Thursday, October 10, 2024

Need some architectural inspo? These four restorations might help

Must read

From the bold to the sentimental, the flashy to the quaint, professor of architecture and host of Restoration Australia, Anthony Burke, has seen his fair share of restoration projects.

While their scale might differ, each project puts the meaning, history and use of the building front and centre.

And, in a world where it’s often easier, cheaper and quicker to knock it down and start again, the care and attention to detail in a restoration often make them stand out.

After narrowing down the long list, here are four of Burke’s favourites.

Notre Dame

We’re starting big with Notre Dame or as Burke describes, “the big superstar of the restoration game”.

The French cathedral was ravaged by fire in 2019 during renovation works and the five-year-long repair and restoration is due to be finished at the end of this year.

The COVID pandemic slowed down the cathedral’s restoration, which is set to finish later this year.(Reuters: Charles Platiau)

Burke says, as well as the sheer scale, the restoration shows how closely connected buildings and national identity can be. 

“It’s a huge cultural project,” he says.

“The way they’ve approached the restoration has been to do things like try and source timbers from French farmers that are the right size so they could use the same size beams that were in the original building and not have to use new timbers.

“We’re talking about going out into the French countryside and talking to people who want to donate 300 400-year-old trees, oak trees, to create the same rafters.

“This is a kind of a gift that people are giving, I think it’s beautiful.”

Loading…

The Great Cobar Museum

If you thought this was going to be all European show-stoppers, then you’re very wrong.

Burke says one of his other recent favourite restorations is the work done on the Great Cobar Museum in central New South Wales, a roughly eight-hour drive west of Sydney.

The federation-era building was built in 1910 and was previously the headquarters for the Great Cobar Mine and later a boarding house, before becoming the museum and visitor’s centre.

Architects DunnHillam were tasked with restoring the building.  / The award-winning restoration was completed in 2021. Supplied: DunnHillam/Katherine Lu

“The reason this has got my attention … was, yes, it’s a beautiful piece of work … but as a regional project there’s nothing kind of super conspicuous about it from the outset,” Burke says.

“To me it was really a kind of a love story about the investment in the region.

“There’s one of these in every regional town, you know, there’s that post office, or that bank or that pub, that everyone knows.

“It’s not exactly the best example of the late Victorian era or x, y or z, but it is the one that has anchored the town since the town was born, so to speak, and that’s what this project feels like.”

The tired outside was revamped. / Both the inside and outside of the building was restored. Supplied: DunnHillam/Katherine Lu

For Burke, the Great Cobar Museum is also a good demonstration of architects valuing history over the allure of trying something new or fresh.

“This is the kind of project though you could have expected them to go, ‘Oh, look it’s a sort of an autonomous 1900s building, it’s good, not great, we could probably build a funky new thing down the road here instead’.

The work also focused on internal rooms. / The new exhibition area. Supplied: DunnHillam/Katherine Lu

“They actually just said, ‘No, let’s not do that. Let’s work with what we’ve got.’ and for all the right principles of not just adaptive reuse, but also working sustainably with what we have.”

National Gallery Berlin

Returning to Europe, the restoration of Berlin’s New National Gallery, which was completed in 2021, is another stand-out.

Construction on the gallery was originally finished in 1968, but a number of issues surfaced in the decades after that, including the large glass panes that surround the ground-level entrance cracking, and condensation problems.

The restoration involved meticulously taking apart much of the building. / It took six years to finish.

The six-year restoration started in 2015 and was carried out by architect David Chipperfield.

“[David Chipperfield] is incredibly fastidious, absolutely mind-bogglingly beautifully detailed about the work that he does,” Burke says.

The restoration involved dismantling around 35,000 different building components, restoring or repairing them as well as the actual building, and then painstakingly replacing them one by one.

Posted , updated 

Latest article