ABSTRACT
The key catalyst for modernist architecture and design in Australia and the Pacific is the American Frank Lloyd Wright. His 1906–9 Prairie Houses, influenced by Japanese ukiyo-e (‘floating world’) woodblock prints and centuries of Japanese and Korean building precedents, became key references for the Asia-Pacific stream of organic architecture that has been labelled ‘indigenous modernism’ (more below). Wright's first influence dates to 1911, when two of his staff, Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin, won an international competition to design the new Australian capital city: Canberra. The Griffins’ 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, defining modern cities as clusters of activity-specific zones, continued to influence town planners until zoning began to be discredited in the 1960s. The Griffins worked extensively in Australia from 1912 to 1935, using Wright-style 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 Pacific, peaking with the ‘indigenous modern’ movement exemplified 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 flamboyantly roofed hotels and houses built on Hawai’i, Tahiti, New Caledonia, Fiji, and other colonized Pacific islands served by commercial air services after the late 1950s.
