Story of cities #17: Canberra's vision of the ideal city gets mired in 'mediocrity'

Submitted by Paul Daley on Thu, 07/04/2016 - 9:07am

Chicago pacifist Walter Griffin’s design for Australia’s new capital promised so much – even German beer gardens. But when war broke out, his ideas were shunned by planners and politicians alike, and a more prosaic city emerged

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In May 1912, Chicago landscape architect Walter Griffin won an international competition to design an unnamed capital of Australia. Overseas entrants had been given only maps, a cyclorama landscape print and – if they could access it – a plaster model of the site to work with.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, some of the proposed designs suggested futuristic, high-density metropolises built around elaborate canals and weirs (third-placed Frenchman, Donat Alfred Agache, even pitched a formal European-style city through which raged a wild river – like the Seine in Paris).

We desire to have a city that will be the Gotham of Australia