Demolish the Adelaide Festival Centre? No way! Let’s build up SA architecture instead

A BUILDING by “starchitect” Frank Gehry could be Adelaide’s ticket to global prominence and a tourist-dollar boom. But SA should look to its own talented architects first.

Chinese billionaire Dr Chau Chak Wing.

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EVERYONE wants a Gehry. A building by “starchitect” Frank Owen Goldberg, better known in the trade as Frank Gehry, can be a ticket to global prominence and a tourist-dollar boom.

Canadian-born Californian Gehry shot to fame (among non-architects) in 1997, when his Guggenheim Museum Bilbao opened its doors and turned a forsaken Basque port area into a must-visit art destination.

The Bilbao Effect soon became the catchphrase on every mayor’s lips. A flood of commissions followed: EMP Museum, Seattle; Art Gallery of Ontario; New World Centre, Florida. You haven’t heard of them? Turns out the Effect wasn’t always so effective.

But then Gehry followed up in 2003 with the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles — a building that secured his reputation as a designer of metal-plated tourist magnets.

Keen to be part of the action, other cities also turned to starchitects. Money was thrown at Sir Norman Foster, Tadao Ando, Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers and Rem Koolhaas. Taipei fell for Toyo Ito, Paris became a fan of Shigeru Ban, London had to have a Zaha Hadid.

Dame Zaha Hadid.

Geneva-based architect Hans Park, who has worked for a starchitect in Japan and on large projects with one of Asia’s biggest firms, extending from China, Japan, Vietnam to Singapore, says he feels “conflicted” about starchitects’ contributions.

“If the state authorities know how to set up the project and how to run it, it tends to be valuable,” he says. “But big projects tend to be difficult, and a city museum is a tough proposition.”

GETTING GEHRY

Could we hope to secure Gehry’s talents to build on the Festival Plaza space anyway? His office is saying nothing, but consider this. Gehry spent months negotiating over the right to do his own thing for the UTS “Paper Bag” building in Sydney. He nearly packed up his wiggly bricks and went home. And he turned 87 last weekend; would he want to spend years negotiating with the Department of Planning, Transport and Infrastructure; the SA Government, Adelaide City Council and the State Heritage Unit?

Consider also that Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, the Arab state’s $1 billion Gehry building based on the Spanish original, was announced nine years ago, yet construction has not yet started. And a verbal, in-principle agreement reached some four years ago to build a concert hall for the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra has progressed no further.

Modern art museums and galleries around the world

VIEW GALLERY

In fact, since the Bilbao Effect came into being, only one Australian building has been created that draws a crowd from around the globe — Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art, or MONA as it is better known, designed by Melbourne architect Nonda Katsalidis (who, by the way, also co-designed The Advertiser building).

David Walsh, the multi-millionaire gambler-turned-MONA owner has grown tired of his building being dubbed Australia’s Museum Bilbao and lets rip in his book A Bone of Fact.

Says Walsh of Gehry’s Spanish sensation: “I hate that particular piece of architectural masturbation so much ... If Gehry met his brief in any way it must’ve been “Build something so over the top that it appeals to the lowest common denominator that divides all of us” ... Am I ranting? Oh dear.”

Ranting? Yes. Wrong? Well he has the architectural runs on the board. Perhaps we could take a lesson from Walsh and turn our attention to our own stars in the making.

“Adelaide once grew Australia’s best; Hassell, Woods Bagot,” says Tim Horton, regulator of architecture in NSW and former Commissioner for Integrated Design in SA.

“But if Adelaide is the great incubator, where’s the next crop of global success stories? Gehry was a young maverick; rejected and dismissed. Let’s find Adelaide’s mavericks and support them. Most of the greats got a big chance in their 20s. For god’s sake be bold and ask Studio-Gram or Davis & Davis.”

Tim Horton has called on Adelaide to support its young architects

Park agrees: “I think a major new arts building would present an opportunity for Adelaide to foster homegrown talents. Architecture is shifting from stars to more ‘inclusive’ types of firms; the superstar is not the only option anymore.”

SA architect John Morphett designed the Festival Centre

John Morphett — the man who designed the Festival Centre — took a prominent role in the design of the Pan-Am Building (now the MetLife Building) in New York while in his early 20s, and before he turned 30 was a key architect in the design of Baghdad University — still standing on the banks of the Tigris despite Shock and Awe.

So, is it time to reclaim Adelaide’s title as the home of great architecture? As Horton notes, our own young architects could be given the contract in conjunction with an experienced big-project team.

And instead of knocking down cultural icon the Festival Centre, perhaps we could look to Adelaide’s art-driven East End and the former RAH site, which sits ready for a new contemporary art gallery on our cultural boulevard, interwoven with parkland gardens. We have the art that we need sitting in storage. We could combine the best of Bilbao and MONA in one Adelaide-designed masterpiece if we give a local team a chance.