Publisher: Pesaro Publishing, ISBN: 9781877015038, Editors: Philip Goad, Katrina Place, Patrick Bingham-Hall, Format: Hardcover, 150 x 130 mm, 128pp
Melbourne’s architects have always reveled in the artifice of architecture and formal experiment. The city currently possesses a myriad of architecture cultures, which all simultaneously offer opinions as to what might constitute an appropriate architecture for the city.
Melbourne’s pluralistic culture is nurtured by an intense self-awareness of Melbourne architectural history – the quality of its streets, its grid, its gardens, and its often wayward and obsessive preoccupation with ideas. There is a corresponding intensity to Melbourne’s history of architecture that is matched by the city’s volatility in the face of economic fortune.
A Short History of Melbourne Architecture depicts the flamboyance, the virtuosity, the cerebral energy which has characterised all Melbourne’s architectural cycles. From the Gold Rush, through the ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ of the 1880s, to it’s acknowledged position as ‘Australian cradle of modernity’ in the 1950s, and finally to the globally acclaimed architecture culture of contemporary Melbourne.