LAA#138: NGA Sculpture Garden
April 15, 2014
The National Gallery of Australia Sculpture Garden
Harry Howard was the first landscape architect I met. The first landscape project I can recall seeing was the model of the High Court of Australia and the (then) Australian National Gallery, in Harry’s office in West Crescent Street McMahons Point, in 1976.
Harry was one of a group of landscape architects who started AILA in 1966. This group of landscape architects changed the profession, through their practice and through their collaboration to draw together as the genesis of the profession in Australia. The now mature sculpture gardens form a fitting tribute to Harry’s vision, his sense of scale and proportion, his humility and the lightness of his design touch.
The HCA/ANG precinct, as it was titled on the drawings, was many years in the planning and design phase. The key component of the precinct is the Sculpture Garden, now thirty years old in the ground. The garden was designed specifically around several sculptures that the inaugural Gallery Director, James Mollison had begun to acquire from the mid 1970s. The garden is the product of the collaboration between Mollison, architect Col Madigan, Howard and Barbara Buchanan, the project landscape architect. A young Mervyn Dorrough moved to Canberra to act as landscape superintendent during the construction phase.
The Sculpture Garden is one of the few gardens in Canberra that architects get excited about. If you ask architects ‘What is their favourite Canberra landscape?” the answer is very often, “The Sculpture Garden at the National Gallery”. This is counter intuitive for me, for here is a landscape which at least on two sides of the building, dominates the building and creates the space. The brutalist gallery façade is subservient to the canopy of the Eucalypts. My choice for the best view in Canberra is the view from the members lounge looking north to the lake, through the canopies of the randomly planted Eucalypts. This view matches the hand drawn presentation images prepared in the late 1970s during the design phase.
In 1994 the Australian Heritage Commission listed the High Court and National Gallery Precinct in its Register of the National Estate. The architects for both buildings were Edwards Madigan Torzillo Briggs. Col Madigan was a champion for both buildings and the precinct for many years post completion, until his death in 2011. Harry equally had championed the landscape and the qualities of the original design until his death in 2000. There is a detailed chronology of the development of the High Court, the Gallery and the gardens within the citation.
In his ‘Sculpture Gardens; Australian National Gallery, Canberra, Study 1’, Harry Howard outlined his concept for the landscaping “that it would provide physical and psychological comfort allowing visitors to orient themselves and be guided through a sequence of varying ‘gallery’ spaces or rooms. The planting was to comprise only Australian native species and, in particular, those occurring around the Canberra region. The asymmetrical and haphazard character of Australian trees and plants would in time soften the formal architectural principles underpinning the design”.
The key points from Howard’s design statement are the use of locally occurring Australian native species, and the assymetrical and haphazard character.
Howard had history in this approach to landscape architecture. Howard was an early convert to the use of indigenous plants in his projects. He was awarded an Institute of Horticulture award for his locally indigenous planting scheme at Helen Street Reserve, Lane Cove, in the late 1970s. He had a series of home nurseries, at Wahroonga and then McMahons Point, through the 1970s where he grew local provenance plants. Cedar wattles, his nursery with Helen McKay in Blues Point Road, also sold plants to the general public. Needless to say, the planting species selection and planting layout was an innovation for the National Capital. Harry and Barbara were assisted in the selection of locally indigenous plants by Peter Sutton, a horticulturist employed by the National Capital Development Commission as a landscape manager. Peter was instrumental in the sourcing and trialing of many of the shrub and understorey plantings.
Harry’s desire for asymmetry to act as a counterpoint to the prevailing symmetry and order within the Parliamentary Triangle did not weaken. I spoke with Harry shortly before his death, at the time that the winner of the design competition for Commonwealth Place was announced. Harry had seen an image,and was very excited about the asymmetry introduced by the proposed planting of trees to one side only of the grassed space.
Interestingly, the Sculpture Garden is still the only landscaped space within the Parliamentary Triangle where the trees are not planted to a grid. The volumes and varieties of space that the trees describe are quite different to any other space in the Triangle, due to the random patterns and growth of the trees and understorey. The planting structure sets up a very different character to the rest of the Triangle. The majority of the Parliamentary Triangle presents isolated buildings fringed by regularly spaced trees or blocks of gridded plantings. The landscape space is a void, or negative space formed by the positive edges of the building and the trees. The result is the creation of spaces which perform their ceremonial function of providing long broad vistas and vast garden rooms, however they dominate the visitor and can be overbearing in Canberra’s extremes of heat and cold, discouraging active use by pedestrians. The Sculpture Garden, by contrast, is a positive spatial volume formed by the trunks and foliage canopies, creating a space that is welcoming. It provides Howards “physical and psychological comfort”, that can be absent in other areas of the Parliamentary Triangle.
The gallery gardens are now very much a ‘collection’ of landscape architecture. Following the initial Howard/Buchanan construction completed in 1982, was the 1994 Fern garden, designed by artist Fiona Hall, occupying the courtyard space formed by Andrew Anderson’s ‘temporary exhibition building’, completed in 1998. In 2010, the Australian Garden was completed,designed by Macgregor Coxall and Partners. This garden occupies the former southern car park area, and includes a ‘Skyspace’ by James Turrell. This garden wraps around the new entrance to the building, and provides a broad grassed area flowing from the new function rooms. The planting palette continues to exclusively use indigenous plants. The 2010 building extensions were again designed by Andrew Anderson. The staff parking area has been moved to occupy part of what was to have been the Autumn Garden of the Howard/Buchanan scheme. The Australian Garden was awarded a design award in the 2012 AILA National Awards.
Interestingly, both the Howard/Buchanan sculpture garden and the Macgregor Coxall scheme had proposed further stages. Significant cuts to the original design were made in the pre-tender phase, and were not reinstated even following favourable tender results. (Disclosure: one of the writer’s earliest drafting projects while still a student was to document the amphitheatre – subsequently value managed out of the project and replaced by grassed embankments). The Macgregor Coxall scheme is very much held by current Gallery Director Ron Radford to be the ‘stage one’ of the Australian Garden – stage two is being designed, and but awaits a more favourable Commonwealth funding regime. This stage includes further building and civil works, providing additional underground parking with landscaped podiums.
Some quotes from an article by Howard in Landscape Australia 3/82 August 1982, pp 208-215. The design objectives were:
“…. the establishment of a strong visual framework which recognizes the unique lake shore site and helps the user orientate.”
“Full sunlight is uncompromising; form, texture, colour and materials subside.”
”Dappled light, heavy shade, bright patches - moving, enclosing, changing with the time and seasons;a sense of place is created.”
“A single sculpture viewed discreetly in an individual setting - there is no feeling of gallery or self conscious display. The sculpture is a focal point in the landscape, completing the scene.”
“From the lake edge visitors are led to the various elevated sculpture platforms where plantings,as elsewhere, aim to soften Canberra’s harsh light and define exhibition spaces by means of trunks, limbs and foliage at various levels.”
“The use of gravel to create a fluid, non-directional floor plane allows for great flexibility of display and visitor movement; the plane can be modulated by plant material to form a series of places or outdoor rooms. ”
The strongest single landscape statement is the connection of the main Sculpture Court and the Gallery building itself to Lake Burley Griffin, by means of the Avenue - for the first time in the development of Canberra building and water have been brought together in some measure.
A bureaucratic decision in 1975 radically changed the direction of approach to the gallery entrance. It was planned to lead to a Roger Johnson’s ‘National Place’, however with the abandonment of that project, the gallery entrance was left five metres above natural ground level. Later, in 1978, traffic direction on the access road was altered, and a car park constructed to the south, rather than a larger underground car park as had been planned. This resulted in the majority of visitors approaching the gallery from the rear. The resolution of the ‘front door’ design issue occupied much of the second and third directors’ tenure. Betty Churcher, the second director, attempted to live with the entrance, but made several changes to the internal layout, and was the director during the planning of the Fern Garden and the temporary exhibition annex. Brian Kennedy, the third director, determined to resolve the front door problem. Plans prepared at the time drew criticism from Madigan, Howard and Buchanan. They were to galvanise support from a number of prominent architects and landscape architects, which culminated in a submission, prepared in 2001, of a statement of principles to protect heritage values, with numerous signatories from members of the professional organisations.
Howard and Buchanan prepared a detailed review of the condition of the precinct landscaping in 1999, measuring the condition against the design intent. Buchanan further reported on the condition in 2000. The key departures from the constructed works related to the outdoor restaurant:
· The car park and access road built behind the Henry Moore sculpture to service the temporary restaurant, which brought cars into a pedestrian zone and intruded into the backdrop to the sculpture.
· The enclosed marquee housing the temporary restaurant blocks visitor circulation around the Marsh Pond and prevents visitors other than restaurant clientele, from using the lower terrace.
· The angled water channel (part of the Woodward water feature) has been covered over in the section that dissects the terrace next to the Marsh Pond.
The report also commented on the general deterioration of the plantings and furniture, and the introduction of miscellaneous items such as concrete paving, bins, signs and drains. A point the report made well was how the design intent of the concept plans had in nearly all cases been realised. It is through the planned haphazard development of the multi, varying angled trunks that making up the canopy and forming the landscape architecture that is the garden rooms that Howard saw at the concept stage.
The feeling I take from the now thirty year old gardens is one of resilience. The Sculpture Garden has had to battle not only Canberra’s climate, but also its bureaucracy. The garden has struggled against a changing maintenance culture, of public, to private, and from gallery directors with varying levels of connection and awareness of the physicality of the spaces. There have been few changes overtime to placement of sculptures, and the Heritage status can be a double edged sword. While it was critical in saving the gardens and the gallery from the poorly thought out proposals to improve the front entrance of the gallery in the late 1990s, the heritage listing complicates changing the sculptural collection.
The fourth and current gallery director, Ron Radford, oversaw the 2010 addition and the new entrance, and the Macgregor/Coxall Australian garden. Several new sculptural works were installed in conjunction with the additions, and a new work was installed in the Sculpture Garden. The gallery spent a great deal of time and a large amount of money on a heritage statement to justify the insertion of the (generously donated) maquette of the Angel of the North, by Antony Gormley, on the axial line through the garden close to the intersection with the lake. Other newly installed works have been granted ‘temporary’ works approval, requiring new applications on an annual basis. Radford wonders aloud whether all future works should be termed ‘temporary’ to allow them to be moved outside the strictures of heritage requirements.
An excerpt from the heritage citation:
“The Precinct is a highly regarded expression of contemporary architectural and landscape design. The architectural design is an example of Late Twentieth-Century Brutalist style demonstrating a development of the modernist movement away from the constrictions of modular structural systems to a more flexible form of architecture. The landscape design using mostly local native plant material is an example of the Australian Native Landscape design style that developed in Australia in the 1960s, and is a fine example of the new found idiom of landscape design being practised in Australia at the time, using carefully grouped, local species as informal native plantings against modern architectural elements. “
“The Precinct has aesthetic importance with its monolithic off-white concrete structural mass of bold angular shapes of projecting and recessing off-form concrete shapes arranged on concrete terraces and emerging from a mass of native vegetation. It has a united profile and is a dominant feature on the lake edge of the Parliamentary Zone.
The garden is a true representation of the intent of the designers, and the light hand of the designers is evident in the soft quality of the light and absence of hard edges to the spaces. It is a testament to the skill of Harry Howard and Barbara Buchanan, and also Peter Sutton, the City Parks Manager responsible for the maintenance of the precinct during the initial establishment of the gardens.