Romaldo
Giurgola AO (1920–2016) was a founding partner of Mitchell/Giurgola
& Thorp Architects, the firm that won the international competition
to design Australian Parliament House in 1980. Giurgola studied in his
native Italy before moving to the USA where he held academic positions
at Cornell and Columbia universities, and in 1958 co-founded
Mitchell/Giurgola Architects in Philadelphia. He was awarded the Gold
Medal of the American Society of Architects in 1982, while work on the
new Parliament House was under way. In 1988 Giurgola settled in
Canberra, designing a tiny Catholic church in Charnwood and a home for
himself at Lake Bathurst, near Goulburn; both are represented in Mandy
Martin’s painting.
The
architect and artist had known each other for many years when this
portrait was made. It is unconventional in that Giurgola appears small
scale amid a melding of the internal architectural space of Parliament
House and the surrounding landscape. This depiction echoed Giurgola’s
design ethos that ‘the building should nest with the hill, symbolically
rise out of the Australian landscape, as true democracy rises from the
state of things’.
Gift of the artist 2005
© Mandy Martin/Copyright Agency, 2023
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