Fabrications

The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and

New Zealand

ISSN: 1033-1867 (Print) 2164-4756 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfab20

Constructing Australian Architecture for

International Audiences: Regionalism,
Postmodernism, and the Design Arts Board
1980–1988

Paul Walker & Karen Burns

To cite this article: Paul Walker & Karen Burns (2018) Constructing Australian Architecture for
International Audiences: Regionalism, Postmodernism, and the Design Arts Board 1980–1988,
Fabrications, 28:1, 25-46, DOI: 10.1080/10331867.2017.1418192

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10331867.2017.1418192

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Fabrications, 2018
VOL. 28, NO. 1, 25–46
https://doi.org/10.1080/10331867.2017.1418192

Constructing Australian Architecture for International

Audiences: Regionalism, Postmodernism, and the Design
Arts Board 1980–1988
Paul Walker and Karen Burns
Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

ABSTRACT
In May 2015, a new Australian Pavilion was inaugurated at the Giardini dell Biennale in
Venice. Designed by Denton Corker Marshall, it has been described as moving beyond
the issues of Australian identity that were the concern of its predecessor, designed by
the architect Philip Cox and opened in 1988 to mark Australia’s bicentenary. This paper
revisits the work of the Australia Council’s Design Arts Board in the 1980s in promoting
Australian architecture through exhibitions, international design journals, and finally
the first Australian Venice Biennale pavilion. During this period, a concern with identity
preoccupied Australian architecture, manifest in an idiom of exposed steel frames and
corrugated iron and a concern with landscape. This view aligned with one of the period’s
prevailing international orthodoxies in architecture: Kenneth Frampton’s concept of
“critical regionalism.” Countering this was the position put by the Italian design journal
Domus, in a 1985 special issue on Australia, which depicted Australian architecture as
contested, fragmentary, and citational – in a word, “postmodern.” While the Design Arts
Board’s engagement with the international design media could lead to unanticipated
outcomes such as Domus’s radical view, it is apparent in readings of the 1988 Biennale
pavilion design that mostly engagement continued to be on the basis that Australian
architecture should proffer images of identity.

Introduction
In May 2015, a new Australian Pavilion was opened at the Giardini della Biennale in
Venice. Designed by the Melbourne-based firm of Denton Corker Marshall (DCM),
it takes the form of a white “cube” gallery inside a matt-black granite box, with
several operable elements that allow the interior to be opened to the exterior. The
DCM-designed pavilion replaced an earlier, temporary Australian pavilion by the
Sydney architect Philip Cox, which was completed in 1988 to mark the Australian
“bicentenary” celebrated that year (in fact, the bicentenary of the establishment of
a British penal settlement in New South Wales). When the Cox design was built
it was presented as a self-consciously Australian architecture, based on a putative

CONTACT Paul Walker walkp@unimelb.edu.au

© 2018 The Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand
26  P. WALKER AND K. BURNS

vernacular drawn from corrugated iron farm buildings, and ostensibly with ref-
erences to the Australian landscape in its curvilinear profile. By contrast, it has
been claimed by an arts critic in the Sydney Morning Herald – one of the country’s
leading newspapers – that the DCM design puts aside questions of national identity
in Australian architecture:
The geometric simplicity is disarming, as it is designed to display no trace of
“Australiana.” There is no corrugated iron, as seen in the work of Cox or Glenn Murcutt;
no echoes of the shearing shed, as in Richard Johnson’s design for the National Portrait
Gallery in Canberra.1
The new pavilion is, indeed, formally a very different building to its predecessor.
And yet there are similarities. The Cox design also incorporated operable elements
that were intended to allow its external envelope to be changed, though this feature
of its design appears rarely to have been deployed. But more interesting to us than
this is how the DCM design was pictured by its designers in a way that recalled
the Venetian context of the period in which the Cox building was designed. A
widely circulated image of the DCM design shows the building complete, being
barged into Venice. In fact, it was built in situ. This image is a purposeful allusion,
we would suggest, to the even more widely circulated photographs of Aldo Rossi’s
Teatro del Mondo being barged along the Grand Canal in 1979. The Teatro del
Mondo was a project which influenced one design for Australia’s first attempt at a
Venice pavilion. If DCM’s fictionalised image of their pavilion arriving ready-made
entailed some sort of casting back, other aspects of the context in which the first
Australian pavilion was projected and built had clearly been forgotten when the
second was envisaged. The announcement in Architecture Australia in 2012 that
DCM had been selected to design the new pavilion included the observation that:
“The fact that the Australia Council for the Arts has embraced a competition for
the design of the pavilion signals hope in an increased representation of archi-
tecture within the Australia Council.”2 But the 1988 pavilion was the final act of
ten years of close engagement between architecture in Australia and the Australia
Council for the Arts that in the end came to an institutional naught.
In this paper, we examine this engagement, and in particular a key element
of it: the attempt to build international audiences for Australian architecture of
which the making of a pavilion in Venice was a major part. While this agenda was
driven by the cultural nationalism that the Sydney Morning Herald’s critic disdains
as a mark of a provincialism that he hopes Australia has left behind, the condi-
tions that subtended the Australia Council’s architectural endeavours in the 1980s
were more complex than this alone would suggest. Moreover, these conditions
were not only of Australian making: the circumstances under which Australian
architecture would be read by audiences elsewhere were conditioned by external
expectations and projections of Australia as much as they were by Australian
projections of the country’s own architectural culture abroad. The trajectory of the
Australia Council’s endeavours promoting architecture, therefore, reflect two sets
of debates: Australian debates about the country’s architecture, and international
 FABRICATIONS  27

debates about what architecture in places like Australia should be in relation to

global circumstances. In the 1980s, the latter necessarily meant the debate about
regionalism and its relation to the global norms of a triumphant postmodernism.
To examine the presentation of Australian architecture internationally, this
paper examines the motivations and activities of the Australia Council in pro-
moting Australian architecture in the 1980s. It then moves to consider the com-
peting ideological positions on architecture dominant during the period. On the
one hand, Kenneth Frampton’s conception of “critical regionalism” aligned with
the views of Australia’s leading architects of the period. On the other, a view of
Australian architecture as eclectic, citational, and provisional – that is, as radically
postmodern – was in 1985 offered by the Italian design and art journal Domus.
The final part of the paper examines the design and reception of the Australia
Council’s project for an Australian pavilion for the Venice Biennale, designed by
Philip Cox, which though motivated by regionalist concerns nevertheless mani-
fested characteristics Domus discerned to prevail in Australian architecture.

Promoting Australian Architecture in the 1980s: The Australia Council

the Design Arts Board
The Australia Council’s endeavours to promote architecture were part of its nation-
alist cultural agenda. The Australia Council had been founded in 1968 to bring
together various federal government endeavours in arts funding and policy. Under
the Labour Whitlam government (1972–1975), it was given statutory authority in
1975.3 The ascendancy of the Australia Council, then, more or less corresponded
with the rise of postmodernism in the visual arts and architecture. Equally, the
abrupt demise of the Council’s engagement with architecture and design in 1988
– part of austerity measures – coincided with the beginning of stylistic postmod-
ernism’s journalistic end.4
The Australia Council was organised as a group of boards, each devoted to
a particular art form – visual arts, theatre arts, crafts, literature, and so on. It
first embraced architecture and design through its Visual Arts Board. When the
architect John Andrews joined the Visual Arts Board in 1977, he pressed for
expansion of the modest support that had been given to architecture and design
projects to that point. In response, the Visual Arts Board established a subsidiary
Architecture and Design Panel in 1980, and this quickly evolved into the Design
Arts Board which had equal standing to the Council’s other “art form” boards.5
The promotion of “design” to equivalent status to the more traditional arts
within the Australia Council’s operations reflected three ideological pushes faced
by the Australia Council in the 1970s and 1980s, each consistent with the rise of
neo-liberalism – or at least of an instrumental view of the arts. The first push was
to consider the arts from an economic perspective. The second was to enhance
wide involvement in the arts by cultivating new arts audiences through educa-
tional initiatives and the support of grass-roots arts practice. The third was in
28  P. WALKER AND K. BURNS

relation to the widespread political and community interest in enhancing a sense

of national identity.6 This last of the imperatives driving the Australia Council had
certainly gained momentum from the nationalist cultural sentiments promoted
by the Whitlam government, but it continued under the conservative Fraser gov-
ernment as anticipation grew around the forthcoming 1988 bicentenary.
The Design Arts Board was able to benefit from these three drives. The minister
responsible for the Australia Council in the late 1970s, R.J. Ellicot, was supportive
of the Australia Council’s new focus on design because in his view it would enhance
Australia’s manufacturing capacity.7 While the move towards community involve-
ment was chiefly addressed within the Australia Council by the establishment of
a Community Arts Board, the Design Arts Board was able to prosper not only
by working with industry bodies like the Royal Australian Institute of Architects,
but also through engaging schools, municipalities, and state government agencies
in its activities. Finally, in relation to Australian identity, architecture had come
to have a primary role. This was due to the building of several high-profile new
buildings constructed to mark the 1988 bicentenary: three projects by Philip Cox
at Sydney’s Darling Harbour, and the John Andrews-designed Sydney Convention
Centre there; Cox’s National Tennis Centre in Melbourne and his Sydney Football
Stadium; and, most significantly, a new Australian parliament house in Canberra.8
The opening of this was planned to be a key part of the nation’s (as opposed to
Sydney’s) bicentenary celebrations. There was consequently a great deal of interest
around the competition to select a design for the building in 1978–1979, won by
the Italian-American architect Romaldo Giurgola, and then in the following eight
years in the building’s construction.
The question of identity motivated the activities of the Design Arts Board in
supporting architectural exhibitions, the publication of Australian architecture
abroad, and the building of the Australian pavilion in Venice. The two major
architectural exhibitions that the Design Arts Board developed were both very
inclusive in approach. Work by well-established firms for the most part work-
ing in an accomplished “late modern” manner appeared alongside work of more
modest scale by younger architects: houses or low-rise housing groups in a post-
modern manner. The first of these exhibitions, “Old Continent New Building:
Contemporary Australian Architecture” opened in Paris in November 1982,9 in
the new Australian embassy building there by Harry Seidler, and went to centres
in Europe and the United States, ending up in Los Angeles to coincide with the
1984 Olympics. The second, “Australian Built: a photographic exhibition of recent
Australian architecture responding to the place,” toured 25 Australian centres from
1985 to 1988. Catalogue publications accompanied both exhibitions. That for
“Old Continent New Building” included essays by four Australian writers, Leon
Paroissien, Philip Cox, Jennifer Taylor, and Conrad Hamann, exploring themes
which range from conventional views of Australian architecture’s relation to land-
scape (Cox) to a consideration of various urban and suburban conditions as the
ground of new Australian architecture (Hamann). The “Australian Built” catalogue
 FABRICATIONS  29

had but a single essay, by Craig McGregor, who emphasised both the inclusiveness
of Australian architecture (“There is no mainstream; current Australian architec-
ture is nothing if not pluralist”) and its international connections.10
But despite their diverse content, “Old Continent New Building” and “Australian
Built” found an iconic image of Australian architecture in a single building, John
Andrews’s Eugowra farm house of 1981. Several photographs of it are included in
the catalogues of both exhibitions and it features on the cover of the Old Continent
New Building catalogue (Fig. 1).11 An essay in structural and environmental tech-
nologies on one hand, on the other Eugowra’s spreading roof and use of corru-
gated steel claddings and tanks were seen to entail an historical self-awareness
of Australian rural vernacular. It was both a modern pavilion and, as Jennifer
Taylor described it, “an affectionate restatement of the vernacular homestead.”12
She wrote of it:
The time-honoured homestead is revived, transformed, and imbued with a new and
startling imagery. With its water tanks, spreading roof and energy tower, the building
tells of the stringent conditions of the area. This gleaming house of corrugated iron
shimmers in the stark landscape and highlights the sun’s strength and intensity. Like
Murcutt’s houses it is a classical pavilion, but the Andrews’ house reaches back into
history through the colonial period and Georgian England rather than through conti-
nental classicism.13
The prevalence of images of Eugowra suggests that, despite their inclusiveness,
regionalism was conceptually predominant in the Australia Council’s architecture
exhibitions. But rather than “critical,” this was a regionalism that was pluralist
and “soft.”

Regionalism and Postmodernism: Frampton and Mendini

How, then, did Australian architecture in the 1980s relate to the international scene
where the discursive categories of “regionalism” and “postmodernism” dominant
in the period were formulated? We will examine this by considering two incursions
into the Australian context, the first by the period’s most prominent international
proponent of a self-conscious regionalism, Kenneth Frampton, and the second by
an equally influential advocate of a radical postmodernism, Alessandro Mendini,
Italian architect and editor of the influential journal Domus.
Frampton visited Sydney in May 1983 as a keynote speaker at the annual con-
ference of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects.14 His Sydney talk was pub-
lished in 1985. It belongs to a group of closely related texts on “critical regionalism”
written by Frampton between 1983 and 1990, most notably “Towards Critical
Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance” in 1983.15 None of
these offered an easy way forward for architecture: its best prospect in Frampton’s
view is necessarily restricted to a selected group of building types where clearly
delimited boundaries underline that architecture’s ability to redeem the world are
now closely circumscribed. It was the sense that the potential of architecture to be
30  P. WALKER AND K. BURNS

Figure 1. Cover of the catalogue for “Old Continent New Building.” Old Continent New Building:
Contemporary Australian Architecture, eds. Leon Paroissien and Michael Griggs. Sydney: David Ell
Press, 1983.

socially transformative had been curtailed that from some points of view aligned
Frampton’s theoretical position with postmodernism. But nevertheless, architec-
ture in principle for Frampton should be a continuation of an Enlightenment pro-
ject of modernisation. No matter the complexities and qualifications of Frampton’s
argument, the praise he lavished at his Sydney presentation on Utzon and the
 FABRICATIONS  31

disdain he expressed for Venturi and the scenographic served to further an ori-
entation, found in the leaders of the profession in Australia, to abstraction and
a focus on tectonics as the source of architecture’s expressive potential. This was
apparent in the work of Cox, and in that of Andrews. Frampton prefaced his
comments on critical regionalism at Sydney by recalling Adolf Loos’s view that the
architect is an urban subject, and “by definition an uprooted person and therefore
can’t return to the state of grace of rooted culture.”
May I remind you just briefly of a beautiful essay written in 1910, bearing the title
Architecture, in which Adolf Loos describes an agrarian environment where the houses
do not seem made by man but look as though they have been created by the hand of
God. Loos presents us with a modern villa which disrupts the harmony because it is
made by an architect. And then the author asks the question: “And is it a good archi-
tect or a bad architect?” And then he answers to himself to the effect that “next to the
throne of God, all architects are equal,” contrary to their delusions. Loos claims that the
architect comes from the city and therefore has no culture. I think it is one of the most
shocking things he ever said, because he means that the architect lacks all sense of a
rooted culture. He is by definition an uprooted person and therefore can’t return to the
state of grace of rooted culture.16
While it is unlikely that Frampton knew of Andrews’s Eugowra house, his
recounting in Sydney of Loos’s parable about contemporary architecture’s root-
lessness seems particularly apt given the prominence in the Design Arts Board’s
promotional activities of a work such as Eugowra, a refined country “villa” exer-
cised with self-conscious references to a putative Australian vernacular.
Frampton was but one of many international architectural figures who vis-
ited Australia in the 1980s, and who used that opportunity to make pronounce-
ments on the state of architecture internationally and locally. Many of these visits
were underwritten by the Design Arts Board, which, for example, supported the
International Speaker series of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects.17 The
Board also pursued a strategy of sponsoring visits by editors and writers asso-
ciated with international design magazines, including International Architect,
Architectural Review, and Domus, to encourage them to publish on Australian
architecture. By far the most challenging was the Milan-based art and architecture
journal Domus, whose editor, Alessandro Mendini, visited Australia in October
1984. An Australian-themed issue of the journal was the outcome, appearing the
following July under the sub-title “Ciao Australia, Coast to Coast: the Last Wave.”18
Consistent with Mendini’s general editorial stance, Domus’s “Ciao Australia”
proffered a radically postmodern view of architecture in Australia, and of the
Australian cultural condition more broadly. This is reflected in “Ciao Australia”’s
lead essay “Old Trends New Directions,” a title which apparently but probably
coincidentally echoes the Design Arts Board’s for its 1982–1984 exhibition of
Australian architecture in Europe and the US, “Old Continent New Building.” The
conjunction of old and new in both is telling. However, if the Design Arts Board
found an image of a kind of resolution between past and present in Andrews’s
Eugowra house that offered the prospect of a datum from which an authentic
32  P. WALKER AND K. BURNS

Australian architecture could be projected, Mendini and Domus offered no such

consoling image. This is apparent in the cover art work of “Ciao Australia”: “embla-
zoned with a black stencil cut kangaroo hopping amidst rock art motifs, styl-
ised Sydney Opera Houses, and boomerangs, all printed over a fluorescent spray
paint background. This cover image was of a fabric swatch – probably from Linda
Jackson’s 1984 bush couture series – combining graffiti and tribal chic references”
(Fig. 2).19 By contrast with the dominant image of Eugowra in the Design Arts
Board’s catalogue publications, this suggested something unresolved, provisional,
almost frazzled. Like the vibrant colours of the journal’s graphics, designed by
Sottsass Associati – pink and blue on a green ground for this issue – the choice of
this detail exemplified a European perception of Australia as exotica. The special
issue title “Ciao Australia Coast to Coast: The Last Wave,” suggested how chal-
lenging it was to project a distinctive national identity within international design
markets in the 1980s. Given its theme of temporal uncanniness in the conjunction
of Australia’s indigenous and post-settlement cultures, the reference to Peter Weir’s
highly regarded film The Last Wave, of 1977, also pointed to insuperable difficulties
in asserting an Australian national identity.
Domus’s “Ciao Australia” issue presented a range of Australian architecture
which did not depart from that included in the Design Arts Board’s own exhi-
bitions: everything from Harry Seidler to Edmond and Corrigan. But textually,
Domus presented Australian architecture as contested, unsettled, ruffled by
the “post-modern wind,” and “stirred by international information streams.”20
Contestation was sometimes rancorous, as Mendini’s interview with Harry Seidler
made evident. When asked by Mendini about his views on the Melbourne architect
Peter Corrigan, an enthusiast for the scenographic approach of Venturi, Seidler is
dismissive. He likens Corrigan’s work to childish tantrums; it lacks constructional
or structural logic.
I do not know Corrigan … The little I have seen illustrated interests me not at all. It is
typically desperate trying to be interesting by being offensive visually. These attempts
imitate our ugly Australian suburbia and call it architecture. Architecture is an art
form.21
Mendini responds by claiming that Corrigan’s approach in relation to “tradi-
tion, context, local materials and small scale works” resonates for young architects
more than Seidler’s modernism. Corrigan’s importance in Mendini’s reading of
the Australian scene in signalled in his being the only Australian architect to
publish a critical essay in Domus’s “Ciao Australia.” Corrigan’s “Learning from
suburbia” was a riposte to the architecture-as-response-to-landscape trope found
particularly in Cox’s essay in the “Old Continent New Building” catalogue and
his various books extolling Australia’s tradition of farm buildings,22 and in the
widely reproduced images of Andrews’s Eugowra house. Corrigan’s title was also
a nod to Venturi. Without naming him, Corrigan excoriates Cox’s views that an
Australian architecture could be found in the early constructional rigour of settler
buildings, their fit to landscape, and their adaptation of Aboriginal techniques
 FABRICATIONS  33

Figure 2. Cover of Domus “Ciao Australia” special issue, 663 (July/August 1985).

such as the use of bark as a cladding material. Corrigan argued that Australian
architects were turning away from such nationalist myths as the nation’s suburbs
had turned away from the vast landscapes of the country’s interior:
The inhabitants of Doncaster and Templestowe [Melbourne suburbs] are right; the
issues of the soil are insurmountable. By turning their backs on the country, people in
the suburbs have demonstrated good sense, and a fundamental capacity for survival.23
The suburbs, commented Corrigan, offered “no social redemption, but at least
they are ours.”
34  P. WALKER AND K. BURNS

It is, however, the art works included in “Ciao Australia” that are really chal-
lenging. Many of these were from an exhibition of Australian painting shown in
Venice in 1985 (with the support of the Australia Council’s Visual Arts Board24)
under the title “Isolaustralia.” Picking out a self-portrait by Jenny Watson called
“This Year’s Fashion,” showing the artist bound and bleeding, the Domus’s “spe-
cial correspondent,” the French art critic Pierre Restany, noted the relation of the
Australian work to the contemporary Italian “Transavantgarde”:
This beautiful, pathetic and cruel work is perhaps the symbol of Australian painting
today, doomed to passive domination and to a mimetic acceptance of mainstreams
carried by the mass media of the north-west hemisphere. The fashion this year is still
transavantgarde inspired.25
Restany commented that another of the painters included in “Isolaustralia,” the
Chilean/Australian artist Juan Davila, aligned himself in solidarity with “all the
other countries with difficult identities.” Reproduced in “Ciao Australia,” Davila’s
“Pieta” featured an overlay of homo-erotic and religious imagery, adorned with
the names of other contemporary painters, from Germany, the UK, Chile, and
New Zealand, as well as Australia.
All of this suggested Australian complexities that architecture did not approach.
It is apparent that Domus’s view of Australian art was indebted to Paul Taylor,
co-editor of the Melbourne-based journal of art theory and criticism, Art + Text,
a further endeavour heavily subsidised by Australia Council largesse. Another
“Ciao Australia” article, “Australia Express” by Judith Blackall, the curator of
“Isolaustralia,” cited Taylor directly, and Taylor contributed a brief article on Jenny
Watson. These pieces reflected the theoretical position Taylor had developed in
an essay in the Milan journal Flash Art, that Australian art was “a carnivalesque
array of copies, inversions and negatives,” the “shattered debris of a self in exile.”26
Influenced by Baudrillard, Taylor pronounced that these images may only “refer
to and reflect other images.”27
As expressed in the essay-cum-editorial in “Ciao Australia,” “Old Trends New
Directions” – written by Mendini’s editorial assistant Fulvio Irace – Domus’s posi-
tion on Australian architecture was closer to Taylor’s on Australian art than to
that of any commentator on Australian architecture, including Corrigan. While
Domus acknowledged the ongoing heft of tropes important to Australia’s cultural
sense of itself – notably Geoffrey Blainey’s general formula of the “tyranny of dis-
tance”28 and of the architecturally specific concept of the importance of the small
suburban house – rather than affirming them as Corrigan did, its take on these
was challenging. Commenting on “the social mythology of the detached house,”
for example, Irace noted a strange conjunction in which Australia’s continental
vastness “is associated with the narrow delimitation of domestic space.” Australian
architecture, he suggested, had been “Stuck in the international fame of a few
isolated masters” – presumably Seidler, Andrews, Cox, and Murcutt – but had
now “reached a fork in the road between an insistence on a conditioned loyalty
to the canons of the ‘modern,’ and the controlled freedom of a less obsequious,
 FABRICATIONS  35

individually freer experimentation,” even if this experimentation was in the con-

strained context of the house:
Eclecticism and adhocism are characteristics too structurally ingrained in the history
and tradition of Australian thinking for us to imagine that they could have been extir-
pated once and for all through the injection of a few – modern – germs.29
This implies there was a tradition in Australia that aligned with a certain post-
modernism. But this was a tradition of dissent, not of compliance to some for-
mal, material or spatial orthodoxy. It would, therefore, not be possible to find
the “absoluteness of a coherent and reproducible stylistic mark” in the work
emerging from new architectural experimentation. Domus ceded a complexity
and self-conscious reflexivity – a knowing discursiveness – to local architectural
culture. By comparison, Frampton emphasised local cultures of building only;
he was oblivious to regional debates and discourse about architecture, and such
things were never acknowledged in his 1980s essays about “critical regionalism.”30
Domus’s contemporaneous pronouncements on cultural referencing and appropri-
ation in Australian architecture, therefore, provides an important counter-point
to Frampton’s influence on accounts of architecture beyond the European-US
cultural axis.31 Nevertheless, variants of regionalism remained dominant in how
architecture outside that axis was characterised.

Australia’s Venice Biennale Pavilion

It seems unlikely that the Domus publication which it had supported mattered to
the Design Arts Board beyond the fact that the “Ciao Australia” issue disseminated
images of Australian architecture widely. This is apparent in the return to the
“soft” regionalist strategy of projecting a national architectural idiom drawn from
a rural vernacular in Board’s next international venture in promoting Australian
architecture. This also occurred through an Italian context, the building of an
Australian Pavilion for the Venice Biennale. This venture was also the Design
Arts Board’s swan song, a final design flourish as the Australia Council withdrew
its support for design and architecture entirely. But in considering the alternative
projects that emerged for the pavilion, it is apparent that Domus’s characterisation
of Australian architecture as knowing and citational nevertheless held. But this
could not be acknowledged.
Through the efforts of the Australia Council’s Visual Arts Board, after a twen-
ty-year hiatus, Australia returned to exhibiting at the Venice Biennale in 1978.
The artists shown that year were Ken Unsworth, John Davis, and Robert Owen.
In the following decade a caste of innovative painters and sculptors followed,
several of whom featured along with Unsworth in “Ciao Australia”’s coverage of
the contemporary visual arts in Australia: Mike Parr, Peter Booth, Imants Tillers.32
The Visual Arts Board had first discussed an Australian Pavilion in 1973.33 The
idea was then championed by the Sydney entrepreneur Franco Belgiorno-Nettis,
whose family business has most recently been of note for its role in administering
36  P. WALKER AND K. BURNS

Australia’s off-shore refugee detention centres. Belgiorno-Nettis lobbied the

Venetian authorities for a site in the Giardini della Biennale. Apparently inde-
pendently of the Australia Council and its boards, Belgiorno-Nettis also commis-
sioned a design from Edmond and Corrigan for a Giardini site other than the one
which Australia was finally assigned. The Edmond and Corrigan scheme was ready
by 1983, but the process of its design may have begun in 1979.34 Two years later,
it appears that the Visual Arts Board had reclaimed the initiative: its 1985–1986
Annual Report includes the information that the Board had “committed itself to
supporting the establishment of an Australian pavilion in Venice.”35 By 1987, the
idea of an Australian pavilion became connected to the Australian bicentenary
year of 1988, and the project for a pavilion design assumed an urgency that it
had apparently lacked previously. Urgency led to an expedient decision that the
architect members of the Design Arts Board – Philip Cox, and its chair, John
Andrews – would themselves undertake the design of the pavilion.36
Sketch drawings of the pavilion in the Andrews collection suggest that a range
of design possibilities were explored in this phase. While most of these have a
similar, stepped triangular footprint, implying that a preferred site had emerged
or been assigned, several sketches of a design for a different site, dated June 1987,
suggest alternatives were still being considered during this phase.37 These explora-
tory designs have plans and sections with complexly stepped or staggered profiles,
clearly connecting them to other projects by Andrews, for example, the modular
planning and off-set zig-zag roofs of the School of Art, Kent State University
(1970), or the stepped roof of Gund Hall for Harvard’s Graduate School of Design
(1968).38 However, by the following June when the pavilion opened, the design had
been simplified and its authorship was attributed to Cox alone(Fig. 3). As built,
the pavilion was in a design idiom of expressed steel frame and claddings that had
become the dominant manner of Cox’s large public projects such as the Sydney
Football Stadium and the Exhibition Centre, Aquarium and Maritime Museum
buildings all at Darling Harbour. A book on Cox and his practice published by
the Royal Australian Institute of Architects in 1988 explicitly aligned the Venice
pavilion design with the Cox buildings at Darling Habour,39 and the connections
to the Sydney Aquarium and the Australian National Maritime Museum are quite
overt: exposed frames; white-painted steel claddings; extruded, curved roofs. In
the1988 monograph on his work, Cox explicitly connects this mode to Australia’s
rural vernacular building traditions. Commenting on his early work, Cox writes:
The architecture was sincere in its belief that it was a “bare bones” architecture display-
ing its complete skeletal anatomy. It related fully to the cathedrals of the Australian
Bush, the woolsheds, incredibly beautiful buildings where structure delights and
inspires. Here there is no division between architecture and structural engineering and
this axiom follows our thinking even to the present.40
The rural legacy to which such work alluded was underlined by a pronounce-
ment on the pavilion design made by the Australia Council’s general manager: “It’s
a house on stumps. Our own shearing shed in Venice.”41 This allusion to a heritage
 FABRICATIONS  37

Figure 3. Philip Cox, Australian Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 1988. Photo: Stephen Varady.

of farm buildings from which the pavilion ostensibly drew was also picked up
in the Italian architectural press: in an article on Edmond and Corrigan’s pavil-
ion design, and one which the authors – Paolo Tombesi and Riccardo Vannucci
– attribute to Cox and Andrews (the version they illustrate pre-dates the final
design), it is characterised in terms both of pragmatics (modular construction;
the fit of its design to the contours of its site) and the “identifiability” it claimed
through its reference to a putative Australian vernacular. By contrast, Tombesi and
Vannucci define the Edmond and Corrigan design not in terms of any particularly
Australian qualities, suburban or otherwise, but rather in relation to the architects’
personal creative world (“al loro personale mondo creativo”).42
But while response to landscape might have been seen as an essential aspect
of Australian architecture, the pavilion’s site in Venice’s Giardini della Biennale
was obviously not Australian, unless meagre topography and a few trees could be
construed to make it so. This conceptual dilemma was obviated by minimising
the on-site construction work: only the concrete footings and in-ground ser-
vices would be built in situ: everything else was to be prefabricated in Australia
and then shipped to Italy. This also was presented as demonstrating national
virtue. Unfortunately, however, the construction of the pavilion did not proceed
smoothly, and at the opening of the 1988 Biennale, in June, the building was not
38  P. WALKER AND K. BURNS

Figure 4. Kempsey Museum, designed by Glen Murcutt, as presented in the Domus “Ciao Australia”
special issue, 663 (July/August 1985).

complete. Regardless, the Australian exhibition – a series of eight large canvases

by the venerated painter Arthur Boyd – went ahead in the unfinished building.43
According to Nicholas Baume, writing in the Melbourne critical journal of archi-
tecture, Transition, it was a debacle:
Newly painted and stretched, Boyd’s canvases were at their most vulnerable in the
midst of a construction site. Enclosed in a non-airconditioned building of steel and
glass in the heat of Venice’s humid summer, the paintings began to melt. Building dust,
insects and micro-organisms made a home in the waxen surfaces of the paintings. To
protect them from such foreign bodies, the pictures were wrapped in plastic which,
 FABRICATIONS  39

when removed, took part of the painted surface with it. As an interim measure to sta-
bilise the condition of the rapidly deteriorating pictures, an air-conditioned tent was
constructed within the pavilion.44
Generally, the European/international arts press welcomed both the Boyd
works and the presence of a new Australian pavilion, even if it was incomplete.45
The 1988 Cox monograph described the Boyd exhibition as evidence of the pavil-
ion’s suitability to its purpose: “The simplicity of form and colour also allow a
high degree of appreciation of exhibitions and artworks and this was particularly
evident in the first exhibition of Arthur Boyd paintings in June 1988.”46
Nevertheless, the embarrassment of an unfinished pavilion rather suggested
that the claims of an Australian capacity for pragmatic construction were rhetoric
rather than reality. Baume blamed the Australia Council. He contended that at the
time that Belgiorno-Nettis commissioned the Edmond and Corrigan design there
had been an agreement with the Venetian authorities that a site would be made
available; when several years later the Australia Council sought to determine if this
offer was still open, they were given an ultimatum to complete the pavilion quickly.
“That it took such a threat from the Biennale for us to accept the long-standing
invitation is a serious failure of our public arts administration.”47 Baume goes on
to suggest that the haste that ensued compromised the design of the pavilion and
led to a dubious decision that members of the Design Arts Board would design
the pavilion “in house”: “Perhaps the circumventing of normal procedures for
developing a brief, awarding a commission and reviewing the design could be
excused had the project been a brilliant success.” He connected this poor process
with that seen in major Sydney projects, notably Darling Harbour, another expe-
dited bicentenary project – albeit on a gigantic scale – to which Andrews and Cox
both contributed designs for major buildings. But without Andrews and Cox’s
initiative to produce a pavilion design that the Australia Council bureaucrats
would commit to – and the free labour of Cox’s office – it seems unlikely that it
would have happened at all.
Retrospectively, the forms of the pavilion design can be seen to align with other
late modern projects with an Australianness that while widely claimed was at best
evasive. On one hand, the Cox design appears to rehearse aspects of Glen Murcutt’s
Kempsey Museum, one of Australia’s most internationally admired projects of the
time: a barrel-vaulted pavilion with an off-set plan, clerestory glazing and cor-
rugated steel cladding, and like Cox’s work widely seen to draw on an Australian
rural vernacular (Fig. 4). But on the other, Kempsey’s vaults and elongated plan
modules in turn appear to have a significant precedent in Louis Kahn’s Kimbell Art
Museum (completed 1972). And while the preliminary pavilion designs under-
taken by Cox and Andrews jointly in 1987 draw from other Andrews projects,
these belong to his North American period more than they do to his later work
in Australia. The Andrews strategy of modular planning from which the prelimi-
nary pavilion designs developed first appeared in the Bellmere school in Toronto
(1965), a project that also drew on Kahn: Taylor connects Bellmere to Kahn’s 1955
Trenton Bath House.48 Moreover, one of the variants of the early Cox and Andrews
40  P. WALKER AND K. BURNS

Figure 5. John Andrews, Miami Sea Passenger Terminal, designed 1967 and completed in 1970.
Photograph by Paul Walker.

scheme for an alternative site in the Giardini shows the pavilion roofed by a series
of shallow parallel vaults, and with plan voids forming small courtyards, recalling
Kahn’s Kimbell design quite directly (Fig. 5). As realised in Cox’s final design,
the profile of the pavilion roof has a strong affiliation with an Andrews design
that opens up another line of potential reference. Cox’s apparent quotation of the
section of Andrews’s widely admired Miami Seaport Passenger Terminal (1967)
may be a coincidence, but it is also readable as an acknowledgement of Andrews,
perhaps a nod by Cox to his colleague’s contribution to the design process and
role in bringing the pavilion project through the Australia Council bureaucracy
(Fig. 5). Miami in turn may owe something to Eero Saarinen: early sketches for the
Miami Seaport Terminal by Andrews recall the roof section of Saarinen’s Dulles
airport. And this certainly does not exhaust the potential connections and refer-
ences that might be found in the various pavilion designs by Andrews and Cox.
Rather than being construed in relation to regionalism – “critical” or otherwise
– all of this in retrospect places the Venice pavilion design as projected and as real-
ised in line with Domus’s comments that “eclecticism and adhocism” are engrained
within the “history and tradition of Australian thinking” about architecture. This
deflects straightforward claims that architecture can represent or perform identity.
Developing Blainey, Irace had remarked in Domus that Australian architects faced
a tyranny of distance that was conceptual as much as physical: “This concept of
Australian ‘distance’ however has a persistent conceptual dimension which reaches
well beyond the apparent laws of geography or the arithmetic of measures. For
‘remoteness’ is also a mental latitude”.49 But instead of inducing its architects to
 FABRICATIONS  41

look inwards, perhaps this persistent sense of distance propelled them to outward
engagement. Rather than a shearing shed, Australia’s Venice Pavilion indicated the
extent to which Australian practice was informed by global circuits of education,
travel, and the impact of the international design press.
Less surprisingly, this approach to the architectural project as a congeries of
allusions and quotations is apparent in the Edmond and Corrigan design. They
had no hesitancy in acknowledging this. Their design naturally disdained any
veil of rural Australiana, instead deploying references to Australian suburbia
apparent in the diminutive scale of its building volumes, and in an entry portico
more suited to familial rituals than the tribal gatherings of the art world. Their
approach of making each space a small building in its own right suggested not
only the small scale of Australian suburban domesticity, but also Kahn’s Trenton
Bath House as a source. However, Edmond and Corrigan’s allusion to Kahn was
coloured by the postmodernism of Kahn’s followers, Robert Venturi and Charles
Moore, and antecedents stretching from Melbourne’s Edwardian empire style to
Aldo Rossi’s recent Teatro del Mondo, Arata Isozaki, James Stirling, and American
postmodernism.50
The difference in style in the allusions to Kahn and other architectural prec-
edents in the pavilion designs of Andrews and Cox and that of Edmond and
Corrigan are significant – a switch from the abstracting tendencies of the late
modern to the overt citation of postmodernism. But while the pavilion as built
by Cox and the pavilion as projected by Edmond and Corrigan suggest differ-
ent conceptions of how Australia might best be represented in the international
placelessness of the Biennale, both demonstrate adeptness in handling a range of
references, Australian and international. Both are caught in the citational logic
that was held by Domus to characterise Australian architecture.

Conclusion
In pointing to the condition of the architect as an urban (and therefore alienated)
subject, Kenneth Frampton’s talk in Sydney in 1983 indicated some perplexity in
relation to the then current state of architecture. However, his “critical regional-
ism” in general disavowed this. Rejecting “simple-minded attempts to revive the
hypothetical forms of a lost vernacular,”51 Frampton’s texts on critical regional-
ism foregrounded tectonics, the modulation of building envelopes in relation
to light and climate, the tactile and material experience of the building, and the
relationship of the building to the topography of its site. These are all issues that
have regularly exercised Australian architects. This formulation was opposed to a
newer vernacular, the road-side buildings based on communication via the sign in
which postmodernism found one of its paradigms. But in focussing exclusively on
exemplary buildings in the regions, critical regionalism disregarded their cultural
circumstances, the design debates and theoretical reflections that informed their
production as much as site conditions and technical capacities. The implication in
42  P. WALKER AND K. BURNS

this is that discourse and theory are the prerogative of subjects such as Frampton
himself – not only urban (and therefore alienated) but globalised and metro-
politan. Disengaged from their local discursive contexts through their physical
and experiential qualities being fetishised, the works of architecture Frampton
discusses are deployed as signs in another kind of globalised debate.
By contrast, on his 1984 trip to Australia Mendini saw not just the Sydney Opera
House – metaphorically speaking – but uncovered a messy and contested vitality in
the country’s architecture. The special issue of Domus that followed acknowledged
this both in its inclusion of a wide variety of contemporary architectural work,
and in the space it gave to contrasting Australian voices, Seidler’s and Corrigan’s.
A third voice is also implied – Corrigan’s Domus attack on the landscape focus in
Australian architectural discourse tacitly invokes Philip Cox, who in the 1980s
was its chief proponent, both in his books on Australian architectural history
and his comments on contemporary architecture, including his own. But while
Mendini clearly saw Corrigan’s views on the significance of suburban culture as
the most important in the emerging architectural scene in Australia in the 1980s,
Domus took a more extreme stance: eclecticism and adhocism were so imbedded
in Australia’s architecture as to be its only prevailing characteristics. This position
appears to be informed by – or at least in line with – the radical views of Australian
art as a scattering of fragmentary simulacra which were also extensively docu-
mented in Domus’s “Ciao Australia” issue.
After the Australian issue of Domus, the next endeavour of the Design Arts
Board in promoting Australian architecture abroad was the building of an
Australian pavilion for the Venice Biennale. The design by Philip Cox corre-
sponded to other Cox designs of the period which the architect sought to legit-
imate through their putative connections with a vernacular heritage based on
constructional logic and fit to the Australian landscape. These arguments had a
strong alignment with Frampton’s critical regionalism. But like an earlier design for
the pavilion by Edmond and Corrigan, preliminary designs by Cox and Andrews
suggest that the pavilion could also be construed through a range of design cita-
tions and precedents embedded in it and that extended well beyond Australia.
Moreover, the argument that a building could assume a specific Australian quality
through its relation to landscape made no sense when that landscape was a nine-
teenth-century park in Venice.
Rather than being catalysed by some specific Australian sensibility, the pavil-
ion reflected a process in which architectural images and fragmentary references
drawn from multiple geographies and histories circulate and hybridise. This links
it to Domus’s view that Australian architecture was thoroughly eclectic and cita-
tional. Media, exhibitions, and the machinery of publicity facilitate this. This is
now architecture’s norm. Frampton perhaps alludes to such a condition in his
Sydney talk. The anecdote with which he concluded on that occasion was about
Louis Kahn and Robert Venturi installing their respective competition designs
for the American Bicentennial exhibition in Philadelphia. Kahn’s drawings were
 FABRICATIONS  43

in austere ink and pencil, Venturi’s in vibrant colour. “The pinning up proceeded
in awkward silence until finally Kahn couldn’t stand it any longer, he turned to
Venturi and said ‘you know, Bob, colour ain’t architecture.’ There was a short pause
and Venturi said ‘Well you know, Lou, a Bicentennial exhibition ain’t architecture
either’.”52
The merging of architecture and media is apparently acknowledged in attempts
by the Australia Council’s Design Arts Board to engage with the international scene
through exhibitions, journals, and finally the Venice Biennale. However, while
Australian architecture wanted to talk to the world, the circumstances through
which it could do so were not in its control. Domus could produce an unantici-
pated response to Australia in its view that there was an irreducible complexity in
the place’s architectural culture, but such a view never became the norm. Generally,
what the world wanted from Australia, like other places outside global centres, was
still some kind of regionalism, even if in quotation marks as in Venice’s Giardini
della Biennale. The Australia Council’s dissolution in the late 1980s of the Design
Arts Board – indeed, of any support for architecture and design – perhaps removed
opportunities for this to be further tested as it had been by Domus.
Turning back to the present, as we mentioned at the beginning, DCM’s new
Venice Pavilion has been welcomed for shedding the shearing shed and other
“cliches of Australian identity.” Said the Sydney Morning Herald’s writer:
The building could represent any nation on earth with equal efficiency. It is a statement
of our contemporaneity; of our willingness to shed the cliches of Australian identity. It
demands that Australian work be judged on the same terms as the art of Europe or the
United States, not as the product of a provincial outpost.53
Nevertheless, Australia apparently still feels constrained to proffer images of
identity, critical, or otherwise. The first art exhibition in the new building – Fiona
Hall’s “Wrong Way Time” – and the first exhibition for the Architecture Biennale
– Aileen Sage and Michelle Tabet’s “The Pool” – were both still concerned with
such matters.54

Notes
1. 
John McDonald, “New Venice Biennale Pavilion a Monumental Statement Displaying
no Trace of Australiana,” Sydney Morning Herald, 8 May 2015, accessed 1 August
2017, http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/new-venice-biennale-
pavilion-a-monumental-statement-displaying-no-trace-of-australiana-20150508-
ggx13e.html. See also Fred A. Bernstein, “Drama in the Giardini: A Dark and
Mysterious Pavilion – The First Arrival in Two Decades – Shakes up the Venice
Biennale,” Architectural Record 203, no. 7 (July 2015): 76–81.
2. 
“Denton Corker Marshall Has Been Selected to Design a Permanent Australia
Pavilion in Venice’s Giardini della Biennale,” Architecture Australia 101, no. 3 (May/
June 2012): 17.
3. 
John Gardiner-Garden, “Commonwealth Arts Policy and Administration,”
Parliamentary Library Background Note, 7 May 2009: 1, 2, accessed 28 November
2017, www.aph.gov.au/binaries/library/pubs/bn/2008-09/artspolicy.pdf. See also
44  P. WALKER AND K. BURNS

Paul Walker and Karen Burns, “Architecture and the Australia Council in the 1980s,”
in Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand:
32, Institutions and Change, eds. Paul Hogben and Judith O’Callaghan (Sydney:
SAHANZ, 2015), 689.
4.  Walker and Burns, “Architecture and the Australia Council in the 1980s,” 695–698.
5.  Australia Council Annual Report, 1983–84 (Canberra: Australian Government
Publishing Service, 1984), 56. The fast-changing position of architecture and design
in the Australia Council’s internal organisation is outlined in Walker and Burns,
“Architecture and the Australia Council in the 1980s,” 692.
6.  Katya Johanson, “The Role of Australia’s Cultural Council 1945–1995” (PhD
dissertation, University of Melbourne, 2000), 149; Walker and Burns, “Architecture
and the Australia Council in the 1980s,” 689.
7.  Johanson, “The Role of Australia’s Cultural Council 1945–1995,” 149.
8.  On Cox’s and Andrews’s 1988 buildings, see Jennifer Taylor, Australian Architecture
Since 1960, 2nd ed. (Canberra: Royal Australian Institute of Architects Education
Division, 1990), 233–237. On Parliament, see Taylor, Australian Architecture Since
1960, 100–104.
9.  Australia Council Annual Report, 1982–83 (Canberra: Australian Government
Publishing Service, 1983), 25.
10. Craig McGregor, “Responding to the Place,” in Australian Built: Responding to the
Place, a Photographic Exhibition of Recent Australian Architecture, eds. Michael Griggs
and Craig McGregor (Sydney: Design Arts Board of the Australia Council, 1985), 8;
Walker and Burns, “Architecture and the Australia Council in the 1980s,” 697.
11. Walker and Burns, “Architecture and the Australia Council in the 1980s,” 697.
12. Jennifer Taylor and John Andrews, John Andrews Architecture a Performing Art
(Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1982), 166.
13. Jennifer Taylor, “History and Place in Recent Australian Architecture,” in Old
Continent New Building: Contemporary Australian Architecture, eds. Leon Paroissien
and Michael Griggs (Sydney: David Ell Press, 1983), 54.
14. Kenneth Frampton, “Critical Regionalism: Speculations on an Architecture of
Resistance,” in The City in Conflict, ed. Chris Johnson (Sydney: Law Book Company,
1985), 9–16.
15. Kenneth Frampton, “Towards Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of
Resistance,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port
Townsend: Bay Press, 1983), 16–30. Including this, seven texts on critical regionalism
published by Frampton between 1983 – when three of them appeared – and 1988 are
listed in Paul Walker, “Kenneth Frampton and the Fiction of Place,” in Shifting Views:
Selected Essays in the Architectural History of Australia and New Zealand, eds. Andrew
Leach, Antony Moulis and Nicole Sully (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press,
2008), 76.
16. Frampton, “Critical Regionalism: Speculations on an Architecture of Resistance,” 11.
17. Australia Council Annual Report, 1982–83, 163.
18. Silvia Micheli outlines Australian architecture’s representation in Domus in “Ciao
Australia: Domus between Australia and Italy,” presented at the Italy/Australia
Postmodern in Translation symposium, University of Canberra, November 2015.
19. Karen Burns and Paul Walker, “‘Ciao Australia’, Postmodern Australian and Italian
Exchanges, 1983–1988: from Domus to the Venice Biennale,” in Proceedings of the
Fourth International Conference of the European Architectural History Network, ed.
Kathleen James-Chakraborty (Dublin: University College Dublin School of Art
History and Cultural Policy, 2016), 285–294.
 FABRICATIONS  45

20. Fulvio Irace, “Old Trends New Directions,” Domus 663 (July/August 1985): 3.
21. Alessandro Mendini, “Colloquio con Harry Seidler,” Domus 663 (July/August 1985):
1.
22. Philip Cox and John Freeland, Rude Timber Buildings in Australia (London: Thames
and Hudson, 1969); Philip Cox and Wesley Stacey, The Australian Farmstead
(Melbourne: Lansdowne, 1972); Philip Cox and Clive Lucas, Australian Colonial
Architecture (Melbourne: Lansdowne, 1978); Philip Cox, The Australian Functional
Tradition (Fitzroy: Five Mile Press, 1988).
23. Peter Corrigan, “Learning from Suburbia,” Domus 663 (July/August 1985): 6, 7.
24. Australia Council Annual Report, 1984–85, 208.
25. Pierre Restany, “Isolaustralia,” Domus 663(July/August 1985): 83.
26. Paul Taylor, “Popism – The Art of White Aborigines,” reprinted in On The Beach, 1
(March 1983): 30–32.
27. Burns and Walker, “‘Ciao Australia’, Postmodern Australian and Italian Exchanges,
1983–1988,” 289.
28. Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia’s History
(Melbourne: Sun Books, 1966).
29. Irace, “Old Trends New Directions,” Domus 663 (July/August 1985): 3.
30. Walker, “Kenneth Frampton and the Fiction of Place,” 76, 77.
31. Burns and Walker, “‘Ciao Australia’, Postmodern Australian and Italian Exchanges,
1983–1988,” 287.
32. Stephen Naylor, “Getting into the Giardini di Castello: Australia’s Representation at
the Venice Biennale,” Art and Australia 40, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 594–601.
33. Australia Council Annual Report, 1986–87 (Canberra: Australian Government
Publishing Service, 1987), 55.
34. On the chronology of the pavilion designs, see Burns and Walker, “‘Ciao Australia’,
Postmodern Australian and Italian Exchanges, 1983–1988,” 290, note 10. Conrad
Hamann dates the Edmond and Corrigan scheme to 1982. See Hamann, Cities of Hope:
Australian Architecture and Design by Edmond and Corrigan 1962–92 (Melbourne:
Oxford University Press, 1993), 110.
35. Australia Council Annual Report, 1985–86 (Canberra: Australian Government
Publishing Service, 1986), 50.
36. Kevin Childs, “Australian Art in Venice, Encased in a Pavilion of BHP Steel,” The Age,
9 June 1987: 2.
37. Childs suggests that the site was changed when “ruins from the time of Napoleon”
were found on the first site. See Childs, “Australia Builds a ‘Shearing Shed’ in Ancient
Venice,” The Age, 3 June 1988: 11.
38. Taylor and Andrews, John Andrews Architecture a Performing Art, 94–108. Following
Taylor, dates given here are for the design of these projects rather than their
completion.
39. “Australian Pavilion Venice Biennale, Italy,” in Australian Architects: Philip Cox,
Richardson, Taylor and Partners (Canberra: Royal Australian Institute of Architects
Education Division, 1988), 100.
40. Philip Cox, “Statement by the Architect,” in Australian Architects: Philip Cox,
Richardson, Taylor and Partners, 7.
41. Childs, “Australia Builds a ‘Shearing Shed’.”
42. Paolo Tombesi and Riccardo Vannucci, “Effetto leggerezza: Il Padiglione Australiano
alla Biennale di Venezia,” Casabella 52, no. 547 (June 1988): 34, 35.
43. After the Biennale opening, the pavilion was closed for two weeks before it opened for
public admission. Naylor, “Getting into the Giardini di Castello,” 598.
46  P. WALKER AND K. BURNS

44. Nicholas Baume, “Guests in Venice: Australia’s Biennale Pavilion,” Transition 29

(Winter 1989): 65.
45. Robert Hughes, “The Venice Biennale Bounces Back Dominated by Jasper Johns, This
Year’s Event Is Again a Prime Festival of the New,” Time 132, No. 4 (25 July 1988):
84; Richard Cork, “Exhibition Reviews: The Venice Biennale,” Apollo: International
Magazine of Art and Antiques 128 (September 1988): 189; Michael Archer, “Venice
Biennale,” Art Monthly (September 1988): 4; Howard Jacobson, “Cast Among the
Avid Art Merchants of Venice, a Biennale Virgin Writes Home,” Modern Painters
(June 1988): 25–27.
46. “Australian Pavilion Venice Biennale, Italy,” in Australian Architects: Philip Cox,
Richardson, Taylor and Partners, 100.
47. Baume, “Guests in Venice,” 65.
48. Taylor and Andrews, John Andrews Architecture a Performing Art, 18.
49. Irace, “Old Trends New Directions,” 3.
50. Hamann suggests Stirling as an influence. Hamann, Cities of Hope, 111.
51. Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism,” 21.
52. Frampton, “Critical Regionalism: Speculations,” 16.
53. McDonald, “New Venice Biennale Pavilion a Monumental Statement Displaying no
Trace of Australiana.”
54. Bernstein, “Drama in the Giardini.”