Refiguring the Pavilion: Garden Wall, 2017 National Gallery of Victoria Architecture Commission, by Retallack Thompson and Other Architects

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Notes

1. This review draws on an analysis of the contemporary pavilion phenomenon undertaken as part of Australian Research Council funded project Is Architecture Art?: A history of categories, concepts and recent practices [DP1601015], by John Macarthur, Susan Holden, Ashley Paine and Wouter Davidts.

2. The Commission is awarded through an independently judged design competition.

3. For an account of the contemporary pavilion phenomenon, see John Macarthur et al., Pavilion Propositions: Nine Points on an Architectural Phenomenon (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2018).

4. See, for example, Sylvia Lavin, ‘Vanishing Point’, Artforum International 51, no. 2 (October 2012): 212–9.

5. Notably the installations of Robert Irwin.

6. Penelope Curtis, Patio and Pavilion: The Place of Sculpture in Modern Architecture (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum and London: Ridinghouse, 2008), 120.

7. Curtis, Patio and Pavilion, 123, 133.

8. Ibid., 129.

9. Both temporary pavilions were subsequently reconstructed in the grounds of the Kröller-Müller museum, Rietveld's in 1965 and van Eyck's in 2006.

10. Thierry de Duve, ‘Dan Graham and the Critique of Artistic Autonomy’, in Dan Graham, ed. Alex Kitnick (Cambridge and London, MIT Press, 2011), 86–7.

11. See Joan Ockman, ‘A Plastic Epic: The Synthesis of the Arts Discourse in France in the Mid-Twentieth Century’, in Architecture + Art: New Visions, New Strategies, ed. Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen and Esa Laaksonen (Helsinki, Alvar Aalto Academy, 2007), 30–61.

12. See Sigfried Giedion, ‘The Need for a New Monumentality’, in New Architecture and City Planning: A Symposium, ed. Paul Zucker (New York: Philosophical Library, 1944), 549–68.

13. In 2015 Arts Victoria was rebranded as Creative Victoria and in 2016 launched Creative State: Victoria's first Creative Industries Policy, 2016–2020, https://creative.vic.gov.au/creative-state.

14. Garden wall is addressed in the catalogue essay Fleur Watson, ‘The Potential of Impermanence: Experiments in Ephemeral Architecture’, in NGV Triennial 2017, ed. Ewan McEoin et al. (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2017), 126–37.