Yarralumla brickworks, Industrial heritage site in Canberra, Australia.
Yarralumla Brickworks, also known as the Commonwealth Brickworks, is a former brick-making site in Yarralumla, Canberra. It retains original kilns designed by Walter Burley Griffin with short fan-forced chimneys, and a 46-metre natural-draft chimney added in 1950. The site is closed to the public.
The brickworks opened around 1913 to supply bricks for Canberra's early buildings, and operated until it closed in 1976. Its original kilns followed Walter Burley Griffin's designs, with short fan-forced chimneys kept below the height of the surrounding pine trees. After World War II, rising building demand led to a 46-metre natural-draft chimney being built in 1950 for new kilns, greatly increasing production capacity.
The site is closed to the public, so the brickworks are known mainly through their output: bricks made here went into many early Canberra buildings, including the works themselves. Narrow-gauge lines carried bricks to sites such as Old Parliament House and the Kingston Power House, and no trace of that transport system remains.
The brickworks is closed to the public, so the site cannot be visited; the 46-metre chimney can still be seen from many points around central Canberra. The grounds lie in the Yarralumla suburb, southwest of the city centre. Plans for the site remain undecided, with a 2015 proposal for a housing estate of 1800 dwellings.
The kiln chimneys were deliberately built short so they would stay hidden below the treetops of the surrounding pine forest. This was not a technical constraint but a deliberate design choice to keep the industrial structures out of sight in the new capital's landscape.
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