The National Gallery of Australia has grown into itself after 40 years

A bold new city emerging in the decades after World War II, the capital was outward-looking and keen to take its place on the world stage.

And a spectacular national art gallery was a key piece of the puzzle.

It was to be an overt statement of the triumph of freedom of expression - a place in which art, and the building in which it was displayed - would be a process of discovery. The gallery would not be subservient to the art, but integral to the experience of viewing it.

Announcing the government's intention for such a gallery was one of Robert Menzies' final acts before resigning as Prime Minister in 1966.

Two years later, in 1968, Prime Minister John Gorton announced that the firm of Edwards, Madigan, Torzillo and Partners had been appointed, led by practice principal Col Madigan.

But it would be another 14 years before an edifice to live up to the original brief finally materialised on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin in the Parliamentary Triangle.

By the time the Queen opened it in 1982, the building - its architectural style, its design, and the national spirit that imbued its conception - had fallen well out of fashion and favour.

Its idiosyncratic layout and architectural design flourishes - coffered octagonal ceiling grids, narrow "gash-like" windows, concrete aesthetic with bush-hammered walls and muted tiles - were met with, at best, confusion, and at worst, outrage.

These extremes mellowed over the years to a kind of resigned tolerance. Successive directors left their mark: in the 1990s, director Betty Churcher took to many of the gallery spaces with white plasterboard, in keeping with the curatorial white-box trend for art displays.

But the brutalist structure is now 40 years old, and well and truly back in vogue.

Times have changed - again. Turning 40 is often a chance to grow into oneself, and current director Nick Mitzevich has overseen the revelation of many of the building's original features now peeking out amidst the changing art displays. Ceilings, stairwells, slit windows and concrete columns are all part of the experience, while curatorial practices have also shifted away from the white box.

Architect Philip Goad, professor and chair of architecture at the University of Melbourne, says people are now reassessing the forbidding concrete sprawl, and realising its softness, and the way it interacts with its bush-capital surroundings.

"It's these completely unadorned wall surfaces, which remarkably are quite soft. People think of them as hard, but because the finish is bush-hammered, it has a sort of texture to it," he says.

"This has a sort of softness to it, I think, which people are only really now starting to appreciate, when plaster is taken off walls and you get a sense of the grand scale of the space and also to the quite inventive lighting system for those big spaces, particularly this sort of polygonal ceiling grid above you."

Goad has penned an essay about the building for Vision, a recently launched book celebrating the building's history, and says when it was completed - well past its due date and having overcome years of controversy - the walls "melded with the light and colour of Canberra".

He points out that in the early days of planning for the gallery, the National Capital Development Commission (which would later become the National Capital Authority) engaged an expert consultant to refine the architectural brief - American art administrator James Johnson Sweeney.

Sweeney was, apart from being an American, "a prominent promoter of anticommunism, a Catholic and an ardent supporter of Modernism and the ideology of individualism". But rather than being a symptom of cultural cringe, the commission's deferral to America was in keeping with Canberra's Cold War influences.

"Canberra can be seen as a sort of Cold War exemplar," Goad says.

"Just the siting of the defence buildings in Russell, the American Australian War Memorial, and then the fact that we would choose an American expert to consult on our art.

"Just the siting of the defence buildings in Russell, the American Australian War Memorial, and then the fact that we would choose an American expert to consult on our art. It really reveals, I think, how Americans were influential across all aspects of Australian society, not just allies in Vietnam...

"And getting someone like James Johnson Sweeney, who really was a Cold War warrior, I think in many respects... you could argue that Blue Poles is also a Cold War purchase. Because the art and giant sculpture was meant to represent absolute freedom. individualism, sort of abstract expressionism being the ultimate sort of American dream of freedom of expression."

In keeping with this ethos, the gallery building was designed to show art in a different way - not as something you observed on a wall, but something integral to the experience of being in the building - "something that you walked around and also walked above".

"In terms of large-scale works of art, and hence the notion of looking down into these big volumes, particularly those huge three volumes that are so distinctive, and only really now are being used properly with seriously big works of art, I think that was quite radical for the time."

And placing it within a native garden filled with sculptures was also in keeping with the Griffin plan for a city in the landscape - buildings and landscape in conversation.

"Everyone talks about the new extensions to the Sydney gallery, and Melbourne doing its NGV contemporary, but none of them have the sculpture garden, and the building that Canberra does," Goad says.

The gallery was also a significant step towards the completion of Canberra as a concept - the postwar dream of finishing the city, with a series of monumental Brutalist buildings that would culminate with the opening - also by Queen Elizabeth II - of Parliament House in 1988.

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"I think that's one of the wonderful things about Australian culture through the 60s - it was ready to embrace internationalism, and it was absolutely okay. It wasn't cringe," Goad says.

"It was saying, 'Look, we're part of the world, and we can do it just as well as any other'. Things like Harry Seidler's Australian Embassy in Paris [was saying] we're equal participants on the international stage.

"It was very much intellectually driven, and it wasn't jingoism. It was just a belief that all things were possible, and here's a canvas which we could do it on."

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