An architect credited with helping change the face of Melbourne has taken out the 2003 Royal Australian Institute of Architects’ Gold Prize, the profession’s highest accolade.
Peter Corrigan, principal with his wife Maggie Edmond of Edmond and Corrigan, has been practising for over 37 years, graduating in architecture from the University of Melbourne in 1966, before completing post-graduate studies in Environmental Design at Yale University.. As well as architectural projects, he has been involved in stage set design - particularly with Barry Kosky and teaching and writing. He represented Australia at the Paris Biennale and has taken out numerous awards prior to the Gold Prize, including the 1982 ACI Architecture Award, which he won for “the most outstanding contribution to the development of architectural theory expressed in completed buildings having particular relevance and significance to the Australian regional context.”
This comment was mirrored by the jury citation released to announce that Corrigan had won the 2003 Gold Award, which says: “In the 1970s (Corrigan’s) introduction of a fresh perspective on the everyday of Australian life was of particular note. His concern and sincerity for the wellbeing of the Australian city dweller has been evident since his early work when he turned the profession’s attention to the suburbs and the lot of the suburban dweller. He sympathises with and celebrates society at large through his articles and his buildings that draw on the local language of form, material and familiar folklore.”
The Gold Award acknowledges Corrigan’s “contribution over 30 years as one of the most original and stimulating voices to Australian architectural teaching and practice,” according to RAIA president Graham Jahn.“Peter Corrigan has been a pivotal figure in the burst of creativity in Melbourne in recent decades and is to a large part responsible for a new and distinguishable architectural language.”
Corrigan’s projects include the Victorian College of Fine Arts, Kay Street Housing in Carlton, which won the Victorian chapter of the RAIA’s 1985 outstanding architecture award, Athan House, Monbulk, which took out the RAIA Victorian chapter bronze medal for outstanding architecture in the new residential category in 1989 and the RMIT Building 8 extension, which took out several awards in 1995.
In a tribute to Corrigan, Conrad Hamann, associate professor in architectural history, School of literary, visual and performance studies at Monash University, writes:
“there is hardly a major architect of recent melbourne who has not been affected by Peter Corrigan, even if indirectly or in reaction…he has had a profound effect and the direction of character of architectural teaching at RMIT and is widely seen as having a crucial role in shaping Australian architectural culture - especially in Melbourne.”
Hamann says that once he began practising, Corrigan “embarked on a singular task in australian architecture - confronting its prevailing history and ideology. He had begun to reassess, through imagery, australian society and the Australian everyday: in city, suburbs or country. This involved examining its meanings and individuality, and exploring the chances of an Australian architectural voice in celebration and challenge.”
He notes that:“Corrigan’s path cuts sharply across the prevailing direction of the history and the ideology of Australian’s architectural culuture.“ and that “Edmond and Corrigan has had a major effect on colour usage in Australian architecture since the 1980s, first in the spread of striped polychrome, then in the use of colour to mark out moments and episodes.”.
Corrigan writes of his architectural ethos in his book ‘Contemporary Architecture’, where, talking about the search for form, he says: “it is intended as a fruitful interplay between the traditions of architecture and the social theories of our time.”
Awarded annually since 1960, the Gold Medal is the highest honour the institute can bestow. It was created to recognise distinguished service by architects who have designed or executed buildings of high merit or who have produced distinction resulting in the advancement of architecture. - Dael Climo.