Architecture and Design

Childhood memories often merge real life with imaginary nostalgia, but in Growing up Modern, Roger Benjamin’s memoir of his family’s 1956 modernist Round House, in the then rural Canberra suburb of Deakin, we find adolescent memories collaged with a mix of archival, architectural, social, and personal histories. It is set mainly during Australia’s postwar years of the 1950s when reconstructive policies drove economic, scientific, educational, and cultural reform. this was also a time when an influx of immigrants, multicultural labourers, and specialist émigrés inserted themselves into Australia’s Anglocentric landscape. The book tells a Canberra and Melbourne story about architectural and cultural modernism, so often imported with the émigrés, that countered Australia’s cultural cringe and anachronistic nationalism. 

Whereas many look to Vienna for its imperial architecture, the city developed a rich and complex relationship with modernist forms when they exploded across Europe in the early twentieth century. In this week’s ABR Podcast, Christopher Menz, former Director of the Art Gallery of South Australia, explains this fascinating aspect of Viennese cultural history – including its surprising connection with Australia. Christopher Menz and ABR Editor Peter Rose will be leading a cultural tour of Vienna from October 13 to 24 for Academy Travel. Listen to Christopher Menz in conversation with Academy Travel’s Stuart Barrie here.

Living in a Modern Way:California Design 1930–1965 is the catalogue accompanying an exhibition of the same name at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2011–12. The exhibition is now showing at Queensland’s Gallery of Modern Art, after a stint in Seoul.