Federation Square uses cultural buildings and public space to bridge the railway tracks that used to cut the city in two. For Charles Jencks, it is not just an important project for Australia, it is the biggest example yet of a new paradigm in architecture. Photography by John Gollings.

Federation Square represents the creation of an urban order on a site that has never before existed. More than just a new set of buildings, Federation Square will be the new centre of cultural activity for Melbourne. Fulfilling the long-held dream of a large, open public gathering space in Melbourne, Federation Square will give the citizens of Victoria an authentic civic destination. In the true spirit of federation, this design brings together distinct elements and activities that form a complex ensemble based upon the collective and the unique.
Within an architecture of difference and coherence, the design has brought together disparate institutions and allowed their true differences to be registered in the developed geometries, while also maintaining a visual and formal coherence across the site. Importantly, the design has also sought to produce a cultural and civic precinct based on permeability, allowing for the interaction of visitors, precinct workers and passers-by.
Federation Square is the reaffirmation of the original interactive nature of civic existence. Rather than a closed enclave of controlled and regulated activities, this project creates a network of animated, emotive and enlightening experiences. Federation Square will integrate a broad range of civic, cultural and commercial activities, responding to the vitality and fluidity of daily life.
The project for Federation Square demanded the design of a new civic square for Melbourne, capable of accommodating up to 15,000 people in an open-air amphitheatre, with cultural and commercial buildings as part of the precinct. The cultural and commercial facilities combine to provide nearly 55,000 square metres. They include new galleries for the National Gallery of Victoria and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image; offices, studios and galleries for Cinemedia (a state cultural organization promoting film, television and new media) and the Melbourne facilities of SBS radio and television; numerous restaurants and cafés; and a store for books and music. All of this exists on a site of 3.6 hectares, the equivalent to a new city block for Melbourne. The civic plaza of Federation Square has been programmed to provide the new civic heart for Melbourne. The plaza, and Federation Square in general, has been developed as the locus and orientation point for Melbourne residents and for regional and international visitors alike.
The civic plaza has been developed to operate as a compound spatial figure, with multiple points of activity and focus. It is a key for the entire project, establishing precise and varying relationships with the acknowledged diverse context of the city and landscape around the site, and for the buildings within it. (Lab Architecture studio)

The “New Paradigm”

Fed up with the fashion-mad building of the 1960s, Mies van der Rohe allegedly complained that ‘you can’t have a new architecture every Monday morning’. He was echoing the jibes of Walter Gropius against ‘playboy architecture’, Le Corbusier’s diatribes against ‘superficial modernism’ and Alvar Aalto’s attack on ‘inhuman dandy purism’ that ‘smells of Hollywood’. The modernist pioneers were facing their first real destructive crisis from within their movement, confronting the new information society, its virus of commercialism and, above all, modernism itself. If there were to be significant change, they argued, then it should reflect something deeper than formal play. For Mies that would be real innovation in technology and construction, while for the others the demon of progress could be a shift in society, politics or spirituality. Whatever the engine of change, it had to affect all areas of culture to be significant.

Given the present state of politics, it is clear that most of the world is still mired in the paradigm of the 19th century. And yet there are stirrings in science and technology – as well as architectural culture – that point in a more hopeful direction, presaging deeper change. As with all shifts, there is a dark side. Nevertheless, one can see a positive turn that relates to a deep transformation occurring in the sciences, and I believe this will soon permeate other areas of life. The new sciences of complexity – fractals, nonlinear dynamics, the new cosmology, self-organizing systems – are real harbingers of change. We have moved from a mechanistic view of the universe to one that is self-organizing at all levels, from the atom to the galaxy. Illuminated by the computer, this new worldview is paralleled by transformations now occurring in architecture. Several key buildings – those by Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman, and Daniel Libeskind – demonstrate this promise. There is also a vast amount of other work on the outskirts of the new paradigm being created by Dutch architects, not just Koolhaas but also Ben van Berkel and MVRDV; by Coop Himme(l)blau in Austria; by those who have moved on from high-tech in England, such as Norman Foster; or by those who have resisted it, like Will Alsop. These architects, along with those who flirted with deconstruction – Zaha Hadid, Eric Owen Moss, Morphosis – also take on parts of the philosophy. In Australia, Ashton Raggatt MacDougall has been mining similar territory for many years, and another group, LAB, has just completed a seminal work of the new movement, Melbourne’s Federation Square. Soon there will be enough buildings to see if all this is more than a fad or a change of style. The emergent grammar varies from ungainly blobs to elegant wave forms, from jagged fractals to impersonal datascapes. It challenges the old languages of classicism and reductive modernism with the idea that a new urban order is possible, one closer to the ever-varying patterns of nature. One may not like it at first, but on second glance it may turn out to be more interesting, more in tune with perception than the incessant repetition of colonnades, curtain walls and blank walls.

The plurality of styles is crucial, reflecting an underlying concern for the increasing pluralism of global cities. Pluralism leads to conflict, the inclusion of opposite tastes and composite goals. Modernist purity, even the dandy purism that Aalto condemned, cannot handle this reality very well. But the goals of the new paradigm are wider than the science and politics that support it or the computer that allows it to be conceived and built economically. This is a shift in worldview that sees nature and culture as growing out of the narrative of the universe, a story that has only recently been sketched by the new cosmology in the last 30 years. In a global culture of conflict, this narrative provides a possible iconography that transcends national and sectarian interests. Those architects looking for a way beyond neutral minimalism often focus on an organic or cosmic iconography, one that conceives urbanism as a type of landscape. Most of nature – galaxies, developing embryos, heartbeats and brain waves – grows and changes with minor variations. This insight was finally given a scientific foundation by the computer scientist Benoit Mandelbrot, who wrote his polemical treatise The Fractal Geometry of Nature in 1977. It took more than a decade before the idea was assimilated by architects and translated into computer production for building. But by the 1990s, it had led to the promise of a new urban order that is always self-reflexive and always evolving slowly, an order more sensuous and surprising than the duplication of identical elements. Perception delights in fractals, in a slightly varying stimulus. Endless repetition dulls the palette, as designers show when they multiply a good idea to exhaustion. Think of Renzo Piano’s beautiful Kansai airport: the same interesting airfoil shape extruded for a mile until it becomes boredom squared. By contrast, architects who use fractals, such as Libeskind, ARM and Morphosis, literally give us a break from their standard forms. In Melbourne, LAB, working with Bates Smart on the Federation Square project, has already pushed beyond these first experiments and refined the grammar.

Norman Foster’s partial shift from a Cartesian to blob grammar marks a turn of mainstream practice toward the new paradigm. When Gehry’s new Guggenheim opened in Bilbao in 1997, architects realized that a new kind of building type had emerged and that there was a standard to surpass. His landmark building (a telling euphemism for what used to be called a monument) pulls this former industrial city and its environs together – river, trains, cars, bridges and mountains – and reflects the shifting moods of nature, the slightest change in sunlight or rain. Most importantly, its forms are suggestive and enigmatic in ways that relate both to the natural context and the central role of the museum in a global culture. The enigmatic signifier in the hands of Gehry can work well, because he labours over the sculptural aspects of the form and light and adopts multiple metaphors that relate, albeit loosely, to the building’s role. Thus in his Disney Concert Hall, the overtones of music and cultural brio were interpreted with clashing petal forms, ship metaphors and symphonic images. They are multivalent signifiers in search of an open interpretation, one related to the building’s function, the site and the language of the particular architecture. The idea of the ‘open work’ of art has been in the air since Umberto Eco proposed it as a typical response of artists and writers in the 1960s. Now, for social reasons, it has emerged more fully into architectural view. As the monument has mutated into the landmark building, as architects have lost most conventional iconography, they now hope to find emergent metaphors that amaze and delight yet are not specific to any ideology. Again, this search is aided by computer: all of Gehry’s curved buildings are produced this way, and at only little more expense than if they had been constructed from repetitive boxes. While he candidly admits he doesn’t even know how to switch on a computer and uses the machine to perfect and manufacture forms worked out sculpturally, younger architects exploit the generative aspects of the digital revolution. Dutch architects, in particular MVRDV, construct datascapes based on different assumptions and then allow the computer to model various results around each one. These are then turned into designs and presented polemically to the press, the public and politicians. Alternative societies are contrasted in their 1999 Metacity/Datatown, in which Holland as a high-consumption Los Angeles is opposed to a country of thrifty vegetarians. The built implications of these choices are then exaggerated and turned into an ironic, democratic poetry. It is democratic because the data is a result of collective laws, building codes, straw poles and debated choice; it is ironic because these various forces conflict and often contradict each other, producing bizarre results; and it is poetic because the consequences are presented in deadpan, colourful juxtaposition.

The same is true of another important feature of the new paradigm, the emergence of the landform as a building type and its correlate, the wave form organized around a new grammar of strange attractors. Peter Eisenman led the way with his Aronoff Center in Cincinnati, a staccato landform that oscillates around a strange attractor of chevrons and zigzags. It looks in part like the jiggling of tectonic plates, an earthquake, the basic metaphor of the earth as constantly shifting ground rather than the terra firma we normally assume. Matter comes alive in this architecture at a gigantic scale. His City of Culture in Santiago de Compostela, now under construction, is another undulating landform that picks up the surrounding landscape as well as other generating metaphors, the local emblem of the coquille Saint Jacques and the adjacent medieval city.

Coop Himme(l)blau, like Morphosis and Hadid, has won several recent competitions with wave-like landforms – the schemes for a museum in Lyon and a BMW centre in Germany. Then there is the LAB landform already mentioned, the one built by Enric Miralles in Alicante and those of Ben van Berkel underway. These ten or so artificial grounds really do constitute an emergent urban type, but the one that really put it on the architectural map was FOA’s Yokohama Port Terminal, designed in 1995 and finished just before the end of the 2002 soccer World Cup. I believe it is the job of architects to take responsibility for the public and esoteric meanings of a civic building, whether enigmatic or not, but this is an especially difficult task in a global culture without a shared value system. The temptation is to hide behind social and technical requirements, to use supposed determinants to suppress symbolism. Perhaps the only architect of the new paradigm who admits to both larger spiritual concerns and public symbolism is Daniel Libeskind. He continually invokes the cultural and emotional plane of expression as the duty of the architect, and he is not afraid of facing up to fundamental issues of meaning and nihilism that silence other designers. Perhaps, like Gehry, some of his expressive grammar is too often repeated across projects, but one has to applaud his courage in confronting a major problem of the moment: spiritual crisis and the loss of a shared metaphysics. Many people, and some philosophers, would say this deprivation in the global age is inevitable and permanent. Yet other philosophers, notably Mary Midgely, argue that new credible public concepts have emerged, such as the notion of the earth as a self-regulating system, Gaia. The metaphor of a dynamic planet tuning itself through feedback is, of course, one of the insights of the new paradigm in science, but whether architects come up with a public iconography based on Gaia remains to be seen. My belief is that the universe story will become a shared metaphysics. It is not yet a public religion, and may never become one, but it is still more than a diverting pastime of astrophysics. It is the orientation point for the future, in search of a corresponding iconology. In spite of these problems, the question of whether the new paradigm exists in architecture is worth asking. My view is that the sciences of complexity underlie the emergence of a new architectural paradigm as much as does the computer, while an informing morality has yet to emerge. The answer is mixed. As Nikolaus Pevsner wrote concerning the paradigm of modernism in 19th-century Britain, seven swallows do not necessarily a summer make. But a wind is stirring architecture, and at least it is the beginning of a shift in theory and practice.