Document ID: chunk:federal_register_of_legislation:F2024L00408:front:0:p240
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competition for the federal capital.  Eliel Saarinen won second place and Alfred Agache third.

    'unlike other competitors, the Griffins did not treat the Limestone Plains as a blank space, but responded sensitively to the natural features, integrating topography into the design.  The plan was skilfully adapted to an 'irregular amphitheatre' rather than arbitrarily imposed on the site.  As Peter Harrison observed, the 'buildings are made important not so much by their size, height or architectural significance, but by their setting… it is not an architectural composition, but a landscape composition.'  (Freestone 2010, p. 96, quoting the Report of the Select Committee on the development of Canberra, 1955, p. 80)

Walter Burley Griffin's winning design for Canberra, to an extent developed with Marion Mahony Griffin, had as its central geometric concept a triangle bisected by two axes at right angle, one being the Water Axis along his proposed lake, and the other the Land Axis, extending from Mount Ainslie through the apex of the triangle.  The alignment of the Land Axis north of the lake was to become Anzac Parade.  Griffin did not intend that the Land Axis should primarily be thoroughfares or roadways.  Rather, it was to form 'a connected park or garden frontage for all the important structures' (Griffin 1913, p. 5).

On the northern side of the future lake, Griffin envisaged that the Land Axis would be 'marked by a broad formal parkway to be maintained open in the centre and banked with foliage on the sides, setting off the residences' (Griffin 1955, p. 98).  It was the landscape element rather than any thoroughfare that defined the Land Axis from the northern lakeshore to Mount Ainslie.  The Land Axis both north and south of the lake thus depended on correctly orientated buildings and plantings to give it definition.  (Marshall and others 2010b, vol. 1, pp. 50-51)

  Figure 27.  Detail of the Griffins' 1911 winning design
  Source:  NCA 2004, p. 15

Figure 28.  Perspective view from Mount Ainslie of the Griffins' design, with the future Anzac Parade at the centre
Source:  Reid 2002

An historical appreciation of the plans for what became Anzac Parade is provided by Weirick,

    'possibly the most ambitious sequence of spatial and symbolic experiences was set out along 'Prospect Parkway' Griffin's term for that section of the Land Axis now known as Anzac Parade.  In Griffin's Canberra, this would have been the physical element which most dramatically linked the city's 'National Capital' functions with the activities of everyday life.  Prospect Parkway extended from the National Stadium on the lakeshore, sited directly opposite the government buildings, to the forested slopes of Mount Ainslie.  Griffin described the Parkway as a 'formal plaisance' and Marion Mahony's perspective from