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About the 2008 Winners
Two entries were awarded the honours in the 2008 About Face design competition.
In the words of Jury Chair, Nicholas Murcutt; “The two overall winning schemes represented two highly divergent ways the About Face competition can be engaged. It was not so much that the two winners could not be separated so much as they were both independently brilliant and were thus joint winners.”
Winner and Peer Award Winner Pendal and Neille
Pendal and Neille were asked to explore space and light. Here the extraordinary history of bricks and architecture are called upon. Islamic architecture, the parabolic vaults of Gaudi, the layered filigree walls of India’s ancient cities and Rome all came to mind. Modern architects who have also ventured into this domain are Kahn and Moneo. This is difficult territory given the power of this powerful brick history. In a sense it is the opposite of M3’s question – asking for an exploration of the classical brick question rather than a more painterly and highly contemporary exploration.
Pendal and Neille contextualized their response within a very beautiful history of brick building in Perth and they chose a site amongst these gems. The proposal, would in the opinion of the jury, represent an enduring piece of architecture. If built, it would be well loved whilst also being located in our epoch. It is not a historicist response. The proposal is sufficiently dense as to possibly be hewn from a single rock yet still perforated to be like lace in parts. Light is drawn deep into the centre filtered like water and delivered to its centre at a perfect temperature. Pendall and Neille showed love and care for the material. It was a civic building and bricks and civic architecture have been and continue to be inextricably linked.
View Pendal and Neille's entry>
About Face Winner m3architecture
Art for m3architecture is always integral to the reading of their projects, not a separate entity. They were asked to look at the wide spectrum of brick colours available and enter into an exploration of their artistic potential. Like maps of aboriginal language groups, they began by producing a brick map of Australia and Brisbane’s brick colours captured on it.
m3architecture chose to focus on these local bricks in the spirit of “home game for the local hero” through the proposal of a suburban sports park at the end of a street. They illustrated firstly the ecological benefit of shorter transport distances of this heavy material as well as the notion of “terroir” as the local colours of bricks resonate with the soils upon which they sit. Colours were tested as pixilated projections of both a Howard Arkely and Fred Williams painting and the suggestion of two sides of a wall to a local sports park was made memorable by the reinterpretation of these works now bound to the colours available locally. The jury was taken on a journey that was constructed based on very specific hypothesis. The originality and humour of the process was terrific. How should we consider the works of these artists when the maneuvers of brick sized pixilation upscale these works and colours shift away from the original art works? How do they alter the works? It is certainly a postmodern question.
Intelligent and insightful decisions were made to then transform this into the promise of architecture. To an extent the submission is a drawn record of an architectural exploration.
