DAB810 ⎮Greg Holmes⎮: Canberra Parlament House

Parlament has been housed in three different buildings on the same site since 1901, the latest building started construction in 1981 and was designed by architects Mitchell, Giurgola and Thorp. The building was completed in 1988 and is over 250000 sqms in size.

Some facts about parliment house:

The Parliament House site covers 32 hectares of Capital Hill; one of the hills around which Walter Burley Griffin designed Canberra in 1912. The building occupies 15 percent of this site.
The building is 300 metres long and 300 metres wide. It is one of the largest buildings in the southern hemisphere.
Parliament House was built to last at least 200 years.
There are 8,340 spaces in the building including about 4,700 rooms and 2,700 clocks.
Australian materials are used throughout 90 percent of the building.
The building cost approximately 1.1 billion dollars.
The underground car parks hold up to 2,000 cars.
A multi-channel television and radio station broadcasts proceedings of the Parliament from both chambers and committee rooms.
The building has two libraries; one a reading library, the other a research library for the benefit of answering questions on most topics from members and senators.
The Parliamentary Education Office runs a parliamentary role-play program for visiting students and teachers to learn how the Parliament works.

This is a aerial view of parliament house, it shows the curving floor plan that seems to be replicating the curving city layout. This creates some really interesting building forms and open space opportunities.

This diagram of Australia’s Parliament House shows its scale and the relationship between the parliamentary, executive, ceremonial and public areas. The building is 300 metres wide, 300 metres long and covers a gross floor area of 250,000m². Massive curved walls separate and define the major component parts. The House of Representatives wing is on the eastern side with the Senate chamber and offices to the west. The executive wing is at the southern end of the structure, behind the ceremonial and public spaces of the central zone.

Ref: www.peo.gov.au/students/cl/aph.html