The first reference to court buildings in Canberra was in Walter Burley 1911 plan. His central triangle contained various national buildings including the “Courts of Justice” on the shore of the central basin of the lake.
The High Court first appeared on an official Canberra plan as a named building in 1959 – a bland rectangle on its current site. The permanent Parliament House was next to it on the lake shore. On the other side of Parliament was the National Library – then a library to serve the Parliament rather than one for the whole nation. In that plan, the High Court building was to be one of half a dozen buildings – including national archives and museums. NCDC Chief Architect Roger Johnson called it “a great monumental plaza’’ or National Place.
But that fell in a heap when the politicians decided to become planners.
In 1968 a free vote in Parliament rejected the lakeside site for Parliament and it was notionally moved up to Camp Hill – back towards Capital Hill. The National Place with half a dozen buildings was then out of the question. According to NCDC staff architect and later commissioner, Paul Reid, Ministers in their offices would not have their view of the lake spoiled with buildings. They wanted more landscape and fewer buildings. So all but the High Court and the National Library (by then built) were removed from the plan. In effect, the High Court stood alone on the plans in a wide space. Even when the National Gallery of Australia was moved down the hill to be adjacent to the High Court, the court seemed – because of its isolation — to be too monumental, too grand and out of proportion.
“With the failure to complete the National Place, the High Court and the National Gallery are left as two mighty remnants, isolated in time and space from everything around them,” Reid wrote. “The problem is one of scale. Very large buildings in Canberra’s central area have been a response to the huge horizontal distances but they are defeated by them.”
However, once New Parliament House – with the site moved to Capital Hill – was completed in 1988 and other buildings, such as the National Science and Technology Centre, were completed, the High Court building sits in context and proportion, and those criticisms have faded.
Moreover, in the two decades since the building was opened the landscaping by Harry Howard and Associates – using all Australian natives — has matured. It has had a softening effect on the building and on the way people see the building.
The siting was fixed in May 1970 when the Minister for the Interior, Peter Nixon, announced “the siting of the High Court and the National Art Gallery in the north-eastern section of the parliamentary triangle”. And on 15 May, 1972, the NCDC announced “a two-stage competition for the design of the High Court building to be located in Canberra”.
The judging panel comprised Chief Justice Sir Garfield Barwick; the commissioner of the NCDC, Sir John Overall; the chairman of the Australian Universities Commission, Peter Karmel; New South Wales Government Architect E. H. Farmer; and Melbourne architect Daryl Jackson. Entrants had to be registered as architects in Australia. The 158 entries in the initial stage were reduced to six for the second stage. Those six would “be required to submit evidence of their capacity to perform at a high professional standard in the matter of design, documentation and the construction of the High Court building.”
The terms of the competition stated:
“In its siting and in its form the High Court building should impart a sense of strength and security. . . The High Court building should, in one sense, be visually related to the Parliament, but at the same time must be seen to stand separate from, and independent of, the Parliament. . . . The locating of both the High Court and the Parliament in proximity to one another in the Federal Capital has strong symbolic significance. Together they represent the basis of government and justice at the national level.”
The competition was won by the firm Edwards, Madigan, Torzillo and Briggs and the architect of the firm in charge of the project was Chris Kringas. Kringas died in 1975 just before construction began. The firm had won the competition for the National Gallery of Australia in August 1968 and shortly afterwards the site for the Gallery was moved from the land axis behind Camp Hill to the lake shore next to the High Court. Colin Madigan was the principal architect for the Gallery project and after Kringas’s death he took control of the design team for the High Court. With Madigan leading both projects, compatibility was assured.
[Since publication of the book version I have been advised that the paragraph above is not correct.
Kringas was director in charge and led the design team, which included Feiko Bouman and Rod Lawrence. The team completed the design in 1973 working from a terrace house in McMahon’s Point, Sydney. Construction documentation was substantially complete at the time of Kringas’s death in March 1975, just one month before construction began. Architect Hans Marelli then supervised construction of the design. The constructed building is relevantly identical to the winning competition design. While there are similarities in material and style between Madigan’s National Gallery and Kringas’s High Court, there are significant differences in architectural form and space.]
Reid described the buildings as “abstract, romantic, brutalist, off-form concrete compositions with an underlying geometric figure: the High Court a square, the Gallery an equilateral triangle”. They were both of “uncompromising modernity”. In his Walter Burley Griffin lecture in 1983, Madigan described the two buildings as embodying “the halcyon, optimistic spirit of the early 1970s”.
The winning design was very different from the High Court depicted in earlier maps and artists’ impressions of the central national court which had it as a low building of one or two levels because, according to those planners, that was all that was needed.
The High Court’s 20th century modernist style, according to its designers, strives for openness and dignity without being intimidating.
Melbourne architect Philip Goad said, “The High Court remains one of the most robust and exhilarating pieces of 1970s architecture in Australia . . . For a court building, the High Court has become a benchmark in Australia for vital architectural expression that deliberately seeks to make the law visible, relevant and accessible to the public. At the same time, it evokes an entirely fitting sense of monumentality, respectful of the image and also the scale of the law.”
Architects who approve the design of the High Court point to the glass as a symbol of transparency, openness and accountability. It lets those inside see out as well as those outside see in. The ramp and forecourt are seen as workable public spaces allowing for public circulation.
The Architect’s Statement (published in the July, 1980, edition of Architecture Australia, the journal of the Royal Australia Institute of Architects) says, “The public hall is conceived as a semi-external space. . . . The external views from the various galleries, platforms and ramps in the space where spectators will gather allow the exceptional views of Canberra to be enjoyed. The extensive areas of glass on the west of the public hall have shade louvres giving protection from the sun whilst maintaining the ‘outlook’ referred to above and providing desirable shade and comfort . . . . This ‘tree-shading’ concept intensifies the semi-external concept of the Public Hall where the radiance of form and light on the louvres reflects the mood of the day. . . .”
Madigan himself wrote in 1973, “One can enter the building and see its structure, services and functions exposed. It immediately ‘includes’ the visitor in the way it works.”
Since the court’s opening, it has had many occasions on which to meet the test of openness and accessibility. The court has dealt with cases that have excited enough public or sectional interest to draw large numbers to the court building. They include the Tasmanian Dam case in July 1983; the Lindy Chamberlain hearings and judgment in May 1983 (bail application), November 1983 (hearing) and May 1984 (judgment); the indigenous people’s land rights cases Mabo in June 1992 and Wik in 1996; the Patrick Stevedores case on the legality of sacking wharf labourers in 1998; the Osland (battered wife) murder case also in 1998; and the McBain case in 2002 regarding in-vitro fertilisation treatment for unmarried women. In these cases, and others, the forecourt of the High Court building became a workable forum for litigants and their supporters to express their views publicly – often before large media contingents. Inside the building the spacious courtrooms enabled large numbers of the interested public to view and hear proceedings.