On a stretch of the Birrarung/Yarra River at Bulleen, nine kilometres from central Naarm/Melbourne, Heide Museum of Modern Art occupies a site that as long served as a meeting point and as a creative hub.
In 1934, John and Sunday Reed purchased a fifteen-acre property, opening it to artists, writers and intellectuals who would go on to define Australian modernism. The Reeds were not distant patrons but participants, sharing their home, their kitchen garden and their collection with the artists they believed in. They helped found the Contemporary Art Society, published the Angry Penguins literary magazine, and spent decades building the institutional foundations that would eventually become a public museum.
In the early 1960s, the Reeds commissioned David McGlashan of McGlashan and Everist to design a new building lower on the hillside, with a brief that read more like a poem than a specification: romantic, ageless, possessed of mystery, avoiding architectural fashion. Walls were to be the primary element, extending inward and out. The building should feel as if it belonged to the site and, eventually, to look like a ruin in the landscape. Above all, it should be ‘a gallery to be lived in’.
Heide Modern, completed in 1967, is built from Mt Gambier limestone on a 12-inch module, with no internal doors, no paint and a limited palette of concrete, timber, glass and terrazzo. The floor plan reads as an abstract composition in the de Stijl manner: asymmetrical rooms and intersecting planes dispersed from a central hearth. Walls extend beyond the envelope into terraced outdoor courts. The double-height north-facing glass in the living areas opens to the parklands beyond. From the hillside the building appears not to have been placed but to have grown out of the ground, which was precisely what the brief had asked for.
