Hannah Lewi

The magic of machines in the house

In the 1850s, a French magician and inventor named Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin filled his home with electrical and mechanical gadgets including a system of centrally-controlled alarm clocks to wake servants, an automatic horse-feeder and a complex system of bells to detect visitors. We examine how this early intrusion of machinery into the domestic realm drew on the craft of conjuring performance and apparatus design. Through an analysis of Robert-Houdins house, we show how the techniques of magic, specifically of simulation and dissimulation, provide a ready-made language in which to consider the accommodation of machines within architectural design. This analysis is then reflected forward to a discussion of two later cases of overtly mechanised houses within the established canon of modern architecture: Le Corbusiers Appartement Charles de Beistegui completed in 1931, and Alison and Peter Smithsons House of the Future or ‘appliance house’ displayed in 1956. Through the language of magic, these cases are discussed in terms of alternative readings of Le Corbusiers modernist mantra of the house as a machine for living.

Plans on Film

This paper investigates how the ideals of modern architecture and planning were represented to public audiences in Britain and Australia through the documentary film medium. The six films selected for analysis emanate from the British documentary tradition and describe the design and implementation of new urban plans and public housing from the 1930s through to the 1950s. Through these snapshots, questions are posed as to the potential role of the documentary genre in providing valuable – if highly mediated – evidential documents for the architectural historian. These films, all created within the Grierson School of British documentary making, vary in their portrayal of the professional architect and planner. Techniques including the face-to-face interview, the staged meeting, the guided building tour and the explication of drawings and plans are all incorporated into these films. The voice of the individual architect, however, is often surprisingly and strangely absent during this period. This observation will be teased out through an interrogation of scenes showing overt and oblique professional opinion, influence and agency. By way of contrast and conclusion, the persona of the architect and planner in the contemporary documentary will also be touched upon, through the film UtopiaLondon (2011). This documentary revisits the territory of modern planning and public housing design of the 1930s to the 1960s and provides a platform for the architects involved to retrospectively express their desires, doubts and intentions in the realist tradition of interview and self-reflection.

You Never Appreciate What You Have Until There is a Chance You May Lose It

Public swimming pools in Australia have played a formative part in the making of Australian identity: as a stage for iconic images of sport and leisure; as a place for the display of the body; and as a fondly regarded setting for everyday community and family life. Since the 1950s, hundreds of public pools have been constructed – through hard-fought community activism and assistance – across country towns and suburbs. However, by the 1970s, a slow decline in public pool use began to have an impact, because of the rise of indoor and mixed-use leisure complexes, the increasing pressures of privatisation and the growth of private pool ownership. Combined with a general lack of ongoing government funding for the upkeep and renovation of now ageing structures, and with added recent pressures over water sustainability, a great number of these original pools have been demolished, severely altered or closed. This paper examines the public pool as a potent place of community action and conservation pressures. Four cases of successful and failed campaigns for pools to remain open in suburban Melbourne are described. These campaigns have brought together local residents, architects and conservationists and have highlighted the growing disquiet over the loss of public amenities. In conclusion, we consider how new modes of online and participatory media are reshaping community activism for the twenty-first century.

‘Contentment, Civic Pride and Progress’: the built legacy of community and everyday modernism in Australia

During the twentieth century, the large and small community buildings so common to everyday life throughout the western world were to assume particular importance for the modernising of the Australian nation.

Spectacular Heritage: ‘Total Restoration’ at the Site of Carcassonne

This article discusses the rise of the heritage site as spectacular theme park through a case study of Carcassonne in southern France, which has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage site and includes all the trappings of mass European tourism. This medieval town is a meta-site of changing practices in architectural conservation, as it was first subjected to extensive restorations under the direction of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc in the mid-1800s. It is this history of conservation which assists in making the argument that the phenomenon of the heritage site as spectacle is not only a contemporary transformation, but also has roots in nineteenth century practices.

Whose Heritage: the contested site of the Swan Brewery

Open any local newspaper across Australia today and more than likely a heritage issue will be one of the dominant stories; sympathising either with preservationist arguments, or with the individual’s freedom to redevelop the local environment. ‘Letters-to-the-Editor’ are filled with complaints about ‘heritage elites’ and ‘government hacks’ seeking to impose unwieldy and unpopular conservation listings and regulations that may threaten owners’ amenity and long-term investment and, on the counter-side, conservationists mounting arguments against new developments. Indeed, the contested domain of heritage is arguably the key issue that currently galvanises real community debate about the political of history and the built environment.

IntroductionSocial architecture: the anthropology of occupation, urban theory and politics

This is the fifth in a series of six supplementary issues that together comprise an anthology of research papers from The Journal of Architecture (to follow that produced in 2006), published as two special issues in each of the three years: 2016, 2017 and this year, 2018. This serialised publication covers papers selected from The Journal’s second decade 2004–2013. As guest editors for the anthology supplements, in our task of rereading and selecting papers for reproduction, we were mindful not to take our own personal editorial predilections for granted, any more than the vicissitudes of research funding available to scholars and institutions, or intellectual and architectural fashions. It was immediately evident to us that the influence of globalisation was unavoidable, both in examination of precursors to the global architecture which we now associate with neo-liberalism, and in the evolving consequences of digital publication and dissemination. Authorship, research mores and modes of readership are now registered within a shared global culture. In the light of these concerns, having surveyed the territory of The Journal for the requisite period, we identified six areas of interest that translated into emergent themes with which to structure our selected texts. They engaged a variety of subjects relevant to research in architecture: 535

Putting Architecture on Show: Two Recent Exhibitions in Victoria, Australia

The question of how best to represent significant places and buildings within the conventions of the museum and gallery has been a contested one since the nineteenth century. One of the first archi...

Carte Blanche on Campus

Abstract This paper explores counterculture and activism in the production of the modern Australian university in the 1960s and 1970s in Australia. In focusing on the building of new suburban university campuses, it interrogates how spatial production was important to the politics of occupation and transformation. Through this examination of campus planning, landscapes and architecture we explore design intentions to the realisation of mid-term consequences in situation, buildings, spaces and form. We unearth alternative historical narratives and understandings of counterculture and activism in two Australian universities: Monash University in Clayton, Victoria and La Trobe University, Bundoora, Victoria. We therefore interrogate here, not the liberating opportunities of the counterculture movement in terms of shifting the way architecture was conceived and produced, but instead the consequences of actions of resistance within the spaces of newly built university campuses, and how this altered the way buildings and landscaped amenities were occupied, used and also developed in subtle and temporary ways.

Back to school: understanding the evidential value of the modern documentary

Documentary films hold the potential to reveal alternative forms of evidence and ambience to the architectural historian. This account investigates that potential through a selection of documentary films on education and schooling made in the United Kingdom between 1930 and 1960. Following an analysis of the defining characteristics the modern documentary movement, four formative films that explain and expose modern educational reform and school building are described in some detail with a focus on the depiction of architectural contexts and yet an absence of the architect as protagonist. In conclusion the role of the documentary genre in providing alternative, if consciously staged or flawed, sources of evidence for architectural history is reappraised.