 | RADARCONFERENCE THE FUTURE IS NOW!
This year’s RAIA conference asked speakers to speculate on architecture’s futures. Three delegates – Paolo Tombesi, Laura Harding and Eli Giannini – respond to the event, the speakers and the ideas raised.
| FUTURE PAST PAOLO TOMBESI |
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Elke Delugan Meissl.
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John Wardle.
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Kerry Hill.
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In Behind the Post-Modern Facade (1993), Magali
Sarfatti Larson notes that professions such as
architecture, characterized by the pervasiveness of
a common cultural discourse, find social cohesion
through difference.
For Sarfatti Larson, the majority of practitioners –
tied to the constraining pragmatics of standard
commissions and budgets – derive professional
legitimacy from the presence of a smaller group of
architectural artists who, through their charisma and
out-of-the-ordinary building opportunities, serve as
“ideological warrant for the normal or routine practice
of the profession as a whole”. Sarfatti Larson’s
description suffers perhaps from overcommitment to
sociological narratives. Yet, time and again, her theory
gets tested and confirmed at annual architectural
institutes’ conferences worldwide. In these events
members of the profession with portfolios of work
exuding intellectual autonomy and operative leeway –
and generally implying some form of institutional or
individual patronage – are brought in to inspire
conference attendees and to galvanize the architectural
body into action.
The Future is Now provided yet another example
of this peculiar form of reversed pilgrimage by inviting
ten diverse practitioners onto its main stage, to provide
cues about the future by using their work both as a
sphere of self-reflection and as a crystal ball.
The prospect of drawing successful, and in most
cases interesting, individual designers into the
limelight is of course a tempting one. Recent RAIA
conferences have done this very successfully, teasing
out powerful testimonies of what it means to be a
particular type of architect in the process.
However, problems may arise the moment we ascribe
– at least rhetorically, as was the case in Sydney –
redemptive, didactic or political value to the work of
such champions. When this happens, the natural
limitations of Sarfatti Larson’s cultural theory of
professional bonding become self-evident: it is one
thing to perceive elective affinities with fellow
architects, it is another to be able to act upon these
affinities within one’s own professional domain.
On such grounds, I found the Sydney convention
slightly tokenistic and tactically flawed in that –
commendable objectives and fascinating presentations
notwithstanding – it left the distance between the
rarefied world of design authorship and the crowded
universe of honoured vocational trade unspoken.
As Stephen Varady wrote in his introduction,
“architects are always thinking about the future”.
This should not come as a surprise, given that “to
project” means literally “to throw (ideas) forward”.
Yet whether or not architects are asked to think actively
about the future rather than work, as it were, in the
future depends on the context surrounding their work
and the demand from which it originates.
This is why the absence of average professional
markets from most of the discussion (at least as a point
of perspective) was conspicuous. With the exception of
a couple of presentations, the landscape of practice
“projected” at Darling Harbour (of all places) was either
one devoid of constraints or one so full of structural
limitations as to require an almost perverse form of
collective indulgence for its realization.
Without taking anything away from the work itself,
how do Rural Studio’s yearning carpet shacks or Kerry
Hill’s exquisite walls, screens and pools exactly engage
the future? What do Kerstin Thompson’s residences in
Victoria say about changing patterns of inhabitation?
Can we all swim into the coves of Baja California that
Carme Pinós colonized with her exploded hotel tubes?
Or should we rather become part of the photogenic
crowd (or Orwellian hordes, you decide) of Coop
Himmelb(l)au’s building openings? Even if we resolved
to repudiate the instant Hollywood culture promoted
by the star of the Sydney show Wolf Prix, could we all
seek refuge in Anupama Kundoo’s utopian Auroville,
joining the sizeable group of middle-class Western
escapees already inhabiting the place?
The obvious answer to all these questions is that the
work presented was emblematic of “methods” rather
than projects to copy. Objection well taken. But if we
were really interested in the future, once methods
emerge, shouldn’t we measure their distance from
average praxis, trying to understand what is required
for the gap to close? In Sydney this would have been
made even easier by the fact that some presentations
contained material already familiar to the audience,
when not recycled outright from previous occasions.
Instead, the opportunity to exploit the experiences
selected as tools for reflective discussion was not taken
up. The result was that despite the speakers’ best (and
sometimes desperate) efforts at sewing the threads of
the conference back into their buildings, the
presentations remained reflections of themselves.
In my view, this ultimately produced the unthinkable
separation of the profession in the auditorium, up on
stage and down in the seating area – a separation
rendered more overt by the decision to assign
architectural theory bards the task of replacing the
public’s voice in the presenters’ panel sessions at the
end of each day. This was not a felicitous decision.
It alienated the audience and meant that the fecund
interaction so successfully achieved in Melbourne last
year did not take place in Sydney. It also exposed the
chasm that can sometimes exist between the academic
version of architectural theory and the issues that
populate the street theory of architectural practice.
Faced with the Sisyphean challenge of pursuing
nonexistent lines of discussion (or else feeding the
platitudes of Austrian prima donnas), neither Naomi
Stead nor Andrew Burges could get themselves out of
a suicidal script quickly enough. The future may have
looked exciting but the present proved tedious while
the rest of the discussion, as Anupama Kundoo
intimated, concerned history.
Indeed, it was the interaction between Kundoo and
Andrew Freear, Mockbee’s successor at the helm of
Rural Studio, that triggered moments of genuine
hilarity as well as arresting lucidity. In particular
when Freear recommended the audience not to get too
hung up on his students’ work, for their whimsical
structures are made possible by sheer necessity and
consequent make-do philosophy, accompanied by free
labour, sweat equity, disrespect of building codes and
donated or discarded materials: a formidable
pedagogical opportunity but hardly the future we want
to work towards.
In the end, the true amalgam of Sydney 2006 for me
was Timothy Hill – next year’s creative director-elect
and consummate socialite – who went closest to
providing some sort of ecumenical closure. He kept
his well-rehearsed, sophisticated architectural comedy
act clear of self-congratulatory moments but full of
illuminating observations about Donovan Hill’s
practice, jovial self-condemnation about their work
and insightful reflections about the current state of
the discipline.
In a way, Hill’s almost protestant insistence on the
mechanisms of the present rather than the rhetorics of
the future could set up an interesting methodological
dialogue between this year’s and next year’s
conferences: does the future of architectural practice
rest with the elevation of discrete projects to
unintentional prototypes (and their authors to
occasional heroes) or does it instead rely on informed
discussion about collective constraints? I tend towards
a blend of the two, looking forward to a time, clearly
in the future, when a legislator, a policy-maker and a
building developer will share the stage with an
incisive architectural discussant publicly to lay out
differences, confess fears and declare ambitions.
One never knows, it could be Melbourne next year.
PAOLO TOMBESI IS ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ARCHITECTURE
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE.
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| FREEDOM AMID CONSTRAINT LAURA HARDING |
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Anupama Kundoo.
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Andrew Freear.
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Carme Pinós.
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It is ironic that, in an era when social and technological
advancement have made the potential of architecture
seemingly limitless, constraint and limitation have
become a preoccupation. At the recent RAIA National
Conference, The Future is Now, reflections on the
difficulty of practice were as pervasive as those
addressing the architecture itself. How do practitioners
find freedom for architecture amidst the current culture
of constraint?
Timothy Hill emphasized the difficulty of the task in
an alternately excoriating and hilarious account of the
tedious, risky and often venomous world of
contemporary practice. Scarcely mentioning Donovan
Hill’s architectural works, he chose instead to project
them as an almost incidental pictorial background,
neatly parodying the relevance of architecture to the
planners, financiers and bureaucrats who relentlessly
stalk its production. Hill urged practitioners to look
beyond architecture to secure its future, calling for
urgent changes to the education of the planning
profession to encompass design and for architects
themselves to assume the characteristics of Isaiah
Berlin’s famed fox, adopting agility and cunning to
evade the deadening influence of the “PLTs” (people
like them). His bravura performance suggested that
Hill has equipped himself with a more formidable,
hybrid armour – wielding the fox’s nimble intelligence
as well as the hedgehog’s ability to bristle fearsomely
when required.
Kerstin Thompson spoke astutely of her practice’s
search for “robust” architecture as a way of negotiating
constraint. Not robust in a material or tectonic sense,
but in a more calculating and fundamental way, where
the generating ideas of the work are interrogated for
their potential to not only survive, but thrive in highly
contested project processes. Thompson called for the
architecture itself to be fox-like – prescient, forearmed
and responsive. Insightfully, she also raised the
possibility of architecture accepting new limits as a
way of reclaiming its rapidly diminishing territory in
the mass housing market, asking whether architecture
might content itself with broader issues of subdivision,
built envelope and the civic realm and forgo the more
traditional role of dwelling design to ensure that
architects can continue to engage with this
economically challenging sector.
Anupama Kundoo and Andrew Freear’s Rural Studio
have each found an enviable and unexpected liberty by
eschewing the commercial sector and confronting
extreme financial constraint in the provision of
low-cost housing and civic projects in impoverished
rural communities. Constraint has powerfully shaped
this architecture’s tectonic and temperament. Modestly
conceived and tightly focused, it is buoyed by a strong
sense of experimentation, optimism and opportunism
that has produced projects with a gritty textural quality
and material richness, refreshingly free of the
conservatism that accompanies architecture-asspeculation.
Kundoo’s inverted terracotta cooking pots
and self-fired adobe brick buildings playfully explore
the more sustainable use of building materials in India,
while Rural Studio’s students have worked with
Chevrolet windshields, fishing nets, cardboard bales
and even carpet tiles to produce numerous residential
projects and the first civic buildings in over 100 years
for the citizens of Newbern in rural America.
John Wardle is confronting the speculative and
commercial after having first built a practice and profile
on the strength of a range of finely crafted residential
works. Wardle astutely nurtures the client as the
custodian and protector of his architecture, placing
them at the centre of the architectural process by
abstracting their aspirations into the metaphors and
allegories that shape the work. Petri dishes, scarf joints,
transparent learning models, grafted vine cultivars,
cross-fertilization and the “sampling” of site-specific
architectural references have lent the work a
simultaneous intellectual richness and broad legibility.
Despite a lingering determinism in some of the smaller
residential works, the highly accomplished
institutional projects display a growing mastery of
metaphor – where tensions between metaphor and the
more incidental elements of site, programme and scale
powerfully catalyse the work.
Wolf Prix and Coop Himmelb(l)au also pursue
metaphor, using “sky buildings” and “steel clouds” as
the vehicles with which to further their theoretical and
formal exploration of architecture. Coop Himmelb(l)au
defend their architectural territory and evade the
deleterious interference of their corporate benefactors
by selling spectacle. They construct evocative physical
and digital models, fly in the Disney team to shoot the
movie, strap the viewer into a high-velocity helicopter
or speedboat, add flashbulbs, fireworks and film stars
and amplify the Rolling Stones soundtrack – diverting
their clients from the architecture to maximize its
chances of escaping with its energy and integrity intact.
It was regrettable that Prix also opted for this as the way
to position his architecture at the conference. Little of
the substance of the work was revealed. We too were
sold the spectacle of the steel cloud, improbably
supported on spiralling whorls of structure that
facilitate ever-increasing cantilevers, and were left to
ponder silently the broader contextual issues arising
from the acres of “ordinariness” required to support
this particular brand of urban exhibitionism.
The contrast with the presentation by the equally
charismatic and effusive Carme Pinós was pointed.
Pinós presented a range of exquisite architectural and
urban projects in a manner designed to be as revelatory
as her English would allow. She elucidated a
compelling architectural strategy of self-imposed
constraint – tightly defining and focusing each project’s
“rules” or limits that, once determined, liberate the
project to indulge in unimpeded formal exploration.
Beautiful, tessellated photographic compositions of the
Cube Tower in Guadalajara, Mexico, carefully
illustrated its extraordinary experiential and formal
qualities, all generated from the simple premise of
producing a singular building that could embrace the
benign Mexican climate, avoid the need for
airconditioning and allow every worker a view outside
the building – no soundtrack required.
Will there be freedom for architecture in the future?
These practitioners reassure us that there will – if we
act shrewdly. Widen our scope to confront the external
impediments that tyrannize our discipline, value and
interrogate the self-imposed limits and frames that are
the basis of our creative freedoms, and dodge, duck and
weave to evade the rest in whichever way we can. As
Pinós would say in her inimitable way, “it is easy – no?”
LAURA HARDING WORKS WITH SYDNEY-BASED PRACTICE HILL
THALIS ARCHITECTURE + URBAN PROJECTS.
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| TALKING ARCHITECTURE ELI GIANNINI |
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Evelien van Veen.
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Timothy Hill.
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Kerstin Thompson.
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Wolf Prix.
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The “new look” RAIA National Conferences under the
stewardship of creative directors, Kerstin Thompson
last year and Steven Varady this year, have garnered
unanimous applause. This success is significant for
the Institute – as these events multiplied to become
annual fixtures, they had to become a “must” for
Australian architects.
As the directors of other events such as the
International Series and the biennial student
conferences have found, a timely, personal approach
from a colleague with an articulate vision can persuade
even the most jaded international and home-grown
speakers to turn their attention to the “theme” put
forward by a fellow creative mind.
Next year will be another first, as Timothy Hill takes
the conference outside the Melbourne/Sydney axis (not
in terms of location, but in terms of cultural subtext).
If his wise and witty performances on stage at the last
two conferences are an indication of what is in store,
we can all look forward to 2007.
It was with these positives in mind that I agreed to
Justine Clark’s request for an opinion piece on this
year’s conference.
I came to the conference late on Friday morning to
catch most of John Wardle’s presentation. John is a
seasoned performer with an anecdotal style that
includes many jokes at his own expense. His amusing
performances reveal much about his own brand of
client-architect relationship, as well as his approach
to design.
For example, in his conference presentation he
described his remarkable success in winning the
substantial commission for a 44-storey residential tower
with an illustration he’d used at the interview for the
job – all his completed single- and two-storey
residential projects stacked on top of each other,
forming a more-or-less 44-storey tower. But interspersed
with the storytelling John was also trying to explain his
design thinking and the things that shape his work. It’s
difficult for an architect to do this – it is tempting to
find an amusing episode, or to take the debate to “safe” commonly understood concepts.
John also discussed a vineyard house in terms of
cuttings from the vine that “inspired” the bifurcated
plan. If only it were that simple. The design may well
have started with a doodle resembling the particular
shape of a vine cutting, but I would have liked to gain
a better understanding of the provenance of these
exquisitely drawn diagrams, the stylistic influences
over the work and his “method” of revealing the
sectional cut at the facades of the buildings. It is rare,
however, for an architect to be able to critique their
own work. It is often others who can reveal what they
see in what we do and, in the process, help us to define
our own predilections and style, and make conscious
what is often a process that started many years ago
through intuition and trial and error.
Next Kerry Hill spoke about the influence of Asian
vernacular architecture on his own work, but the
relevance of the tradition became difficult to believe as
his exquisite modernist pavilions changed location
from Singapore to Western Australia, Croatia,
Queensland, India and Kyoto. It would have been
interesting to hear some reflection about the branding
of a certain type of image, while remaining true to the
local. Or about ways to conduct an international
practice in regions where the local architectural
traditions are disappearing or diminishing. Or
how modernist architecture has established
precedents through its association with traditional
Japanese architecture.
In Anupama Kundoo’s presentation we were
reminded that to practise architecture among some
of the world’s poorest is a political act. Her work
delighted and shocked with its mix of age-old wisdom,
primitiveness and experimentalism. Anupama’s
particular interest in adapting traditional craft to
contemporary spaces engages sensibilities that we are
slowly forgetting here. The construction methodologies
we employ remove the labour component from our
projects and exalt the material/technological. Likewise,
the emphasis we place on computer-generated design
methods is in sharp contrast to her labour-intensive
projects and the immediacy of her design-as-you-build
methods. And, as Andrew Freear commented, there was
not a single “sexy Columbia-type graphic” to be seen.
Andrew Freear then took us through the built work
of Rural Studio’s architecture school programme. His
teaching methods and those of Samuel Mockbee, the
studio’s founder and leading light, reminded us of the
dilemmas facing architects designing in subsistence
conditions: “Do the clients really want these
‘experimental’ works or would they really prefer to look
like everyone else?” But Andrew revealed an optimism
and courage that stems from the idealism and the
ambition of the programme and the enthusiasm of its
young practitioners. The chapel made of Chevrolet
windscreens and the baseball field and pavilions/nets
remind us that architecture is essentially a backdrop for
community interaction – an aspect too often overlooked
in our corporate commissions.
I concluded my attendance at the conference with the
presentation by Carme Pinós. Her work is polished but
the presentation left me disappointed. Here again the
explanation for the design was dumbed down. We
learnt about the topographic and geometric sensibilities
in her project for a hotel at Porto Villarta but we didn’t
hear about the precedents for coastal projects (Bofill’s
Xanadu or Red Wall). Pinós refers us instead to the
usual despoiling of the coast by greed and mass tourism
that has become commonplace in southern Spain. By
contrast, her infill project for an office building within
the historic centre of Barcelona shows how rich the
work can be when challenged by context and more
complex constraints.
These last two conferences have sought to bring us
out of our comfort zone and to show us other realities.
They have done this well and have proved their true
value to the profession. However, what I find less
comforting is the reluctance of many speakers to talk
about the traditions of architecture and the innovations
of our day, the influence that other architects’ work
exercises over their own and the relationship that
technological, social and philosophical ideas have
to the work – while staying within the discipline
of architecture.
We shouldn’t need reminders that, as architects, we
are the ones qualified to speak about this.
ELI GIANNINI IS A DIRECTOR OF MCGAURAN GIANNINI
SOON. SHE WILL CHAIR THE 2007 RAIA NATIONAL
CONFERENCE TASKFORCE.
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