8 August 2024
The competition for the Shrine was held in late 1923 – a whole lot of great images of the entries have been unearthed by researchers for an exhibition about to start at the Shrine galleries.
The first image is a fabulous geometric design by Walter & Marion Griffin, but they didn’t even get a place, or published.
Almost all the others were classically inspired, some tall, some not, with various forecourt ideas, and of course the winner, by Hudson & Wardrop, was part Parthenon, part Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, finally completed in 1934. All images of the losers are via the Age.
The last image is the Griffin’s entry in the 1922 Chicago Tribune competition, and has a lot of similarities. The Shrine design looks like it was to be partly illuminated glass, and floodlit, would have looked great at night, and it also looks gigantic – if the marching figures below are the right scale. Marion would have drawn it, she wouldn’t exaggerate? Interesting that they entered, being avowed pacifists, but then it was meant to be a place of quiet contemplation, not a glorification of war or victory.
26 April 2021
The runners-up of the #ShrineOfRememberance competition held in late 1923, were published in Jan 1924; I’d never seen them before I searched Trove.
Ive started with 4th prize, which would have been quite stylistically advanced, being by #RoyLippincott with #EFBillson, who both worked by Walter Burley Griffin, and whose scheme is arranged much like the Canberra War Memorial by #EmilSoderson, designed late 1920s. The next one got 5th place, and was by #StephensonAndMeldrum, and looks like a monolith set within a circular plaza, that would have been interesting.
The others also have large plazas, being more ‘places of remembrance’ than mausoleums. The curved wings scheme came 3rd, and was by a 27 year old DK Turner. The last one here, which came 2nd, and is mostly plaza, was by William Lucas, who was born in Melb but living in South Africa (and who complained that the winning scheme was derivative, to which Hudson replied so was his!).
This is the original design of the #ShrineOfRememberance, by Phillip Hudson and James Wardrop, which won the competition in late 1923, as published in Jan 1924, and it’s pretty much as built – I hadnt seen this before, and thought maybe it might have changed at some point, but the only difference is that the lower tier of walls with statuary on the corners wasn’t built – and which @armarchitecture was inspired by to do their corner courtyards.
Storey of Melbourne 
Interesting how entries in images 3,4 and 6 in the montage have pre-empted the brutalist architecture of nazi germany. The Chicago Tribune entry is so horrendous and backward looking I can only assume it was submitted as some sort of joke. The same could also have been said about the Griffin one, maybe he was having one of his bad days.
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