Charles Rice

Experience and criticality: returning to Federation Square

Introduction By way of the opportunity offered to me to present at the ‘Critical Architecture’ conference at The Bartlett School of Architecture in November 2004, I have revisited Federation Square. My initial engagement with this complex of buildings was in the form of a review published in this Journal in early 2004. That review marked the first instalment in The Journal of Architecture’s programme to publish long-form reviews of built works regularly, and I chose to review Federation Square largely because I had been struck by how it engaged in an active way with Melbourne’s central city grid. There were some specific questions I was interested in asking as a critic, mostly to do with how the complex activates a relationship between its users and its programmes. There was a strong sense that these questions related to the immanent logic of the complex, and hence would provide the framing wherein judgement could take place. But I felt also that particular sorts of ‘answers’ to these questions were somehow embedded in the very material resolution of the complex. It appeared, in an uncanny way, as if Federation Square itself were negotiating a terrain of criticality that was usually the province of its everyday user, and in this negotiation, it was countering my putative role as ‘architecture critic’. This essay opens up these as issues of my initial review, and attempts to address them beyond its specific confines (whether real or imagined). A problematisation of experience that I felt palpably at Federation Square will be central to the way in which I address these issues.

Bourgeois inhabitations: Theory and the historical emergence of the interior

In studying the domestic interior of the nineteenth century from within the discipline of architecture, two particular theoretical problems arise. On the one hand, turning ones attention to the domestic in architecture automatically suggests a focus on things below the level of architectural theory as classically conceived. On the other hand, to turn away from the explicitly theoretical in architecture leaves open the question of how theoretical approaches derived from other disciplines can aid us in understanding what is at stake in this very turning away. Initially this paper will look at how a concept of the interior, along with a professional practice of interior decoration, emerged historically from the beginning of the nineteenth century. In an engagement with the explicitly commercial rather than the explicitly theoretical in design terms, this historical emergence of the interior shows the limits of the concerns of architectural theory. At the same time as these limits are shown, the interior as a condition ‘additional’ to architecture brings to prominence the bourgeois subject who makes an interior through inhabitation. Here a new theoretical agenda opens, one which sets out an exploration of how this bourgeois subject inhabits this additional condition of the interior, created within, but apart from, architecture.

Evidence, experience and conjecture: reading the interior through Benjamin and Bloch

This article looks at the resonances between Walter Benjamins writing on the bourgeois domestic interior, and Ernst Blochs investigation of the detective novel. These resonances hinge on the evidence that the interior registers through traces, and how these traces relate to the conjectural knowledge of detection. Explored via Carlo Ginzburg, conjectural knowledge raises the question of experience in modernity, a question crucial to understanding the role of literary narrative in the nineteenth century, as well as the historical emergence of the bourgeois domestic interior at this time.

Interview with Reinhold Martin

One of the recurring considerations in this special issue is that of historicity: How does historical specificity bear on architectural criticism? How is the historian a critic and the critic a historian? How does the anthologization of history, theory and criticism produce occlusions and exclusions? Apropos to these concerns, in his most recent book, Utopia’s Ghost, Reinhold Martin argues that: ‘‘Simply to historicize postmodernism seems inadequate and, in many ways, premature’’. Through a close reading of buildings, projects and texts from the 1970s and 1980s, the complex intersections of temporality, ideology and history at work in the production of postmodern architecture are subjected to critical analysis. With an eye to the implications for writing architectural history and criticism, Charles Rice (CR) and Lee Stickells (LS) discussed the book with Reinhold Martin (RM).

Interview with Reinhold Martin: Utopia's Ghost 1 1. This interview was conducted via email during August and September of 2010.View all notes

One of the recurring considerations in this special issue is that of historicity: How does historical specificity bear on architectural criticism? How is the historian a critic and the critic a historian? How does the anthologization of history, theory and criticism produce occlusions and exclusions? Apropos to these concerns, in his most recent book, Utopia’s Ghost, Reinhold Martin argues that: ‘‘Simply to historicize postmodernism seems inadequate and, in many ways, premature’’. Through a close reading of buildings, projects and texts from the 1970s and 1980s, the complex intersections of temporality, ideology and history at work in the production of postmodern architecture are subjected to critical analysis. With an eye to the implications for writing architectural history and criticism, Charles Rice (CR) and Lee Stickells (LS) discussed the book with Reinhold Martin (RM).