Capital Designs: Australia House and Visions of an Imperial London, by Eileen Chanin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Capital Designs: Australia House and Visions of an Imperial London by Eileen Chanin Shuhita Bhattacharjee (bio) Capital Designs: Australia House and Visions of an Imperial London, by Eileen Chanin; pp. xviii– 474. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2018, $49.95, $35.00 paper. Eileen Chanin's Capital Designs: Australia House and Visions of an Imperial London uncovers the detailed story of Australia's first diplomatic mission, examining the reasons behind its conception and the process of its construction. The Commonwealth House (later called the Australia House) was inaugurated in 1913—soon after the Federation of the six states of Australia (1901) and before the First World War—and its construction was completed in 1918. Parts 1 through 4 explain how Australia aimed to consolidate its global position through a conspicuous architectural presence in London, which formed the heart of the imperial network. Chanin explains how the building of Australia House was congruent with London's larger architectural restructuring—the construction of new thoroughfares through derelict areas in the form of the Holborn to Strand improvements at Aldwych. [End Page 148] From part 5 onwards, Chanin as an art historian describes in meticulous detail the technical aspects and political debates that underpinned the various artistic choices exercised while erecting this building. Her analysis suggests that the Australia House's architectural construction embodied an attempt at national self-definition. It was a result of the "heightened national sentiment that came with Federation" (35), and reflected how in the "approach … to buildings and urban environments" (46) the Australians "equip [themselves] … with the latest and the best, [while] the English are astonishingly content with the obsolete and the inconvenient … because they instinctively distrust the Entirely New" (qtd. in Chanin 46). It is useful to note how Chanin's overview implies in places that the motivation for, or character of, these architectural shifts—whether British or Australian—was often moral. For instance, Arthur Cawston, a British architect, called for London's restructuring to redress the separation of the rich and poor, and the Australia House was built in accordance with labor principles beneficial for workers. However, the book as a whole foregrounds a different kind of collusion—not moral, but material. Chanin complicates the conventional postcolonial understanding of the imperialist hierarchy that is supposed to exist between the colonizing nation and the colonized as she reveals how the imperial heartland and dominion merged in their desire for, and plans of, global visibility. Chanin notes that "concerned Londoners fretted over whether their city was an appropriate hallmark of Empire" when compared to "Paris, Berlin or Vienna" (xiv). Concurrently, the Australian Commonwealth showed similar international ambition, with its officials "developing what was then the world's newest country" and, "for the first time in the world's history … 'a Nation for a Continent, and a Continent for a Nation'" (25). Chanin notes how administrators across the colonial divide understood that "government rests upon finance" and that finance can be facilitated by architectural interventions (39). The new London roads were aimed at "easing congestion in order to advance commerce" (25), and the Australia House was designed so that the future High Commissioner could control the Australian national debt from there by tapping into London's flourishing "commercial life" (38). Interestingly, Chanin helps us deduce that the imperial center and colonial outpost agreed on the means to achieve the international visibility that they both sought: imposing and strategic architectural presence. As Chanin observes, Britain was "giddy with the pace of change" (xiv) in building technologies, and London was being positioned globally as "a frontier of architecture and urbanism" (xv). Similarly, "Australia needed lofty expression" (xvi), and the Australia House was "an expression of power … built as a centre and symbol for a new nation—in, and for, an imperial capital" (xv). This view of the pivotal and charged role of architecture was typical of the times, as echoed during the Seventh International Congress of Architects held in London in 1906. Though Chanin does not allude to it directly, the politico-cultural centrality of architecture to the process of colonialism and in the context of the Victorian era has received in-depth secondary attention elsewhere, in works by historians...