ABSTRACT
The key catalyst for modernist architecture and design in Australia and the Pacic is the American Frank Lloyd Wright. His 1906-9 Prairie Houses, inuenced by Japanese ukiyo-e (‘oating world’) woodblock prints and centuries of Japanese and Korean building precedents, became key references for the Asia-Pacic stream of organic architecture that has been labelled ‘indigenous modernism’ (more below). Wright’s rst inuence dates to 1911, when two of his staff, Walter Burley Grifn and Marion Mahony Grifn, won an international competition to design the new Australian capital city: Canberra. The Grifns’ radial, car-friendly plan caused English architect Edwin Lutyens to change his layout for New Delhi, India’s Raj-era capital. Although the building styles were different, both cities prototyped British philosopher Ebenezer Howard’s 1898 town planning concept: ‘Garden Cities for To-Morrow’. Howard’s concentric diagrams, dening modern cities as clusters of activity-specic zones, continued to inuence town planners until zoning began to be discredited in the 1960s. The Grifns worked extensively in Australia from 1912 to 1935, using Wrightstyle motifs in sandstone houses at their Castlecrag bush subdivision on Sydney’s north shore, and interpreting Japanese landscape, theological, art, and architecture traditions. Their concepts diffused across Asia and the Pacic, peaking with the ‘indigenous modern’ movement exemplied by luxurious Amanresorts by Australian architects Peter Muller and Kerry Hill in Bali, Malaysia, and Singapore during the late 1980s and 1990s. These followed many examples of amboyantly roofed hotels and houses built on Hawai’i, Tahiti, New Caledonia, Fiji, and other colonized Pacic islands served by commercial air services after the late 1950s.
