CONTROLLED SPIRALS IN POST-WAR MOTORISED BRISBANE
ANDREW WILSON
The Wickham Terrace Carpark (1961) in Brisbane was designed by the city architect James Birrell (1928-2019) and involved a collaboration with Melbourne artist James Meldrum. The collaboration between architect and artist and its contribution to the experience of driver and pedestrian is a particularly interesting aspect of the car park project. A commitment to architecture and to culture, the integration of art and the commissioning of artists are recurring themes found with James Birrell’s architectural projects over the arc of his career. The car park design separates the car’s movement up through the car park on split floor plates under low coffered ceilings and departure on a tight spiral ramp. These experiences are supplemented by a monumental hieroglyphic mural wrapped around the lift tower of the car park aimed to address the broader city.
The interest in the integration of art and architecture developed during Birrell’s education. In 1947 he enrolled at the Melbourne Technical College – later RMIT – and was later accepted into the University of Melbourne Architectural Atelier. In 1952, he was a founder of the magazine Architecture and Arts with Helen O’Donnell, Norman Lehey and architect, painter and sculptor Peter Burns, who was founding editor. Established out of the milieu of the student publication Smudges at the University of Melbourne, it presented architecture projects and art content side by side. It paid homage to Arts and Architecture, the magazine founded by John Entenza in the United States of America that sponsored the Case Study House program in Los Angeles after World War Two.
James Meldrum (1931–) was included in an exhibition organised by the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Melbourne in 1951, the year James Birrell graduated. His first solo exhibition took place at Kozminsky Galleries, Melbourne, in 1953.2 He taught at RMIT and experimented with different painting approaches during the 1950s, oscillating between geometric abstraction and surreal figuration.
In 1954 James Birrell exhibited with the Contemporary Art Society – reactivated that year by John Reed seven years after its collapse in 1947, with Peter Burns appointed Secretary – in Mora Studio, the studio of artist Mirka Mora in Grosvenor Chambers. He submitted Space Modulator, a three-dimensional painting, a rectangular support with blocks of wood fixed on. The masonite support was painted yellow; the blocks were painted black and arranged in a rectilinear architectonic composition determined by the golden mean. Space Modulator was singled out for derision in a review in the Bulletin as being ‘less interesting than a motor-car dashboard’.1
For the Wickham Terrace Carpark project, Meldrum employed metal tools used by ceramicists to impress patterns into clay to generate the mural template. This motif was sketched out by Meldrum in Spain and posted in a letter to Birrell. It is reminiscent of colourful abstract paintings executed by the artist at the time, such as Calm Group (1960), a composition of dark shadowy ovular forms, and the brighter Small Reverie (1960), a composition of seemingly translucent interwoven oblong shapes.
Meldrum’s sketches were transposed onto the inside of formwork as positive shapes, then left as an impression in the concrete. The motif was repeated seamlessly and serially to wrap around the lift tower, while cut to fit its form, covering available surfaces as a kind of inverted monumental bas-relief. It was repeated vertically at every level and three times across the street-facing façade of the Wickham Terrace Car Park lift tower. In the act of construction, the formwork was removed and repositioned a level above after each pour.
The resultant mural operates at two levels; first, as a component of strategies conceived out of an interest in positioning the car park as a positive twentieth-century civic building type and, second, as a textural device perceived at speed when driving past on Wickham Terrace, also from the interior of the car park when moving through it on foot. Fragmentary views of the mural are visible from the car park interior framed by the edges of the car park decks. The serial deployment of Meldrum’s pattern produces a monumental effect that addresses the city, motorist and pedestrian. The depth of its imprint was calibrated to be graphically legible both at speed and in the glare of the mid-summer sun.
Birrell designed the car park over eight levels, to accommodate five hundred cars. It was connected by underground tunnel to Anzac Square next to Central Station as a key element of a post-war transport hub.3 It was originally conceived as two stacks of horizontal car park decks, making a butterfly plan at the corner, adjacent to a six-storey office building propped by a tripartite strut to complete the ensemble. In Birrell’s first conception each stack had its own separate spiral ramp drum.
Over these decks and topping a full spiral drum in the centre hovered a cylindrical restaurant capped by a creased nonagonal roof, positioned to take advantage of panoramic views across the city.4 The two forms were eventually stacked up to become one. The office building and restaurant were sacrificed, replaced by a refreshment kiosk at a lower level. This early conception reveals an intention to introduce other programs to dampen the blunt effect of a building type intended for one purpose only, the daily ritual of driving in and driving out and the movement of patrons to and from their cars.
The form of the car park results from an accretion of spiralling down ramp drum, lift tower and ancillary tower fused onto the main car park decks. A small entry ticket booth was designed as a separate cylindrical form capped with a flattened conical roof. Additional ramps around the booth complete the car circulation diagram. The composition of the car park dramatises the movement of the cars on the decks required to accommodate them. Further, the fire escape stairs—which could have been housed in the tower—are added on to it to provide another view of the city, appearing from behind the screen of the mural as though the form were being pulled apart. They could have been designed by Marcel Breuer. The mural is actually quite deceptive. Although it wraps around the lift tower and hides the lower ancillary tower behind, it collapses into surface effect front on. The back of the ancillary tower features a curtain wall now hidden by an adjacent building. The ramps of the car park deck fall in the opposite direction to the slope of the site on the Wickham Terrace elevation.
Cars articulate the composition in other ways. The car park appears to have been embedded in the ground. The variable floor plate edge that registers every ramp along the length of the car park is an added destabilising compositional effect. The elevation features tooth-like concrete upstands on to which is fixed a textured buffer in front of each parking bay. Cadmium springs and thin stainless steel rods tensioned by turnbuckles are components of the façade composition deployed as a precaution to guard against vehicles careering out of control. They screen the basement and ground level of the car park including one opening at each level of the downward spiral, presumably the moment of greatest acceleration.
The trajectory of movement on the split floor slab of the car park decks is up. The constant low floor-to- ceiling height creates a continuous experiential loop broken by required turns at each end. The gridded waffle slab ceiling accentuates this movement. Arrival on the open roof deck reveals a panoramic view of the city. A tight spiral then controls the descent, and a recurring oscillation unwinds between spiralling framed views to the city and framed views back into the dark interior of the car park, with its shiny floors and squat rectangular columns capped by truncated pyramids, prior to exiting to the street.
The Wickham Terrace Carpark represents an attempt to define an emerging building type in the post-war Australian city. The mural is integral to the architecture, doubling to amplify the civic ambition of the project. Upward and downward circulation through the car park is separated – made radically different as adjacent experience – anticipating the way someone might park their car, move out into the city and return to drive home. It imagines the car park type as a positive civic presence; an ambition that may seem naïve today, given our contemporary doubts about the car and the debased car park solutions with which we have become all too familiar.
1 “Artbursts”, The Bulletin 75, no. 3871, (April 1954): 19.
2 James Meldrum’s curriculum vitae, www.greenhillgalleriesadelaide.com.au/meldrum/ meldrummain.html (viewed 21 February 2008).
3 Philip Goad, “One of the Lost Tribe: James Birrell and that Other Tradition”, in Birrell. Work from the Office of James Birrell, NMBW Publications, Melbourne, 1997, 20.
4 John Macarthur and Shane Murray, “Form and Materials: Some Notes on Birrell’s Aesthetic” in Birrell. Work from the Office of James Birrell, 9.