2022 NGV Architecture Commission

The 2022 NGV Architecture Commission is an evocative reimagining of the Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens.

Over the summer months, the Architecture Commission will evolve and change as it is painted by a team of Melbourne artists, drawing inspiration from the vibrant colours and rich artistic embellishments that defined the original building. The layering of these artworks over months asks us to consider the effect of time on all architecture. Since the fifth century BCE the Parthenon has changed use and form over generations, including as a temple, church and mosque. It has also suffered under military attacks, fire and looting, before undergoing major preservation from the 1970s to its current state.

By displaying the effects of time, the project suggests that perspectives on buildings, and identities, can evolve and change. Temple of Boom celebrates the constant cultural flux, while also seeking to expand our understanding of the Parthenon as an enduring architectural and cultural beacon.

Taking its name from the vibrations of music, Temple of Boom is envisioned as a meeting place for the community and an outdoor venue for a diverse program of NGV-curated performances, programs, and live music across the summer period.

Adam Newman is an architect at NWMN, a small architecture practice based in Melbourne. At NWMN, Adam’s principal focus is on adaptive building re-use and regeneration through the lens of conscious engagement with local ecologies. He has broad experience at the scales of urban master planning, social housing regeneration, civic and residential architecture, and industrial design and fabrication. Adam is a registered architect (ARBV), a member of Architeam, and a teaching associate at Monash University, Department of Architecture.

Kelvin Tsang is lead designer and technical director at NWMN. His interests lie in using narrative-driven architectural design and image production to promote conversations about architecture’s role as a driver of positive change.

Along with practice-based work on residential, commercial and interior projects, Kelvin is a teaching associate at Monash University, Department of Architecture. With a Master’s degree in Architecture from Monash University, Kelvin received Top Student in Master’s Studio and Top Project in Masters Studio in consecutive years.

Temple of Boom will be painted over the summer months by a list of Melbourne street and urban artists who have been guest curated by Toby Benador, Founder and Director, Just Another Agency.

FIRST LAYER COLLABORATION

David Lee Pereira is a visual artist whose works explore the fluidity of gender, sexuality and identity. Influenced by the work of impressionist and surrealist artists Georgia O’Keefe, Salvador Dali and Edvard Munch, Pereira has adorned the structure with large-than-life floral motifs that draw attention to nature’s flamboyant use of scent and colour to allure pollinators.

Manda Lane is a muralist, illustrator and paper-based artist from Collingwood, Victoria. With a keen focus on botanicals, her art explores the interactions between the natural world and industrial or man-made objects. In this mural installation, Lane depicts various growth behaviours of plants, creating a visual metaphor for personal expression and growth.

Drez is a multidisciplinary artist based in Melbourne who uses colour and form to play with perspective. Drawing inspiration from art historical perspectives, including the Greenbergian Modernism and Op-Art schools, Drez’s work creates an intersection between abstract art and street art. For this installation, Drez has created a boldly colourful mural that changes composition when viewed from different angles.

SECOND LAYER COLLABORATION

Creature Creature is an artist duo consisting of Chanel Tang and Ambrose Rehorek based in Melbourne in Australia. They first met at university and ‘flirted through art’ until they formed an official union in 2011 under one name. Creature Creature was chosen from a quote in the 1960’s film A Bucket of Blood; “A Creature is a Creature…or it is an artist!” Since then, they have continued a collaborative art practice that spans across exhibiting art, murals, street art, design and illustration. Their work represents duality and the sum of a whole, a message of togetherness, states of balance, yin and yang. Their partnership breaks the myth of the lone artist, as collaboration is an instinctive ritual for them in realms of art, love and life. Collaboration is about preserving diversity, creating something complex, layered and fluid. The beauty of coming together. Born in Adelaide, Ambrose has a Degree in Visual Arts from the University of South Australia. Chanel was born in Wellington, New Zealand, moved to Australia in 1998 where she did her Degree in Fine Art at Monash University. They met doing a Graduate Diploma in Graphic Design at RMIT.

Manda lane is a muralist, illustrator and paper-based artist from Collingwood, Victoria. With a keen focus on botanicals, her art explores the interactions between the natural world and industrial or man-made objects. Within her public art practice, Manda creates floral-based murals and installations, focusing on the organic behaviours of native and tropical flora. Working predominantly in black and white, Manda adopts a contemporary and stylised approach to traditional botanical art, with the purpose of re-connecting communities to the beauty of nature, while also seeking to encourage a conversation about the symbiotic relationships between the nature and the urban environment.

Aretha Brown, practising artist and screenwriter, takes heavy influence from her time growing up in Melbourne’s Western Suburbs. As well as her own identity as a queer, Blak, young person living in the confinements of an urban colony. In 2021, Aretha wrote her first subversive comedy short titled How to be cool in Melbourne. Parodying the ideas, inner workings and social politics of Melbourne’s underground art and cultural spaces. Aretha has also been a regular appearance at comedy clubs, performing her signature political and satirical stand-up throughout Melbourne. Aretha founded the **Kiss My Art Collective. Formed to champion young women and non-binary artists by providing jobs, work experience and a safe creative space on large-scale public murals throughout Australia and internationally.

Chuck Mayfield, coming from a family of artists, has been practicing in creative fields from an early age. He has been painting and drawing his whole life, and started painting graffiti art and murals at age 16. After thirteen years of working in Brisbane as a commercial mural artist, a screenprinter, and in the field of sign and displays, he acquired a bachelor in visual communication and moved to Melbourne to pursue a career in the arts. Chuck has painted murals and exhibited work in cities across Australia, Asia, Europe and the US, and continues to travel, painting walls and working on creative projects. He now lives in Melbourne and works from Everfresh studio as freelance artist, mostly painting murals, while also producing personal works in public, private spaces, for live performance and exhibitions.

Resio is a Melbourne, Australia-based contemporary artist whose works are a unique combination of styles inspired by Abstract Expressionism, Action Painting and the global visual and physical language of graffiti. Resio’s works weave together complex abstractions of dynamic colour, shapes and movement with photorealism and a masterful approach to the traditions of graffiti and studio painting techniques. Resio’s ‘language’ is easily translatable to large-scale public murals, studio painting, and private commissions. This diversity in expression has earned him a reputation as a unique talent emerging from a long line of Australian artists inspired by the international dialogue of art and graffiti who choose to exhibit their work on both Gallery and public walls.

The Parthenon was built as a temple dedicated to the goddess Athena. Famous for its harmonious proportions and the exquisite quality of its sculptural decoration, the Parthenon endures as a symbol of Hellenic identity, artistic excellence, beauty, democracy and civilisation.

The temple’s plans were drawn by the architects Iktinos and Kallikrates. The construction of the Parthenon involved an unprecedented number of artists and craftspeople of all specialties. Work began in 447 BC and was completed just fifteen years later. The careful placement of precisely cut masonry ensured that the Parthenon remained essentially intact for more than two millennia.

By the seventh century, alterations were made during the building’s transformation into a Roman Catholic cathedral. The Turks seized the Acropolis in 1458, and two years later they adopted the Parthenon as a mosque, raising a minaret at the south-west corner.

During the bombardment of the Acropolis in 1687 by Venetians fighting the Turks, a powder magazine located in the temple blew up, destroying the centre of the building. The Venetians then inadvertently smashed several sculptures.

In 1801–03 a large part of the sculpture that remained was removed, with Turkish permission, by the British nobleman Lord Elgin, and sold in 1816 to the British Museum. The Greek government continues to seek their return to be displayed in the new Acropolis Museum in Athens.

In 1975 a multi-decade restoration of the Parthenon began funded by the Greek government. Each salvageable piece of marble was returned to its original position, while gaps filled with new marble from the original quarry. This time-consuming project is ongoing.

2022 PROJECT TEAM

Architects Adam Newman and Kelvin Tsang

Artists David Lee Pereira, Drez, Manda Lane, Creature Creature, Chuck Mayfield, Aretha Brown, Resio

Guest Curator Toby Benador, Just Another Agency

Builder Savio Projects

Project Manager Assembly Interiors

Structural Engineers TGA Engineers

Building Surveyor Nicolas Building Surveyors

Manufacturer AuGRC Pty Ltd

Timber Supplier Ceres Fair Wood

2022 NGV ARCHITECTURE COMMISSION JURY
Amaia Sanchez-Velasco – Lecturer School of Architecture, University of Technology Sydney
Don Heron – Assistant Director Exhibitions Management and Design, NGV (Chair)
Linda Cheng – Editor, Architecture AU
Michael Banney – Founding Director, M3
Mel Dodd – Head of Department of Architecture, Monash University
Rachel Nolan – Founding Director, Kennedy Nolan

Following the founding of the Department of Contemporary Design and Architecture at the NGV in 2015, the Gallery developed the NGV Architecture Commission series to offer a unique opportunity for Australian architects and designers to propose a compelling design idea for presentation within one of Australia’s great civic and cultural spaces – the Grollo Equiset Garden at NGV International.

Seeking to exhibit leading architectural ideas in the context of the NGV, the series was instigated in 2015 with John Wardle Architects’ I Dips Me Lid, a playful steel, timber and textile structure which provided a theatrical centrepiece offering shade, retreat and a place for performance and workshops.

In 2017 M@ Studio’s hyperreal suburban carwash Haven’t you always wanted…? won the Melbourne Prize in the Victorian Architecture Awards.

In 2018 Retallack Thompson and Other Architects’ Garden Wall, a maze-like series of open-air passageways, corridors and rooms was awarded a commendation in the Victorian Architecture Awards Small Projects category.

In 2019 Muir + Openwork’s Doubleground was awarded the Australian Institute of Architects national award for small project architecture and the Victorian chapter’s Kevin Borland award for small project architecture.

In 2020 Yhonnie Scarce and Edition Office’s In Absence won the Victorian chapter’s Kevin Borland award for small project architecture and the global award for small building of the year at the 2020 Dezeen Awards.

2022 marks the seventh NGV Architecture Commission.

The NGV Architecture Commission has previously been designed by Taylor Knights and James Carey (2021), Yhonnie Scarce and Edition Office (2019), MUIR + OPENWORK (2018), Retallack Thompson and Other Architects (2017), M@ STUDIO Architects (2016), John Wardle Architects (2015).