Berlage x Bnieuws
IN CONVERSATION WITH DAVID T. VAN ZANTEN Words: Berlage student, Stef Dingen, and David T. Van Zanten, Mary Jane Crow Emeritus Professor at Northwestern University
Several weeks before giving a lecture about Chicago-based architect Walter Burley Griffin’s Canberra Plan, as part of this semester’s Berlage Sessions, there was the opportunity to speak to historian David T. Van Zanten. His recent lecture was one in a series of case studies examining the histories, politics, policies, and processes of canonical architectural competitions since the mid-eighteenth century.
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From the Chicago Tribune Tower and the Paris Opera House, to Parc de la Villette and most recently the Guggenheim Helsinki, the public lecture series explored these competitions as opportunities of experimentation. Beyond the architectural competition’s evident objective of selecting an architect, ulterior motives are often at play. Financial and political considerations can steer the organising party in selecting a particular architect, while designers may utilise their answer to the competition brief as a vehicle to promote a certain ideology. The ensuing glimpse into our discussion about Griffin’s endeavours in Australia, leads from his lofty personal aspirations to the changing nature of architectural competitions at large. “This is not necessarily a competition to design the new capital for Australia, but rather to set an example of a new architecture,” Professor Van Zanten explained early on in our conversation on Walter Griffin’s work. After beating his European star competitors Eliel Saarinen and Alfred Agache, in the 1911 competition to lay out Canberra, the new capital city of a united Australia, Griffin managed to get himself named in charge of a second step: an immediate competition for the parliament central to his winning urban plan. As Van Zanten argues, it is the competition for this capitol building that he used in his pursuit of inventing a new, concrete architecture. Similar ideas had been implicit in the initial renderings of their winning Canberra proposal by Marion Mahoney, Griffin’s wife and professional partner, but only after the pair mobilised jurors across Europe and the United States, did their intentions become clear. The eventual jury consisted of Louis Sullivan, Victor Laloux, John James Burnet, and Otto Wagner, all of whom were sympathetic to the use of reinforced concrete, and could thus serve as allies in Griffin’s quest. Wagner in particular, appeared to be receptive to this potentially revolutionary project. Reality hit though when World War I broke out, and the competition as Griffin had imagined it never came to any sort of fruition. It is at this point that our talk moved away
