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Between Art and Garbage

Ella Mudie September 20

In the June edition of Meanjin, Ella Mudie contemplates the strange, industrial architecture of our now defunct garbage incinerators, and how art can be found within buildings with even the most mundane functions – case in point, the Willoughby Incinerator designed by Walter Burley Griffin for Sydney’s suburban north shore. A brief extract is below, and you can now read the full essay on our editions page.


Willoughby_Incinerator_photographed_by_Adrienne_Kabos_in_2005.

Willoughby Incinerator, 2005, photographer Adrienne Kabos. Courtesy of the Walter Burley Griffin Society Inc.


In the late 1920s Griffin was offered a most unusual commission. Invited to submit a design for an incinerator plant to be built on the site of an unpopular rubbish tip in the Victorian suburb of Essendon, Griffin devised a structure that was charming in its near ecclesiastical appearance. From this initial design Griffin, along with his architectural partner Eric Nicholls, went on to build thirteen such incinerators in suburbs in Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia, the ACT and Queensland.

Today, half the incinerators designed by Griffin and Nicholls have been demolished. But at Willoughby, on a site not far from the suburb of Castlecrag where the Griffins made an indelible mark with their experimental housing projects, the incinerator—generally praised as among the finest surviving examples, is being restored after years of neglect. At the time of writing, a refurbishment of the Willoughby Incinerator involving a conversion into an exhibition space, artist studio and café is about 60 per cent complete and scheduled for completion by early 2011. Not only does this restoration bring the story of the incinerators into the twenty-first century, inviting reflection on their mysterious origins, but it also coincides with a period of increased focus on the fate of industrial relics as a growing number of structures, once harbingers of the future, now face an uncertain future.

Like many industrial buildings, the Griffin incinerators were cutting edge at the time of building only to become redundant within a matter of decades. This speedy descent into obsolescence stemmed from the fact the buildings represented a specific solution to the urban dilemma posed by waste disposal as population growth in the 1920s and 1930s placed serious pressure on local rubbish tips. When an engineer named John Boadle, from Moonee Ponds in Melbourne, patented a revolutionary form of garbage disposal in 1926, his design attracted interest from a number of councils. In Boadle’s reverberatory incineration unit, garbage was heated to such a temperature that smoke and gases were deflected, resulting in markedly lower emissions and what appeared, at the time at least, to be a relatively clean method of waste disposal.

In 1929 Essendon City Council decided to take up the technology and build its own plant. It was quickly realised the planned incinerator’s close proximity to houses called for an aesthetically pleasing building, not too industrial in its outward appearance. Thinking laterally, Griffin looked to an unlikely source of inspiration for his design. He returned to the features of the Peters House, a renowned Prairie-style residence he designed in Chicago in 1906 not longer after leaving the office of Frank Lloyd Wright, translating its geometric, diamond windows and steep tent ceiling into a new, industrial context. This marriage of a domestic style with an industrial structure proved a winning combination that was repeated in later incinerators, including the design for the plant at Willoughby built in 1934, and became a valuable selling point that helped Griffin and Nicholls secure future contracts.


 

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