17 Meredith Circuit  

Designed by organic architect Laurie Virr in 1975.

3 Bruthen Road 

“Designed and built by respected Geelong architect Graeme Williams as his own family home, this quality executive house offers 350m2 (38 squares) of living space (approx). Open plan in design with large windows throughout, this house optimises its northerly aspect and cleverly uses plantings to filter the summer sun.”

Auction: Sat, 17th October 09 1.00pm
Fruit Property Geelong. 640K+

4 Thornhill Drive 

NOW SOLD

Pretty special house and garden from the 50s or 60s, being sold by an architect (2008).

Owner’s text:

The house was designed in 1962 by Peter Robinson+Associates. Don’t know much about them, but we met the project architect, Peter Matters, on the day of the auction in late 2002. He was 80-something not out, still practising somewhere out near Bacchus Marsh, and had shown up out of curiosity to see who bought the place.
He designed the house for a local real-estate agent (!) and his wife, who raised their 3 children here. It’s a perfect family house and was obviously well-loved by its original owners. The mother had recently died, and I think the children were happy to see the house go to another family who would appreciate its unique qualities.

I think of the place like one of those Californian Case-Study houses with its casual-modernism-with-the-hard-edges- knocked-off-gone-all-lazy-and-comfortable-attitude. The place is pretty much as imagined by the architect back in the 1960’s.

Andrew (Boy) Charlton Pool  

Australian Academy of Science Dome  

1958

Blues Point tower 

Built 1961.

From an interview Harry Seidler gave to the Sydney Morning Herald in 2002 ( link ):

“This is old news, stupid bloody nonsense, I’m sick to death of it. It’s a journalistic gimmick. I’ve always thought Blues Point Tower is one of my best buildings and I stand by that. Anybody who can’t see anything in it ought to go back to school.”

MORE IMAGES
Seidlers scrap books at the SLNSW
Blues Point Tower at Flickr

Boyd Baker House  

“In coming into the Boyd Baker House Sir Roy [Grounds] asked Michael Baker “what mistakes did Robin make?” Dr Baker simply replied “none” .”

The buildings are available to stay in and for functions.

Bushbunker  

“Bushbunker is an architecturally designed bushfire safety bunker concept that has been envisioned in response to the horrific Black Saturday bushfires of February 2009. The design addresses the limitations of the Victorian Governments revised building standards for bushfire prone areas, as well as the critical shortcomings of current market solutions.”

Capitol Theatre  

The main link below is to the RMIT webpage (RMIT own the building). More interesting and photo-filled is this page .

Council House, Perth 

Designed by Jeffrey Howlett and Don Bailey (for the 1960 Perth Town Hall
Competition), this elegant modernist building finally made it onto the state heritage register in 2006, after surviving a 1990s proposal to pull it down.

Sources: Heritage register, wikipedia

Eureka Tower  

Federation Square  

Governor Phillip Tower 

Denton Corker Marshall design, built in 1993.

Guilford Bell Pavilion  

An owner’s profile of her pyramid-roofed Guilford Bell house in Templestowe, Melbourne. Includes some photos.

Happy Haus  

Donovan Hill designed portable housing.

Heide Museum of Modern Art  

Worth a visit from time to time. Generally well-curated exhibitions in some interesting buildings by McGlashan Everist and, more recently, O’Connor and Houle.

Closed Mondays.

Holyoake Cottage  

Field Consultants’ Holyoake cottage is for private sale in Hawthorn for $750,000. Inspections (by appointment) this week (6th & 8th August 2009).

Winner of the Victorian Architecture Medal and Harold Desbrowe-Annear Award, the architects (FIELD consultants) described it like this:

It is not a villa. It is not heavy. It is not for a land rover discovery. It does not have a bathroom for every bedroom. It is not cheap. It is not tempered. It is not solid. It is not a figured plan.

It is not in Sydney. It is not in America. It does not have three bedrooms. It does not have a pantry. It does not have a sewing room or a den. It does not have a family room. It is no place for a white man.

Kangan Batman TAFE  

Automotive Centre of Excellence (ACE). Stage 1 (Stage 2 is expected to be complete by early 2011).

This Lyons building is a one stop auto training shop for Victoria. A lot of functionality has been wedged into a tight site, helped along by a first floor with heavy duty lift for carrying cars up and down. Lyons seem to have made the most of an obviously limited brief, using the necessary windows and safety markings to express some of their trademark diagonal style.

It works well as a building while empty and quiet, but you’d have to have reservatinos about setting foot in there while its busy. There are just so many nasty auto-building actvities jammed next to one another you’d have to wonder how you could hear or breathe. Still, the occupiers deem it a success, and may expand to a six day week to accommodate demand. The facilities are so state of the art that graduates express disappointment when they return to their old-school suburban auto shops which are slightly more Victorian in atmosphere (meaning the era not the state).

The building is 5 star friendly – using automatic thermostats to shift air around as required. The only air-conditioned spaces are the offices (one can imagine the briefing session), all other areas are naturally ventilated and heated (with the exception of the halls which have gas boosters for the winter months). The teaching spaces suffer from this, being stifling hot even without students in the room – probably something to do with all the computers.

The buillding is Stage 1 only at the moment, it is soon to triple in size to accommodate just about anything to do with automobile training.

Is there some slight irony that an automotive training centre is 5 star friendly? Apparently the students are made aware of forthcoming changes in the industry due to peak oil and carbon emissions, but this isn’t evident other than in an electric toy car. Surprising also is the fact that all broken cars returned to their gleaming initial state by the students are then crushed into cubes.

Kaurna Building  

Louis Laybourne Smith School of Architecture and Design by John Wardle Architects.

Lonsdale House barber shop 

This little barber shop occupied space on Caledonian Lane, in between a tailor and a mattress shop. The storekeepers had been worked beside one another for about 30 years, I was told. In 2004, ill health meant the barber had to close. A Japanese cafe held the space for a few years after that. The Myer-owned building has been empty this year and has been covered in graffiti, paving the way for its demolition.

Here is a little gallery of photos taken inside and outside the barber shop in 2004, during a measure up.