Pavilions: a Symposium

Pavilions: a Symposium

MPavilion 2016 design. Courtesy of Studio Mumbai.


This symposium brings together leading architects, artists, curators, architectural historians, cultural historians and art historians to focus on the theme of “The Pavilion”, a building structure with an ancient lineage and great contemporary resonance.

Monday 3 October

Keynote forum: Contemporary Architects and the Pavilion
A public Forum with Bijoy Jain, Sean Godsell and Robert Grace
Moderated by Professor Philip Goad, Melbourne School of Design

On the eve of the launch of MPavilion 2016, come and hear what three leading contemporary architects have to say on the contemporary pavilion and its significance for audiences today The speakers at this public forum have all experimented with the idea of the pavilion: Bijoy Jain of Studio Mumbai, is designer of the 2016 MPavilion; Sean Godsell, of Sean Godsell Architects, designed the 2014 MPavilion; and Robert Grace, of Robert Grace Architecture, designed the Garden Room at Woodchester House in 2011. This public conversation on the meaning of “The Pavilion” will be moderated by Professor Philip Goad, of the Melbourne Design School.

Keynote Forum: Contemporary architects and the Pavilion

Monday 3 October 2016
6.15 pm - 7.30pm
Lecture Theatre - B117, Melbourne School of Design, The University of Melbourne

Bijoy Jain was born in Mumbai in 1965 and received his Master of Architecture from Washington University in 1990. The founder of sustainable architecture firm Studio Mumbai, Jain studied and worked in architecture in the United States before returning to India in 1995 to establish his practice. Jain gained worldwide recognition with the installation ‘Work-Place’ at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, offering an insight into the firm’s unique process of learning through making. Bijoy Jain’s work has been shown at many venues, including the Alvar Alto Symposium, the Architectural League of New York and the Canadian Centre for Architecture, which holds several of his project archives. Jain has won many awards for his work, includingthe Global Award for Sustainable Architecture from the Institut Français d’Architecture (IFA) in 2009, BSI Swiss Architectural Award in 2012, Grande Medaille d’Or from the Academie D’Architecture in Paris (2014), and was commissioned by the Naomi Milgrom Foundation to design this year’s annual MPavilion in Melbourne.

Sean Godsell was born in Melbourne in 1960. He graduated with First Class Honours from The University of Melbourne in 1984. After traveling in Japan and Europe he worked in London from 1986 to 1988 for Sir Denys Lasdun, before returning to Melbourne in 1989 and joined The Hassell Group. In 1994 he formed Godsell Associates Pty Ltd Architects. In July 2002 the influential English design magazine wallpaper listed him as one of ten people destined to ‘change the way we live’. He was the only Australian and the only architect in the group. Sean has received numerous local and international awards. In 2006 he received the Victorian Premier’s Design Award and the RAIA Robin Boyd Award and in 2007 he received the Capochin Residential Architecture Award in Italy and a Chicago Athenaeum Award in the USA - all for St Andrew’s Beach House. In 2008 he was a finalist in the wallpaper International Design Awards and a recipient of his second AIA Record Houses Award for Excellence in the USA for Glenburn House. In 2008, noted architectural historian and Professor of Architecture at Columbia University Kenneth Frampton nominated him for the inaugural BSI Swiss Architecture Award for architects under the age of 50 and his work was exhibited as part of the Milan Triennale and the Venice Biennale.

Robert Grace, Architect, Franco-Australian, graduated from The University of Melbourne and from Columbia University. Conducted PhD research at The University of Melbourne in Paris whilst recipent Ackmann Scholarship and later at the AA in London. Based in Paris he has completed and worked on projects in Australia, Europe and the West Indies. He is a registered architect in Australia, United Kingdom and France. His atelier robert grace architecture was founded in Melbourne in 1984, and has been established in France since 1991. His projets have won prizes in Australia, United States and England. Many of these have been the subject of numerous publications in the same fashion as his crtical commentaries. He has been a member of international juries and has taught and lectured at Australian, American and European Universities. In 2016 he established state of grace as the research arm of robert grace architecture. His rencontres 2016 (in partnership with Columbia Global Centers, Paris) gathers actors in the world of architecture and associated realms to discuss their works, speculations and their collaborations. Rencontre no 4 marks the return to Paris in Septembre after Blak Flamingo, no 3 at the Venice Biennale. In 2016 his Des'Esparon series of papers and talks around the specific, personal and reflective experiences of building a home in the town of Esparon in the Cevennes in the South of France, have been given at conferences in Istanbul, Paris and Copenhagen.

Professor Philip Goad is the Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor and Chair of Architecture at The University of Melbourne. Internationally known for his research and is an authority on modern Australian architecture, Philip has worked extensively as an architect, conservation consultant, and curator. Philip is an expert on the life and work of Robin Boyd, and has held visiting scholar positions at Columbia University, Bartlett School of Architecture (London) and UCLA (Los Angeles). Philip is a past editor of Fabrications, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, and is a contributing editor to Architecture Australia. Along with Associate Professor Julie Willis, he is the editor of The Encyclopedia of Australian Architecture.

Tuesday 4 October 2016

One day of sessions
A selected group of experts will provide different perspectives on the "The Pavilion" during three sessions. The first session (held at The University's Melbourne School of Design) will to be made up of art historians and cultural historians; the second and third sessions (held at the VCA) will be made up of architects, architectural historians, art historians, artists and curators. This day of discussion and debate provides an appropriate platform for the launch of the new MPavilion 2016 that evening.

Session 1 - Art Historians and Cultural Historian

10.00am - 12.00pm
Malaysian Theatre, Melbourne School of Design, The University of Melbourne

Session Chair: Assoc. Professor Alison Inglis
School of Culture and Communication and Acting Director, AIAH at The University of Melbourne

Short biography
Alison Inglis is an Associate Professor in the Art History program at the University of Melbourne. For many years, she co-ordinated the MA Art Curatorship program in the program. Her research interests include nineteenth-century British and Australian colonial art; technical art history; and museum studies. Her experience in the field of curatorial studies is reflected in her membership of several museum boards (including Museum Victoria and the Duldig Studio). Her current research focuses on two ARC-funded projects: Australian art exhibitions 1968-2009: a generation of cultural transformation; and Human kind: eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century British and Australian portraits in the National Gallery of Victoria. She also was curator (with Patricia Macdonald) of the exhibition For Auld Lang Syne: Images of Scottish Australia, Art Gallery of Ballarat, 2014.

Assoc. Professor David Marshall
School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne
Pavilion and Fabrique: Meaning and Reception
This paper discusses a category of building that is related to, and sometimes overlaps with, the pavilion: the fabrique. The fabrique is not to be confused with the folly, although both are found in parks and gardens and the terms are often used interchangeably. The fabrique is a building whose sole purpose is to generate cultural meaning. It is by definition not functional in the usual sense, although a fabrique may be given a function. The fabrique was a creation of Eighteenth-century France and England, but the examples I want to focus on are more recent than that. I will endeavour to show the importance of this poorly understood architectural genre, and to explore the psychology of the reception of such buildings.

Short biography
David Marshall is Associate Professor in Renaissance and Baroque Art History in the Art History Discipline within the School of Culture and Communication at the The University of Melbourne and Adjunct Professor, School of Historical and European Studies, La Trobe University. He is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and Honorary Research Fellow, British School at Rome. He is founder and editor of Melbourne Art Journal and the Director of Melbourne Art Network. His main area of specialisation is view painting and landscape painting in 17th and 18th century Rome, and the relationship between painting and architecture. Current projects include books on the painter of views and capricci, Giovanni Paolo Panini, and a study of the Villa Patrizi, the most important early 18th century Roman villa, destroyed in 1849. He is the founder and editor of Melbourne Art Journal. He spends several months each year researching in Rome.

Dr Katrina Grant
Melbourne Art Network
Garden Theatres - stages for performing power and learning
In the seventeenth-century a new type of structure began to appear in gardens across Italy - the garden theatre. These theatres took on a variety of forms from architectonic topiary that mimicked the form of stages with wings to large-scale architectural fountains that were described as water theatres. Garden theatres varied dramatically in size and appearance, and the different designs signalled different types of performances. Although the idea of a theatre in a garden was not entirely new, the seventeenth-century saw an exponential rise in the number and variety of structures that were described as theatres. This increase is often simply put down to the general ‘theatricality’ of the Baroque period, however, on closer examination we can trace a fascinating shift in attitudes toward the role of gardens, the idea of nature and the sorts of behaviour and experience that these gardens were intended to trigger. This talk will look in particular at the differences between two specific examples: the large-scale theatre often modelled on a classical theatre) intended for the performance of princely power and the more intimate hedge-theatres and grove-like amphitheatres linked to the performances of poetry and disputa by members of intellectual academies.

Short biography
Katrina Grant completed her PhD in Art History on the relationship between garden and theatre in Baroque Italy in 2011. She has previously published articles upon the villas and gardens of Lucca and the work of William Kent and Filippo Juvarra. Her research interests include the work of Filippo Juvarra, the history of stage set design, the design of Italian Baroque gardens and the use of the garden as a performance space in 17th and 18th century Europe. She has taught courses on Baroque Art and Architecture, garden history and Art and Travel. Katrina is an editor and webmaster of Melbourne Art Network and is also a founding editor of Emaj (electronic melbourne art journal), an open access, online art history journal that began in 2005.

Dr Paul Fox
Independent historian, Melbourne
The nineteenth-century Australian garden pavilion. A meditation on the prospect and nature of colonial scenery.
This paper will examine the garden pavilions in the Melbourne Botanic Gardens. It will argue these pavilion provided both a prospect of Australia colonial scenery and a vantage point to meditate on the particularities of Australian colonialism.

Short biography
Dr Paul Fox's research interests include garden and landscape histories. He is the author of Clearings. Six colonial gardeners and their landscapes (2004); articles on nineteenth century photography, and Sweet Damper and Gossip: Colonial sightings of the Goulburn and North-east (1994). He has been Museum Victoria's Thomas Ramsay science and humanities scholar, AGL Shaw scholar at State Library of Victoria and Alfred Deakin postdoctoral fellow at Deakin University. His latest research paper Architects and garden suburbs: The politics of Melbourne's interwar garden suburbs will be published in Landscape Review in 2016.

Session 2 - Architect, Architectural historian and historian

Tuesday 4 October 2016
1.30pm - 3.30pm
Federation Hall, Victorian College of the Arts

Session Chair: Professor Julie Willis
MSD and ACAHUCH, The University of Melbourne

Short biography
Professor Julie Willis is an authority on the history of Australian architecture 1890-1950 and has undertaken significant projects researching the development of modern hospital architecture in Australia; the importance of small public buildings in community and civic identity; architecture during wartime and its subsequent impact on practice and production; and the embodiment of nationalism and identity in Australian government architecture. She is currently involved in major projects examining the development of innovative school architecture in Australia; and equity and diversity in the Australian architectural profession. With Professor Philip Goad, she is Editor of the Encyclopedia of Australian Architecture. Her work on the history of women architects in Australia garnered significant attention, being awarded a commendation in the category of Best Art Book Published in 2001, by the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand, the National Bates Smart Award for Architecture in the Media in 2002, and named a Year of the Built Environment Exemplar in 2004. Julie is past editor of the refereed journal Fabrications and now a Chair of its editorial board, and a member of the advisory board of Architectural Theory Review.

Robert Grace
robert grace architecture
Pavillons
This paper will consider the following issues: MPavilion & the 200 year old swamp; What makes a Pavillon; any programme is ok; in analogue towards "architecture artisanale" in our post fossil era; dimunition of the world.

Short biography
Robert Grace, Franco-Australian, graduated from The University of Melbourne and from Columbia University. Conducted PhD research at The University of Melbourne in Paris whilst recipent Ackmann Scholarship and later at the AA in London. Based in Paris he has completed and worked on projects in Australia, Europe and the West Indies. He is a registered architect in Australia, United Kingdom and France. His atelier robert grace architecture was founded in Melbourne in 1984, and has been established in France since 1991. His projets have won prizes in Australia, United States and England. Many of these have been the subject of numerous publications in the same fashion as his crtical commentaries. He has been a member of international juries and has taught and lectured at Australian, American and European Universities. In 2016 he established state of grace as the research arm of robert grace architecture. His rencontres 2016 (in partnership with Columbia Global Centers, Paris) gathers actors in the world of architecture and associated realms to discuss their works, speculations and their collaborations. Rencontre no 4 marks the return to Paris in Septembre after Blak Flamingo, no 3 at the Venice Biennale. In 2016 his Des'Esparon series of papers and talks around the specific, personal and reflective experiences of building a home in the town of Esparon in the Cevennes in the South of France, have been given at conferences in Istanbul, Paris and Copenhagen.

Dr David O'Brien
MSD, The University of Melbourne
The Wave Hill Walk-off Pavilions: Stories in Steel, Concrete and Sweat
Fifty years ago one of the most important events ever to take place in Australia occurred on a remote cattle station at Wave Hill in the Northern Territory. Lord Vesty, living in London, refused to pay the Aboriginal stockmen and farm workers their rightful wages. He had stolen their land. The workers and their families, led by Vincent Lingiari, left the station along the ‘walk-off’ track. After a strike lasting more than eight years the Australian Government accepted the Gurindji’s claims for equal wages and allocated a portion of their land back. At a ceremony in 1975 Australia’s Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, symbolically poured a handful of sand into Vincent Lingiari’s hands as he passed ownership back to the Gurindji people. This was the first successful land rights case for Australia’s First People.

Bower Studio staff and graduate students from The University of Melbourne liaised and worked with the community over a two-year period to secure funding and industry support to realize the community's desire to commemorate the 50th anniversary with a series of pavilions along the track. The community provided its input and the design team included students who had completed a range of previous Bower Studio programs. The bough shelter’s designs were driven in part by the stories told by the community elders and traditional owners during consultation visits as well as a series of remnant artifacts from the Wave Hill Station held in esteem by the elders. Each of the shelters along the track use the same architectural language but is unique to its specific site and the stories belonging to that site.

Short biography
Dr David O'Brien is a Senior Lecturer in Architectural Design and Technology at the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, The University of Melbourne. David began the Bower Studio in 2008 and has since worked alongside twenty communities in Australia and Papua New Guinea with his teams building community infrastructure including education, health and housing facilities. For more information of these projects please see the Bower Studio website.

Professor Kate Darian Smith
ACAHUCH, The University of Melbourne
Pavilions as Memorials
On 1 January 1901, a crowd of 250,000 people gathered in Centennial Park in Sydney to celebrate the Federation of the Australian colonies. In a special pavilion erected for the occassion, Lord Hopetoun and Edmund Barton were sworn in, respectively, as the inaugural Governor-General and Prime Minister of the Australian nation. Constructed of plaster, the pavilion was never intended to be permanent, and by 1903 its deteriorated form was removed. In 1988, during Australia’s Bicentennial, a new and permanent commemorative Federation Pavilion was erected in Centennial Park to mark this historic event. This paper explores how pavilions may serve as memorials for communities and the nation. Many of these are associated with commemorating the loss of Australians in war, ranging from the elaborate Geelong Peace Memorial Pavilion (Buchan, Laird & Buchan, Percy E. Everett), dedicated in 1926 in the aftermath of World War I, to the utilitarian sports and community pavilions that were built throughout Australian after World War II. Pavilions, large and small, have been a remarkably adaptive memorial form within the Australian landscape.

Short biography
Kate Darian-Smith, FASSA, is Professor of Australian Studies and History, Faculty of Arts and Professor of Cultural Heritage, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, The University of Melbourne. She is Co-Director (with Julie Willis and Philip Goad) of the Australian Collaboratory for Architectural Heritage, Urban and Cultural Heritage (ACAHUCH). Kate publishes across a wide range of topics in Australian and imperial histories; memory studies; media history; childhood studies; and cultural heritage. An editor of Australian Historical Studies, she is a Research Associate at Museum Victoria and has advised state and federal governments and cultural institutions on Australians studies and heritage. Her recent publications include, as contributor and co-editor Designing Schools: Space, Place and Pedagogy (2017; with J Willis); Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers: Conflict, Performance and Commemoration in Australia and the Pacific Rim (2015 with P Edmonds); Children, Childhood and Cultural Heritage (2013 with C Pascoe).

Assoc. Professor Alison Inglis
School of Culture and Communication and Acting Director, AIAH at The University of Melbourne
The 'airy pavilion' entombed: Werribee Park's shell grotto
This paper investigates the seemingly contradictory structure - the Grotto Pavilion. While the Pavilion is traditionally associated with airy structures - located high on a building or open to some extent to the surrounding atmosphere - there is one subset of this architectural category which overturns these expectations: the Grotto Pavilion. A brief history of the Grotto Pavilion will be considered, but the focus of the discussion is the rare nineteenth-century grotto at Werribee Park, near Melbourne.

Short biography
Assoc. Professor Alison Inglis graduate of the Art History Department of The University of Melbourne. Alison teaches subjects on Art and Revolution: nineteenth-century Europe; Art, Markets and Materials; and museum studies (in particular issues in art museum management and art conservation). Alison has co-ordinated the MA Art Curatorship programme since 1995. Her PhD thesis examined the work of the nineteenth-century artist, Sir Edward Poynter, focusing on his decorative work including public schemes in the South Kensington Museum, the Houses of Parliament, St Paul's Cathedral and domestic commissions. She has been co-curator of three exhibitions: Archaeology in 19th century art and design; the early collections of the State Library and National Gallery of Victoria; and works of William Morris in Victorian collections. She has been and is now a member of several museum boards, including the Board of Heide Museum of Modern Art; the Management Committee of the Duldig Studio and the Donald Thomson Collection Committee of the Melbourne Museum.

Session 3 - Curators and artist

Tuesday 4 October 2016
4.00pm - 6.00pm
Federation Hall, Victorian College of the Arts

Session Chair: Professor Su Baker
Director, Victorian College of the Arts, The University of Melbourne

Dr Rebecca Coates
Director, Shepparton Art Museum
Pagodas, Pavilions and Contemporary Art
Pavilions are a mechanism for museums, galleries and private foundations to fuse contemporary art and architecture, offering new sites for collaboration, platforms for extended exhibition activity, and attractions for audiences beyond those engaged in contemporary art. While the Serpentine Gallery has led the way with their Pavilion series, the commissioning of permanent and temporary pavilions has become the domain of the private foundation.  Recent examples include Inhotim, Brazil; Art Site Naoshima, Japan; the Prada Foundation's collaborations with architect Rem Koolhaas; Thyssen Bornemisza TBC21's Pavilion Series of temporary and permanent collaborations with architects and contemporary artists; and most recently, the Naomi Milgrom Foundation's four year commission series, MPavilion (now in its third year). This paper examines the impacts of the pavilion model on contemporary art. It considers whether, as was recently claimed, within the contemporary art world, the current "pavilionisation" effect has reached its limits.

Short biography
Rebecca Coates is a curator, writer, and lecturer. She is Director of SAM, Shepparton Art Museum. She has worked extensively as a curator in Australia and overseas, at institutions including the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Melbourne International Arts Festival (MIAF), and Museum of Modern Art Oxford (MOMA Oxford). She is also an Honorary Fellow, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, where she was previously lecturer in contemporary art and art curatorship. She was awarded a PhD in Art History, University of Melbourne in 2013. Her thesis examined the intersection of contemporary art and exhibition histories, biennials and private philanthropy, exploring the rise of private art foundations as part of a globalized contemporary art world.

Geoff Nees
Artist and curator, Melbourne
A brief and incomplete history of Japanese inspired Pavilions in Melbourne
Melbourne Artist and curator Geoff Nees will share some thoughts and images on pavilion architecture, discussing his own work in the area as well an incomplete history of Japanese influenced pavilions in Melbourne, including his own current collaborations with Kengo Kuma and Associates from Japan.

Short biography
Geoff Nees is a Melbourne-based artist, curator and DJ whose work can be found in galleries, public spaces and private collections around the world. Ranging from studio-based works on paper to large-scale architectural facades and interiors, his projects develop out of a broad, interdisciplinary practice that incorporates research - especially into Australia’s music and fashion histories. Geoff is a passionate advocate of free radicalism and a proud campaigner for local talent.

Dr David Sequeira
Director, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, VCA
The Pavilion: from the Renaissance to Ramsey Street
"The pavilion is primarily a vantage point, a perspective, a point of view. Quite unnecessary but necessarily shaping the scene."
Elizabeth Shultz ‘Shore line’
Drawing on selected historical and contemporary imagery The Pavilion: from the Renaissance to Ramsey Street explores the highly charged symbolic nature of the pavilion and its persistence in the representation of culture, values and beliefs. Understood as a potent hybrid of interiority and exteriority, the pavilion (in a range of forms including the gazebo, pagoda and rotunda) is presented as a site for romance, devotion and conviction.

Short biography
David Sequeira is an artist and curator with extensive experience in working with diverse audiences to develop a place for art in their lives. David has held senior positions in the areas of curatorship, audience engagement, business development and cultural programming in a range of art museums and public institutions including the National Gallery of Australia, the National Portrait Gallery, the National Film and Sound Archive and Australian Parliament House, Canberra. Most recently David curated the highly acclaimed exhibition My Learned Object: Collections & Curiosities for the Ian Potter Museum of Art at The University of Melbourne. Containing over 2000 objects ranging from paintings to dead animals in formaldehyde, the exhibition surveyed over 30 of the University’s Cultural Collections. David is currently Director of the Margaret Lawrence Gallery, VCA, The University of Melbourne.