Canberra
Canberra is the capital city of Australia. With a population of 410,301, it is Australia's largest inland city and the eighth-largest city overall; the city is located at the northern end of the Australian Capital Territory, 280 km south-west of Sydney, 660 km north-east of Melbourne. A resident of Canberra is known as a Canberran. Although Canberra is the capital and seat of government, many federal government ministries have secondary seats in state capital cities, as do the Governor-General and the Prime Minister; the site of Canberra was selected for the location of the nation's capital in 1908 as a compromise between rivals Sydney and Melbourne, Australia's two largest cities. It is unusual among Australian cities, being an planned city outside of any state, similar to Washington, D. C. in the United States, or Brasília in Brazil. Following an international contest for the city's design, a blueprint by American architects Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin was selected and construction commenced in 1913.
The Griffins' plan featured geometric motifs such as circles and triangles, was centred on axes aligned with significant topographical landmarks in the Australian Capital Territory. The city's design was influenced by the garden city movement and incorporates significant areas of natural vegetation; the growth and development of Canberra were hindered by the World Wars and the Great Depression, which exacerbated a series of planning disputes and the ineffectiveness of a procession of bodies that were created in turn to oversee the development of the city. The national capital emerged as a thriving city after World War II, as Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies championed its development and the National Capital Development Commission was formed with executive powers. Although the Australian Capital Territory is now self-governing, the Commonwealth Government retains some influence through the National Capital Authority; as the seat of the government of Australia, Canberra is the site of Parliament House, the official residence of the Monarch's representative the Governor-General, the High Court and numerous government departments and agencies.
It is the location of many social and cultural institutions of national significance, such as the Australian War Memorial, Australian National University, Royal Australian Mint, Australian Institute of Sport, National Gallery, National Museum and the National Library. The Australian Army's officer corps is trained at the Royal Military College and the Australian Defence Force Academy is located in the capital; the ACT is independent of any state to prevent any one state from gaining an advantage by hosting the seat of Commonwealth power. The ACT has voting representation in the Commonwealth Parliament, has its own Legislative Assembly and government, similar to the states; as the city has a high proportion of public servants, the Commonwealth Government contributes the largest percentage of Gross State Product and is the largest single employer in Canberra, although no longer the majority employer. Compared to the national averages, the unemployment rate is the average income higher. Property prices are high, in part due to comparatively restrictive development regulations.
The word "Canberra" is popularly claimed to derive from the word Kambera or Canberry, claimed to mean "meeting place" in Ngunnawal, one of the Indigenous languages spoken in the district by Aboriginal Australians before European settlers arrived, although there is no clear evidence to support this. An alternative definition has been claimed by numerous local commentators over the years, including the Ngunnawal elder Don Bell, whereby Canberra or Nganbra means "woman's breasts" and is the indigenous name for the two mountains, Black Mountain and Mount Ainslie, which lie opposite each other. In the 1860s, the name was reported by Queanbeyan newspaper owner John Gale to be an interpretation of the name nganbra or nganbira, meaning "hollow between a woman's breasts", referring to the Sullivans Creek floodplain between Mount Ainslie and Black Mountain. An 1830s map of the region by Major Mitchell indeed does mark the Sullivan's Creek floodplain between these two mountains as "Nganbra". "Nganbra" or "Nganbira" could have been anglicised to the name "Canberry", as the locality soon become known to European settlers.
R. H. Cambage in his 1919 book Notes on the Native Flora of New South Wales, Part X, the Federal Capital Territory noted that Joshua John Moore, the first settler in the region, named the area Canberry in 1823 stating that "there seems no doubt that the original was a native name, but its meaning is unknown."' Survey plans of the district dated 1837 refer to the area as the Canberry Plain. In 1920, some of the older residents of the district claimed that the name was derived from the Australian Cranberry which grew abundantly in the area, noting that the local name for the plant was canberry. Although popularly pronounced or, the original pronunciation at its official naming in 1913 was. Before white settlement, the area in which Canberra would be constructed was seasonally inhabited by Indigenous Australians. Anthropologist Norman Tindale suggested the principal group occupying the region were the Ngunnawal people, while the Ngarigo lived to the south of the ACT, the Wandandian to the east, the Walgulu to the south, Gandangara people to the north and Wiradjuri to the north-west.
Archaeological evidence of settlement in the region includes inhabited rock shelters, rock paintings and engravings, burial places and quarry sites as well as stone tools and arrangements. Artefacts suggests early human activity occurred at some po
National Gallery of Australia
The National Gallery of Australia is the national art museum of Australia as well as one of the largest art museums in Australia, holding more than 166,000 works of art. Located in Canberra in the Australian Capital Territory, it was established in 1967 by the Australian government as a national public art museum. Prominent Australian artist Tom Roberts had lobbied various Australian prime ministers, starting with the first, Edmund Barton. Prime Minister Andrew Fisher accepted the idea in 1910, the following year Parliament established a bipartisan committee of six political leaders—the Historic Memorials Committee; the Committee decided that the government should collect portraits of Australian governors-general, parliamentary leaders and the principal "fathers" of federation to be painted by Australian artists. This led to the establishment of what became known as the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board, responsible for art acquisitions until 1973; the Parliamentary Library Committee collected paintings for the Australian collections of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library, including landscapes, notably the acquisition of Tom Roberts' Allegro con brio, Bourke St West in 1918.
Prior to the opening of the Gallery these paintings were displayed around Parliament House, in Commonwealth offices, including diplomatic missions overseas, State Galleries. From 1912, the building of a permanent building to house the collection in Canberra was the major priority of the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board. However, this period included two World Wars and a Depression and governments always considered they had more pressing priorities, including building the initial infrastructure of Canberra and Old Parliament House in the 1920s and the rapid expansion of Canberra and the building of government offices, Lake Burley Griffin and the National Library of Australia in the 1950s and early 1960s. In 1965 the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board was able to persuade Prime Minister Robert Menzies to take the steps necessary to establish the gallery. On 1 November 1967, Prime Minister Harold Holt formally announced that the Government would construct the building; the design of the building was complicated by the difficulty in finalising its location, affected by the layout of the Parliamentary Triangle.
The main problem was the final site of the new Parliament House. In Canberra's original Griffin 1912 plan, Parliament House was to be built on Camp Hill, between Capital Hill and the Provisional Parliament House and a Capitol was to be built on top of Capital Hill, he envisaged the Capitol to be "either a general administration structure for popular receptions and ceremony or for housing archives and commemorating Australian Achievements". In the early 1960s, the National Capital Development Commission proposed, in accordance with the 1958 and 1964 Holford plans for the Parliamentary Triangle, that the site for the new Parliament House be moved to the shore of Lake Burley Griffin, with a vast National Place, to be built on its south side, to be surrounded by a large mass of buildings; the Gallery would be built on Capital Hill, along with other national cultural institutions. In 1968, Colin Madigan of Edwards Madigan Torzillo and Partners won the competition for the design though no design could be finalised, as the final site was now in doubt.
Prime Minister John Gorton stated that, "The Competition had as its aim not a final design for the building but rather the selection of a vigorous and imaginative architect who would be commissioned to submit the actual design of the Gallery."Gorton proposed to Parliament in 1968 that it endorse Holford's lakeside site for the new Parliament House, but it refused and sites at Camp Hill and Capital Hill were investigated. As a result, the Government decided. In 1971, the Government selected a 17-hectare site on the eastern side of the proposed National Place, between King Edward Terrace and for the Gallery. Though it was now unlikely that the lakeside Parliament House would proceed, a raised National Place surrounded by national institutions and government offices was still planned. Madigan's brief included the Gallery, a building for the High Court of Australia and the precinct around them, linking to the raised National Place at the centre of the Land Axis of the Parliamentary Triangle, which led to the National Library on the western side.
Madigan's final design was based on a brief prepared by the National Capital Development Commission with input from James Johnson Sweeney and James Mollison. Sweeney was director of the Guggenheim Museum between 1952–1960 and director of The Museum of Fine Arts and had been appointed as a consultant to advise on issues concerning the display and storage of art. Mollison said in 1989 that "the size and form of the building had been determined between Colin Madigan and J. J. Sweeney, the National Capital Development Commission. I was not able to alter the appearance of the interior or exterior in any way... It's a difficult building in which to make art look more important than the space in which you put the art"; the construction of the building commenced in 1973, with the unveiling of a plaque by Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, it was opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 1982, during the premiership of Whitlam's successor, Malcolm Fraser. The building cost $82 million. In 1975, the NCDC abandoned the plan for the National Place, leaving the precinct five metres above the natural ground level, without the proposed connections to national institutions and next to a vast space only taken up by Reconciliation Place, which does not substitute for the grand ma
Lumino kinetic art
Lumino Kinetic art is a subset and an art historical term in the context of the more established kinetic art, which in turn is a subset of new media art. The historian of art Frank Popper views the evolution of this type of art as evidence of "aesthetic preoccupations linked with technological advancement" and a starting-point in the context of high-technology art. László Moholy-Nagy, a member of the Bauhaus, influenced by constructivism can be regarded as one of the fathers of Lumino kinetic art. Light sculpture and moving sculpture are the components of his Light-Space Modulator, One of the first Light art pieces which combines kinetic art; the multiple origins of the term itself involve, as the name suggests and movement. There was an early cybernetic artist, Nicolas Schöffer, who developed walls of light and video circuits under the term in the 50s. Artist/engineer Frank Malina came up with the Lumidyne system of lighting, his work Tableaux mobiles is an example of Lumino Kinetic art of that period.
Artist Nino Calos worked with the term Lumino-kinetic paintings. Artist György Kepes was experimenting with lumino-kinetic works. Ellis D Fogg is associated with the term as a "lumino kinetic sculptor". In the 1960s various exhibits involved Lumino Kinetic art, inter alia Kunst-Licht-Kunst at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven in 1966, Lumière et mouvement at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1967. Lumino Kinetic art was aligned with Op art in the late 1960s because the moving lights were spectacular and psychedelic. Frank Popper views it as an art historical term in the context of kinetic art. Frank Popper. Origins and development of kinetic art. New York Graphic Society. Quote: "Apart from machines of this type, various other methods of projection have been practised in the field of lumino-kinetic art." Artist mentioned on p199: Leonard, Don Snyder, Tambellini. Roukes, Nicholas. Plastics for kinetic art. Watson-Guptill Publications. ISBN 978-0-8230-4029-2. Quote: "The interruption of "white light" created by overlapping red and blue light serves as one basis for making lumino- kinetic art objects"Christoph Grunenberg.
Summer of love: psychedelic art, social crisis and counterculture in the 1960s. Liverpool University Press. ISBN 978-0-85323-919-2. P 291 Quote: "Moderne de la Ville de Paris on 23 May 1967, offered the public access to a large range of lumino-kinetic works by artists such as Agam, Cruz-DiezFrank Popper: "The Place of High-Technology Art in the Contemporary Art Scene." by Frank Popper. Leonardo, Vol. 26, No. 1, pp. 65–69. Published by: The MIT Press Kinechromatic art Highlighting Borusan, example of a lumino kinetic art project by Waltraut Cooper, pioneer of digital art
Expo.02
Expo.02 was the 6th Swiss national exposition, held from 15 May to 20 October 2002. The exposition took place around the lakes of Bienne/Biel and Morat/Murten, it was divided into five sites. The five Arteplages were located in Neuchâtel, Yverdon-les-Bains, Morat/Murten, Biel/Bienne and on a mobile barge traveling from one site to another; the barge represented the canton of Jura. Expo.02 was the subject of controversy in Switzerland due to the many financial problems it encountered. It was first scheduled to take place in 2001, but the catastrophic organization and lack of funding threatened to put an end to the project, saved at the last minute by the Federal Government, which put in a large amount of public money to save the exhibition. Expo.02 cost 1.6 billion Swiss francs. Most of it came from major Swiss companies which sponsored the different exhibitions on the Arteplages. According to the organisers, more than 10 million admissions were counted, the exhibition succeeded in achieving its sole and only goal: the public's pleasure.
Each Arteplage was dedicated to a different theme. There was "Nature and Artifice" in Neuchâtel, "I and the Universe" in Yverdon-les-Bains, "Instants and Eternity" in Murten/Morat, "Power and Freedom" in Biel/Bienne and "Sense and Movement" on the mobile platform. Expo-archive.ch Official site
Ned Kahn
Ned Kahn is an environmental artist and sculptor, famous in particular for museum exhibits he has built for the Exploratorium in San Francisco. His works involves capturing an invisible aspect of nature and making it visible. In 2003 Kahn collaborated with Koning Eizenberg Architecture, Inc. on a piece for the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh consisting of hundreds of movable flaps that respond to the wind creating visible patterns. Kahn won a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" fellowship in 2003, the National Design Award for environmental design in 2005, his work is in the collection of Napa. Kahn works in California. Environmental art Environmental sculpture http://www.nedkahn.com http://greenmuseum.org/kahn
Tensegrity
Tensegrity, tensional integrity or floating compression is a structural principle based on the use of isolated components in compression inside a net of continuous tension, in such a way that the compressed members do not touch each other and the prestressed tensioned members delineate the system spatially. The term was coined by Buckminster Fuller in the 1960s as a portmanteau of "tensional integrity"; the other denomination of tensegrity, floating compression, was used by Kenneth Snelson. Tensegrity structures are based on the combination of a few simple design patterns: loading members only in pure compression or pure tension, meaning the structure will only fail if the cables yield or the rods buckle preload or tensional prestress, which allows cables to be rigid in tension mechanical stability, which allows the members to remain in tension/compression as stress on the structure increasesBecause of these patterns, no structural member experiences a bending moment; this can produce exceptionally rigid structures for their mass and for the cross section of the components.
A conceptual building block of tensegrity is seen in the 1951 Skylon. Six cables, three at each end, hold the tower in position; the three cables connected to the bottom "define" its location. The other three cables are keeping it vertical. A three-rod tensegrity structure builds on this simpler structure: the ends of each green rod look like the top and bottom of the Skylon; as long as the angle between any two cables is smaller than 180°, the position of the rod is well defined. Variations such as Needle Tower involve more than three cables meeting at the end of a rod, but these can be thought of as three cables defining the position of that rod end with the additional cables attached to that well-defined point in space. Eleanor Hartley points out visual transparency as an important aesthetic quality of these structures. Korkmaz et al. put forward that the concept of tensegrity is suitable for adaptive architecture thanks to lightweight characteristics. On 4 October 2009, the Kurilpa Bridge opened across the Brisbane River in Australia.
A multiple-mast, cable-stay structure based on the principles of tensegrity, it is the world's largest such structure. The idea was adopted into architecture in the 1960s when Maciej Gintowt and Maciej Krasiński, architects of Spodek, a venue in Katowice, designed it as one of the first major structures to employ the principle of tensegrity; the roof uses an inclined surface held in check by a system of cables holding up its circumference. In the 1980s David Geiger designed Seoul Olympic Gymnastics Arena for the 1988 Summer Olympics; the Georgia Dome, used for the 1996 Summer Olympics, was a large tensegrity structure of similar design to the aforementioned Gymnastics Hall. Tropicana Field, home of the Tampa Bay Rays major league baseball team, has a dome roof supported by a large tensegrity structure. Shorter columns or struts in compression are stronger than longer ones; this in turn led some, namely Fuller, to make claims that tensegrity structures could be scaled up to cover whole cities.
Biotensegrity, a term coined by Dr. Stephen Levin, is the application of tensegrity principles to biologic structures. Biological structures such as muscles, fascia and tendons, or rigid and elastic cell membranes, are made strong by the unison of tensioned and compressed parts; the muscular-skeletal system is a synergy of bone. The muscles and connective tissues provide continuous pull and the bones present the discontinuous compression. A theory of tensegrity in molecular biology to explain cellular structure has been developed by Harvard physician and scientist Donald E. Ingber. For instance, the expressed shapes of cells, whether it be their reactions to applied pressure, interactions with substrates, etc. all can be mathematically modeled if a tensegrity model is used for the cell's cytoskeleton. Furthermore, the geometric patterns found throughout nature may be understood based on applying the principles of tensegrity to the spontaneous self-assembly of compounds and organs; this view is supported by how the tension-compression interactions of tensegrity minimize material needed, add structural resiliency, constitute the most efficient possible use of space.
Therefore, natural selection pressures would favor biological systems organized in a tensegrity manner. As Ingber explains: The tension-bearing members in these structures — whether Fuller's domes or Snelson's sculptures — map out the shortest paths between adjacent members Tensional forces transmit themselves over the shortest distance between two points, so the members of a tensegrity structure are positioned to best withstand stress. For this reason, tensegrity structures offer a maximum amount of strength. In embryology, Richard Gordon proposed that Embryonic differentiation waves are propagated by an'organelle of differentiation' where the cytoskeleton is assembled in a bistable tensegrity structure at the apical end of cells called the'cell state splitter'; the origins of tensegrity are controversial. In 1948, artist Kenneth Snelson produced his innovative "X-Piece" after artistic explorations at Black Mountain College and elsewhere; some years the term "tensegrity" was coined by Fuller, best known for his geodesic domes.
Throughout his career, Fuller had experimented incorporating tensile components in his work, such as in the framing of his dymaxion houses. Snelson's 1948 innovation spurred Fuller to commission a
Children's Museum of Pittsburgh
The Children's Museum of Pittsburgh is a hands-on interactive children's museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It is in the Allegheny Center neighborhood in Pittsburgh's Northside; the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh was founded in 1983 in the old Allegheny Post Office, gifted to the museum by the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation, is situated on Pittsburgh's North Side Allegheny City. The neighboring Buhl Planetarium building was vacated by 1991 when it was superseded by the nearby Carnegie Science Center; the museum grew from a traveling mobile museum started at the Three Rivers Arts Festival in 1972, was part of the first wave of children's museums spreading across the county at that time. In the early 2000s, it was announced the museum would be expanding from the old Beaux Arts-style post office into the neighboring vacant Art Deco Buhl Planetarium. A plan was devised by Koning Eizenberg Architecture, Inc. to connect the two historic structures with a modern glass addition over what was a street called Allegheny Square.
The street was vacated and realigned and the addition was built. The Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh became the largest Silver LEED certified museum in the country in March 2006; this validates that the Museum’s expansion has been designed and constructed using sustainable practices with particular attention to site development, water conservation, energy management, using recycled materials, waste management, reusing resources, indoor air quality as well as developing new programs for visitors. To offer teaching moments about the new green museum, many of the building’s structural and mechanical systems are left exposed. In 2010, officials announced plans to rehab a rundown park in front of the museum; the centerpiece of the new park will be a fog sculpture by Ned Kahn. The park opened on June 2012 during a community celebration. In its seasonal "Backyard", the museum grounds includes an interactive environment called "Allegheny Waterworks" which incorporates preserved local architectural relics.
Among its sculptures are reliefs of Joe Magarac and other figures, designed by sculptor Charles Keck and rescued from the Manchester Bridge when it was razed in 1970. The Children's Museum of Pittsburgh houses several ongoing exhibits as well as rotating exhibits; the MAKESHOP, Studio, Garage, Theater and Nursery areas are ongoing interactive exhibits and encourage touch and play. Located within the museum are iconic items from the show Mister Rogers' Neighborhood; these include the original puppets, one of Fred Rogers' sweaters, his sneakers. The Children's Museum of Pittsburgh presents a wide variety of programs for children in fields ranging from dance and rocket building to quilting and robotics. Visiting artists offer workshops in a host of media, including pottery, Japanese paper cutting and painting; the Museum's extensive outreach program offers performances, after school programs, artist days and festival programs for schools and groups throughout the year. Educational field trips are offered for local schools and other groups.
The museum has collaborated with a number of regional institutions and programs, such as the University of Pittsburgh and the Create a Comic Project. The addition has received numerous awards, including a 2009 National Medal for Museum and Library Service from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, National Trust for Historic Preservation award, LEED silver certification, an award from American Institute of Architects. Children’s Museum Executive Director Jane Werner received the Green Building Alliance 2006 Shades of Green Leadership Award which celebrates leaders who have helped transform the Pittsburgh region into a more sustainable place to live and work. Werner's contributions cited include launching a new program/initiative supporting green-building related activities. Children's Museum of Pittsburgh official site
