Young people of today won't believe you when you tell them that in the olden days there was no such thing as computer-generated modelling so that, for instance, architects had to make elaborate scale models of their proposals.
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But whether the sceptical little urchins believe it or not it is the truth and yesterday Canberra's great modernist architect, Enrico Taglietti, presented the Canberra Museum and Gallery with two models he made at the time for two of his proposed iconic Canberra buildings.
One of the models is of the Town House Motel, opened in 1961 but callously demolished in the 1980s. The other is of the highly innovative, and for Canberrans, sentimentally significant Canberra Cinema Centre, opened in 1966. The centre still stands but now has its once-unique subterranean cinema space converted, blasphemously into a nightclub.
We don't have room here today to discuss both buildings fully so we'll attend to the Cinema Centre while noting that the Town House Motel (which used to stand at the intersection of what was Childers Street and today's Barry Drive) was meant to echo the shape and feel of a cruise ship, surreally moored at this inland city, with 68 rooms on three levels.
The first film shown at the new Canberra Cinema Centre, on October 4, 1966, with the governor-general Lord Casey present, was the Australian premiere of David Lean's epic Dr Zhivago. The word "epic" has been devalued by overuse but Dr Zhivago, the eighth greatest doubloon-earning film of all time, was at the very least epic in length. Lord Casey and everyone else had to sit through 220 sometimes meandering and sometimes sob-jerking minutes. That's almost as long as three back-to-back question times in the House of Representatives.
Taglietti designed, for local businessman entrepreneur and film enthusiast Darrel Killen (who was there for yesterday's event) a 500-seat underground cinema, within a commercial space that included office spaces, a gallery, restaurant and shops.
Taglietti (born in 1926 but today still upright and spry and very witty and good-humoured) said yesterday that, yes, the project had been a stimulating challenge. It had to be made to fit into a very petite niche in the inner city.
"The Centre Cinema was fantastic as a concept because no one expected the cinema to be underground. We did it for the simple reason the building needed to be viable and to have some retail, some shops, and so if I put the cinema on the ground I had no way of producing area for anything else. The area of the cinema would practically use the full area of the block. So [laughing to recall the audacity of the idea] I suggested to Darrel 'Why don't we put it underneath? Or put it on top?' "
Subterranean cinemas were unknown in Australia (and are still rare here because of fire regulations) but Taglietti, a European, (he born was born in Milan in 1926 and migrated to Australia in 1955) had seen them in Britain, in France and in Italy.
Designing a cinema has given him lasting delight because, he says, its teeming uses by people gave it a special liveliness.
"For an architect, talking for myself, your buildings are your children.
"They grow and they may do things that you may not like [more laughter] but they lead their own lives as people react to the building. That is the life of every building. So it's good to go there [to a busy building like his cinema] and find it totally alive."
And for Canberrans who loved the cinema the creation of this new one was "essential" he thinks because of the new choices it gave filmgoers.
His Centre Cinema bristled with innovations too numerous to catalogue.
There was even a small room where mothers and young children could watch films (through "portholes") and listen to them with relayed sound without having to worry about the children's noises.
The Centre Cinema, after being patronised for decades by surely every cinema-going Canberran, closed, poignantly, on June 1, 2003 with a screening of Dr Zhivago in which Julie Christie as Lara was as timelessly young and beautiful as she had been when Lord Casey and Taglietti saw her ("a very long film and a lovely girl" Taglietti recalled yesterday) at the cinema's opening in 1966.