The Pinnacle

Design Architect: Frank Godsell
Project Team: Frank Godsell, Dmitri Massinof

You think Laika was lonely?

Pinnacle at the close of its first decade.

Spare a thought for poor Gagarin – twenty days in a tiny, claustrophobic capsule, with only a purloined balalaika for company. Twenty days before that first, almost inaudible report as another metal bauble nosed its way into the crooked gap between the steel sphere of the life-support capsule and the eight-faced jewel of the retro-rocket.

The Amerikano, Alan Shephard, in the tiny conical flask of Freedom 7. He punched through to Gagarin’s cosy coffin in a matter of minutes. Neither of them were de-orbiting – spot welds and oxy-acetlyne cuts would work well enough to hold in the air.

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Tadosa – Cities on the Edge

Not all of our projects are local. For the last month, we’ve been working alongside a number of parties in the curation and framing of a body of research into ‘edge’ conditions in ‘edge-states.’

The liminal (and near) nations of Transnistria, South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Somaliland have a chequered history of collaboration. Drawn together by a shared inability to gain all but the most cursory recognition from the UN, and consolidated into a sort of loose body of mutual co-operation and support, they remain marked by stark political, geographic and demographic differences. Transnistria is defined by a heavily industrialised economy, but mounting debts and a slowly dwindling population; Somaliland is marked by rapid population growth and some of the few functioning public institutions in the broader Horn-of-africa region.

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The Circle City – Archive Material

Detail of concertina join and segment control tower

Somewhere, mouldering away in the State Government Archives, are row upon row of near-featureless filing cabinets, dating from the glory-days of the Melbourne Metropolitan Tramways Board. For the main, they contain little more than the dull minutiae of everyday, bureaucratic activity – minutes, missives, memos. But one cluster holds something dramatically different; thousands of tightly coiled wax paper documents.

It’s this latter collection that we really should be thankful for. While G&C’s local archives are prey to the exigencies of conversion – of transfer from blueprint to any number of mutually incompatible software formats, on any number of broken or compromised media – this collection preserves the original blueprints of the trams and systems that have colonised our city for the last century.

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Press Release – The Melbourne Wall

In rapid response to recent ‘Occupy Melbourne’ demonstrations, prominent Melbourne architects Godsell & Corrigan have been engaged to reconstruct a relic of the city’s urban past – The Melbourne Wall – in order to contain growing civil unrest in the city’s inner suburbs.

Beginning on Friday 21st October 2011 as a police barricade, riot-squad officers were quickly replaced with temporary mesh fencing and will soon be superseded again by a triple-brick wall of the highest architectural order.

The beginnings of the Melbourne Wall formed quickly in response to 'Occupy Melbourne' protests

What started as a peaceful demonstration quickly escalated into full-blown conflict as Lord Mayor Robert Doyle instructed riot police to forcibly remove protestors from the city square. Some commentators suspect Mr Doyle of orchestrating the conflict in order to lay the foundations for his vision to reconstruct The Wall.

Speculation of this nature begins in December 2008, when Mr Doyle made a call to arms on Radio 3AW to keep the ‘bogans’ out of Melbourne, saying ‘I don’t want the city to be a bogan magnet’. Many wondered at the time what measures he would take. Now, with mounting pressure to contain an unruly mob, he may have found the perfect reason to build the long-awaited ‘Bogan Wall’.

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The Melbourne Wall

Design Architect: Frank Godsell
Project Team: Patricia Corrigan & Frank Godsell
READ PRESS RELEASE

In response to the growing civil unrest sparked by the ‘Occupy Melbourne’ demonstrations, Godsell & Corrigan have been engaged by local government to create a wall that will ensure ongoing peace in the City of Melbourne. In these uncertain economic times and in the wake of the Jasmine Revolution, we feel a new kind of wall is required – a wall that not only divides, but one that inspires the city’s disenfranchised.

The proposed plan for the new Melbourne Wall

Indeed, the new Melbourne Wall will be a beautiful instrument of division within the urban landscape. Drawing influence from the masters of German Brick Expressionism, the Wall employs a decorative Flemish Bond to bring texture and life to the greyest corners of Melbourne.

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Circle-City Tram

Design Architect: Patricia Corrigan
Project Team: Frank Godsell & Patricia Corrigan

June, 1980. Melbourne’s city circle tunnel, grossly over-budget and years overdue, finally approaches completion. Sadly, this belated finish would also put paid to one of the city’s most novel additions to the public transport network.

Engineer's Specifications - Cortocelleli Partners, 1978

In late 1978, Godsell & Corrigan had been invited to design an interim tactic toward the provision of a ‘city-circle’ – a method of transport that would anticipate and formalize approaches for the slowly approaching city-loop. Their solution was – and remains – one of the strongest and simplest urban gestures to ever be employed at an infrastructural level; a 6 kilometre long interconnected chain of carriages, an endless, continuous tram encircling the city centre.

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The Australian Pavilion – Venice

Design Architect: Frank Godsell
Project Team: Patricia Corrigan & Frank Godsell
READ PRESS RELEASE

In close consultation with the Australasian Arts Council, Godsell & Corrigan have designed the next incarnation of the Australian Pavilion in Venice. This project continues our interest in the confluence of natural and man-made artefacts, drawing inspiration from the sprawling roofscapes of McMansion suburbia to create an icon reminiscent of the monolithic heart at the centre of our great nation: Uluru.

The New Australian Pavilion along the giardini canal in Venice

Our pavilion concerns itself equally with both the beautiful and the grotesque, pervasive as they are in the Australian psyche. It captures the country’s natural splendour and its mythology, yet doesn’t forget the expanding suburban waistlines that threaten to crowd our natural treasures. Dangerously, it examines the hypothetical moment when Uluru itself is colonised by suburban interests. Not a project of optimistic speculation, but rather a careful look at who we are today and what it is we may become; a fitting backdrop for our nation’s artists and architects to examine the most pressing issues of our age.

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Press Release – Australian Pavilion, Venice

An Australian Annexe to the U.S. Pavilion

In a limited design competition between the two directors of Godsell and Corrigan, the Australasian Arts Council has arrived at a winning scheme for the new Australian Pavilion in Venice.

Each year, the pavilion will be used to exhibit Australia’s most talented artists and architects as part of Venice’s alternating art and architecture biennales. The existing pavilion, generously designed by Cox Architects in 1988 for no fees and with very limited resources, has become outdated, underperforming as a venue suitable to represent Australia’s world class talent.

In recent years, the AAC has come under increasing pressure to run an open competition for all Australian architecture practices to consider what our future pavilion might be. However due to fading vision, the AAC’s jury decided to limit the competition to just two practitioners with an established track record.

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Reconstructive Icons

Design Architect: Patricia Corrigan
Project Team: Frank Godsell & Patricia Corrigan

Unused Scheme - 2006

Following the collapse of the 9th Apostle in 2005 – despite common assumptions, there were only ever nine sandstone stacks – the Board of Victorian Regional Tourism toyed with the idea of reconstructing the crumbled monolith. Building upon existing religious nomenclature, and contemporary fascination with what would prove to be Australia’s first Catholic Saint, an ill fated proposal to reconstruct the edifice in the likeness of Mary McKillop was floated.

It was, for very obvious reasons, quietly shelved.

G&C prepared this image, alongside a much more serious proposal for a short term eco-hotel that would sensitively re-assemble the ruined structure.

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