The Swagman & The Squatter

The architectural community has joined in expressing great sadness at the passing of Col Madigan. There have been several moving personal tributes to the man and his buildings. His buildings are amongst the most complex, distinctive, and intelligent public buildings in Australia. I’m going to attempt to get some thoughts down about the intriguing pair of The High Court of Australia and The National Gallery of Australia. It’s going to be pretty idiosyncratic I’m afraid.

The High Court and NGA are the only two buildings that remained after Robert Johnson revised his 1969 plan for National Place. It should be said that Johnson was clear from the outset that his design departed from Griffin’s intentions, that a new paradigm was coming into focus.

“Although Canberra may represent centralised government, we do live in a democracy and in a loosely knit, rapidly evolving society. The physical representation of this might be a looser and more open composition of buildings…” he goes on to argue that the new approach would have “the drama of asymmetry and calculated irregularity”.

“…enhancing rather than defying the larger Griffin concept. I do not believe that a close re-hash of the Griffin design either makes any sense today or is the best way to pay respect to Griffin.”

Madigan himself said that the his buildings “reacted strongly against the asphyxiating order of conformity and responded to the halcyon optimistic spirit of the early 70s… In short the buildings hold a demanding asymmetrical balance, in some ways matching, in other ways threatening the illusionary safer symmetry.”

The buildings were meant to be two great set-pieces in National Place, as it is they stand by the water like The Swagman and The Squatter waiting to be born into mythology.

They do not pretend to tiptoe across the landscape but rather are a part of it, born of the landscape and yet resolutely modern and monumental.

Edwards Madigan Torzillo and Briggs’ initial competition entry for the NGA shows a very low slung building, almost a landscape and certainly a bunker. It recalls Uluru or a reclining figure. The Buildings is plugged into a network of bridges, ramps, and roads that form a complicated landscape or perhaps a new mote and drawbridge.

The intention from the start was for a fortified repository for the nation’s art – for its identity.  There is something like fear built into this idea that art needs protection like a secret delicate commodity.  We see it still in Wood Marsh’s ACCA or Fender Katsalidis’ Museum of Old and New Art.

The building as built is closed and not a little tortured, subordinate to the High Court yet creeping toward the lake.  There are cracks in the armour. The galleries have fissures at their seems that afford views to the gardens beyond.  The grand entry with its tower and portico lifting away from the ground plane breaks down toward the water to become more like a village than a fortress, more settled into the landscape while still resisting domestication it is featureless, abstract, and mute.  The entry is highly articulated with massive columns split into blades, levels interspersped, carrying a top heavy load that signals entry but also something beyond reach, some ancient complexity now out of hand.

We like to think of art as a distilled idea, as somehow reflecting the complexity of human desire and culture. The NGA, while outwardly a willful bunker is internally complex, labyrinthine, almost Piranesian. There is a kind of artificial nature to this interior.  The complexity here is not merely formal, it is cerebral.  Madigan said the work sought “a purposeful tendency to become more complex more free and man is at his best when he is…embracing complexity”.

The building’s underlying tetrahedral structure suggests an evolution of natural structures, space is squeezed and then released, long ramps that double back on themselves, tightly knotted triangular chamfered stairs, grottos and cracks afford unexpected encounters with sculpture and painting. It is as though high modernity has encountered the Australian landscape been weathered and formed by the environment – rather than resisting timidly or touching the earth lightly – the NGA internalizes the land in which it sits.

It reminds me a little of Picnic at Hanging Rock.  The building has the sense of ineffable age and sunbaked claustrophobia.  I recall a sense that Miranda might stumble out delirious; torn between fear and eternity.

Next the High Court…