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RADAR
FEATURES
COMMENT
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| | RADARBOOKS
| TAKE 4: COLLABORATION AND COALITION |
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CREATING ARCHITECTURAL KNOWLEDGE IN CONTEMPORARY PRACTICE
Edited by Louise Wallis, Paula Whitman
and Susan Savage. RAIA, 2005. $33.
I like the intent of this book. Collaboration
in the design process is a very worthwhile
area of discussion in architectural practice,
and examining collaboration through a
series of case study essays by different
authors seems a good way to do this. It is
interesting too (and worth encouraging) that
it is published by the RAIA and is the
outcome of the longstanding Sisalation
Prize. It is a fairly uncommon instance of
our industry and our profession helping to
create research which is closely aligned
with practice, but not directly it.
The first essay (Baz Bill and Spud:
Knowledge from Connection With Making)
describes Gabriel Poole’s relationship with
builders in making his architecture. This
immediately gets into arguments which I
find a little irritating. Firstly, the idea that it
is novel to liaise with, and at times defer to,
people carrying out the crafting of building.
Surely this is common enough, and it need
not be accompanied by a sensibility which
sets doing against thinking. This tired
separation is always slightly antiintellectual
– it seems to go with that
frontier suspicion of the academy. My
concern is that the collaboration is pitched
as a one-way effort; the architect becoming
more like a builder and suppressing what
they undoubtedly bring to the collaborative
table. If they are not bringing anything else
to the table, then we might wonder what
they’re doing there.
Generally the texts focus on the crafting
collaboration – architect and steelworker,
architect and engineer, architect as builder.
Lots of refined timber structures and butter
paper. The best exception to this is Tokyo
Speed: Recreating the Academy in Practice,
a description of collaboration with related
design firms sharing work and exhibition
space. Here I was curious about the
suggestion of spatial and personal proximity
as key ingredients. There is almost no
mention in this book of long-distance
collaboration facilitated by digital tools,
which is an area of rapidly growing interest.
A marvellous image of collaboration at a
more fundamental level is provided in
Phillip Crowther’s essay, which contrasts
the three-legged race with the relay; the
three-legged race being less efficient but
more fun, and perhaps more like design
collaboration. By extension, collaborative
efforts slow each runner down but they
produce something neither could have
come up with alone. It reminds me a little
of George Orwell’s assertion that democracy
is messy and slow while Fascism is clean
and efficient.
The main concluding point of these
essays is that we do not know enough about
architectural knowledge, and that
describing collaborative methods might
help expose that knowledge and make it
more accessible. The difficulty of
understanding what architectural
knowledge is has real professional
consequences. The authors cite the
Productivity Commission’s inability to
accept that a clear body of knowledge
defines the profession, and should therefore
be protected in the public interest. (And
universities have their own difficulties in
identifying our discipline’s research.)
The other point made in this book is that
despite such pressures, it is pointless to
suggest a clearly defined or fixed body of
knowledge for our discipline. The case
studies in Take 4 do not produce one and
nor should they. This does not mean that
we should not attempt to grapple with
what it is that architecture is trying to do.
For this reason the individual stories of
these essays, despite our various biases,
are well worth reading.
GRAHAM CRIST
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| THE MESH BOOK |
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LANDSCAPE/INFRASTRUCTURE
Edited by Julian Raxworthy and Jessica
Blood. RMIT University Press, 2004. $44.
The Mesh Book has emerged from the 2001
conference of the same name held at RMIT
University. Like the conference, which was
vigorous and well attended, the book covers
a wide spectrum of approaches to the
relationship between landscape and
infrastructure: infrastructure as metaphor,
infrastructure as delivery system,
infrastructure as big chunky stuff,
infrastructure as ephemeral enigmatic stuff,
and, most importantly, infrastructure as
really about landscape and not primarily
about constructions of architecture or
engineering. There is a strong thread of
“reclaiming” infrastructure as a landscape
issue, and in doing so, asserting landscape’s
innate richness, openness, connectedness
and agency.
The editors note that the very topic of
infrastructure resists easy definition: “the
closer you get to it, the more background
there is behind it.” Robust visible
structures, such as stormwater systems and
motorways, are in fact there to enable quite
different systems and structures to operate.
These systems and structures have their
predispositions and non-utilitarian
tendencies which may lie quite beyond our
own current preoccupations or
representational strategies.
Various permutations of constructedness
and emergence are addressed in three main
sections: invisible infrastructures,
immanent infrastructures and present
infrastructures. Some of the most engaging
material propositions are from the work of
Dutch landscape practice Vista, whose
large-scale landscape interventions exploit
the necessary control of hydrology in
vulnerable low-lying land in a productive
and unsentimental way. This work sits
alongside other thought-provoking and
innovative projects, and critical writings,
which together create an important addition
to the wider debates on landscape
infrastructure and urbanism.
The book structure is not without some
repetition and limitation. There are about
four different introductions, each defining
parameters for the idea of infrastructure and
landscape, or asserting a classification of
infrastructural strategy and effect. The
editorial voice is complicated by the
landscape architectural academic Peter
Connelly’s critique of other chapters within
his own. This gives the sense that the book
is functioning like a post-conference
after-party conversation – not simply a
report on the state of things but a
determined effort to dig deeper (forgive the
heavy machinery allusion) into the ways in
which the practice of landscape architecture
conducts its investigations, and how the
very idea of landscape is conceived.
KATRINA SIMON
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| THE ARCHITECTURE OF DEFENCE |
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36 STRATEGIES
Philip James Kirke. Friend Books,
2005. $36.
A treatise by a West Australian architect,
this little book presents a designer’s
resistance to the intellectual dominance
of engineering and project management
thinking. Less evangelical than Pattern
Language, more the way I remember the
Team 10 Primer to be, Kirke’s book gives
us an insight into how a concern for
environmental, social and human values
can give architectural shape, form and
expression to an unlikely building type
– defence buildings. It is written with
a touch of rye humour and has a thoughtful
logic and structure.
Like Norberg-Schulz, Kirke argues for
reconnecting feeling with thinking. He
focuses on the physical, cognitive and
motivational effects that architectural
place-making can have on people – from
how we use the land to how we design the
micro scale of a workplace – through four
themes. Two of them are about people-topeople
relationships – internally, and with
the broader community. The third is about
protecting people and equipment, and the
fourth is about the particular task needs of
people and equipment. The use of thirty-six
strategies in an idiomatic form is a “nod” to traditional Chinese folk literature on
military logic.
Kirke was a senior architect with GHD for
some 18 years, and is now an associate with
Hassell in Perth. He has worked with
Indigenous communities in WA and has
published a number of children’s books.
Kirke’s views on architecture and what
drives the making of a satisfying outcome
are transferable to many building types.
This book is well worth a read.
PROFESSOR GRAHAM BRAWN
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BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT ARCHITEXT
Tusculum, 3 Manning Street, Sydney,
T 02 9356 2022 E architext@raia.com.au
41 Exhibition Street, Melbourne.
T 03 9650 3474 sydney@architext.com.au
W www.architext.com.au
The Architecture of Defence is available directly
from the publisher: Friend Books, 99 Corinthian
Road West, Shelley, WA 6148.
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Copyright © 2010 Architecture Media Pty Ltd
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