 | RADAREVENT POSSIBLE WORLDS SYMPOSIUM
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NOX’s D-Tower, 1999–2004,
Doetinchem, charts the shifting moods of the city
through changing lighting. The project is a
collaboration with Rotterdam artist Q. S. Serafijn.
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An example of FXV’s interest in
ephemeral urbanism, this project was originally
developed for the competition The Light at the End
of the Tunnel, which sought creative and viable
architectural ideas for restoring London’s railway
viaducts. The component system is being
developed into a deployable system for urban
renewal.
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ARM’s project for the Melbourne
Recital Centre houses the “precious” chamber
within the “packaging” of the building.
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Peter Scriver reviews this year’s Architecture Symposium at the Adelaide Festival of the Arts, which gave the opportunity to reflect on radical projections of the future.
Between the biennial Festival of Arts, and
the Festival of Ideas in alternate years,
talkfests on architecture and urbanism have
become an established fixture of Adelaide’s
cultural scene in recent years.
“Possible Worlds: The Architecture of
Imagination”, a one-day symposium
organized under the visual arts programme
of the current (2006) cycle of the Adelaide
Festival, was encouraging evidence that
architecture remains, at least for the
moment, “hot media” – to cite the still
apposite notion of Marshall McLuhan, half
a century on. Once again, in spite of almost
no advertising, hundreds of interested
citizens in addition to architectural students
and practitioners were prepared to come out
and immerse themselves for hours in the
imagery and issues, if not the esoterica, of
contemporary architectural discourse.
As curators Jennifer Harvey and Sean
Pickersgill state, this symposium was
“intended to provoke interest and
speculation on the manner in which
architecture can and will shape our lives
in the future”. Futurology is at best a
speculative exercise. But what was most
striking about the actual discussion that
ensued was the renewed insight it cast
upon certain radically inventive strands of
architectural thought and experiment in the
past, and their enduring pertinence to the
emerging new forms and orders of the urban
present, if not the future.
Of the four keynote talks, the three
morning speakers – Lars Spuybroek
(principal of NOX Architects, Rotterdam),
John Bell (director of FXV, London), and
Neil Masterton (Ashton Raggatt McDougall)
– represented the un-stated focus of the
symposium on issues of digital mediation
and invention in contemporary practice.
While focusing on seemingly arcane
examples of early Renaissance religious
paintings, the fourth speaker, Andrew
Benjamin (UTS), addressed cognate issues
in architectural representation. A final
panel discussion, chaired by Justine Clark
(editor, Architecture Australia), was
initiated with a prepared response to the
previous speakers by Sue Phillips (Phillips
Pilkington Architects, Adelaide) in which
local possibilities and implications of the
day’s issues were explored.
Heralded as a master among
contemporary digitally immersed architects
and artists in Europe, Lars Spuybroek offered
a disarmingly engaging introduction to the
driving ideas, strategies and tactics of his
work. Articulating a fundamental distinction
that would be revisted variously through the
course of the day, Spuybroek differentiated
the time-honoured notion of the designer as
a form-giver from his fascination with the
notion of emergent order, or “epigenesis”.
In revealing accounts of a selection of his
own art and architectural works, Spuybroek
explored some of the challenges encountered
in attempting to connect the possibilities of
emergence and self-organization observable
in other evocative examples of dynamic
systems, such as bird flocks or soap bubbles,
to the unique problems of architecture.
While the tools of digitally sophisticated
designers today are new, Spuybroek
reminded us that they only enable us to
revisit old problems in a new light. Antoni
Gaudi and Frei Otto, among others, had
been there before.
Like Spuybroek, John Bell’s subsequent
polemic on ephemeral architecture and the
agency of the designer in the contemporary
“city of bits” was underpinned with a
reassuring historical perspective on the
nature of the work and ideas at issue.
Championing Archigram and their
situationist tactics as precursors to the
emerging “cyborg urbanism” and
“short-wave” dynamics of the way we
actually live in cities today, Bell shared his
profound appreciation in retrospect for the
genuinely inventive and far-seeing futurism
of these pre-digital pioneers of radical new
forms of urban and social space.
The increasingly urban-scale design work
of ARM of Melbourne proved an interesting
foil for further demonstration and later
discussion of many of the design strategies
and tactics described by the previous two
speakers. Speaking on behalf of the firm,
Neil Masterton articulated a conscious
creative tension in their work
experimenting with “big things”, either as
icons in themselves or as the occult
objects/ideas that impress themselves on
the “generic stuff” of building. This was
illustrated memorably in ARM’s current
project for the Melbourne Recital Centre,
in which the section reveals the precious
chamber of the concert hall itself inside
the generic packing of the architectural
superstructure.
Returning somewhat obliquely to the
stated themes of the symposium – possible
worlds and the architectural imagination –
Andrew Benjamin brought the discussion
back to fundamental aspects of architectural
theory in the final formal talk of the day.
With the advent of the digital, he argued,
we need to question the status of the
architectural image, as part of the need for
a renewal of architectural theory more
generally. Marked by the contingency of its
reception in time and place, the
architectural image has an aleatory nature,
or afterlife, which cannot be predicted, in
the form-giving sense of a finite prescription
for a predetermined architecture. The latent
possibilities of such a projection can only
emerge in real-time – as each of the earlier
speakers had demonstrated through the
contingent experience of experiment and
practice.
Working at the intersection of theory,
criticism and practice, John Bell offered
some of the most compelling and
potentially productive insights of the day,
for this reviewer, with his critique of
“long-wave” design and planning ideologies
in the “short-wave” realities of
contemporary urbanism. Moreover, Bell
clearly attempted to address the actual brief
of the symposium’s sponsor, the South
Australian Government Department of
Environment and Heritage, who had asked
speakers to offer ideas on how architecture
may be involved in a more sustainable way
of thinking about environmental design.
Inadvertently perhaps, but unforgettably
nevertheless, Bell’s nostalgic celebration of
the ephemeral lightness of being of
Archigram’s 1970s project for “Event City” offered a paradoxical answer. For a big
country town such as Adelaide – which, for
one month every two years, is transformed
into the “Event City” without equal in this
half of the globe – the bigness of the more
metropolitan architecture and urbanism to
which it has often aspired is simply not
necessary, not to mention unsustainable. In
a smarter, lighter world of technologically
integrated environments designed to
respond to and enrich the moment, not to
shape the future irrevocably, it might just
be possible to have one’s cake and eat it too.
PETER SCRIVER IS A SENIOR LECTURER
IN ARCHITECTURE AT THE UNIVERSITY
OF ADELAIDE.
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