Architecture: Australian War Memorial redevelopment.
The proposed redevelopment of the Australian War Memorial not only compromises Charles Bean’s original vision for a ‘simple, solemn, exquisite building’, it calls into question our processes of public governance.
When Scott Morrison announced on November 1, 2018 that the government would provide $498 million over nine years to fund a major redevelopment of the Australian War Memorial (AWM), he described the place as “the soul of the nation … sacred to us all. It transcends politics, it transcends all of us.”
Despite Morrison’s overt religiosity and hyperbole here, he’s not wrong. The commemorative spaces at the national memorial are deeply moving: the bronze Roll of Honour with its embossed names and poppies pressed into the cracks, the pool of reflection and eternal flame, the Hall of Memory with its sublime mosaics and stained glass, facing the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. A sequence of beautiful, intimate and elegiac spaces, they are an object lesson in the power of monumental architecture.
It’s hard to improve on Charles Bean’s own description of his imagined memorial as “a perfect, simple, solemn, exquisite building”. Bean saw the AWM as a temple to the fallen, explicitly refusing any role as a celebration of militarism. It was to be an expression of sorrow, service, self-sacrifice and suffering.
So whether we like it or not, the spaces and rituals of the AWM play the role of a civil religion in Australian society. Many have observed the religious language: references to the “fallen” and to an “Anzac spirit”, artefacts described as “relics”, the notion that Australians all must make a “pilgrimage”. Certainly, Commonwealth governments of both stripes have recognised the benefits of marrying religious and civil sentiments around the Anzac legacy. In light of the proposed redevelopment, though, the question is whether such religiosity is being manipulated to political ends.
The original AWM building, by Emil Sodersten and John Crust, is actually quite small. Since it opened in 1941 it has been constantly in flux – as the 2011 Heritage Management Plan (by Godden Mackay Logan) explains, there have been many extensions, additions, and refurbishments over the years, their lavishness increasing from the mid-1990s onwards. But the proposed new changes will dwarf anything that has gone before.
Brendan Nelson was the director of the AWM between 2012 and 2019 and the driving force behind the redevelopment, hence its nickname among some wags: the Brendan Bunker. On the face of it, the justifications for redevelopment seem reasonable – space to exhibit recent military and peacekeeping operations, space to show their associated large military hardware, better facilities to manage the million-plus visitors a year, and better equity of access. But if you scratch the surface there is genuine cause for concern here. It’s half a billion dollars, on top of the other $600 million expended on commemorations for the Centenary of World War I from 2014-18.
The AWM has structured the new works into four subprojects, all to be completed by 2027. Two of these have caused most of the fuss. First is a major new southern entry located under the existing forecourt, facing Parliament House, at the termination of the Griffins’ Land Axis. This was won in competition by Scott Carver, with a low-profile solution retaining the all-important direct approach to the AWM along the central main axis, tucking the new entry and other new spaces under the main building’s forecourt and stair.
The most contested though is Cox Architecture’s new Anzac Hall, which provides significantly expanded exhibition space for the display (some say glorification) of war machines. Controversially, it will necessitate the demolition of what’s there now: the original Anzac Hall, an acclaimed building only 20 years old. Designed by Denton Corker Marshall and completed in 2001, Anzac Hall has won several major architecture awards, and is a still fully functional public building, recognised as part of the heritage value of the AWM ensemble. Knocking it over rather than retaining and adapting it seems needlessly wasteful.
The original Anzac Hall is elegantly resolved and also quite modest – large enough to accommodate the display of “LTOS” (large technology objects) as its brief required, but recessive and respectful to its site. How ironic that this very humility seems to have sealed its fate – not bold enough, not big enough, not conspicuous enough to symbolise government investment in the Anzac legend.
Cox’s new Anzac Hall is effectively a knock-down rebuild: a vast two-storey blackbox exhibition hall embedded into the ground behind the main building. Because of its size and bulk it can’t help but be rather lumpen – there’s really not much you can do with a hangar. The earlier building – lower, narrower and shallower – appears sleek and streamlined in comparison.
The brief called for a “glazed link” between the new Anzac Hall and the main building. In this, Cox’s scheme appears to nod to the Great Court at the British Museum, an expansive space ideal for functions, making for a great cafe and useful in easing “museum fatigue” among visitors. Such light-filled spaces are, however, generally unsuitable for the display and interpretation of actual artefacts. This belies the main justification for the whole redevelopment, to provide additional exhibition space.
Cox Architecture has found itself at odds with the Australian Institute of Architects – usually a sober and reticent body – which has complained vigorously about a lack of due process, including the original competition brief having mandated the demolition of Anzac Hall (though this condition was later loosened). The institute’s Hands Off Anzac Hall petition has more than 2200 signatures. But while Cox likely feels it has copped a drubbing from its peers, really the fault lies less with the architects and more with the briefing and conception of the project per se.
There has been much unrest on these issues, with the controversy uniting diverse groups and individuals in opposition, including two former directors, other longstanding staff of the AWM, heritage and history experts, and the government’s own Australian Heritage Council.
These and other groups worry it is excessive and unnecessary. They argue it changes the nature of the AWM from a place of commemoration to one that glorifies war; that the redevelopment’s vast funding is an “ambit claim” representing poor value for money; that it’s like a theme park, where superannuated military hardware (planes, helicopters and armoured vehicles) are set up as props without real opportunity for interpretation or engagement; that there will be many mature trees lost, damaging the sense of a monument within a landscape setting; and that the redevelopment is too big and will dwarf and ruin the character of the place and impugn Bean’s vision that it should be “a gem of its kind” and “not colossal in scale”.
Despite hundreds of pages of argument setting out such objections, submitted to the two parliamentary inquiries – those to the parliamentary standing committee on public works were 80 per cent opposed – AWM chair Kerry Stokes dismissed the objections as merely those of “special interest groups” from Canberra. Yet, incredibly, it all seems certain to go ahead. Anzac Hall recently closed to the public, in preparation for its demolition.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Extensions to major war memorials can be excellent and modest. Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance was extended (largely underground) in two stages by Ashton Raggatt Mcdougall in 2002 and 2014. This is some of their best work – uncharacteristically restrained, poignant without being bombastic, its raw materiality suiting its subject. More recently, in 2018, Sydney’s Anzac Memorial was also extended, in a finely wrought project by architects Johnson Pilton Walker in collaboration with the NSW Government Architect’s Office. These new spaces are also tucked discreetly underground, accentuating rather than compromising the beauty and grandeur of the original memorial.
Since the funding for the AWM redevelopment was announced, the Brereton report has unveiled damning revelations about war crimes by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan. This is complicated by Stokes’ funding of Ben Roberts-smith’s defamation case about his alleged involvement in these crimes.
Then there is the ethical conflict raised by corporate sponsorship of the AWM by at least four prominent international arms manufacturers. Some see the whole redevelopment as a means of shoring up public support for future military campaigns.
In Morrison’s words, the AWM “transcends politics”. But does it also transcend accountability? And heritage protection? Does it transcend fiscal responsibility and due process? Because that’s how it’s looking. If the War Memorial truly is our nation’s most sacred site, then it’s irreligious to overpower it with a cavernous, wasteful and scandalously expensive new development that makes a mockery of consultation and builds a giant boondoggle right next to one of our most revered monuments. The process has damaged public faith in our bureaucratic structures, our proper checks and balances, our good governance and our democracy. If this can get through,
• what next?
If the War Memorial truly is our nation’s most sacred site, then it’s irreligious to overpower it with a cavernous, wasteful and scandalously expensive new development.