From the bold to the sentimental, the flashy to the quaint, professor of architecture and host of Restoration Australia, Anthony Burke, has seen his fair share of restoration projects.
While their scale might differ, each project puts the meaning, history and use of the building front and centre.
And, in a world where it’s often easier, cheaper and quicker to knock it down and start again, the care and attention to detail in a restoration often make them stand out.
After narrowing down the long list, here are four of Burke’s favourites.
Notre Dame
We’re starting big with Notre Dame or as Burke describes, “the big superstar of the restoration game”.
The French cathedral was ravaged by fire in 2019 during renovation works and the five-year-long repair and restoration is due to be finished at the end of this year.
Burke says, as well as the sheer scale, the restoration shows how closely connected buildings and national identity can be.
“It’s a huge cultural project,” he says.
“The way they’ve approached the restoration has been to do things like try and source timbers from French farmers that are the right size so they could use the same size beams that were in the original building and not have to use new timbers.
“We’re talking about going out into the French countryside and talking to people who want to donate 300 400-year-old trees, oak trees, to create the same rafters.
“This is a kind of a gift that people are giving, I think it’s beautiful.”
Loading…
The Great Cobar Museum
If you thought this was going to be all European show-stoppers, then you’re very wrong.
Burke says one of his other recent favourite restorations is the work done on the Great Cobar Museum in central New South Wales, a roughly eight-hour drive west of Sydney.
The federation-era building was built in 1910 and was previously the headquarters for the Great Cobar Mine and later a boarding house, before becoming the museum and visitor’s centre.
“The reason this has got my attention … was, yes, it’s a beautiful piece of work … but as a regional project there’s nothing kind of super conspicuous about it from the outset,” Burke says.
“To me it was really a kind of a love story about the investment in the region.
“There’s one of these in every regional town, you know, there’s that post office, or that bank or that pub, that everyone knows.
“It’s not exactly the best example of the late Victorian era or x, y or z, but it is the one that has anchored the town since the town was born, so to speak, and that’s what this project feels like.”
For Burke, the Great Cobar Museum is also a good demonstration of architects valuing history over the allure of trying something new or fresh.
“This is the kind of project though you could have expected them to go, ‘Oh, look it’s a sort of an autonomous 1900s building, it’s good, not great, we could probably build a funky new thing down the road here instead’.
“They actually just said, ‘No, let’s not do that. Let’s work with what we’ve got.’ and for all the right principles of not just adaptive reuse, but also working sustainably with what we have.”
National Gallery Berlin
Returning to Europe, the restoration of Berlin’s New National Gallery, which was completed in 2021, is another stand-out.
Construction on the gallery was originally finished in 1968, but a number of issues surfaced in the decades after that, including the large glass panes that surround the ground-level entrance cracking, and condensation problems.
The six-year restoration started in 2015 and was carried out by architect David Chipperfield.
“[David Chipperfield] is incredibly fastidious, absolutely mind-bogglingly beautifully detailed about the work that he does,” Burke says.
The restoration involved dismantling around 35,000 different building components, restoring or repairing them as well as the actual building, and then painstakingly replacing them one by one.
“You’ve got a fantastic project in the first place, you’ve got a legendary architect who’s coming afterwards as the second blush, and taking this product apart and fastidiously, put it right back together,” Burke says.
“To come up to contemporary standards and make it fit for purpose … breathing new life into it, without changing any of the best parts of its DNA.”
Dawn Fraser baths
In the same vein as Cobar, Burke says the restoration of the Dawn Fraser Baths is another example of a quiet, but meaningful, project.
The saltwater pools in Balmain in inner city Sydney were built in 1882, and are the oldest remaining example of a fully enclosed tidal pool in the city.
“It’s not kind of really pretty in a flouncy way, it’s just something that so many people have had a connection to,” he says.
“The restoration seemed to tap into exactly that sentiment, you know, it didn’t change too much.
“It did a little bit of quiet remediation around things like sea level rising and fixing up some of the old timbers and boards and stuff.
“That’s not spectacular but it respected what it really is and kept it that way and think that’s great. I don’t think every restoration has to feel shiny.”
Anthony Burke is a professor of architecture and the host of ABC TV’s Restoration Australia. You can stream the new season now on ABC iview.
Posted , updated