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[Cameron Offices, Belconnen]

• 
  "Why do I believe this to be such an important building?
  … primarily because it is conceived of and works in urban design terms. … it is meta-architecture which provide us with lessons about meta order." (Jaquelin T. Robertson, arec_80.10)

• super sidewalk
  "The building is an established city precint. …
  It is a communal building; social; an order with civic responsibilities. It is a city building." (Robertson_80.10)

• megastructure man
  " . . . Cameron is not only the town's major transit, circulation and employment center, but also its mechanical plant."

• essential rightness
  "... an innately correct structure and type"

  "... innately correct response both to the place itself and to the precedence" (Robertson_80.10)

• the generic
  " ... an important new type of office building, a model for city building in other places.

  In this sense, it takes its place along side Wright's Larkin and Johnson Wax buildings and Herman Hertzberger's Centraal Beheer in Amsterdam." (Robertson_80.10)

• landscape cum climate
  "It is important in understanding Canberra to know that you cannot separate ... landscape and architecture; in Griffin, as in Wright, they are one." (Robertson_80.10)

• minor disorientations
  "Indeed the building’s greatest weakness is its “fashion,” particularly, the neo-Rudolphian excesses of the pedestrian mall: too many columns and levels and jutting soffits and entry options at a slightly pompous scale ...

• familiar drabness
  And, of course, the Brutalist color and material palette is increasingly hard, and hard to take." (Robertson_80.10)

• formal propositions
  "... a kind of unselfconscious and unreferential vernacular within the general language and intention of Modern Architecture ... " (Robertson_80.10)

• 
  "... after the rhetoric against form & style, Andrews' work is one architecture of 'astutely assembled modernist device' ... " (Peter Myers, "Back Stage with John," trans_83.02)
  
  

• 
  "Cameron is Andrews' finest building. It is unique architecture with its importance arising from the contradictory combination of artlessness and awareness. From his direct, but often complex, answers to the given conditions of program and site, the building has attained a rare sense of appropriateness to Australia." (Jennifer Taylor, aaust_81.05)

*** :

*** :

• prematurely famous
  "Scarborough was, afterall, the first modern megastructure in North America, what everyone tried to design in school." (Jaquelin T. Robertson, arec_80.10)