Reading Response 5: The Semiotics of the New Parliament House

Reading Response 5: 

The Semiotics of the New Parliament House - Ivor Indyk

The New Parliament House has a clear and unambiguous symbolic duty: it must stand as an expression of the Australian democratic spirit. It moves beyond the strictures of modern formalism in attempting to provide richer expressions of cultural value.

The building stands to resolve the Australian Spirit and also the means by which it is to be expressed. As the Parliament House and War Memorial face each other from either end of the sharply defined land axis, it is hardly surprising that the one should assume full significance only in relation to the other. The two are bound by a symbolic reciprocity: the War Memorial stands guard over the ideal of freedom and nationhood represented by the Parliament house, a sombre reminder of the cost of this ideal in terms of human lives, and of the moral qualities required for its defence. Where the Parliament House gestures towards the future, the War Memorial tells, with greater certainty, of the heroic past in expressions of the spirit of Anzac.

Parliament House, with its essentially political function, makes no reference to the content of Australian Politics, for the debates in the Chambers, and the activity around them, may be expected to provide all that is necessary in this respect. The building speaks forcefully and insistently of the Australian landscape, as if the spirit of Australia resided here, not in the people or their politics but in the timeless presence of the land.

Nature is so strongly and so consistently invoked in this building that we really are required to see that land as the fundamental point of reference for the activities occurring within it, as the source of all power, the foundation of the democratic way of life. The land quite literally acts as a common ground upon which the representatives of opposed persuasions might meet: references to the Australian landscape will command unanimity where references of a specifically political or social nature may only produce discord or division.

When you seek to express something as elusive as the Australian spirit, begin with the land.