| Romaldo Giurgola AO (b. 1920), architect, was a founding partner of the firm that won the international design competition for Australia’s New Parliament House in 1980. Giurgola studied in his native Italy before moving to the USA, where he gained his MA at Columbia. After teaching at Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania, he was appointed chair of Columbia’s architecture department in 1966. Meanwhile, in 1958 he co-founded Mitchell/Giurgola Architects in Philadelphia. By the early 1960s his style, combining modernist principles with a more ‘inclusivist’ idiom, saw him identified as a key member of the ‘Philadelphia School’ of architecture alongside others including Louis Kahn. He was awarded the Gold Medal of the American Society of Architects in 1982.
Mitchell/Giurgola became Mitchell/Giurgola and Thorp Architects in 1980, as the firm set to work with Australian architect Richard Thorp on the project culminating in the opening of New Parliament House in 1988. That year Giurgola was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects, and MGT Architects opened an office in Sydney. In 1990 Giurgola’s second notable Canberra building, the modest St Thomas Aquinas Church in Charnwood, won the RAIA’s Canberra Medallion. In 2004 his St Patrick’s Cathedral, Parramatta, won him Australia’s highest architectural award, the RAIA’s Sir Zelman Cowen award for Public Buildings, which he was first awarded in 1989 for Parliament House. A resident of Canberra since the 1980s, Giurgola recently completed work on his own house at Lake Bathurst near Goulburn.
Mandy Martin has held more than 110 solo exhibitions since graduating from the South Australian School of Art in 1975. Between 1978 and 2003 she lectured at the School of Art at the Australian National University. During this period, her massive work Red Ochre Cove was commissioned for the Main Committee Room of Parliament House. Her work is represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia and major Australian state galleries, regional museums and universities, as well as the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Canberra-based for many years, Martin now lives near Cowra, NSW.
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Artist's Statement
Aldo Giurgola Portrait
This triptych presents the breadth of Aldo Giurgola’s life-work in the context of his own life-journey. I wanted to present him as a man of humility who has truly served humanity and to represent this through his three “houses”, that of God, Parliament and his own house.
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