Winners of Australia's THE LODGE ON THE LAKE Competition

Winners have been unveiled in THE LODGE ON THE LAKE competition. As part of the celebrations for the Centenary of Australia's capital city Canberra in 2013, the University of Canberra and the Gallery of Australian Design had invited designers to participate in this design ideas competition for a new official residence for the Prime Minister of Australia on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin in Canberra. 

The competition was endorsed by the Australian Institute of Architects and the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects, however there are currently no intentions by the Australian Government to actually build a new Lodge for the Prime Minister.

First Prize: Jack Davies and team members Nicholas Roberts and Henry Stephens

Patterns of Occupation

Australia's earliest settlers encountered a landscape they perceived to be harsh and expansive - 'they did not see the landscape of infinite space as sublime' (Malouf, 2010). ELizabeth Farrelly suggests this has led to a self-perpetuating condition in the national psyche - one where the immediate move towards occupation of this landscape is through an endless proliferation outward, along the ground plane. This notion paradoxically suggests both an adventurous exploration of the frontier, and a conservative lack of willingness to make a place within the landscape - to dig in.

Walter Burley Griffin's 1912 masterplan for Canberra was predicated on the notion that modernist tropes in urban planning could be reconsiled with the particularities of topography, suggesting an occupation of the Australian landscape rarely aspired to. This proposal returns to these issues bound up in Australian identity and issues of modernity. The lodge is both a development and a critique of the Australian relationship of landscape and dwelling, through an intersection of public assembly, intimate domesticity, and ground plane.

Click here to read the entire explanatory statement.

Second Prize: Professor Alan Pert and team members from Nord architecture/landscape firm (Brian McGinlay, Helen-Anne Love, Mark Bell and Rod Kemsley) and Atelier 10 environmental /structures firm

Our design philosophy focuses on the celebration of architecture as a haptic, tectonic endeavor. With materiality and craft as a top priority, aesthetics derive from the raw, natural materials of construction and the skills of those who work and assemble them.

While the building form is driven by local context and cultural traditions, inspiration is found in the specific topography of the site and the need to manipulate, celebrate and control the equally specific quality of natural light. We favour the tactile over the visual, the experiential over the experimental.

Much of the architecture we are seeing across the world today is the unfamiliar, synthetic product of late capitalism; a myriad variety of design approaches we have to contend with in the ever-changing context of rapid urbanization. As architecture shares society’s doubts about an uncertain future everything seems disposable, “flexible”, temporary and we find ourselves surrounded by drywall sheets rather than bricks; butt joints rather than bonds.

Click here to read the entire explanatory statement.

Third Prize: Monica Earl and Nic Moore, with team members Darryl Chandler, Lea Fernandez and Terence Yong

This scheme understands that a new Lodge needs both to fulfill the requirements of a complex brief, but also to be a strong symbol of Australian domestic and political values. As an equivalent to the White House, the Lodge must be the hearth of the nation – a command post, an event space, a sanctuary and an icon.

Lake Burley Griffin required massive civil works. Two metres of soil was scraped from a river valley; beach sand, retaining walls and boulders were brought to an imagined shore and a sluice gate was shut to impound the Molonglo river. The Lake’s level is presently held constant to this carefully crafted shoreline by manipulations of the Scrivener and Googong dams, but this level can fluctuate with rainfall and climate.

Click here to read the entire explanatory statement.

Commended: Canberra designer Narendra Kaley

All images courtesy of THE LODGE ON THE LAKE competition.