Buildings that argue back

The pavilions stand on the bank of the Derwent, on the same Berriedale peninsula as the Museum of Old and New Art. They are low, glassy and turned towards the water rather than towards the road. Each one carries the name of an Australian artist or architect, which tells you plainly what the building thinks it is for. The museum below them is cut into the sandstone; the pavilions sit above it and look out.

Water does most of the work here. The Derwent is wide at this point, and the far bank is close enough to read the light on it through the day.

What makes this a first chapter rather than a fifth is the relationship between the rooms and the collection. The pavilions were not added to a museum that already existed as a business. They are part of the same idea, built on the same ground, in the same argument about what art is allowed to do to a visitor. You can walk from the room to the galleries without leaving the site, and the walk is short enough that people do it twice in a day.

Hobart itself is about fifteen minutes away by road. Most people arrive by ferry from the city waterfront, which is the better approach, because it puts the peninsula in front of you the way the buildings were designed to be seen.

The hotel occupies part of the Nishi building in the NewActon precinct, and the first thing anyone mentions is the stair. It is built from thousands of pieces of recycled timber, stacked and layered into a form that fills the atrium and is impossible to read as ordinary joinery. People stop on it, which is unusual behaviour for a stair.

Canberra is a planned city, and NewActon is one of the few parts of it that was allowed to grow dense and irregular. The precinct mixes apartments, offices, cinema and hotel in one block, and Nishi is the piece that holds it together. The timber facade and the deep planting soften a building that is, structurally, quite large.

The rooms sit inside that mix rather than above it. You come and go through a lobby that other people are using for other reasons, which is closer to how a city building actually behaves than most hotels manage.

The chapter criterion is met here by material rather than by objects on walls. This is a building assembled from salvaged and reused parts as a deliberate position, in a city where most public architecture is smooth, symmetrical and new.

Two buildings make this one: the administration building of the Carlton and United Breweries site, and the old Clare pub on the corner. They were joined rather than merged, and you can still feel the seam when you move between them. Chippendale grew up around industry, and the brewery block was the largest thing in it for a long time.

The pub is the older half and the more stubborn one. Corner pubs in Sydney have a particular shape, with the bar pushed to the street and the rooms stacked above, and that shape survived the conversion.

The administration building brings the other half: office scale, tall windows, and corridors that were built for staff rather than guests. Rooms cut into that fabric come out at odd sizes, which is part of the appeal and part of the compromise. Around it, the old brewery land has become housing, a park and university buildings, so the block has changed completely in twenty years.

It closes this chapter because it shows the limit of the idea. This is not art placed inside a hotel. It is a hotel made from two buildings that already had strong personalities, and the design work went into letting both of them keep speaking.