scaled to the
presence of the Bridge pylons – but for all its formal
brilliance, the polyhedron proposal was too close to Moneo’s
1997 theatre project in Basel to sustain Sydney’s ambitions for
cultural distinction.
Nonda Katsalidis submitted two schemes. The addition to
the MSB occluded its stripped-classical facade with projecting
levels of commercial space. The new building similarly
privileged the commercial component of the brief, in a somewhat
prosaic exercise in mainstream modernism.
Neither scheme had the functional logic or poetic power to
match the proposed level of intervention.
Richard Francis-Jones, with MGT Architects, developed an
extraordinary proposal for the addition. A series of parallel
blades, taken through the centre of the MSB’s sandstone massif,
revealed a suppressed energy in its fluted and stepped forms.
The blades then expanded on the north side of the building into
expressive spaces for experimental cinema, with sliding screens
which could open to vistas of the Opera House and the Bridge.
Similar, open-air cinema spaces created a sensational roofscape
– with the whole ensemble poised over a stepped podium in
sandstone. The gallery spaces of the MCA were re-calibrated
internally and extended under a park terrace. Criticised by the
jury for competing with the Opera House, this was a very
different work of architecture.
Perfectly scaled to its setting, it had the same power of
miraculous transformation of the MSB as Neil Dawson’s Steps.
Jones’s proposal for a totally new building could not match the
excitement and resolution of the addition scheme. With the blade
forms unconstrained by the MSB mass, the building became
agitated and characterless in the larger landscape of Sydney
Cove.
The Sauerbruch Hutton strategy for addition had a
compelling lucidity as a diagram, but little to commend it as an
architectural proposition. The programmatic requirements of
gallery, cinémathèque and commercial space were sorted into
clear zones of opportunity – the commercial space returned to
the office structure of the MSB building, the cinemas encased in
a windowless block on George Street, and the gallery lifted into
the air as a new top-lit space riding over the MSB building –
all linked by a great Harbour Gallery. The proposal for a new
building had a more plausible scale and circulation pattern in a
somewhat lower structure. Both schemes appealed to the jury for
the clarity of their programmatic response, the opportunity
provided by top-lit gallery spaces, and the potential of the
Harbour Rooms to create a new type of urban space in the city.
Both schemes were also informed by a subtle re-reading of the
landscape patterns of the site, guided by landscape architect
Kathryn Gustafson. However, the architectural expression of the
two proposals is almost totally unconvincing. The first problem
is the size and deadness of the horizontal box as an urban
element – a problem inherent in the top-lit gallery solution.
The second is the play on Sydney’s collection of mediocre
skyscrapers – Goldfields House, the AMP Building and so on – a
problem inherent in the architects’ design philosophy. A
retromodern design language may have worked for the GSW
Headquarters in Berlin, where a mediocre high-rise of the 1960s
was transformed by new interventions, but Sydney needs less of
this, not more.
The MCA competition of 2001, founded in controversy, may
very well founder. The schemes of the selected architects are
inappropriate for the site. The one scheme which did demonstrate
brilliance and an appropriate response to the brief and the site
– the MSB addition by Richard Francis-
Jones with MGT – has been overlooked.
The question is what to do next. If Circular Quay is to be
maintained as a great public space, the Farrelly option of
converting the MSB building into a luxury hotel must be
resisted. Following Carr’s statement of February 2001,
demolition of the MSB building appears to be politically
impossible. The building remains a “given”.
Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art clearly has a role as a
cultural facility, provided it is properly funded. If the MCA’s
financial future remains dependent on its own fund-raising
capacities, the addition of revenue generating space to the MSB
building is a valid strategy. This leaves two options. The
honourable course of action is to invite the competition
winners, Matthias Sauerbruch and Louisa Hutton, to have another
go and get it right. The correct course of action is to invite
Richard Francis-
Jones to build his clearly superior scheme.
James Weirick is professor of
landscape architecture at the University of New South Wales.
www.archmedia.com.au
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Colorful Sustainability
KfW Office, Frankfurt (Model Photograph: Lepkowski
Studios, Copyright Sauerbruch Hutton)
(click-2-enlarge)
Sauerbruch Hutton are famous for their use of color and pioneering
work in sustainable architecture. It was about these two subjects that
Matthias Sauerbruch spoke in his lecture at the Netherlands Architecture
Institute on Thursday 27 September 2007.
Sauerbruch Hutton designs buildings that are sustainable in three
ways: socially, culturally, and in their energy consumption. The title
of the lecture ‘Sustainability’ did not refer to what Americans call
‘Green Washing’; a couple of windmills on the roof of your building, and
– voilà - your building is ‘sustainable’.
Berlin
Sauerbruch started off with the project that meant the break-through of
his office, the
GSW-building in the center of Berlin, a building that has became an
icon with its energy-saving double facade. Sauerbruch started however
with an elaborate story on the history of Berlin, and the location of
the project. The wall ran in the vicinity of the site, and when the
‘west’ during the cold war build a golden office slab (with an obvious
meaning), the Soviet-Union answered by building four higher gray slabs.
“We wanted to continue that story”, Sauerbruch said, and so a colorful
slab appeared in the new ‘west’.
This creative form of cultural sustainability from his office was not
welcomed by everybody. The chosen model of the ‘critical reconstruction’
of Berlin was the nineteenth century courtyard building block, not the
twentieth century architecture. But: “You cannot reconstruct history.”
The double facade of the GSW was developed from a wish to let in a
lot of light, and therefore make large surfaces of glass, but at the
same time to save energy, and to ventilate the building naturally. In a
‘post-occupancy’ analysis Sauerbruch concluded that the building indeed
has a light interior, that the cross-ventilation worked, and that the
fresh air from outside is very much appreciated. He would however not
design a building like this again with today’s knowledge. The double
façade, at one side a meter deep, is a costly solution. And the large
glass surfaces are quite a job to clean, as they all gets dirty so much
faster with all the air that passes by to ventilate the building.
Frankfurt
How things can be done different, was illustrated by Sauerbruch
with a project that is currently being built in Frankfurt. There it was
a matter of luck that the lens-shaped building was rightly situated to
the dominant wind-current, to be able to use the pressure difference at
each side to cross-ventilate the whole building. To open up the building
towards the wind-current the architect designed facade paneling like
scales, that open-up like gills. In the spring and summer, the building
is supposed to work without air-conditioning or heating.
Dessau
The
large office building that Sauerbruch Hutton realized in Dessau even
more than their other projects excels in pragmatism. And that was maybe
the biggest lesson from this story on sustainability; work with the
context, the history, the people, and the climate. Not a ‘form follows
me’, that architects sometimes are blamed for, but a ‘form follows the
context’. During the lecture Sauerbruch kept repeating the sentence ‘If
you like’; not only the architect, but also the building is a chameleon
that adapts to the location and its conditions.
To make room for a park the whole building is put at one side of the
parcel. The building opens up towards the park, and the canteen is even
taken out of the building and planted in the park. This restaurant free
accessible for the inhabitants of the city. A magnificent example of
public domain.
The snaking form of the building according to Sauerbruch was a
pragmatic answer to the conditions: the depth of the office slab was
given by regulations, the height of four stories tuned to the
surrounding architecture, with this loop it was possible to make a
(covered) courtyard, and a snaking building looks smaller in its
surroundings as you can only perceive parts of the building at a time.
He did not want to make a statement in this East-German city, because
here in Dessau everything from the ‘west’ is suspect, also this
government institute.
One can go too far in the celebration of history, which proved the
case of the library building that is part of the complex. The plan was
to build the building around an old wall, on which the traces of time
were visible in different layers. When construction started, the weak
wall collapsed, and a new ‘old’ wall had to be build instead. It looked
horrible.
With a pipe in the ground with a length of five kilometers that cools
the air, ventilation via the covered courtyard, and night-ventilation,
the energy use would in theory be half of what is requested by law,
Sauerbruch told proudly. But because of failing systems, and unwilling
users, the energy consumption proved for now only somewhat better than
the average office building. But it is being worked on, Sauerbruch
promised.
Color
Also in its coloring this building in Dessau is contextual. Greener at
the side of the park, redder near a factory building, changing at the
corners, lighter in the courtyard.
With this subject, Sauerbruch came upon the – strategically chosen –
last part of his lecture. With words as ‘scale, presence, character,
materiality’ he deliberately kept it somewhat vague. The part of the
architecture he and his partner approached like a painter works on his
painting, he kept repeating.
A building must be loved, in order to be kept by next generations,
and a building is appreciated when it stimulates. It doesn’t have to be
fashionable, but it has to be contemporary. A timeless architecture is
worthless, was the theorem of Sauerbruch. At this part Sauerbruch
clearly grew beyond his pragmatic attitude, towards a more offensive
approach. Placing himself in the tradition of De Stijl and Le Corbusier,
he called the most important virtue of color the visual effect on space.
With variations in color a building becomes plastic,
three-dimensional. In the last design that he discussed, a
museum-building with 36.000 colored ceramic sticks, he talked about a
building that physically consists out of one piece, but because of its
coloring seems to be made up out of three ‘volumes’. Color is also
space.
Museum for the Brandhorst Collection, Munich (Model
Photograph: Bitterbredt.de, Copyright Sauerbruch Hutton)
ADAC Headquarters, Munich (Model Photograph: Simone
Rosenberg, Copyright Sauerbruch Hutton)
Jessop West, University of Sheffield (Copyright
Sauerbruch Hutton)
This article has been published in Dutch on 5 October 2007 on
Archined.nl
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