Paul Walker

Architecture Post Mortem: The Diastolic Architecture of Decline, Dystopia, and Death

Architecture’s sublime uselessness is figured in this famous passage by Adolf Loos: “Only a tiny part of architecture comes under art: monuments. Everything else, everything that serves some practical purpose, should be ejected from the realm of art”. While Loos’ words haunt Architecture Post Mortem, it is mostly more contemporary experiences of architecture’s irrelevance that drive the inquiries gathered together in this demanding book. Donald Kunze’s introduction starts with the economic collapse of 2008 – what can architecture do in the aftermath? It is pressured to be more real, regarding its expectations of having a critical or projective role (reduce them), its relations with the business world (increase them) and what architectural education should be (recast as training in digital technique). These pressures reduce architecture’s role to styling and branding; the ultimate aspiration for an architect is to be one of a miniscule elite who are their own brands (Foster, Hadid, Koolhaas). Against this, Kunze and his colleagues wish to recuperate a role for theory which defers or resists this call to the new order; that seeks to find a more openended and less commercially conditioned role for architecture and architectural education. (And for architectural history, the possibility of doing work that does not contribute to triumphalist narratives.) Many of the chapters call on cinema – even commercially successful cinema – as a location where narratives can be found that are simultaneously subversive (at least in their subtexts) and engaging enough to have audiences. Cultural work need not be reduced to just getting another conformist image to market. For architecture, cinema is also a nowhere/now here (to use Kunze’s construct) – its apparent spaces have an immediacy, but also a projective, otheroriented quality to which architectural theory (or fantasy, if you prefer) might aspire. A key theme in the book is the fate of the public realm. Todd McGowan reviews the laments from Christopher Lasch and Robert Putnam about the privatisation of our culture (he could have added Paul Carter, Richard Sennett and Martin Pawley), but suggests that the symbolic aspect of consumption has a public dimension, and that it is only through our psychoanalytically moving through desire to “drive” that we evade the serial disappointment that our achievement of one desired object after another produces. Simone Brott’s text cleverly weaves analysis of the 2009 film District 9 (aliens ghettoised in Johannesburg) with commentary on South African state involvement with chemical and biological weapons, both during the apartheid regime and afterwards. Adopting the apocalyptic tone of Mike Davis’ writing on Los Angeles, Brott addresses not the disappearance of public space, but its militarisation and the “violent urbanism” (41) that this entails. How does architecture in the post-critical moment respond to this? If architecture does not resume a critical stance, does it not become complicit, refigured not as cultural work, but as facilitation of the powers that be? Bolstered by his readings of Lacan and Žižek, and rejecting the triumphalist, post-history view that left critique is defunct, Nadir Lahiji revisits the figure of the ruin in Benjamin’s commentary on Klee’s Angelus Novus image. Interesting issues, appalling written: “I suggest that thoughts and building enter into a dialectical commonality once they are – thanks to the unhistorical extimate kernel of history (Žižek) – within the death drive.” (55; emphasis in original) Sure – if you say so. The following chapter by David Bertolini is a little gentler on readers, as they are escorted through the complexities of Lacan’s readings of Immanuel Kant and the Marquis de Sade, via analyses of three films (The Wizard of Oz, Children of Men

Architecture of the Contact Zone: Four Post-colonial Museums

Museums have become important locations for shaping and reshaping contemporary relations between post-colonial nations and indigenous cultures. The anthropologist James Clifford has used the term ‘contact zone’ to describe the indeterminacy and possibility that exists when the formal, anthropological knowledge held by curators and the embodied, evolving culture represented by indigenous groups encounter each other within the orbit of the contemporary museum. Clifford’s use of the term ‘contact zone’ is borrowed from the work of Mary Louise Pratt who used it rather in an historical sense to describe the strangeness and unanticipated outcomes for epistemology of encounters on the frontiers of European imperial expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This chapter will examine the architecture of four museums which in their institutional missions have foregrounded relations between contemporary nation–states and the communities descended from colonised people. These museums are the Tjibaou Cultural Centre, Noumea (completed 1998); Te Papa Tongarewa/Museum of New Zealand, Wellington (1997); National Museum of Australia, Canberra (2001); and the Musee du quai Branly, Paris (2006). Each museum is based on a different idealisation or conception of the contemporary emerging from the colonial histories which it represents: rapprochement between coloniser and colonised at Tjibaou; the post-colonial nation as ‘bicultural’ at Te Papa; the post-colonial nation as multicultural ‘mosaic’ at the NMA; rapprochement between a former coloniser and the formerly colonised at quai Branly. In each museum, architecture was charged with the responsibility to make these idealisations physically and experientially manifest even as architecture itself struggles with its own inheritances of elite, monocultural knowledge. For both Clifford and Pratt, the term ‘zone’ primarily entails a spatial metaphor; the contact zone is an epistemological space. The term ‘zone’, however, can also be taken to refer literally to the physical spaces of an institution or the geographical spaces where colonial encounters with the other took place. Indeed, both Clifford and Pratt often discuss or allude to just such ostensible places in their work. The chapter will bring their discussions of the ‘contact zone’ to bear in critique and analysis of its four key examples to consider what architecture could be in such a place, how it too could become a more labile and less determinate thing.

Constructing Australian Architecture for International Audiences: Regionalism, Postmodernism, and the Design Arts Board 1980–1988

Abstract In May 2015, a new Australian Pavilion was inaugurated at the Giardini dell Biennale in Venice. Designed by Denton Corker Marshall, it has been described as moving beyond the issues of Australian identity that were the concern of its predecessor, designed by the architect Philip Cox and opened in 1988 to mark Australia’s bicentenary. This paper revisits the work of the Australia Council’s Design Arts Board in the 1980s in promoting Australian architecture through exhibitions, international design journals, and finally the first Australian Venice Biennale pavilion. During this period, a concern with identity preoccupied Australian architecture, manifest in an idiom of exposed steel frames and corrugated iron and a concern with landscape. This view aligned with one of the period’s prevailing international orthodoxies in architecture: Kenneth Frampton’s concept of “critical regionalism.” Countering this was the position put by the Italian design journal Domus, in a 1985 special issue on Australia, which depicted Australian architecture as contested, fragmentary, and citational – in a word, “postmodern.” While the Design Arts Board’s engagement with the international design media could lead to unanticipated outcomes such as Domus’s radical view, it is apparent in readings of the 1988 Biennale pavilion design that mostly engagement continued to be on the basis that Australian architecture should proffer images of identity.

Ethno-Architecture and the Politics of Migration

The focus of this book is on understanding cultures, experiences and consequences of transnational migration by considering how migrant communities apprehend and modify built environments of their ...

Tents and Monuments

Abstract At Canberra’s Aboriginal Tent Embassy, a politically profound assertion of difference has inveigled itself into the grand composition of Canberra’s urban landscape with a group of small, informal and flimsy buildings. The Embassy’s dishevelment and formlessness is aesthetic. In this paper, the strategies of the Tent Embassy are considered in relation to architectural discourse on ornament and the monumental. The borders of architecture as a discipline have often been defined in relation to the discipline’s discourse on ornament. Disdained in early modernist thinking, ornament slowly returned to architectural discourse through mid-century debates on new monumentality and then in the 1980s in attempts to theorise the postmodern. Ornament in this context can be taken to stand for any aesthetic excess. This architectural consideration of ornament is connected to ideas of cultural differences and multiple communities within the city. The paper develops this discussion through exploration of the apparently very different approaches of two other Canberra sites explicitly given over to historical constructions of Australian national identity – the National Museum of Australia and the Australian War Memorial. Their differences, however, are shown to have had less significance than might be supposed in relation to the degree to which either institution has been able to promote representations of singularity or diversity within the Australian community. By comparison, the Tent Embassy strategically and effectively deploys its aesthetic condition to assert that there are borders within the very centre of the nation-state.

Project of Crisis: Manfredo Tafuri and Contemporary Architecture

2. To name but a few: Carlos Martı́ Aris, Gaston Bachelard, Gernot Böhme, O.F. Bollnow, Philippe Boudon, Massimo Cacciari, Bernard Cache, Jean-Louis Cohen, Hubert Damisch, Christian Girard, Juan José Lahuerta, Bart Lootsma, Frédéric Migayrou, Werner Oechslin, Kas Oosterhuis, Daniel Payot, Paolo Portoghesi, Josep Quetglas, Patrick Schumacher, Peter Sloterdijk, Ignasi De Solà-Morales, Lars Spuybroek, Georges Teyssot, many of whom actually write in English or have been translated. It must also be noted that even a few academics in Anglo-Saxon institutions such as Marco Frascari, Mark Goulthorpe, Gevork Hartoonian, Felipe Hernández, Jeffrey Kipnis, Sanford Kwinter, Detlef Mertins and Colin St. John Wilson also seem missing in action.

Migration and Modern Architecture: The Case of New Zealand

The history of modern architecture in New Zealand is written around a conception of cultural diffusion from Europe to antipodes, countered at mid-century by the emergence of local resistance to international modernism. By considering aspects of the careers of architects Amyas Connell and Basil Ward, Ernst Plischke, and Miles Warren, this paper complicates this narrative of diffusion and resistance. As architects moved between New Zealand and Europe, and vice versa, they acted not as agents of cultural diffusion from centre to periphery; rather they participated in more complex interactions. Both in Europe and in New Zealand, the reception of European modernism by New Zealand architects was inflected by the countrys own circumstances, but even early in the twentieth century these local circumstances were in turn conditioned by international networks of technology and culture in which New Zealand was already embedded.

Style and Climate in Addison's Brisbane Exhibition Building

Designed by George Addison in 1888 and completed in 1891, Brisbanes Exhibition Building has in the past 40 years been ascribed in guide books and heritage register descriptions to a wide range of apparently contradictory styles: Victorian, Romanesque, Byzantine, Indo-Saracenic, Federation. While the application of these various stylistic terms could imply that the design of the Exhibition Building is open to various interpretations, these terms refer to stylistic categories that are themselves contested. In light of this, the implications of such stylistic attributions are considered in relation to Ernst Gombrichs propositions about the stylistic terms of art history. Gombrich argues that most such terms have their origins in normative judgements, and while they become seemingly naturalised as taxonomic categories, they do not entirely transcend their ideological origins. Following on from this, the paper points to tacit propositions about the affiliations of the Exhibition Buildings architecture entailed in the stylistic descriptions applied to it.

Here and There: House and Nature in New Zealand Architecture

New Zealand does not make its own canons. Rather, they are constructed within discourses that traffic between the local situation and the international. This, at least, is the case in architecture. To consider this proposition, it will be productive to examine some recent representations of New Zealand architecture in the mainstream European design media: an article on Auckland architect Rewi Thompson in the Italian journal Lotus; another in the English publication Blueprint about a house on Motiti Island in the Bay of Plenty; and several pieces from the English journals The Architectural Review and Architectural Design (AD). All of these have appeared since 1996. Pieces in other journals will be subjects for short asides.