A Different View: The National Library and Its Building Art provides a long-awaited study of the architecture and associated artworks of the National Library building. For a number of years, separate brochures or leaflets have included some details on aspects of these (for instance the Alice Kettle embroideries), but this book project provided an opportunity to synthesise information, to double-check some of the legends and rumours, and to provide a more comprehensive, authoritative, and well-illustrated resource on the subject. It is a souvenir book for the visitor to take away, or a work to assist those on the Library’s information desk to handle tricky questions. For instance: ‘Is the telescope on the foyer tapestry the one at Tidbinbilla or Parkes? (Actually, the inspiration was Woomera.) Or, ‘What is the concept of the Tom Bass sculpture?’, or ,‘What type of stone is used in the building’s cladding?’ A Different View opens with consideration of the Bunning & Madden-designed building itself: the brief and budget, Bunning’s design concept, the structure’s materials, and the modifications which the original design negotiated through to completion. Five equally-balanced treatments follow, each with full-colour accompanying illustrations, on the artworks within, attached to, or sited on the perimeter of the Library building. Four of these—the Leonard French windows, the Tom Bass Lintel Sculpture, the Mathieu Mategot tapestries, and the Arthur Robb side panels—were specifically conceived and envisioned from the start as an organic part of the building’s design. They were commissioned by chief architect Walter Bunning, and his papers relating to the building (appropriately lodged in the Library’s Manuscript Collection) include his original correspondence with French, Mategot and Bass.
Two further artworks found their way to the Library separately. As the book tells, the Henry Moore sculpture Two Piece Reclining Figure No 9 was in some sense ‘foisted’ on the Library’s reluctant Council Chairman by the National Capital Development Commission, which wanted a ‘world-class piece of sculpture’ prominently displayed in the capital and thought the Library would be the best place to put it. The sculpture’s current position on the border of the Library precinct rather than up on the podium as originally intended, is, as A Different View explains, a compromise position (though a fortuitous one nonetheless; when Henry Moore himself was consulted on the amended positioning, he congratulated the committee for placing the sculpture further away from the building, where it could assert its own proportions). The other ‘non-original’ artwork is the Alice Kettle embroidery series Australian Landscapes I-IV, hanging in the Main Reading Room. This is a much more recent addition, commissioned by the Library’s retiring Director-General, Warren Horton, and hung in 2000 in memory of his wife and friend of the Library, Patsy Hardy. Walter Bunning died in 1977, Henry Moore in 1986, and Mathieu Mategot in 2001. In the process of working on the book it was therefore a delight to be able to speak directly with the surviving creators of two of the Library artworks—Tom Bass, and Arthur Robb. Bass, now aged in his late 80s and still working a few days a week at his sculpture school at Erskineville in inner Sydney, sounded hale and hearty on the phone, and was able to correct a misconception about the title of his monumental sculpture straddling the Library’s main entrance. It has on occasion been titled ‘Knowledge’, but Bass advises it should simply be called the Library Lintel Sculpture—and that’s how it is now described in the new book. Bass was also able to provide for this publication a wonderful impromptu shot taken by his friend Max Dupain, showing the sculptor aboard his massive creation against a stormy skyline at his Minto property in 1968 (the sculpture was too large to be made in Bass’s city studio). The book also features a shot of the sculpture being dismounted from trucks in three sections on the day of its installation. There is another photograph of Bass standing alongside supervising architect Neil Potter, who continued working in Bunning & Maddens’ Canberra office until recent years and was able to clarify a number of points relating to the book’s final text.
A second happy contact was made with Arthur Robb, the then young architect responsible for drawing many of the Library perspectives for Bunning & Madden, and now, 35 years later, traced via a number of phone calls to his present position at a university in Sydney. Robb was able to provide details about the often-neglected seven copper panels he designed along the outside of the Library on the lakeside of the Main Reading Room. He had been obliged to step in quickly to fill this commission following the Library Council’s rejection of some earlier proposed designs, and deftly put together a number of geometrical compositions sympathetic to the mandala-like motifs of crosses and circles in Leonard French’s stained-glass windows. French’s windows are perhaps the most celebrated of the Library’s building artworks. They were designed for what was originally the Library’s exhibitions area in the foyer with the intention of subduing the outside light for purposes of viewing and preserving displayed objects, but have subsequently been incorporated into the Library’s Bookplate cafe and Bookshop areas. A Different View explains French’s design concept for the windows, made up of 50 mm-thick blocks of Belgian and French chunk glass in a palette of 50 colours, and in part inspired by Gustav Holst’s The Planets.
The main part of the text for A Different View was adapted and extended from a talk that Canberra researcher and writer Christine Fernon prepared for the Friends of the National Library two years ago, supplemented with text and suggestions from a number of other contributors. Fernon confesses that she had sometimes felt frustrated, when passing through the Library foyer to work in the Petherick Room, to overhear visitors wondering aloud about aspects of the Mategot tapestries or the French windows. She was therefore pleased to have the opportunity to put some things straight and provide a solid, dependable—authoritative—reference for curious future visitors and for Library staff approached with sticky queries. (The tapestries, incidentally, as the book notes, are annually dispatched for a session in a frozen foods warehouse in Canberra’s Fyshwick, to have any parasites snap-frozen and combed out as part of a preservation schedule.) Fernon was able to provide an astonishing amount of detail on the intricacies of the building’s conception, history and artworks, right down to the fact that some sample marble cladding, used for testing resistance to weathering in Canberra’s conditions, was later modified into a memorial seat at Acton Pier. This was dedicated to Grenfell Rudduck, a friend of the Library’s chief architect Walter Bunning and a champion of the building in its embattled early days (Rudduck died before the Library’s completion).
As Fernon
explains, the National Library’s architectural style (variously called
‘neo-classical’, ‘contemporary classical’, or ‘late-twentieth century
stripped classical’) was part of a larger concept for some key Canberra
buildings, and has ‘companion’ structures in the ACT Legislative Assembly
building, in buildings in Civic, and in some of the Russell Defence complex
buildings. Though some aestheticians have criticised the Library’s architecture,
or the contemporary classical style, it is undoubtedly true that the building
is generally affectionately regarded by Canberrans and interstate visitors
alike. Prominently sited beside, and reflected in, Lake Burley Griffin,
and viewed in varying seasonal lights, the building is an instantly recognisable
icon with its clean, elegant lines—usually shot from A final boon in producing A Different View was the opportunity to consolidate and supplement the Library’s photographic holdings of itself. Most of the images used in the book—and a whole lot more which overflowed it, and which are now placed in the Library’s Pictures Collection—were shot by National Library staff photographer Damian McDonald, who turned up to the Library at all hours and in all lights, to climb up ladders or squat or kneel to catch various aspects and angles of the building and artworks. McDonald strung up lights for the Mategot tapestries; took wide-angled shots of the Library from across the lawns; came at the freshly-scrubbed Tom Bass sculpture from all sides to address its various profiles and went in super-close with the lens to catch the detail of the gold thread on the Alice Kettle embroideries or the chipped-glass texture of the Leonard French windows. In one instance, he took advantage of a Canberra bushfires assignment in January 2003 to snatch a glorious aerial shot of the Library from a helicopter as it wheeled flameward over Commonwealth Avenue Bridge. Within the book, all of these images imaginatively flow with the text, wrapped up in a stylish yet open manner by designer, Cate Eggleton. We hope that A Different View: The National Library of Australia and Its Building Art—a book which has long been anticipated—will promote an enticing and lasting appreciation of both the building and associated artworks of this national icon of research and learning. PAUL CLIFF is an editor in the Library’s Publications Branch. He recently edited a new edition of Judith Wright’s Birds: Poems for the Library, and is currently editing David Branagan’s biography of celebrated geologist and Antarctic explorer Sir T.W. Edgeworth David |
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