Water and sunlight's natural works of art can form in an instant, or over hundreds of years. A black and orange storm-streaked sunset appears in minutes, a deep, dark green valley edged with pale blue hills unfolds over centuries. One such century has passed, marked by industrial and artistic intervention, beginning with Canberra's first public building, the Kingston Powerhouse which, 100 years later, stands transformed as Canberra Glassworks.
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From the beginning of glass artist Klaus Moje's artistic career, water has guided one of the key people in this change. His peers today regard him as a living legend. "I am specifically connected to water with my work and my attitude," Moje says. "The transparency and the float of the hot glass is something leaning itself to the elements. It can be water, it can be wind. It is more the natural elements I would say that play a role, and water is just one of them. Diving into the tropical waters is my greatest experience with colour, these colours have been repeated in glass and I repeat them in glass."
As well as inspiring Moje's extraordinary achievements with glass, water helped choose a site for the powerhouse, when the Commonwealth's director general of works Percy Owen chose Kingston because of its proximity to a gauging weir built to measure the flow of the Molonglo River. The water was crucial for steam to fire the powerhouse generators for a new, all-electric city and a pumping station on the Cotter River. It was also convenient for a railway line extension from Queanbeyan, to haul in coal from the Hunter Valley.
An example of early 20th century industrial architecture, the building was one of John Smith Murdoch's creations, along with the provisional Parliament House and the Hyatt Hotel, but was temporary. The powerhouse's generating plant was ordered eight days before Walter Burley Griffin was declared the winner of the design competition for the national capital, historian and author Peter Donovan says. Engineers Australia chairman Keith Baker, an electrical engineer who has worked for Commonwealth works and heritage divisions, says Kingston was the ideal location in engineering terms, although it set engineers against Griffin, who wanted the power station on the other side of the lake.
The author of A Century of Canberra Engineering, Baker has taken a critical view of the powerhouse and its origins. "The thing that struck me then was how little resources the department had available to meet their aspirations. Percy Owen had to set up an engineering organisation from scratch, with very few staff," Baker says.
Glass artist Alexandra Frasersmith, who works as a visitor experience supervisor and retail manager at the glassworks, points out the American oak grain impression left from concrete formwork, and clusters of Molonglo River stones on one wall. She says the building had three requirements, it had to be fast, cheap and affordable. Other people recorded that temporary brick-making facilities turned out a batch of bricks for the powerhouse, but they were not fired properly and broke, which meant reinforced concrete with river gravel was the main building material.
When the powerhouse was commissioned in 1915 with 5500 volts generating capacity, the First World War threw a spanner into Canberra's early development, delaying the Cotter pumping station construction and stalling population growth. The two big steam-driven generators at Kingston were vastly oversized for what was needed, Baker says. He says the plant and the way it was organised were state of the art, especially for coal handling and heat recovery. "To have the coal coming in from overhead through the boilers and the ash going out in the lower level and using the same conveyor to take the coal in and ash out, it had a big conveyor looped right over the top of the building, down the side and back again," Baker says. The ash receptacle and coal bunkers are still a part of the building. Removing them would have been more trouble than it was worth.
Water returning from the power station boilers to the river was so warm the weir became a popular swimming place for early residents. By 1927 Canberra's growth was gathering momentum. A steam turbine was installed at the powerhouse before Parliament opened because the load on electricity was rising. The Canberra Times of July 1927 says it was using 6000 tons of coal and the operating engineer Thomas Trevillian boasted it had not been without light during his four years of control. Trevillian worked there from 1921 to 1951, riding his motorbike to work from Queanbeyan in the beginning, then moving into one of the first brick government cottages built in Canberra.
Trevillian built from scraps the steam whistle which became familiar to all workers in early Canberra. Ice was made in the powerhouse. Canberra's only public telephone was there too. Baker says a fitters workshop was built next door, and an ambulance was based around there as the place began to hum.
Yet after only 14 years the powerhouse's peak days were over. The Commonwealth's drive for self-sufficiency was compromised for cheaper electricity from across the border, when Burrinjuck Dam's hydro-electric scheme began servicing Canberra. The Kingston boilers fired up again for short periods from 1936, the year a family of glass workers in Germany welcomed their new son, Klaus Moje. Of course, Moje was yet to find his feet, and the powerhouse idled on, coming back to life for various periods up until 1957 to take the strain off NSW during postwar construction surges.
Generators may have been intermittent, but the steady hum of activity in the powerhouse was a familiar heartbeat for early Canberra, workers responding to Trevillian's whistle from 7.30am and throughout the day until knock-off time, according to staff employed there in the 1950s and interviewed by historian Matthew Higgins in 1998: Mick Ozerskis said you could hear the whistle at Queanbeyan, someone else heard it from across the lake at Reid. The men remember a worker walking between two coal trucks outside the fitters shop when a steam winch pulled one truck into another, crushing him to death. An Italian working on the lower level looked up a chute once, only to get a face full of hot ash.
From the 1960s until 2000 it was used for storage, servicing vehicles and training staff, then gathered dust for many years while awaiting a new purpose, until 2005. Just as water's natural works of art can spring from obstacles, like a fallen tree that bends a river, so too can an architect's intervention clear a way ahead. When project architect Jocelyn Jackson and her team set out to convert the powerhouse building into the Canberra Glassworks they had no masterplan for the precinct, from which to plan a front entrance. Their solution was two entrances from either sides of the building. While an $11.5 million budget was set aside, glass furnaces, a gallery, café, shop and office had to be included, as well as glassmaking equipment.
After talking to glass artists, and weighing up their brief from ArtsACT, decisions of what not to touch, and what they put out of sight carried the original cathedral elegance from one era into another. "We didn't change any of the glass in the existing windows," Jackson says. "If you look at it closely, and not a lot of people do, there are numerous different types of glass. Some might be slightly cracked, some is very old, some has been replaced before. We do know they blasted out the old engines when it was the powerhouse, they broke the window and the [broken] glass was replaced. The quality and variety of that glass seems to be obscure, which is probably contributing to that [light]. If we had taken that out and replaced it with plane glass it would have been quite a different feel. There was a ripple glass, some of it's obscure, some is quite dirty but I think in the end it is not a bright light, it's an indirect light."
Baker says it is unfortunate none of the rotating machinery was kept. "But the spaces have been preserved very well, I was pleased they didn't break it into a whole lot of little boxes."
Jackson says that was no coincidence. One of the smart decisions was to go downstairs with a lot of little rooms, to save the big open spaces above.
"Richard Whitely [glass artist and head of the ANU's glass workshop] helped in that decision-making, he said, 'we can't have the sandblasting and noisy things upstairs, we can't put those in the rooms'. That was one of the goals , to make the best use of those spaces and not to divide them all up and to see both of those big rooms [retained] in their entirety. Whitely and Moje were rational, practical people , they were a great help in the planning stage," Jackson says.
The worst experience was discovering asbestos that was supposed to have been removed, had been buried down the ash chutes. A happier find was timber sitting over the top of tanks, which was salvaged and turned into seats for members of public in the engine room. Eight coal hoppers and the original gantry crane, still used to lift a massive kiln lid, look down below to the engine room, now a kiln studio with lathes for cutting glass.
In the big entrance Frasersmith looks up and says, "The windows are so beautiful, the light is just gorgeous." The glassworks is world-class infrastructure, unlike anything else in Australia, to encourage artists graduating from the ANU to stay in Canberra, she says.
Moje was overwhelmed the powerhouse was chosen for the glassworks. "We never expected to have this kind of support through the government, as it turned out in the end. We were pleading only for a small access workshop that our students would have, but then in negotiation with two different parties, and bipartisan support, it was the powerhouse that was converted into what it is now, the glassworks," he says. "The possibility of starting a non-academic institution was a fantastic thing. It was my dream all the time after we had the [ANU] glass workshop established, to have a non-academic workshop in Canberra, and as it shows, this has beautifully prospered."
In semi-retirement Moje, moved from Canberra to the South Coast. Now aged 78, he is returning to settle in Canberra. He will step down from the glassworks board to make way for new blood, but will remain on the creative committee. He came to the ANU in 1983 aiming to educate students so they could prosper. "My experience in so many institutions was that students felt so lost in this new movement, everyone was teaching, hardly anyone had the expertise of a maker. The enthusiasm was there, but not the experience, the history. This is what I possibly brought with me. My aim was to build up a body of artists who are able to handle the material in a variety of approaches," he says.
The most satisfaction is seeing students achieve their goals all over the world. "This is something that has never been bleeding through to the community here, but the impact we have built up with the glassworks and glass workshop is immense," Moje says.
Glassworks general manager Beverly Growden says aside from its core business as a studio for hire, production lines turn out glass awards, and regular exhibitions provide a platform for artists. People living near the glassworks will be reminded of its original role at 8.30pm on June 20, when the whistle will be blown during the winter glass market, a blast from a young, creative city's industrial past.
Don't miss winter glass market
Canberra Glassworks will celebrate with a free celebratory Winter Glass Market event on Saturday, June 20, from 4pm-11pm. The celebration will reflect on the building's history.
Local artist Sui Jackson's wood-fired glass furnace will be fired for the first time with glass blown the traditional way for all to see.
A Winter Glow Garden will enliven the garden bed near the historic smokestack. The building will be lit up and hand-crafted electric lights will embellish the foyer. There will be live glassmaking, music, activities and food and drinks.
