Canberra
In 1900 Queen Victoria gave permission to her six Australian colonies to confederate and form an independent country. By 1901 the Aussies had written up their constitution and decided upon their form of government (bi-cameral/parliamentarian) so wham bam there was the planet’s newest country. No revolution. No bloodshed. Just . . . Australia. Five million souls scattered across an entire continent inventing themselves.

Too right!

In the fashion of their colonial predecessors (the Canadians, us) the Aussies decided that their capital should be in its own federal district, so chose a riverine bowl sixty miles from the sea about midway between Melbourne and Sydney. What is now the capital of Australia was in 1905 a sheep station. And so they named that bowl Canberra and set about designing a capital.

Somehow the bureaucrats and politicians got it right. But It took a while.

Before they could start on the buildings they had to design the city . . . Canberra itself. They mounted an international design competition and selected a husband/wife landscape design team from Chicago who brilliantly proposed damming the valley’s Morongo River to form a Lake at the center of the capital district. World War I came along and delayed things but eventually Canberra was laid out and constructed around provisional government buildings — temporary structures designed to allow the government to function until permanent structures could be erected.

World War II came along and delayed things some more, but in 1979 another international design competition launched, and hundreds of architectural firms the world around submitted plans for Australia’s parliament complex. In 1980 the committee awarded the contract to a Philadelphia architectural partnership: Mitchell and Giurgola. The genius of their design consisted in embedding the massive houses of government within the topography of Canberra.

Our gorgeous capital building is a massive pile of rocks sitting atop the land. Ditto London’s House of Parliament, Berlin’s Reichstag, and etcetera. The Parliament Building of Canberra yields entirely to the land into which it is constructed. From some angles all you see of the houses of government is the flag flying over them.

All of this matters to me because the Mitchell of Mitchell and Giurgola was my uncle. He used to lay over in San Francisco as he commuted from Philadelphia to Canberra during the years of construction. During one of those layovers we walked with Mitch through Muir Woods and had the privilege of seeing that virgin grove of redwoods through his eyes. The mass, the fall of light, the beauty.

The Australians care a great deal about their land and about the plants and rocks and animals that define it. Pop over to Canberra sometime. There you will see a capital built not on its place but in it. The grassy hill into which it was built . . . remains. As the roof.