The New Australian Parliament House .

Australia's new parliament house. For nearly eighty years, the government of Australia has discussed and debated plans to build a federal parliament building in the country's capital city. This article discusses the project to construct a parliament building, a structure that opened in May 1988. It explains the Parliament's role in monitoring the design and construction of the new building and its founding of the Parliament House Construction Authority to manage the building's design and construction effort. It profiles the project's designer, the Philadelphia (PA, USA) firm of Mitchell/Giurgola & Thorp Architects; it details the building's engineering system and the process of building the new Parliament, explaining the structure's design, the relationship of its form to its function, and its key features of its interior, structure and landscape. It also describes the functions of its key spaces, such as forecourt, foyer, and reception hall as well as the design features of the House and Senate Chambers and the Ministerial Wing, which serves as the home to the executive government. -- Project management at the new parliament house, Canberra. The construction of Australia's new Parliament House is the country's most prestigious and ambitious building project. This article reviews the history of this project and discusses the key processes and tools used to manage this project. In doing so, it details the project's organizational structure, the project manager's responsibilities, and the procedure used to implement construction. It then describes the information systems used and identifies the data these systems processed. It also explains the challenge of managing this project and identifies the time, cost, and quality controls used to manage the project's performance. It concludes by outlining six lessons the author--the project's co-project manager--learned while working on this project. -- Managing the architectural aspects. Those design and construction organizations that work internationally understand the challenges of working far from the home office. This article documents the experience of the architectural firm that designed Australia's new Parliament, the firm of Mitchell/Giurgola, which is based 10,000 miles from the project site in Philadelphia and New York City (USA). It discusses the firm's history, its project bid, and its opening a satellite office near the project site. It then explains how the firm staffed their Australia office and how they worked on this project, a seven-year endeavor that was originally slated as a fast-track effort.