Three Ideas of Emptiness: Structural Biases Towards Isolation, Separation and Absence in the 1979 Australian Parliament House Competition Brief

Abstract

ABSTRACT The 1979 competition brief for Australia’s Parliament House has been described as an exceedingly complex, bureaucratic document. Its 170 pages summarise site and user data in tremendous detail. Yet, curiously offer little information about Australia’s democratic values and guiding principles. The absence of this information is significant as it inhibits discourse on architecture's capacity to enact the democratic practices of the Australian people in built form. This essay compares the 1979 brief to the parliamentary reports from which it was developed. Through amending, rephrasing and reframing earlier content, the brief is shown to introduce three structural biases: towards the isolation of site, the separation of interior activities and the absence of emphasis on democratic values. These biases established real and significant pressures for competition entrants on how to conceptualise and design Australia’s most significant, most anticipated, architectural emblem of its democratic identity. In this historical instance, this essay argues, what preceded the representation of power in Australia’s parliamentary architecture were moves to evade the representation of Australian democracy in the brief, which exacerbated a different type of power: the power over what to include and exclude.