Backwards

I'm doing a little relief work at Fremantle Hospital at the moment, and I can recommend the site to any student of 20th century architectural history. This place is better than a textbook.


There are a few tin cottages from the 1920s or red brick buildings from the 1940s, but they've been engulfed in walkways and additions linking the major buildings, which date from either around 1960 or 1980.


The two dominant periods don't blend too easily. Around the operating theatres and major wards, it's all terrazzo stairs with steel bannisters topped with gold-coloured vinyl, feeding out into corridors with turqouise vinyl flooring with stainless steel columns. It looks like how an architect in 1959 might imagine the Hospital of the Future.


But a second later, if you take a wrong turn, the exotic stainless steel and terrazzo gives way to beige formica edged with jarrah strips, carpet in bold primary colours, and that institutional Brutalism seen in 30 year old university campuses and government offices across the western world. The building I'm in at the moment is a veritable monument to 1980, from the glossy red pipe bannisters in the stairwell to the textured white tiles and blue counters in the bathroom - the whole place could have been made out of old-school Lego.


Frankly, I can't wait to get to get back to my usual office. Here I feel as if Darth Vader, Alf and Magnum PI could come striding around the corner at any minute.