 | SAYING AND DOING SKILFULLY MOVING FROM DISCOURSE TO PRODUCTION, MINIFIE NIXON’S FIRST MAJOR PROJECT REVEALS THE IMPORTANCE OF DISCIPLINARY KNOWLEDGE.
REVIEW SHANE MURRAY PHOTOGRAPHY DEREK SWALWELL
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The main facade returns to meet the north wall of
the building.
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The main facade of the building
appears as a series of intersecting cones.
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The plexus space is top lit. The Wall
work is by sculptor Andrew Hazewinkel.
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The interiors speak of sober judgment.
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The
intriguing spatial effect where the facade meets the
north wall.
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SINCE ITS ESTABLISHMENT in 2001, I have been intrigued by the purpose of
the Victorian College of the Arts’ Centre for Ideas (CFI). What is implied in this naming?
What does it mean to have a centre whose title implies an apparent authority over ideas
in an art school? What is the provenance of ideas within the various disciplines that
make up the college? Does the CFI precede, accompany or pursue the work undertaken
in painting, sculpture or film? What will happen to Ricky Swallow, denied the succour of
the CFI; how has Stieg Persson survived and what does this mean for the legacy of Ian
Burn, now departed without this nourishment?
These musings might appear as a swipe at an unintended consequence of the
pressure to brand in contemporary education, but they raise several issues germane to a
discussion of the colloquially titled Centre for Ideas building at the VCA. Whatever the
exact role of the CFI and the questions it raises about the relationship between
conceptualization and execution, its existence illustrates the ambitions of one of the
most prestigious and important art schools in the country. Importantly, the VCA has put
its money where its mouth is and engaged the young and relatively untried firm of
Minifie Nixon to articulate a physical enclosure for their mission. Minifie Nixon are also a
firm that to my knowledge is ideally placed to interrogate these issues.
The new building is actually unnamed and is currently described as the Union and
Library Building Extension. However, for many, it goes under the name of its glamour
tenant the CFI. While I cannot speak for the arts, architecture presents as a discipline
where the discourse surrounding production, including questions of concept, authority
and application, continues to reverberate with apparently irresolvable agitation. How
architects compose and arrange buildings formally and how we might speak about this
process is a continuing conundrum within architectural practice. As architects with an
avowed commitment to the articulation of concept and its implied authority over their
architectural production, with this first major built work, Minifie Nixon provide an
interesting sounding-board upon which to reflect on the contemporary relationship
between saying and doing.
Minifie Nixon believe that one successful outcome of their building is the fact that
concept has endured the process of physical execution. By concept they mean a
particular investigation that consisted of an examination of the formal implications of the
Voronoi tessellation as developed by the British sculptor Jonathan Callan. The outcome
of this research has resulted in the beautiful main facade of the building that appears as
a series of intersecting cones, some of which have their apexes penetrated to form
circular windows while others are marked with small reflective domes. In describing this
transmission of concept, Paul Minifie observes that the diagram has been sufficiently
maintained in its transmission through to execution that it suspends other acculturated
readings. These other readings might have included the role and history of facadism in
Melbourne architecture, among many. It is interesting to speculate as to why Minifie
seeks this direct transmission of concept. I suspect it emanates from the belief, which is
not unique to him, that this is currently the only acceptable path for legitimacy in
contemporary architecture. What is intriguing about the Minifie Nixon project is that
while its originating concept does appear to have endured and in fact does achieve the
type of reverberation between outcome and diagram that the authors claim for it, there
is so much more happening that complicates and enriches the outcome.
Minifie Nixon tend to limit their discussion of the project to the Voronoi tessellation
and its influence over the primary facade of the building. However, it should also be
noted that their project flourishes in a challenging physical context. The VCA campus is a
Dali-esque monopoly board of formal incongruities – a type of Scandinavian community
centre masquerading as college, landed onto a smattering of nineteenth-century
cottages, stables and police hospital, subsequently adjoined by one of Melbourne’s least
successful forays into educational architecture, the mix seasoned with a couple of
relocatable classrooms. The Minifie Nixon building is denied the clarity of a stand-alone
situation and instead is attached on two sides to two incongruous buildings. It is only on
one side that the facade is available to view and even this opportunity is encumbered by
the old police hospital building that obscures its presentation to Dodds Street. The
planning of the building, which operates over three levels, is required to contend with the
extension of an adjoining programme from the union and library building and also has to
act as a major thoroughfare between three sides of the campus. If this were not difficult
enough, the larger context incorporates a contemporary sampler of institutional
architecture running along Dodds Street, the nearest frontage to the building. These
include the revamped National Gallery of Victoria,Wood Marsh’s ACCA and Edmond
and Corrigan’s Performing Art Centre, soon to be joined by the Melbourne Theatre
Company recital hall by Ashton Raggatt McDougall. In the ideological world of Melbourne
architecture this is a bit like going to work for your parents while your grandfather drops
in to check on you. This is a demanding environment for any architecture and one in
which Minifie Nixon’s project stands up very well.
The fact that the building has been able to contend very successfully with these
demands is a credit to the architects, but also begs the question of how this contention
has been achieved. What we find in the project is a range of both established and
particular architectural procedures that contribute to the formal execution. The internal
spaces of the building are arranged around the plexus space, an intersection of
circulation that enmeshes the existing movement through the college with the new
functions of the building. Top-lit and embellished with a beautiful wall work by the
sculptor Andrew Hazewinkel, this space becomes both a formal and visual centre that
the rest of the ensemble negotiates in a quite physical way. Particularly at the library
level, where the existing library merges with the new library, we find a complex series of
spatial layering and particular tectonic passages that address certain important junctions
in the volume and give accent to the layering of the space looking back into the plexus.
Interestingly the formal impetus for many of these passages appears to be
independent of the impact of the main conceptual facade into the interior.While the CFI
office’s ceiling is perforated with a series of depressed cones, a formal consequence of
the Voronoi concept, the most intriguing spatial effect in this space is where the facade
returns to meet the north wall of the building – an architectural elevation and intersection
much more to do with precedents established in the offices where Minifie Nixon endured
their architectural apprenticeships. When I visited the building I was surprised by the
sense of sober judgment that characterized much of the interior treatment. They appear
as institutional spaces, speak of limited budgets, of durability and of clever and
considered application of architectural accent. Much of the building, and its negotiation
of its circumstances, is effective because it evidences the type of accumulated
experience that enables the application of disciplinary knowledge where issues of the
project are negotiated in the doing of the architecture.
The relation of the feature facade to the substrata of architectural skill and judgment
that I have described is not an issue for this project alone. It is the same kind of schism
represented by the building’s tenant, the Centre for Ideas. Institutions are currently so
engrossed in what they perceive to be the limits of disciplinarity that denouncing a
discipline’s autonomy has become something of a cliché. In this circumstance we risk
losing sight of why disciplines and disciplinary knowledge came to exist in the first place,
what they actually entail.We remain mute on much of what architects do. Since the late
seventies in architecture, we have become so habituated to the unpacking of
disciplinarity and the seeking of authority for what we do from elsewhere that the
applied procedures of a discipline such as architecture have been required to endure at
a subliminal level, denied articulation. This leads to an absence between material and
discourse that requires our attention. Minifie Nixon have delivered a fine building, one that
demonstrates a sophisticated and experimental approach to contemporary issues of
architectural ideation and also one that reveals the inventive application of acquired
disciplinary skills.We need to understand, however, that the success of this building is
not just in its conceptual facade but also resides in the other half of the story.
SHANE MURRAY IS ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN AT RMIT UNIVERSITY.
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