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An overview
of Out from Under,
showing the panels
by Chris Bosse of
PTW Architects.
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Panels from left
to right: Dale
Jones-Evans
Architecture; Terroir
(in the corner); Tony
Owen NDM; Andrew
Burges Architects.
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Detail of a
model by John
Wardle Architects.
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Chenchow
Little’s series of
models. Photograph
Anthony Burke.
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Looking
towards the work
of John Wardle
Architects on the
back wall, with detail
of m3architecture’s
panel in the
foreground.
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The
opening night of
the exhibition.
Photograph
Anthony Burke.
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Detail of the
panel by Offshore
Studio.
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Detail of the
panel by Staughton
Architects.
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Nicholas de Monchaux reflects on a San Francisco exhibition of young Australian practices escaping the mystic bush ethos.
How does America see Australia – architecturally? In
San Francisco, the exhibit Out from Under, viewed at
the SFAIA, proposes a set of young Australian practices
that, as characterized by curator Anthony Burke, together
“signal a release from the grip of a mystic bush ethos”.
As much as they loom large in America’s image
of Australia, it’s not Paul Hogan and Steve Irwin who
preoccupy Burke, but rather the epic silhouette of
Glenn Murcutt, whose bioclimatically vernacular
Modern introduced most American architects to a
compelling, distinctively Australian way of building
decades ago. Admiration for Murcutt’s achievements
has garnered him America’s and the world’s laurels
– not just the Pritzker, but such bonbons as the Thomas
Jefferson medal given in memory of America’s only
architect-president.
After referencing the singular image of corrugated
steel in the bush, however, Out from Under presents
a blisteringly cosmopolitan set of architectural
methodologies. As if to partially reassure a foreign
audience, the galvanized sheeting is not completely
H absent, but it’s hard to find, and where you see it –
tubed and filigreed by Kerstin Thompson Architects
of Melbourne, or buoyantly extruded by Tony Owen
NDM of Sydney – it’s used in urban buildings as an
ironic reference to a well-loved vernacular. And lest we
make any mistake, the red triangles that cascade across
Owen’s exhibit board resolve themselves below into
a green-on-red X-ray of a violently stilettoed heel.
Paul Hogan, meet Kylie Minogue.
So what image does the exhibit as a whole
present? From the desert coast of California, it is not
a particularly coherent message, but a particularly
relevant one. From urban galleries to private houses,
from stadia to suburbia, Out from Under proposes a
generation of Australian architects grappling with the
same issues as their American peers, except possibly
more so. The strands in American architectural practice
that resonate most clearly with the San Francisco show
are those describing the areas of contemporary practice
– from low-tech ecological change to high-tech digital
fabrication – in which the greatest uncertainties lie.
In some of the exhibit’s best offerings, low-tech and
high-tech strands reinforce each other to open new
architectural territory. In Dale Jones-Evans’ Art Wall for
King’s Cross in Sydney, for example, a massive Coreten
wall becomes a laser-etched, filigreed sunscreen whose
decorative surface defies conventional architectural
categories. More subtly, the Water Cube invented for
Beijing’s 2008 games by PTW Architects with Arup and
CSCEC (represented in the exhibition by Chris Bosse
and his works) seems the essence of an unbuildable
digital rendering – until the glorious construction
photos reveal that the pores of the delicate structure
are, in fact, giant and very real plastic bags. Projects by
m3architecture of Queensland and Minifi e Nixon of
Melbourne appear to render the traditional masonry of
Australian urban construction into delirious surfaces
of colour and texture whose life cycle would definitely
seem to have included a span as computer bits.
In 1980, around the same time that Glenn Murcutt’s
name first appeared in American architectural journals,
one of America’s own giants, critic Gore Vidal, famously
quipped, “Sydney is everything San Francisco thinks
it is – and far more beautiful.” And true to form, many
of the featured projects resemble, and sometimes
outshine, their American counterparts. Yet the most
eye-popping projects in Out from Under present a picture
of Australian practice that is, wonderfully, less beautiful
than its American big brother. From McBride Charles
Ryan’s stripy facades (as in the Templestowe Park
Primary School Multi-Purpose Hall) to Minifie Nixon’s
giant aluminium pores (the VCA Centre for Ideas), the
uncompromising forms and colours of many of Out from
Under’s urban buildings, one has to admit, would have
a hard time getting built as permanent structures in
America’s downtowns. With their festival appearance,
such buildings seem to recall the temporary nature
of all building, not least in the improbable built ecology
that Australia shares with this other Pacific coast.
It is on this note that the lessons of Out from Under
are perhaps the most provocative. For all the exhibit’s
efforts to declare itself an urbane alternative to the bush
architecture by which Australian practice might be
stereotyped, it is useful to recall that Australia’s cities are
as ecologically vulnerable as its romantic countryside,
if not more so (as San Francisco worries about a second
year of drought, Sydney enters its second decade of the
same). The ecological connections to the West Coast are
especially clear in the timeline of Sean Godsell’s work
presented by his exhibit boards, which departs Australia
for new commissions in the Arizona desert.
Finally, a sense of ecological transience is
reinforced by an image in the exhibit that treasures
not a building, but rather its gradual disappearance.
Neeson Murcutt presents a project for a brick lookout
in Sydney’s Olympic Park. At the centre of the site,
the masonry blocks are responsibly ordered, yet at
the project’s periphery, we face a pile of decomposing
blocks (the project’s most beautiful image), whose edge
is continuously eaten, and so re-engineered, by the
swirling waves of Sydney’s great harbour.
Nicholas de Monchaux is an architect and assistant
professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
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