MMXX: Two Decades of Architecture in Australia

A combination of in-depth essays and selected project reviews, Cameron Bruhn’s MMXX makes a valuable contribution to what Stuart Harrison hopes is a growing collection of comprehensive histories of Australian architecture.

More a massive magazine than a book in the traditional sense, MMXX (Thames and Hudson, 2020) seeks both currency and reflection. Cataloguing 20 years of Australian architecture, Cameron Bruhn acts as author and editor, concisely writing on 59 selected projects and bringing in a strong set of diverse voices to contribute essays. He makes clear the link to Davina Jackson and Chris Johnson’s 2000 book Australian Architecture Now, but this and other books around the time sought currency rather than reflection in their attempts to capture a concise period.

Given Bruhn’s stated attempt to survey a 20-year period, I came away thinking the book’s ambition was to offer a sequel to Jennifer Taylor’s Australian Architecture Since 1960 (published 1990) – which was itself a sequel, of sorts, to John Maxwell Freeland’s seminal Architecture in Australia: A History (1968).

Although they are the depth of the book, the essays are a bit hard to find in MMXX, with the bulk of the glossy stock given over to projects. The essays are good – some exceptionally so, as they locate key themes of the two decades, discussing the emergence of activism, the rebirth of regionalism, the importance of small projects and the changes in how we exhibit and discuss architecture.1 Each of the essays uses examples; this helps to hide some noticeable but inevitable absences from the featured projects (no State Library of Queensland!) and allows the inclusion of important non-building architectural work – such as the advocacy organization Parlour, policies such as Better Placed, and Venice Biennale exhibitions, as well as other, less glossy outcomes.

Many of the projects you would expect to see are covered, plus some pleasant additions. For example, the Tonsley Park redevelopment in Adelaide – an exceptional government-led adaptive re-use project that is beautifully photographed in MMXX – has not had the press it deserves. Design Tasmania, an underappreciated project in Launceston, gets affection – and Bruhn makes the good point that, as an older project by an architect who’s not online, it hardly exists in the endless, increasingly globalized online publishing world. Maybe this lack of online presence is how exceptionalism will be created in the next 20 years.

The projects are rigorously sorted in ascending order by the number of people involved in one way or another (one shearer, 1,200 runners, etc.) – most often by the number of visitors in a specific period (1,000,000 per year for Carriageworks, 3,000,000 to Mona since its opening).

The lack of standardization of this data means that the sorting doesn’t say much about the projects’ relationships to each other or about wider changes across the sample. Using numbers to sort projects has been common in research-led architectural publishing in recent years and could have been more helpfully used here. In a book fundamentally about time – MMXX is 2020 in roman numerals, to state the obvious – ordering the projects by date of completion may have been more instructive.

The typeface used for the project texts is quite large, while for the essays it is too small; more evenness here would have addressed the sense of the essays as footnotes. An alternative version of the book uses the essays as chapters and brings the projects in to support them and to illustrate the broader cultural conditions Bruhn sets up at the start: prosperity, uncertainty and internationalism (although these are hardly touched on afterwards). There is the suggestion that the forces of globalization have made the work increasingly similar – but does this play out? Are the regional forces that Taylor and Jackson and Johnson identified still at play?

Bruhn makes astute points about changes in the publishing, marketing and promotion of architecture over the last 20 years, including the change to digital photography. The magazine sensibility of the book is belied by the lack of immediacy, however – none of the writers raises the events that started quietly at the end of 2019 and have dominated global society since. In this way, the book’s end point is the pre-pandemic world that now seems like an era ago.

The real achievement of this book is that it was published at all in 2020. It includes only a handful of houses – when in the Australian media the home is king, and almost all architecture media are filtered through the project of the private dwelling. In MMXX, we see office buildings, a hospital, schools, galleries and many other types, some published for the first time for a broad audience. Many of the projects have been pressed onto the pages of Architecture Australia over the last 20 years. (This has been a good pool to draw from – Bruhn was editorial director at Architecture Media from 2009 to 2018.)

Making books like this is not easy. Budgets for writing and editing are low (for photography, non-existent), and printing has to be done offshore. Jennifer Taylor took six years to write her history of Australian architecture – who would fund that today? Despite this, MMXX is a big book, with depth, and it will form part of the rich and hopefully growing collection of histories of Australian architecture. Unfortunately, the cover – which tries to reflect a multiplicity of ideas – is surprisingly lacking and may not attract potential buyers to open the pages. But I hope that they do.

Footnote

1. Essays are by David Neustein, Laura Harding, Helen Norrie, Maryam Gusheh, Philip Oldfield, Sam Spurr, Rory Hyde, Catherin Bull and Conrad Hamann.