Triangles in the landscape

As the National Gallery proceeded towards completion in the late 1970s, so too did the design and documentation of the Sculpture Garden. From the very beginning with the 1968 competition entry¹, each design iteration of the Gallery building had attempted to create a dialogue with its larger site, and with the wider context: the landscape-based ideal of Canberra. The idea of terraced outdoor rooms engaging with a building that also might be terraced in form had been an early preoccupation that ran across both the Camp Hill and lakeside sites. But with the idea of an elevated National Place, proposed in 1971 but abandoned in 1975², the strict volumetric requirements of the High Court that encouraged a cuboid form, and the desire for the taller forms of the Gallery to engage in dialogue with its neighbour, a new verticality was the outcome. Despite this visual shift, the original design concept of a landscape of outdoor gallery ‘rooms’ remained.

In 1978, landscape architect Harry Howard (1930–2000) and his associate Barbara Buchanan were appointed to work closely with architects Madigan and Roger Vidler in the EMTB office, to refine the 14-hectare landscape design for the Gallery and ‘weave a fabric between the High Court and Gallery buildings and their surrounds’.³

Howard, who had graduated from architecture at the University of Sydney in 1954 and then from town planning, had been an associate in the EMTB office from 1959 until 1965. Passionate about indigenous plants—an interest he shared with friends and landscape architects Bruce Rickard and Bruce Mackenzie, with whom he and other architects and designers shared studio space at 7 Ridge Street, North Sydney—Howard directed his career to landscape architecture after 1966. He was thus ideally placed to work with EMTB. In mid-1978, Madigan and Mollison travelled overseas to look at sculpture gardens and by the end of the year they had finalised requirements for and determined to produce a landscape of international significance.⁴ Richard Goodwin’s perspective renderings of the garden in 1979 brought the team’s vision to life. Edging closer to realisation, it seemed finally that a complete, holistic vision of an integrated environment of art, building and landscape might be achieved.

As with the Gallery, the emphasis for the Garden was on local materials; it was planted almost entirely with indigenous Australian flora, much of which Howard desired to be sourced from the Canberra region.⁵ The plan was to have Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring gardens, based on flowering seasons, and Howard wanted the asymmetry and haphazard nature of native trees and shrubs to complement and soften the Gallery’s pristine forms. Within the Parliamentary Triangle, this landscape—the only one in the Parliamentary Triangle where trees have not been planted on a grid—was and remains a unique and compelling statement, very different from the Beaux-Arts formalism of the capital’s ceremonial axes and its largely exotic avenue plantings.

The landscape design made the most of given, confusing and then shifting circumstances of the levels between the two buildings—the necessary urban nature of the entry concourse, with its ramps and stairs and the underground car park, both then under construction, as well as the one-way nature of Parkes Place and the introduction of a surface car park at the rear of the building between the Gallery and King Edward Terrace. The garden was planned originally to fan around the Gallery in a 180-degree arc with longer directional vistas, hinting at views of the lake and the Carillon. An earth berm, originally proposed by Bruce Mackenzie, was adopted to shield the site from traffic noise from Bowen Place.⁶ Close to the north-west corner of the building was the Mintaro slate-paved sculpture court (the Winter Garden), location for human-scaled sculptures by Rodin, Aristide Maillol and Gaston Lachaise, which could also be seen from inside and alongside maquettes of the originals. At what became a seminal meeting in October 1978 to determine design principles, Mollison specified that ‘sculptures and the lake were not to be seen at the same time, and not in strong light’ and that visitors were to be under no illusion that works of art were being placed in a purely natural setting: each sculpture was to be placed in a ‘room’ or on a ‘podium’ within the Garden.⁷

As Roger Vidler has explained, an overarching principle of the sculpture collection was that it would grow in five-year stages with the garden being developed similarly, following a principle of spatial growth represented by large equilateral triangles:

Another use of geometry was the use of the Golden Mean to determine the proportions of the differently sized garden ‘rooms’. Remarkably, these ordering principles do not overpower. Howard and Buchanan’s planting choices, based on shape and seasonal flowering, mean that even with the myriad changes and additions over the decades the final result is one of the most subtle experiences of a consciously designed indigenous landscape in Australia.

However, in 1981, as the building was completed, this was hardly evident. Over the next ten months, landscaping began on a grubby, muddy site previously occupied by a concrete plant, material stockpiles, rough builders’ roads, subcontractors’ yards and temporary offices. Scraped clean, planting began. The Sculpture Court was paved and a pond inserted, as well as a slate-paved avenue leading from the Gallery to Lake Burley Griffin, and all the major sculptural works were installed. Night lighting took the form of three-metre-high poles topped by spherical glass balls, inspired by the sculpture park Espacio Escultórico at UNAM in Mexico City, which Mollison and Madigan visited on their overseas tour. But sculptor Robert Klippel later objected and all the light poles were subsequently lopped to bollard height (as they remain today).⁹ By September 1982, the planting was sparse but complete.

On 12 October 1982, Queen Elizabeth II opened the National Gallery of Australia. It was a grand affair, televised and broadcast to an audience of nearly two million Australians. In addition to the Gallery’s Council and some 850 guests, Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser and his wife were there, as were other politicians and dignitaries, including the Honorary DT McVeigh, Minister for Home Affairs and Environment. Gallery Chairman Gordon Darling and his wife accompanied the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh through the Australian art (Galleries 6 and 7) before the royal party watched a fireworks display over Lake Burley Griffin from the Visitors’ Lounge. They then proceeded to Galleries 5 and 4, then International art in Galleries 3 and 2, and Primitive and Aboriginal art in Galleries 8 and 8A, where the Queen met Indigenous artist George Garrawun and viewed the Pukumani poles (Tiwi Island burial poles) from the Tiwi Islands, before returning to Gallery 11.

The Queen and Duke of Edinburgh had been given a near full architectural and art experience of the gallery (but in reverse) and the building was at last completely alive with art and visitors. Remarkably, the royal party did not enter Gallery 9, the magnificent and lofty volume of the ground floor sculpture gallery, where two highlights of Mollison’s international collecting were on display—Constantin Brâncusi’s Bird in Space c 1931–36 and Joseph Beuys’s Stripes from the house of the shaman 1964–72. Col and Ruby Madigan were presented to the Queen. Also at the opening—at Madigan’s request—were all the key project staff, as well as the significant consultants. Absent was James Johnson Sweeney—then 82; he would have been gratified to know that his shepherding of the design process had come to pass in a vision finally realised.

This is an edited excerpt of the essay ‘Concrete Ambitions’, co‑published by the National Gallery of Australia and Black Inc. on the occasion of the Gallery’s 40th anniversary in Vision: art, architecture and the National Gallery of Australia.