Curated by Miranda Wallace at the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), ‘Place Makers’ offered a retrospective view on the recent development of Queensland’s residential, public and institutional architecture. For many, this history has been dominated by the Queensland house, with its widely shared language of orthogonal pavilions and timber screens (the ‘tin and timber tradition’), its opposition to divisions of interior and exterior, and a strong phenomenological claim to mediate between inhabitation and the world (a local expression of Frampton’s ‘critical regionalism’).
If anything, these characteristics give rise to a sense of ‘the Queensland School’—a contestable term that nevertheless has some traction in discussions around the body of work, and the domestic projects especially, in ‘Place Makers’.
The show, staged in the new GoMA building by Lindsay and Kerry Clare of Architectus (2006), documents over forty architectural projects by twenty-two practices operating in the state, though some are outposts of multi-state and multi-national offices.
A lavish 320-page catalogue complements the exhibition, and in an absence of other syntheses of contemporary Queensland architecture, it assumes a critical authority over the period. For those who did not get to see the exhibition in situ, this book will do most of the job of conveying its content. Therein, essays frame the exhibition’s content relative to Queensland’s historical and geo-climactic conditions. Some essays see clear architectural consequences to those contexts; others explore their complexity unprogrammatically. The most useful essay is by Wallace, who considers a series of soft markers for dealing with the projects and practices represented in ‘Place Makers’: regionalism, pragmatism, romanticism, conceptualism.
Each project included in ‘Place Makers’—and these are supplemented by another dozen examples in the catalogue—is