St John's Cathedral

Brisbane is a city where the architecture usually jaunts from timber and tin, to concrete, steel and glass. From lightweight, even ephemeral structures, to strong and modern buildings. St John’s Cathedral, after more than a century of construction, and crafted from clean-cut stone in a medieval style, is wonderfully alien.

Not that we’re fans of a neo-Gothic revival in Brisbane. It’s hardly a progressive or contextually relevant style. In fact it more or less pre-dates Brisbane itself. This design is conservative and unfashionable, but what better design could one think of for a conservative and unfashionable institution like an old-world church?

A young and modern city needs a few eccentricities. So here we have one. And credit must be given to those who can sustain the slow, slow pace of a cathedral build, completed true to its original design despite the world changing beyond prediction a few times in between. Not many other institutions could manage this type of patient development.

St John’s 49.7m high spires never got to look as dizzyingly tall as intended. They are only recently completed and are overshadowed by plain, taller buildings. But time has delivered one small irony for the cathedral’s completion in 2009. Fine views of the older eastern façade, from the river and Kangaroo Point, have been opened up by the clearing of a large site for a ‘grander’ project on Adelaide Street, itself now nothing more than mothballed vacant land.