Toby Reed
On the Beach
In Australia in 1959, during the filming of On the Beach, a film about the imminent end of the world after a nuclear apocalypse, the actress Ava Gardner was (mis)quoted in the press saying that Melbourne was the perfect place to make a film about the end of the world. This quote still resonates with people’s vision of Australia years after. To many people on this planet, Australia is situated under the world, where the sun shines from the wrong direction, and where the water spins down the sink hole in reverse motion (when compared to the northern hemisphere).
Australia is a place where reality is inverted on more levels than just a country where things are upside down or in reverse and where architects orientate their buildings towards the northern sun, not the south. It also has an inverse spatial relation to dominant (Eurocentric) dialogues of architectural discourse: a country of open space instead of closed and seemingly free of the confines and dogmas of traditional architectural traditions. The mutant condition found in the kangaroo and the platypus – animals that defy traditional western notions of purity and type (or form), veering towards assemblage and collage. This mutant condition and defiance of pure types is another part of a shared consciousness among Australian architects and artists. These things are so embedded in the national psyche that they rarely need to be discussed overtly. Combine this with the Indigenous concept of Country, a philosophy unique to Australia and including all space whether rural or urban. The importance of this sense of Australia as a world ‘upside down’ or ‘in reverse’ came to the fore talking to Nader Tehrani, Iranian-American architect and director of NADAAA, about his collaborations with John Wardle in Melbourne for this issue. These are significant, albeit often unspoken or under-articulated, ideas behind much of Australian architecture.
Australia is represented around the world through a series of fluctuating images, strip cities on the beach like Surfers Paradise, tin sheds in the desert and shed-houses in the country, images constructed from the cinema, media and architecture. The cinema has unleashed films as diverse as The Endless Summer, Morning of the Earth, Mad Max, Walkabout, Wake in Fright, The Cars that Ate Paris, Long Weekend, Ten Canoes and Samson and Delilah, all of which help convey networks of ideas and images about Australia.
In our post televisual, post digital world, cities and the buildings in them often function like cinematic black holes, showing us and allowing us to enter alternate zones (and manifestations) of the real, a reality with multiple and endless variations. Each country has its own zone of assemblages, as does each city within it. This is a seemingly unplanned accumulative process in any culture in which the city constantly manifests through multiple series of interconnected assemblages arising from often conflicting forces. Although chaotic, this is a process in which architects play an active part. In this way, buildings tend to manifest their own reality, each different from the next, but connecting, forming groups and zones, and helping to form part of a series of urban assemblages (which appear slightly different from those of other countries).
Bush Minimalism + Urban Assemblage
In the same way that the cinema has propagated a vision of Australian space and life, so has Australian architecture and urbanism. The most obvious contemporary example is that of Glenn Murcutt, Australia’s only Pritzker Prize winning architect, who to many around the world has defined the image of the modern Australian house as a reworking and morphing of the Miesian with the typical Australian vernacular bush shed. The shed as a beautifully detailed object in the landscape is an image which circulates in the media about the Australian house, but it is just an image.
Most important as far as creating a world-wide image of Australian architecture, but far from the everyday experience of much of the urban population, is the image of Australia as a vast landscape populated by outback (or bush) minimalism.
Glenn Murcutt more than any other architect is responsible for this tendency within Australian architecture (which has continued in the very different work of Sean Godsell, Room 11 and others), which has so profoundly affected the image of Australia for the rest of the world and has been incredibly influential on other Australian architects. For Murcutt, the shed became the model for the Australian house. Our discussion with Glenn Murcutt in this issue attempts to explore how this came about, tracing the modernist reworking of the country tin shed as the quintessential Australian house via the Farnsworth House.
For a while, between the 1990s and early 21st century the optical expressionism prevalent in Melbourne became well known globally as a neo-baroque attack on late modernism. These buildings helped define the Australian city as sets of urban assemblages, optical collages which paralleled closely and expressed, a developing multi-cultural society with multiple centres and connections. Australian architects need to keep researching and consciously think through the urban assemblage of the Australian cities which we have created, and the models which we utilise. In this issue of 2A we begin with rural projects and slowly move into the urban centres so we can explore and interrogate these tendencies (of bush minimalism and urban assemblage) and those in-between.
Country
We occupy the land in a very different way from that of the European architect. In many ways, Australian architects are not burdened by the intense traditions of dominant architectural cultures, but we are burdened in a different way, by the violence of our colonial past. Vitally important, is the Aboriginal concept of Country that has long predated colonisation, as we can see from the Narwarla Gabarmnung that is over 35000 years old. Australian architects have an uneasy relationship with the colonial architecture of European settlement due to the violence and dispossession inflicted upon First Nations People. Australian architects, unless Indigenous to this land, are slowly awakening to the idea that even architects who are born and raised in Australia who are of non-Indigenous background need to learn and listen to respond to Indigenous knowledge when considering designing on Country, as an act of reconciliation and reparation.
Many architects are seeking to incorporate Aboriginal concepts of Country into the creation of their work. This has happened through consultation, education, inclusion, and collaboration as well as entirely Indigenous-led creative design teams. Indigenous notions of Country have finally begun to take hold in everyone’s consciousness. We can ask ourselves why this has taken so long and why is it beginning to take hold now? It is important for healing and creating a better future for everyone, if architects and designers can understand how to design with and register Indigenous knowledge in the built environment. In this way Australian architecture is currently going through a major paradigm shift to try to understand what it means to design and build on Country – Country being wherever we are in Australia, including the urban areas, and not just in the bush or outback.
In public buildings, this is most often a process of consultation and inclusion. The Barak building by ARM Architects is placed at one end of the urban axis in Melbourne, opposite to the war memorial at the other end. The optical balustrades around the apartment building, like blurred lines of the television cathode ray, form an image of a photo of the traditional Wurundjeri elder William Barak. The building has been controversial but the presence of Barak’s image as a sign in the centre of the city is an acknowledgement of the Traditional Custodians of the land and the importance of Indigenous cultural heritage being maintained and helping to generate the modern Australian city. Its relation to the War Memorial acknowledges the often repressed Frontier Wars.
The importance of this inclusion was also obvious to the early modernist architects such as Robin Boyd and Peter McIntyre, as evident in their 1959 film Your House and Mine.
First Nation concepts, thinking and attitudes to Country set a new realm of possibilities for methodologies and geometries for the generation of space and form. The Indigenous use and combining of the X-ray, aerial mapping, image/sign plans and patterning with thought and ideas/concepts is a constant part of a collective artistic consciousness in Australia. This situation puts Australia in the perfect position to decentralize the dominant dialogue of architectural origins and models. Most Australian architects benefit from a resultant sense of freedom but not many have yet taken a clear route to consciously decentre or question dominant architectural traditions.
However, despite the politics of space, the DNA of the colonial is present in many Australian buildings simply as an architectural response to climate and lifestyle. This can be seen in the use and transformation of the verandah and the Australian tin shed. We can see this in buildings by Glenn Murcutt, Sean Godsell, Edition Office and also in many non-architect designed houses where the colonial is invoked as sign. Architecture is always burdened by the ghost of the past use of space and form by various political systems. Certain architectural tropes when used in particular ways evoke a past (unwanted) political ideology. As we know most architecture styles have been utilised by opposing systems of belief. For many architect’s design is a constant process of utilising space and form for new ends while attempting to subvert previous ideology and assert new ways of living and thinking. Buildings and architectural zones have always reinforced capital and the colonial shed and verandah were forms of settler violence, as well as logical ways of dealing with the environment and the spatiality of daily rituals. For the last half century architects have been attempting to divest the shed and verandah of this ideology and reinject them with new, more positive, possibilities.
Flashback: Australian Modernism
Tendencies within Australian architecture are often simplified as a binary opposition between Sydney and Melbourne, but as with all binaries, we know that this is just an image. This cliché has partly arisen through the parallel development of modernism in these two cities, and to look at this briefly can be instructive. The development of modernism in Australia had an early injection of the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright when his prime pupils/proteges Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony won the design for Canberra, the nation’s new capital city, in 1912, and began designing and building in Melbourne and Sydney.
In Melbourne, a small group of architects centred around Robin Boyd, Roy Grounds and their pupil Peter McIntyre helped develop a distinct regional style that was defined by ideas and experiments rather than formal modernist rules. Their buildings focused on new ways of creating form and space centred around an ideas approach in which each building became an experiment. Peter McIntyre’s houses and his 1956 Olympic Pool are examples. His 1954 Beulah Hospital in an outback town explored sustainability and prefabrication in a trailblazing way for the time, as a result of the remoteness and harshness of the landscape.
Harry Seidler moved to Sydney in 1948 after studying under Gropius and Breuer, and having worked for Breuer, Aalto and Niemeyer. The houses he designed at the time such as the Rose Seidler House (1950) helped define the Sydney school as an outpost of modernism. As McIntyre noted recently, Seidler was like a priest and treated modernism as a religion that must not be strayed from, which he considered some Melbourne architects to be doing. Seidler’s presence created a more orthodox modernism in Sydney that gained a major Danish shot in the arm when Jorn Utzon won the Sydney Opera House competition in 1957. Utzon’s influence was important. Sydney architect Richard Leplastrier worked closely with Utzon and was also one of the first architects to meaningfully engage with Indigenous knowledge.
Traditionally Melbourne and Sydney formed two seemingly distinct and opposing attitudes in Australian architecture: Sydney as orthodox followers of modernism lead by Seidler (and later Glenn Murcutt) and Melbourne as an architecture of ideas lead by Boyd (and later Melbourne post-modern architect-provocateur, Peter Corrigan). However, in recent years this dualism moved from cliché to total diffusion.
We now have a dispersed situation where there is a fairly equal mix of ideas across the country, from Western Australia to Queensland and Tasmania. This duality has slowly dissipated and now most of the architects around the country combine a mix of conceptual frameworks and ideas, environmental and sociological concerns.
Living in an inverse world allows for possibilities such as a freedom from architectural canons or even to totally rethink architectural strategies and subvert dominant architectural constructs. This is a freedom that many Australian architects take for granted and often utilise casually, but few have taken full advantage of. To take full advantage of this situation could help healing the traumas of the past for Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians together, produce better and more generous places and space for everyone, housing as a human right, not as asset building. It could also help generate formal and tectonic strategies and methodologies for new objects and the spaces in and between them. “`