Moving forward with modernism
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The global COVID-19 pandemic has prompted a fresh look at mid-century planning ideals and the vision for Canberra, says modernist champion Edwina Jans.
Edwina, Co-Founder and Creative Director of Canberra Modern, was a guest speaker at a Salon Canberra event held last month.
During the COVID-19 lockdowns, Edwina “marvelled” at how easily our city functioned under extreme pressure. It was “no accident” that we could shop, exercise and observe social distancing with ease.
“We saw the city shine as a result of inspired and informed decisions by past generations of planners, architects, developers, governments and, of course, the community,” she said.
“Our city, with its town centres, garden suburbs nestled into the landscape and green belts running through them is the embodiment—and the inheritor—of a modern vision for town planning. This vision drew together what Walter Burley Griffin called the ‘spatial arts’—architecture, landscape design and graphic arts—together with the twentieth-century ideals of social equity, democracy, and clean, open living spaces.”
These ideals proved essential in 2020. “Canberra’s modernist legacy of careful and considered planning and design was one of the city’s success factors in enabling residents to thrive,” she argued.
Edwina founded Canberra Modern in 2016, alongside Amy Jarvis and Rachel Jackson, with a determination to conserve and celebrate our city’s mid-century heritage places.
“We don’t believe that every building from the mid-to-late twentieth century is significant or that places should be kept just because they are old,” she told our audience. Instead, Canberra Modern is focused on the characteristics of buildings, landscape and city planning that are integral Canberra’s significance and that “should be shouted from the rooftops”.
So, what is modernism?
In architecture, modernism encompasses many individual styles, from brutalist to art deco. While each country and city have its own interpretation of modernism, it is underpinned by fundamental principles: “truth to function, technical innovation, visions of social equality and the trajectory towards progressive aesthetics,” Edwina explained.
What makes Canberra unique is its “deliberate implementation of visionary modernist planning” from the days when it was just an idea on a drawing board.
Tim Ross, modernist champion and Canberra Modern’s patron, has argued that “modernism may have had its birth in Europe and its glamour in America, but I think it found its egalitarian purpose, unrivalled anywhere else in the world, in Australia’s suburbs.”
Edwina suggests that modernism was “democratised” in our nation’s capital. She points to our planning for “social ideals”, our national civic and cultural buildings, like the National Library, National Gallery and High Court, culminating in the “late-modern” Parliament House on the hill.
Many of Canberra’s modernist icons may be instantly recognisable, but our city is an introvert that keeps its best secrets hidden, someone in the audience observed.
“It is these places—the suburbs, the houses, the leisure facilities ‘for the people’ such as the Civic Olympic pool—that are most at risk,” Edwina warned.
“Whether everyone knows about the Shine Dome, or Parliament House, or the National Gallery and their creators doesn’t matter. What matters is that the community know how these buildings and people have made the city and how it shapes our lives for the better.”
Edwina admitted that modernist design embodies values that can appear anachronistic—car dependency, low-density suburbs, huge blocks and the use of asbestos for example. But our city was always intended to be a “lab for creativity and design thinking” in architecture, city planning, education and democracy.
As the beneficiaries of creative processes that began more than a century ago, we must not only “get behind this legacy” but “take it forward” in the same spirit. Our dreams today will influence how people live in Canberra long after we are gone.
Canberra’s modernism is a big selling point for our city, Edwina said, pointing to other modernist tourist magnets like Palm Springs and the Frank Lloyd Wright House Trail.
Edwina would also like to see a heritage listing that would celebrate our city’s “outstanding physical features” as well as the “associations with significant people and major commemorative events that make Canberra one of the world’s great capital cities”.
But most of all, embracing our modernist heritage can help us create a better city for Canberrans, Edwina argued. “Modernism at its heart is optimistic about the future and new ways of living that make for a happier, more fulfilled humanity.”
Sounds like a great foundation for a 21st-century city.
