Shenzhen's new art galleries by Urbanus

The gold standard of art gallery design is the white box, a pristine space removed from worldly concerns, outside both place and time. It’s an important statement about the works that hang inside the gallery: art, it says, is universal and timeless. This is why it’s valued. But in its designs for Shenzhen’s newest art galleries, Urbanus Architecture is challenging these basic assumptions, producing art spaces that engage with local urban culture.

Minifie Nixon Architects
Healesville, VIC

Day-to-day work at the new Minifie Nixon-designed Australian Wildlife Health Centre is deadly serious but also entertaining and informative: think somewhere between ER and the National Geographic channel.The AWHC houses a complex range of veterinary services: emergency ward, hospital operating theatres, laboratory, post-mortem zones, care and recovery, rehabilitation, and safe areas for the release of recovered wildlife.

Kinsley + Associates
Cessnock, New South Wales

Kinsley + Associates, led by Roger Kinsley, Managing Director, is uniquely positioned to deliver a coordinated architectural and engineering design solution. The grandstand is essentially constructed of Australian materials, with Luxalon cladding featuring above the colonnade.

Prior & Cheney Architects
Beaconsfield, Victoria

As flocks of young couples and new families flood into Victoria’s Cardinia Shire, the Municipality has been feverishly expanding its facilities to accommodate them and to keep pace with what is now the region’s fastest growing housing development. Indeed, it was not just architectural excellence and innovation that was needed for the new Beaconsfield Community Complex. It was energy.

Lahz Nimmo Architects
Sydney, NSW

Lahz Nimmo’s amenities blocks were essentially designed to do what all toilets do – exist primarily for utility’s sake without intruding aesthetically. The point of distinction here is that this design actually contributes to its surroundings, subtly highlighting the Australian bush-ruralism of the urban parkland.

How to urbanise, industrialise and modernise

As the world lauds Shanghai as a model of exciting urbanism, University of Leeds’ Professor Justin O’Connor has noticed something disturbing. “What,” he asks, “is exciting other than a vicarious reliving of the West’s own innocently brutal days of early industrialisation and modernisation?” Somewhere between dystopic science fiction and this innocently brutal past, Chinese cities hold the West’s gaze with their images of booming growth, teeming masses and environmental apocalypse. But the fact is that nineteenth-century London translates poorly into twenty-first century eco-anxiety and is unimaginable on China’s staggering scale. This is China’s great problem: how to urbanise, industrialise and modernise when the Western model – the only one seriously available – seems to imply Armageddon?

Hamburg

Music, at once otherworldly and arrestingly present, presents a unique challenge to architects called upon to house it. Herzog & de Meuron rise to the challenge with the Elbe Philharmonic Hall, an ethereal monument to musical form.

Architecture’s most prestigious prize finally honours Jean Nouvel for a career of architectural experimentation.

Jean Nouvel, bald and in black, looks like everyone’s idea of an architect. He acts the part too: formulating ideas in bed, vacationing in the South of France, and dressing only in black (except in summer, when he wears only white). Thankfully, his embodiment of architecture’s great clichés is matched by his contribution to architecture’s contemporary vocabulary. Living up to his image, he is widely recognised as one of the most influential living architects, and routinely included amongst a select group of immensely successful superstar architects.

Hames Sharley Architects
Mandurah, WA

Like Anzac Cove, today a sacred site of reflection and contemplation, the award winning Mandurah War Memorial by Hames Sharley both remembers and commemorates the wartime sacrifice of service-men and -women down the years. Located an hour south of Perth on Mandurah’s northern foreshore, the design comprises a procession of columns that emerge from the western estuary on the axis of the rising sun of Anzac Day.

Cox Humphries Moss Architects
Griffith, ACT

When Canberra’s heritagelisted home of cricket and Australia Rules football needed a facelift and a bit of shelter, long-standing architecture firm Cox Humphries Moss was there to answer the call. Cox Humphries Moss specialises in formulating superior designs on a very limited budget, as was the case with Manuka Oval. The plans needed to utilise standard, readily available materials so as to extend the budget to cover the greatest scope of work available.

Ashton Raggatt McDougall
Melbourne, VIC

Melbourne Central was never the city’s main train station, nor was it an architectural masterpiece, or even a successful retail venture. A recent facelift, however, has taken on the challenge of rewriting past shortcomings; rejuvinating the complex much like a Hollywood star reinvents a flagging career with a new ‘image’ and a few well-chosen film and media appearances.