Overlayed on the lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people was a city planned by the Griffins using Garden City principles. As our ‘bush capital’ evolves, we continue to be influenced and guided by its landscape setting. It was with respect for the landscape that Romaldo Giurgola crafted our most significant public building on Capital Hill, and it is with respect for the landscape that we reimagine our urban fabric to support a growing population.
session 1 | The Future of Housing and the Need for Public Amenity
This symposium will bring together some visionary architects, urban designers, policymakers, and economists to discuss the evolving landscape of residential design, the need for more housing typologies, and the strategies for delivering public spaces and streetscapes that promote healthy living.
Housing densification is a necessary construct for the future of our cities and to achieve this we need to accept that urban renewal will be required. How does a city based on ‘garden city’ design principles and highlighted as one of the world’s most liveable cities, retain its landscape quality while delivering housing supported by an overlay of high-quality public amenities for its residents. In partnership with the Australian Institute of Architects, City Renewal Authority and Suburban Land Agency.
The symposium will be followed by a reception from 5pm-6pm.
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Petra Oswald is the Program Manager Built Form, Suburban Land Agency. She is a collaborative city maker with a strong interest in bringing cross-disciplinary skills together to achieve a low carbon, green and inclusive urban environment.
In her mind, creative and collaborative development processes are fundamental to achieve cities that look after people, place and the planet. With more than 20 years of experience in sustainable city making in Australia and Europe, Petra has led various teams and projects in applied research, planning and design, placemaking and urban development.
She manages the Built Form Program in the ACT Government’s Suburban Land Agency. Her team is tasked to design and construct sustainable showcase precincts to inspire our collective conversation about the neighbourhoods and cities we want.
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Lucy Wilson is a landscape architect with an urban focus and Executive Branch Manager Design and Place Strategy at the City Renewal Authority. She has had a broad career in state government, local government and private practice in Australia and internationally.
At the City Renewal Authority Lucy's team provides strategic program and project leadership for design and sustainability across the City Renewal Precinct.
Prior to working at the Authority Lucy worked between Main Roads WA and the Office of Government Architect WA, shaping the design quality of large-scale infrastructure projects.
She has won numerous awards, including heading up the once-in-a-generation transformation of Perth's East End at the City of Perth.
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Felicity is a qualified urban designer and experienced lead designer with a significant portfolio of major projects including public architecture, master planning and strategic urban design. Dedicated to finding the public benefit in all projects, Felicity designs with civic priorities at the forefront of decision making. Felicity leads the Stewart Architecture Sydney studio and manages projects in Canberra, Sydney and broader NSW.
Regarded as an emerging leader in architecture and urban design, Felicity worked on the highly successful Green Square Library and Plaza which opened in 2018 to critical acclaim, receiving numerous local and international awards.
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Executive Director of the Australia Institute, Dr Richard Denniss is a prominent economist, author and public policy commentator, and a former Assoc Professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy at ANU. He is the author of several books including: Econobabble, Curing Affluenza, Dead Right: How Neoliberalism Ate Itself and What Comes Next? and Big: The Role of the State in the Modern Economy.
Tickets | General Admission | $45 one session | Craft + Design Canberra Members | $35 one session
Discounted ticket for both sessions | General Admission | $80 two sessions + reception | Members | $60 two sessions + reception
SESSION 2 | ROMALDO GIURGOLA: ROME, PHILADELPHIA, CANBERRA
This session focuses on the work of Italo-American architect Romaldo Giurgola, the principal designer of Australian Parliament House (APH). Giurgola had known about the Walter Burley Griffin–Marion Mahoney plan for Canberra since his student days in Rome and was an enthusiastic entrant in the 1979 competition to design the new and permanent Australian parliament building. His winning scheme for the Australian capital was deeply concerned with the city’s landscape qualities and how a new monumental complex must respond to those qualities while also acting as a key pivot of urban movement and meaning.
The speakers in this session will highlight the ways in which Giurgola’s Roman professional and personal formation and the urban problems and questions specific to Philadelphia shaped his approach to remaking Canberra. The session will include presentations by guest speakers Dr Denise Costanzo from Penn State University and Bill Whittaker from University of Pennsylvania Architectural Archives. It will also include a panel discussion involving Giurgola’s former colleagues and collaborators moderated by Professor Philip Goad. The panel will reflect on the ideas, values and processes that shaped APH and the ways in which the project remade the national capital.
The University of Sydney and University of Melbourne jointly lead the project Locating Giurgola: From Philadelphia School to Global Practice, which is funded through the Australian Research Council’s (ARC) Discovery Project (DP) scheme. Other supporting organisations are University of Pennsylvania, Penn State University, Swiss Federal Institute (EFL).
The symposium will be followed by a reception from 5pm-6pm.
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Denise Costanzo is an associate professor of theory and criticism at Penn State University, USA. An architectural historian with a background in architecture and art history, she explores architecture’s conceptual and cultural dimensions in ways that integrate the distinct languages of design, art history, and critical inquiry.
Her research centers on the exchange of American and European architectural ideas, with a focus on how references to Italy reveal the mechanics of architectural power during the 20th century. Her scholarly methods include visual, textual, and systems analysis, social and institutional critique, and historiography.
She has delivered invited lectures at Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania, American Academy in Rome, and the University of Naples, and presented her work at meetings in the United States, Canada, Italy, France, Belgium, Australia, and Turkey.
Denise is widely published and her most recent book project, for which she was awarded a Rome Prize fellowship from the American Academy in Rome for 2014-15, is titled Modern Architects and the Problem of the Postwar Rome Prize: France, Spain, Britain, and America, 1946-1960. This multi-national, cross-institutional study investigates the intersection and mutual transformation of modernism and academic tradition after World War II.
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Professor Philip Goad is internationally known for his research and is an authority on modern Australian architecture. Philip has worked extensively as an architect, conservation consultant, and curator. Philip is an expert on the life and work of Robin Boyd, and has held visiting scholar positions at Columbia University, Bartlett School of Architecture (London) and UCLA (Los Angeles).
Philip is a past editor of Fabrications, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, and is a contributing editor to Architecture Australia. Along with Professor Julie Willis, he is the editor of The Encyclopedia of Australian Architecture.
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Bill Whitaker is the curator and collections manager of the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design. Trained as an architect and architectural historian at the University of New Mexico and the University of Pennsylvania, Bill primarily works on documenting and interpreting Penn’s design collections, including holdings related to the life and work of architect Louis I. Kahn and landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, as well as that of the husband and wife design team of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.
He has lectured on a wide range of subjects related to twentieth century architecture, landscape, and community design in the greater Philadelphia region, to audiences in the United States, Canada, Germany and India.
Tickets | General Admission | $45 one session | Craft + Design Canberra Members | $35 one session
Discounted ticket for both sessions | General Admission | $80 two sessions + reception | Members | $60 two sessions + reception
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Image Credit: Sydney Melbourne Building Opening, 2023 | Image courtesy of City Renewal Authority Image Credit: Neil Fenlon | Romaldo Giurgola on the Lawns of Parliament House 2021 | Image courtesy of the National Library of Australia.