Michael Spooner: A Clinic for the Exhausted – In Search of an Antipodean Vitality

Professor Jane Rendell, Vice Dean of Research, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, London

A Clinic for the Exhausted

“With the current flourishing of architectural design research, the time is ripe to consider the role of writing in defining a new relation to design, one not of opposition, negation, or subjugation, where writing documents, comments and critiques the inventiveness of design, but rather where writing is employed as a technique alongside drawing and other spatial and visual processes as a speculative design strategy. In confronting the limits of both architectural research and academic writing, words – fictive, poetic, philosophical – can play off images and in so doing reconfigure architectural design research … there is no finer an example of how exquisite such work can be than this project by Michael Spooner, which is witty, erudite, precise and highly imaginative.“

Michael Spooner

A Clinic for the Exhausted In Search of an Antipodean Vitality Edmond & Corrigan and an Itinerant Architecture

Dr Michael Spooner is co-editor of Frederick Romberg: an architectural survey (2013) and Practice of Practice 2: Research in the Medium of Design (2010). He has exhibited work in Procuring Innovative Architecture, DESSA Gallery, Ljubljana (2012), and with Peter Corrigan realised City of Hope, Venice Biennale (2010). He won the inaugural Architecture Australia Unbuilt Prize (2007). He is currently a lecturer in the School of Architecture at RMIT University, Melbourne, where he received his PhD. A Clinic for the Exhausted commences from a vision of a landmark Australian architectural icon, RMIT University Building 8 by Edmond & Corrigan, apprehended as an ocean liner taking leave of its concrete moorings. Conceived as both a literary and an architectural project, A Clinic for the Exhausted ministers to an architecture of unforeseeable effect, and attempts to ascertain how one can architecturally act on behalf of the unknowable.

ISBN 978-3-88778-392-1

Michael Spooner

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Michael Spooner A Clinic for the Exhausted In search of an Antipodean Vitality Edmond & Corrigan and an Itinerant Architecture

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A CLINIC FOR THE EXHAUSTED In search of an Antipodean Vitality - Edmond & Corrigan and an Itinerant Architecture A Clinic for the Exhausted examines a method of inventing in the present an architectural practice concomitant to the realisation of an architecture grounded in an unknown; an architecture that departs from the finite architectural object, the imposition of an architect or the illusory status of a fictional community. Traversing a field of research comprised of architectural, cinematic, literary, and philosophic intensities (to name but a few), this project ministers to the open and uncloseable implications of an impersonal architecture that is faithful to a community whose arrival is not simply overlooked, but is preserved without negation.

A Clinic for the Exhausted argues that by fostering an architecture without foreclosure and of unforeseeable effect, a community in the present could minister to the practices of an unknowable constituent, thereby entrusting the unknowable with a share in our contemporary condition. By asking after a community that is dispossessed of an accountable presence, this research attempts to ascertain the degree to which one can act on behalf of the unknowable. In establishing the ethical dimensions that the fundamental question of an unaccountable life proposes, this research engages with an aoristical sense of the question of a life in the univocity of a propositional space that assumes the surfeit of excess: exhaustion.

The difficulty posed by a community without omission appeals to the indelible space of the Clinic, a space that confronts in excess of any particular place or any particular person, the no-where that is particular to no-one. The research submits that the task of those who claim the specularity of the Clinic, that is an audience from whom no-one is exempt, lies in extending the practice and the procedures that the irreducible question of a life harbors. Thus, the realisation of an architecture that claims the question of a life must also claim the dimensions of the Clinic, a scale that cannot overlook the unevidenced.

Hence, the manner by which the project has been undertaken applies a radical methodology that affirms the contemporary sufficiency to abstain from that which is already known. The project seeks to propagate the momentum of a single encounter between two Australian architects — a letter from Howard Raggatt to Peter Corrigan — displacing the field of thought that gave rise to it in such a way that the interminable persistence of an unevidenced event — a building that takes flight in the image of an ocean liner — can never be held to account. Qualifying this attempt to admit the unknowable I will mobilise an arsenal of lucid moves, uncanny conjunctions and casual assertions that will continually avow the effusiveness by which the research sets out to meet the unmeetable. This method offers more than an alleged impractical epistemic impasse, a claim that would fail to realise that the very suggestion of unassailable proof, a demand to explain, excuse or account for instances of interpretive indecipherability remains untenable and is conditional on withdrawing from the question of a life. It is via the felicitous incisiveness of the prose, drawings, and images that compose this research that an atemporal experience of an unaccountable architecture will be perpetuated.

A Clinic for the Exhausted offers as an exemplary architecture amidst the mass of existence, an enveloping reticence that evokes the relations of those who remain nameless.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project is the result of a myriad of formal and informal conversations and collaborations with those who were brave enough to share in the prospect of a life underscored by its passage. I would like to acknowledge: - HÊlène Frichot, whose participation in this creative endeavour and her friendship over the many years of its navigation, has supported the stoking of ideas, the opening of thought, and the prospect of a world.

- Rochus Urban Hinkel and Spurbuchverlag for taking a punt on an antipodean.

- Michael J. Ostwald for humbling me with an erudite foreword at my invitation.

- Georgina Meyer for undertaking a photographic essay on Building 8 at my invitation.

- The friendship of Peter Knight.

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- To those whose comments have extended the promise of this project immeasurably: Leon van Schaik, Ricarda Bigolin, Jane Rendell, Stephen Loo, Linda Marie Walker and Howard Raggatt.

- The enduring support of my parents Jean and Robert, and my brother Gregory.

- Luke, for making sure that I knew that there was an end, even as I continue to refuse to commit to such an idea.

Finally, I have had the greatest of opportunities to have worked alongside Peter Corrigan undertaking various endeavours, most notably the entry A City of Hope for the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2010. However, it goes without saying that it will be the smallest of gestures that have left a mark. I am unclear of what this has meant for this project that circles around him, without ever declaring him the subject. Whether this adjacency has distorted the outcome for better or worse is of little consequence.

I can say with certainty that without his generosity I would never have known what exhaustion truly is.

It is to Peter that I dedicate A Clinic for the Exhausted.

Michael Spooner

left: stairwell to the office of Edmond & Corrigan

CONTENTS Aquatic and Architectural Labours: Charting Spooner’s Voyage ....................3 Michael J. Ostwald Preamble Prologue Introduction

..................12 ..................24 ..................46

1. AN EPIDEMIOLOGY OF ILLNESS

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..............................................................................59

Plato’s imaginaire or Socrates’ Pharmacy?

Molière’s Pharmakon: Le Malade imaginaire Argan’s imaginaire Molière’s imaginaire or Argan’s Pharmacy?

A declaration of love From the sickroom to the street: an ascent into a lunar sea A turn: from periplus to periplum

2. ROUSSEL’S EPIGENETIC LANDSCAPE

......................................................................89

A view from Roussel’s window Mobilising a methodical treatment of chance Death in Venice A return to Venice…

3. FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH

...............................................................................................117

A question of the un/known The peculiarly difficult task of remaining hidden No-knowing: how we might know what we don’t yet know how to know Kairos: an excursion between theory and practice What is a measure of no-knowing No-knowing, knowing as such What worth is, is worth no-knowing

previous page: detail, A Clinic for the Exhausted

4. A CLINIC

................................................................................................................................141

Interlude The Swimming Pool Library The Landscape Room

5. THE PATHOLOGY OF EXCESS

........................................................................................185

Our approach: cast in the image of a boat On the wayward movement of an open boat An itinerant life What is our shared experience of exhaustion On exhaustion The Clinic: an Ambiloquy Straddling the threshold of no-knowing

6. AN EMERALD SEPULCHRE

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...............................................................................................203

A tortoise: a lifeboat I, Peter Corrigan An epithet in verse Of excess In excess

7. EPILOGUE

................................................................................................................................225

8. THE ARCHITECTURE OF EXHAUSTION.........................................................................233 Bibliography

...............234

AQUATIC AND ARCHITECTURAL LABOURS: CHARTING SPOONER’S VOYAGE Michael J. Ostwald

Socrates: And who is best able to do good to his friends and evil to his enemies in time of sickness?

Polemarchus: The physician.

Socrates: Or when they are on a voyage, amid the perils of the sea?

Polemarchus: The pilot.

Plato, The Republic1 Don’t sail in strange waters without a chart.

Peter Spectre, A Mariner’s Miscellany 2

Plato’s The Republic, the classic work of political philosophy, describes an idealised community that, through its leadership and constituent parts, works to ensure justice for its inhabitants. Together with Thomas More’s Utopia and Aldous Huxley’s Island, these texts, each with radically different social agendas, construct a narrative that commences with a journey, which is followed by a period of learning or discovery, prior to reaching an ideal city-state.

While there are many variations of this structure, these three stages provide a foundation for the exploration of alternative realities. The first stage signals the desire to leave behind the current state of affairs, the second confirms the need for a more enlightened way of thinking and the final offers a counter proposition: a vision for a better society.

Another common feature of such utopian works is that they use aquatic metaphors and architectural imagery to enable a shift from political motives to philosophical solutions.

For example, the works of Plato, More and Huxley are critical of the dominant social practices of their eras, having an overtly political agenda. However, the purpose of their narratives is to 1

Plato, The Republic, trans. Tom Griffith, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 7.

2

Peter H. Spectre, A Mariner’s Miscellany, (New York: Sheridan House, 2005), 136.

left: detail, The Swimming Pool Library

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describe a new society that is founded on a set of universal values or virtues; a philosophically grounded alternative. Jacques Rancière argues that this transition from politics to philosophy is not only presented as a type of voyage, it is also commonly described using maritime or estuarine tropes.3 For example, a central metaphor in Plato’s argument for the existence of an ideal community is the ‘ship of state’. Conversely, the ideal city-state, the essence of which is traced to a set of social or cultural conditions, is typically described in utopian literature using architectural imagery. Before examining a recent example of a three-part narrative structure that merges maritime and architectural symbols, it is worth considering Plato’s ‘ship of state’ in more detail.

In Book VI of The Republic Plato suggests that the governance of a city-state, like the leadership of a naval vessel, requires more than just a simple knowledge of the mathematics of commerce or the machinations of sail-craft. Plato asks his audience to imagine the captain of a fleet of ships, a person who is of greater physical stature than his crew, but suffers from various infirmities of sight and hearing. Despite this, his knowledge of navigation remains exemplary and he has successfully led the crew through dangerous waters. However, because of the captain’s manifest limitations the sailors are led to mutiny, believing that they are more 4

physically capable of steering the ship. After disabling the ‘noble captain’ with ‘drink and narcotics’, they appoint one of their own to operate the tiller, and they name this sailor the ‘pilot’, even though he has only a manual capacity to steer and none of the knowledge required to navigate the tempestuous seas.4 Plato uses the metaphor of the ‘ship of state’ to develop an argument for the importance of philosopher-kings; people with the knowledge, skills and foresight to govern, even though they are reliant on the physical labours of others to support their decisions. His message is that, without a true pilot, the ship of state will flounder and capsize, casting its crew adrift. While Plato’s text soon moves on to other issues, the evocative nature of his account leaves the reader to ponder the last thoughts of the saturnine captain as, through an inebriated haze, he regards his ship slipping beneath the waves. In a similar way, Huxley’s protagonist in the Island, intoxicated by the beauty of the sea, loses control of the tiller and his boat is “smashed to pieces at the foot of the cliffs”5. Each of these events acts as both a sign and a catalyst; they signal the shift from politics to philosophy and they enable the discovery of an alternative reality.

3

Jacques Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, trans. L. Heron, (New York: Verso, 1995).

4

Plato, The Republic, 191.

5

Aldous Huxley, The Island, (New York: Harper, 1962), 7.

On a December night in 1993 Melbourne architect Howard Raggatt found himself in a similarly impaired state, albeit in a more sanguine mood. Looking up at a new urban building in the city, he was inspired by its lights and bulk to imagine it as a grand ocean liner, wreathed in streamers and ribbons, its passengers waving farewell in preparation for a voyage. The structure at the centre of Raggatt’s intemperate reverie was Building 8 in Swanston Street, Melbourne by architects Edmond & Corrigan. Like a fragment of utopia (described as part of a ‘new Jerusalem’) Raggatt identified in this design a sense of a larger unfinished whole and a greater exploratory (or escapist) potential that could be enabled by allowing it to break free from its moorings. While Building 8 could not make such a journey, the combination of its complex layered presence and the stuporous licence granted by Raggatt would provide architect Michael Spooner with the catalyst for a design that could aspire to achieving these very goals.

Spooner’s design, A Clinic for the Exhausted, re-imagines Building 8 as a vessel that is simultaneously architectural and aquatic. In his design, the first of three works in the present volume, the language of architectural representation is used to propose a voyage into the unknown; a structure which serves to ask questions rather than provide answers, or to challenge the values of the commercial establishment with a baroque vision of decorative and formal excess. Spooner’s designs, like Plato’s imagined voyage, are not intended to be taken literally; they serve a larger rhetorical purpose. Furthermore, just as there is a long tradition of using imagined accounts of voyages as a precursor to describing a utopian state,6 there is a similarly revered convention wherein ‘paper architecture’ is used to explore, test or challenge ideas associated with space, form and inhabitation.7 A Clinic for the Exhausted appears as a densely scaffolded, ship-like form, surmounted by fragments of lifeboats (each celebrated by being raised upon towers) and framing a solitary bust; a giant human face gazing serenely across the ship’s bow. The scaffolding — revealed in cross section as being maintained by a system of oar-like projections — also serves as an out-rigger or tiller that is embedded beneath the surface the ship sails upon. A series of gangways, stairs and caged chambers make up the interior of the vessel. The ship’s master, more maniacal pilot than noble captain, is depicted beside the vessel, looking out from above a different and altogether more feminine bust. This image of the captain, derived from one of Jean-Jacques Lequeu’s infamous hermaphroditic self-portraits, is labelled by Spooner ‘Peter 6

For example, see: Richard C. S. Trahair, Utopias and Utopians, (Westport CT: Greenwood, 1999); Gregory Claeys, ed. Utopian Literature, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

7

Jeffrey Kipnis, Perfect Acts of Architecture, (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2001).

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Corrigan’, the architect of Building 8. From this image alone Spooner suggests a range of connections, through the paper architecture of Douglas Darden to the clandestine etchings of Marcel Duchamp8, the marine mammalian obsessions of Captain Ahab9 and the voyages of Raymond Roussel.10 Spooner’s architecture invites this level of interpretation, but not endlessly or whimsically. Instead, it suggests a set of readings drawn from literature (Joseph Conrad), pedagogy (Joseph Jacotot) and philosophy (Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida). The connection between these ideas and the forms present in the architecture are sometimes literal, relying on graphic form-making systems (similar to Darden’s “discontinuous genealogy”11).

Alternatively, they are reminiscent of the visual puzzles that have, throughout history, presented multiple, often conflicting, images simultaneously. For example, the famous diagram of two symmetrical faces in profile looking at one another can also be read as an outline of the vase between them. The power of this image is not found in either the pair of faces or the vase, but in the uneasy shifting between states that the human mind subconsciously constructs after viewing the image. Spooner’s A Clinic for the Exhausted explores such tensions both graphically and conceptually, in the latter case using the pharmakon — a potion which, depending on context, is both medicine and poison — as a device for exposing such conflicting interpretations. This device is also informative because, in The Republic, Plato positions both 6

the physician and the pilot as people who can, through their knowledge, ‘do good to [their] friends and evil to [their] enemies’. Such parallels between pilots and physicians, navigation and medicine and, most importantly, ships and clinics, recur throughout The Republic and are reflected in Spooner’s work.

The second and third designs in Spooner’s flotilla — The Swimming Pool Library and The Landscape Room — are akin to alternative constructions of A Clinic for the Exhausted.

Neither explicitly separate works, nor simple developments of interior spaces, these projects continue the exploratory process, both developing new knowledge and leading the reader to a more advanced state. Much like the narrative structure of utopian fiction (and of its dystopic and heterotopic relatives) Spooner’s projects represent the evolution of a set of ideas, from an initial departure point (the sea-going clinic) through the acquisition of knowledge (in the

8

Philippe Duboy, Lequeu: An Architectural Enigma, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986).

9

Herman Melville, Moby Dick, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). [First ed. 1851]; Douglas Darden, “Melvilla: An Architect’s Reading of Moby Dick”, A+U, 272 (1993), 55.

10 The frontispiece and self-portrait in my own collection of unbuilt works (with colleagues Tucker and Chapman) also references Lequeu’s drawing ‘He is Free’ and Darden’s self-portrait. See: Michael J. Ostwald, Chris Tucker, Michael Chapman, Residue: Architecture as a Condition of Loss, (Melbourne: RMIT University press, 2007).

11 Douglas Darden, Condemned Buildings, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993).

aquatic library) to a visionary city-state (positioned, like Plato’s, in the landscape). This last element is significant because Rancière argues that Plato’s The Republic is essentially an “antimaritime polemic”; a story of a nation embarrassed by its reliance on imperialist “trireme[s] of drunken sailors’”12 Thus, the philosopher-kings sited themselves and their city-state far inland, away from the “buffeting of the waves and the brutality of the sailors.”13 If then, the voyage is an essential and innately dangerous, debased and unpleasant part of the critique of the present, then the landscape is the final refuge of its ideas.

Both the Swimming Pool Library and The Landscape Room retain the vestiges of their seagoing progenitor, but now the masts, oars and rigging have taken on a less literal role, becoming entwined in the fabric of a building in the first case and being almost invisible in the bejewelled chamber at the centre of the second. Where A Clinic for the Exhausted provides a platform for voyaging, the Swimming Pool Library seemingly encloses the hull of a vessel within its carefully ordered walls. The Landscape Room completes the transformation, with its walled enclosure and central chamber housing a giant, mechanically-assisted human form (like a John Hejduk re-animation of the Statue of Liberty or a monument to early diving suits). This last design, with its self-contained, symmetrically-constructed world enclosing a tower, has much in common with the language of architectural utopias.14 Furthermore, the rigorous black and white line drawings produced by Spooner suggest a machine-like quality; a message reinforced by the cut-away axonometric and sectional depiction.15 However, the detail of these images is more mandalic in its repetition and, as a total composition is redolent of 1960s architectural ‘Bowelism’ crossed with Jules Verne’s classic vision for the underwater realm of Captain Nemo. Indeed, rather than Plato’s noble captain, More’s brave explorer, or Aldous Huxley’s shipwrecked journalist, Spooner depicts the architect as a figure of Nemoesque proportions and passions.

12 Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, 1.

13 Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, 1.

14 There are many examples of architectural utopias with these features including Andreae’s ‘Christianopolis’, Robert Owen’s ‘Villages of Co-operation’, Stedman Whitwell’s ‘New Harmony’ and James Silk Buckingham’s ‘Victoria’.

See: Helen Rosenau, The Ideal City: Its Architectural Evolution in Europe, (New York Methuen, 1983); Anthony Vidler, “The Scenes Of The Street: Transformations In Ideal And Reality, 1750 – 1871”, 6–91, in Stanford Anderson, ed. On Streets, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1986).

15 Another form of idealised community also has this structure – a continuous walled enclosure around a central tower, with an omniscient figure at its core. That structure is the nineteenth century prison, much celebrated by Foucault, as the spatialization of a power relationship. See: Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1977); Thomas Markus, Buildings & Power: Freedom and Control in Modern Building Types, (London and New York: Routledge, 1993).

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While often linked to the utopian tradition, Captain Nemo was a sea-going anarchist, not an ideological explorer. Nemo’s primary motivation was the destruction of the British colonial navy, even though he also sought a better world under the waves. Eschewing more conventional libations, Nemo viewed the glory of his submarine the Nautilus, through a mind intoxicated by “musical ecstasy.”16 With its ornate library, lined with bookcases of “black rosewood and inset with brass”17 and his vast rectangular museum, beneath a “luminous ceiling decorated in delicate arabesques”18, Nemo was the pilot of a different type of idealised world, one which was, by his own admission, driven more by a combination of curiosity and resistance than by a desire to create a better world.

The lifeboat, left behind by the ship of state, is an appropriate image for a work of architectural exploration. First, unlike the ship of state, which has a clear power structure founded on the distribution of labour and knowledge, the lifeboat is without such a political imperative. Second, the lifeboat has a straightforward purpose — survival — which denies deep philosophical musing and is isolated from both drunken sailors and rustic shepherds.

The lifeboat follows the currents, is driven ahead of storm fronts and may, someday, reach land. The initial role of the audience carried by that open boat is to observe, to think and to 8

be enveloped in the world it delineates. This is the nature of Spooner’s voyage and I encourage you to join his flotilla, to enjoy its passage and to see where it takes you.

In the final paragraph of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, its narrator, Professor Arronax, addresses the audience and suggests that he hopes that the anarchic agenda will soon be transformed and that the “philosopher continue the peaceful exploration of the sea”.

Perhaps this is the ideal conclusion for both Verne’s book and the present chapter. Spooner’s voyage, contrary to the utopian tradition, offers the designer and the philosopher a place where they can thrive and, as Arronax says, “[i]f his destiny be strange, it is also sublime.” 19

16

Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, trans. William Butcher, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 152. [First ed. 1869].

17 Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, 69.

18 Ibid., 71.

19 Ibid., 381 right: detail, The Landscape Room

And Adam saw that in the middle of the ring of bystanders, laid flat on the gravel like a heap of rags, there was that insubstantial, ridiculous thing which had nothing terrestrial about it anymore, and nothing aquatic either. This amphibious monster was a man of no particular age, just a man like any other.

His only peculiarity — and it made you want to laugh, a deep, throaty laugh — was the quantity of water he represented, what with his flesh and clothes, in the middle of this wet scene; it was the fact of being a drowned man out in the rain.

J.M.G Le Clézio, The Interrogation1

Thinking provokes general indifference. It is a dangerous exercise nevertheless. Indeed, it is only when the dangers become obvious that indifference ceases, but they often remain hidden and barely perceptible, inherent in the enterprise. Precisely because the plane of immanence is prephilosophical and does not immediately take effect with concepts, it implies a sort of groping experimentation and its layout resorts to measures that are not very respectable, rational, or reasonable. These measures belong to the order of dreams, of pathological processes, esoteric experiences, drunkenness, and excess. We head for the horizon, on the plane of immanence, and we return with bloodshot eyes, yet they are the eyes of the mind.

Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? 2

With a gasp I saw revealed to my stare a pair of feet, the long legs, the broad livid back immersed right up to the neck in a greenish cadaverous glow.

Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer 3

1

J.M.G Le Clézio, The Interrogation, trans. Daphne Woodward, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), 112.

2

Gilles Deleuze, & Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson & Graham Burchill, (London & New York: Verso, 1994), 41.

3

Joseph Conrad, “The Secret Sharer,” in The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ and other stories, (London: Penguin, 2007), 178.

PREAMBLE In 1990 the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) would begin the procurement process for a new building to complete a gap in the Melbourne city campus located between Swanston Street and Bowen Lane. The commission for the proposed building, eventually known as ‘Building 8’, would be appointed to the Melbourne architectural practice of Edmond & Corrigan. Edmond & Corrigan had been founded by Maggie Edmond and Peter Corrigan in 1975. With their early work, most notably Resurrection School and Church at Keysborough (1977-81) and St Josephs Chapel at Box Hill (1978), they emerged as a significant voice around which local architectural discourse gathered. The resulting architectural work challenged the prevailing professional attitudes, and drew as many hostile reactions as it did celebratory acclaim. Building 8 would be significantly larger and more complex than any appointment the office had received to date, the scale of the undertaking dwarfing the small architectural office they retained on Little La Trobe Street only steps away from the final location of the building.4 12

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The mandate from the university required Edmond & Corrigan’s proposal to address a short fall of some 40% in university space, contingent on accommodating the School of Architecture and Design, the School of Business, and School of Planning as well as provide a home for a new university library and café. Importantly, the building was to present a public face for the university along Swanston Street, the civic spine of Melbourne, that would, “make overt its cultural contribution to the community,”5 completing a task that had stalled some seventeen years before with the Australian architect John Andrews’ unfinished Student Union Building.

Andrews’ building was located between the incomplete fortress of the Casey Wing (1967-75)

by Bates Smart McCutchen, a collection of tower blocks which were planned to extend the full length of RMIT’s Swanston Street frontage but of which only three of the proposed were built, and the much earlier Storey Hall (1884-87) by Tappin, Gilbert and Bennehy. Storey Hall was renovated and extended by the contemporary Melbourne architectural practice Ashton Raggatt Mc-

4

Edmond & Corrigan were appointed as the Design Architects . They would work in conjunction with Demaine Partnership, a Melbourne based practice founded in 1938, to complete documentation.

5

Leon van Schaik, “Building 8: The Appointment Process” in, Building 8: Edmond & Corrigan at RMIT, eds. Leon van Schaik & Nigel Bertram, 3 Volumes, (Melbourne: SchwarzTransition Monographs, 1996), Vol. 1, 92.

EDMOND & CORRIGAN, BUILDING 8, RMIT UNIVERSITY, MELBOURNE, 1994 drawings by Michael Spooner

13 RMIT UNIVERSITY CITY CAMPUS STRE ET

BOWEN LANE

8

VICT ORIA

EDMOND & CORRIGAN 1990-1994

LA TROBE STREET

FRANKLIN STREET

JOHN ANDREWS INTERNATIONAL 1977-83 (proposed)

LITTLE LA TROBE STREET

SWANSTON STREET

BATES SMART McCUTCHEN 1967-1975 (proposed)

LOCATION PLAN

SWANSTON STREET ELEVATION

Dougall (known by the acronym ARM), in 1996.6 In 1990, Andrews’ building sat truncated, with the construction of only three of the ten stories intended undertaken, the seventeen year lapse in its completion softening none of the difficult internal circulation and harsh street presence of the building. Consequently, the decisions regarding the volume, height and depth of Edmond & Corrigan’s proposal would be largely driven by these other buildings: the Casey Wing, with tightly stacked floor plates, would determine the proposal’s floor levels, while Andrews’ building, with its structural limitations and awkward diagonal layout would establish the proposed height and entry circulation of the new building. During the development of the brief an increase in the building program meant a larger floor plate would be needed to accommodate all the intended functions. Thus, the architectural response would have to meet not only the exceedingly high expectations of the university on a prominent city site, but would have to do so within the difficult constraints of assimilating the incomplete accretions of past architectural endeavours.7 6

14

7

Howard Raggatt, Ian McDougall and Stephen Ashton are the founding directors of the Melbourne architecture practice of Ashton Raggatt McDougall. ARM came about in 1988, and was the result of the various early partnerships between the respective directors. ARM has produced some of the most controversial public buildings in Australia, most notably Storey Hall at RMIT University in Melbourne, (1996) The National Museum of Australia in Canberra (2001) and most recently, the Melbourne Recital Hall (2012). Both Raggatt and McDougall completed their Masters of Architecture in the initial Masters by Invitation program that had been initiated to facilitate a critical review of work undertaken in practice. This was a major turning point in architectural education that directed an emerging stream of architectural practices to engage and prospect the causes of their respective practices. Both Raggatt and McDougall were instrumental in furthering the early architectural culture in Melbourne. Most notably, McDougall and Richard Munday founded the Australian Architectural journal, Transition, published from 1979-2000 and named after the eleventh chapter of J.M. Freeland’s Architecture in Australia: A History. As Schaik informs us, the early editions of Transition were put together in a house in St. Kilda where both McDougall and Munday were, “forced to wash up in order to work on it, all the while taking phone call messages from Peter Corrigan [who featured on the editorial board] relayed as often as not by Norman Day, from some more salubrious spot. (The house in St Kilda belonged to Peter Corrigan’s mother, a territorial fact which has given rise to debate about the genesis of ‘Australia’s Journal of Architectural Discourse’).” While the role of Peter Corrigan’s mother in the advent of Transition and the discourse on architecture in Australia from the mid-seventies remains circumspect, there can be no less a conspiratorial plot for A Clinic by reiterating McDougall’s admission in an interview: “At least the first cover [of Transition] was also inspired by those of the medical journal Lancet.” Raggatt’s thesis is published as: “NOTNESS: Operations and Strategies for the Fringe” in, Fin de Siecle? and the Twenty-first Century, ed. Leon van Schaik, (Melbourne: 38South Publications,1993).

McDougall’s thesis is published as: “The Autistic Ogler” in, Transfiguring the Ordinary, ed. Leon van Schaik, (Melbourne: 38South Publications, 1995). For notes regarding Transition see: Leon van Schaik, “Ten Years of Transition,” Transition, No. 29, (1989), 29-33 and; Melinda Payne, “Reading the Journal: Moments in the History of Transition, Transition, No. 59/60, (1998), 6-27.

A balcony was added to the Swanston Street elevation in 2008 that provided an outside area from the level 4 food hall. The design, by Edmond & Corrigan, and included in the drawing of Building 8’s elevation here, is notable for four gold silhouettes of the infamous Australian Bush-ranger Ned Kelly, and several silhouettes of palm trees realised in pink. Ned Kelly has appeared before in the work of Edmond & Corrigan, as in the silver centerpiece for the Art Foundation in 1987, but also in the case of a more elusive consideration of the Australian context of

14

It was during the closing stage of Building 8’s construction that the university’s appointment process and Edmond & Corrigan’s design development along with the new building’s general sense of civic place in the sphere of Melbourne architecture was richly detailed in historian Conrad Hamann’s monograph on the firm of Edmond & Corrigan entitled Cities of Hope (1993), followed by Leon van Schaik and Nigel Bertram’s three volume monograph Building 8: Edmond & Corrigan at RMIT (1996).8 It is the intention of this preamble to attend to the episodic historical development of Building 8 concisely so as not to offer a knowingly elucidated examination of the given architecture that can be read back into some general indictment of the broader examinations of Building 8 plumbed by Schaik, Bertram, and Hamann amongst others.9 This research will endeavour to illuminate what is best described as the proliferation architectural turns that make Building 8 a difficult endeavour to ‘pin down’. The rhetoric of the preceding paragraph arises because Building 8 can be read as a collision of citations from various architectural, literary and fine art heritages. Every instance of Edmond & Corrigan’s brazen sampling is loosened from the original contexts which gave rise to it, and thrown into a social, economic and cultural economy that presents itself as Australian. However irrefutable an assertion of what is or is not ‘Australian’ that attaches itself to a discussion of a prominent example of ‘Australian Architecture’, it is necessary to realise that Edmond & Corrigan’s oeuvre makes no claim to being authentically Australian. Rather their work suggests a lengthy discourse on myth making that considers the cultural, social and political context of Australia; the tenuous readability of the traces and inscriptions of the various fragments in Building 8 suggesting an awareness of a less-than-certain path through a less-than-certain territory. As Schaik writes in their work. An early design of the balcony included the silhouette of the Minotaur and though this proposal appears to have been considered with some seriousness — a pencil sketch rendering a Picassoesque line — it was substituted for another ‘Ned Kelly’. One suspects that Corrigan thought the corridors of Building 8, with their labyrinthine lilt, were enough to confirm the presence of the mythical beast. Unlike Building 8, which retains a measure of Corrigan’s self-consciouness regarding his work in theatre, the balcony is unabashedly ‘of the stage’.

8

See: Conrad Hamann, Cities of Hope: Australian Architecture and Design by Edmond & Corrigan 1962-92, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1993); and the updated edition of this publication, Conrad Hamann, Cities of Hope Remembered, Cities of Hope Rehearsed: Australian Architecture and Stage Design by Edmond & Corrigan 1962-2012, ed. Fleur Watson, (Melbourne: Thames & Hudson, 2012). Building 8: Edmond & Corrigan at RMIT was composed of a volume on the design development of Building 8, a volume of essays commissioned for the publication, and a volume that collected the writings of both Peter Corrigan and Maggie Edmond. It was housed in a gold, silver or clear lucite slip-cover, and is remarkable for being one of the few Australian publications to consider the context of a single piece of contemporary Australian architecture so thoroughly.

9

See the appendices to Cities of Hope compiled by Winsome Callister. The most recent consideration of the work of Edmond & Corrigan was the exhibition Peter Corrigan: Cities of Hope, RMIT Gallery, 12 April-8 June 2013, Melbourne, Australia. The accompanying catalogue is notable for the contribution by Felicity D Scott that considered the political and social changes at Yale University during the late 60s and early 70s and the impact it had on Corrigan who arrived in 1967 to undertake the two year Masters of Environmental Design.

15

his foreword to his and Bertram’s edited monograph, Building 8 proceeds by, “plundering fields of cultural provenance.”10 The consequence of Schaik’s statement might lead this investigation of Building 8 here into an inventory recording the many ‘thefts’ with which Edmond & Corrigan might be implicated. This research does not intend to allow itself to become preoccupied with the objective historical narratives of Building 8 as a means to determine the extents of how we come to advocate for or against the architecture of Edmond & Corrigan. It will be necessary that the doubt that is present in any interpretation of an architecture must also be what can articulate and further enable the passage of this project through what Peter Corrigan has foregrounded as “difficult coded knowledge.”11 Every ‘found’ fragment arises as the topos of a struggle between disassociation and recognition, and recognises the void between a community’s reluctance to follow, and an inability to bring themselves to discredit the architecture that confronts them.

Building 8 attends to Corrigan’s argument for a knowledge that refuses the demands of explication that would systematically determine the extents of an architecture based on an inventory of historical motifs and narratives. Such an approach would problematically orientate the discourse on Building 8 toward a reflection on the past. Instead Building 8, by the insistence and extent of Corrigan’s infringements, what belongs to his own palatable 16

impudence, gathers the artifacts of a past, stages them in a present, and assumes the position of an architecture that has yet to emerge. This does not surmise the naivety of utopic ideas of architectural progress or determine an origin for, or a conclusion to, Australian authenticity.

10

Schaik & Bertram, Building 8, Vol. 1, 10.

11

The full paragraph reads: “If an art work aspires to an embodiment of a social organisation, a community, it needs to establish connections between the rules (underlying) and their manifestations in the real world. It is necessary for an audience to be able to make comparative inferences with their own lives. The potential audience will more readily attend if it sees its own preoccupations dealt with in the art work. This is not to be misunderstood as kitsch. Difficult coded knowledge, not taste, is involved.” Peter Corrigan quoted in Richard Munday, “Passion in the Suburbs”, Architecture Australia, (Feb/March, 1977), 52. This paragraph also sits at the front of Hamann, Cities of Hope.

Sanford Kwinter argues similarly that: “As every thoughtful architect knows, an object is never other than an object in disposition. When musical composition emancipated itself from its prison-house within the acoustically generated spectrum of the classical chromatic scale, it allowed one to rewrite the rules for controlling tones and sounds and combining them into structural relationships. One of the most important things that we learned is that we can’t always or initially hear these relationships, and yet we know that they both exist and serve a critical (audible or supra-audible) function. What we don’t access literally without ears, we can actually learn to access through a transformation in the organisation of our human apparatus – a new posture or attitude, a new distribution of attention, a new form of physical listening. Concepts were then, and remain today, the primary walking sticks with which we navigate new space and reshape ourselves. There is no reason to deny architecture the power of this extraordinary transformative engine. Concepts are the architecture of hope.” Sanford Kwinter, “Concepts: The Architecture of Hope,” Harvard Design Magazine, No. 19 (Fall 2003/Winter 2004), 1-4: 4.

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It is the anticipatory play of ablation, substitution and quotation, as Corrigan meanders across the entire edifice of culture that advances the unruly nature of the architectural disjunctions of Building 8. How we determine what holds what together in an architecture of continual displacement further entrenched in Corrigan’s autobiographical apparatus is of little relevance to the speculations of this preamble and the following undertaking. In order to realise the conditions by which Edmond & Corrigan’s architecture operates across the whole of an architecture requires an examination of what any such method divests itself of in the cutting out and into of another; of the territory it carves from itself for itself. It is to recognise that from Building 8 we might generate interpretations that advance far beyond what one interpretive dimension could fathom; and thus this project is an attempt at an architecture that coheres an edifice by enfolding through the dimensions of Building 8, prospecting an infinite number of accounts of itself from within the enveloping impasse of its own excessive gestures. It is an approach which examines an architecture that is, “commensurate with our capacity for dreaming.”12 From the repertoire of Building 8’s architectural transmogrifications A Clinic for the Exhausted derives an affective atlas that is characterised by a conflation, expenditure and displacement of meaning across an open assemblage of cultural references. The project examines how the proliferation of Corrigan’s method can approach an architecture and in turn a community that can refute being conscripted within a collection of known events. It is this attitude that informs the preceding preamble and all that follows, continually opening the project to further interpretations as it traverses a re-imagining of Building 8 and architect Peter Corrigan. The project which forms here a leaping off point, was also entitled A Clinic for the Exhausted and was formerly presented as the winning entry to the professional journal Architecture Australia and its inaugural Unbuilt Prize.

overleaf: Building 8, images by Georgina Matherson 12 Project statement. Peter Corrigan. Peter Corrigan with Michael Spooner, Edmond & Corrigan: City of Hope, Now + When, Venice Biennale 2010. Corrigan’s thesis is founded in the figure given form in Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope as that of a man who is not content, the dreamer. For Bloch, day-dreaming is not a discontent by which what is lacking can be wholly filled through an indiscriminate material wealth. For Bloch, this discontent is a challenge to the present conditions in which any person whatever may find him or herself; discontent has as its core foundation the dignity of life, a refusal to accept one’s social deprivation and a preparedness to go against the grain. Bloch’s dreaming is an excursion into the passing shadow. It confirms Corrigan’s ‘dreaming’ not as an acute mystification, but, as a vital epistemic process; what opens life to the latency of a utopianism by which the dreamer is he who can never finally be content. As Bloch states, it is a model of utopia which is, “transcendent, without transcendence.” See: Geoghegan, Vincent. Ernst Bloch (London & New York: Routledge, 1996), 149; compare with, Principle 33, “A dreamer always wants even more”, in Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Volume Two, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice & Paul Knight (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 451.

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19

21

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PROLOGUE In 2007, the journal Architecture Australia commenced the publication of a series of articles dedicated to the works of architecture from both international and Australian architects that had fallen short of being built, but that had contributed in some way to the broader discourse on Australian architecture. It also re-established a competition program that had been initiated in the 1990s for unbuilt works of contemporary architecture. Architecture Australia awarded first prize of the reinstated Unbuilt Prize to a project entitled A Clinic for the Exhausted. The jury commented that they were torn between the project’s, “last-century picaresque roman-a-clef tongue-in-check cockamaine self indulgent absurdist magic-so-called-realism” that raised the spectre of post-modern irony, and its appearance as, “a painstakingly referenced and affectionate homage to that remarkable architect — Peter Corrigan” that was presented by way of the appropriation of Building 8.1 The jury also examined whether an entry to the Unbuilt Prize could be entirely improbable in terms of build24

ability or whether the competition should only consider those projects that had intended to become concrete realities but had not made it off the drawing board. Preceding the competition, Architecture Australia had published, as part of its review of unbuilt works of architecture, a commentary by the Australian architectural historian Philip Goad on Edmond & Corrigan’s Australian Pavilion for the Giardini delle Biennale, commissioned in 1979 by Franco Belgiorno-Nettis, Transfield founder and also the founder of Sydney’s Art Biennale, with the backing of Venetian authorities. This project had failed to materialise, stalled by the lack of support from Australian authorities.2 It was difficult to locate the seriousness of the winning entry of the Unbuilt Prize against the background of the Edmond & Corrigan pavilion and other contemporary proposals featured in the competition. Was the awarded project only a wild imaginary extrapolation of Edmond & Corrigan’s Building 8? Or was it something more hopeful, like Venice, a city borne afloat?

1

Jury citation, “2007 AA Unbuilt Prize for Unbuilt Work”, Architecture Australia, Vol. 97, No. 1 (Jan/Feb, 2008), 86. The 2007 AA Prize for Unbuilt Work jury consisted of: Shelley Penn, Peter Skinner, Anthony Burke and Justine Clark.

2

Philip Goad, “Unbuilt Australia: Venetian ‘City of Hope’,” Architecture Australia, Vol. 96, No. 6,(November/December, 2007), 27. Also, see: Nicholas Baume, “Guests in Venice: Australia’s Biennale Pavilion,” Transition, No. 29 (Winter, 1989), 65-67.

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East Elevation

North Elevation

West Elevation

South Elevation

25

EDMOND & CORRIGAN, AUSTRALIAN PAVILION, GIARDINI DELLE BIENNALE, VENICE 1979 drawings by Michael Spooner

D

B

E 1 2

3

2

4 D

E

6

2

C

2 2

C

5

A

LOCATION

A. Edmond & Corrigan Proposal B. Australian Pavilion D. Japanese Pavilion C. German Pavilion E. Russian Pavilion

SITE

1. Entry 2. Gallery 3. Exit

4. Service 5. Existing Public Facilities 6. Existing Statue

The scheme A Clinic for the Exhausted drew out what was called a ‘discontinuous genealogy’ that traversed the architectural conditions of Building 8 through John Andrews’ Student Union and Bates Smart McCuthen’s Casey Wing but exaggerated a sense of the unfinished, the fragmented and the unbuilt through an identification of Building 8 with the mythical ‘Ship of Theseus’, the timbers of which were progressively replaced as they rotted away. The ship presents a metaphor of the architectural accretions with which Building 8 concerns itself. The term ‘discontinuous genealogy’ taht described the passage from the ‘Ship of Theseus’ to the final Unbuilt work is a reference to the same procedure by which the architect and academic Douglas Darden would conceive of his own unbuilt architectural projects.3 Darden would superimpose a series of images to create a dense montage which he termed the ‘composite ideogram’. Darden’s resulting architecture could not in any one way be grasped from the constellation of figures in the composed image, nor was it systematically built up from each of the figures contained within each of the images used. The procedure’s genealogy enabled Darden to draw out a precarious architectural position.

The relation to this procedure in the unbuilt project suggests that what remains unclear is the lineage of A Clinic for the Exhausted. Certainly, the appearence of a self-portrait of the eighteenth-century French draughtsman Jean-Jacques Lequeu in the guise of a hysterical 26

bare breasted women labelled as ‘Peter Corrigan’, perhaps in reference to Corrigan’s thefts of Lequeu’s studies for Peter King’s Mahoney Masques,4 confirms a less than direct sense of logic in the project. It has been contended that Lequeu’s appearance in history is nothing more than the sly reckonings of the surrealist Marcel Duchamp, who slipped into the Bibliothèque Nationale de France all that we know of him; an eighteenth-century architect conceived in the zeitgeist of the early twentieth century.5 The impetus to invent Peter Corrigan as a lady, (if we could imagine a bare breasted Corrigan a ‘lady’ not least as the same image of an ‘architect’), is realised in the text beneath the Lequeu portrait as though already written, irrelevant of the author of the Unbuilt project. It is also perhaps no coincidence that Darden uses a

3

See: Douglas Darden, Condemned Buildings, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993). For an extended comment on the discontinuous genealogy and composite ideogram see: Michael Chapman & Michael J. Ostwald, “Douglas Darden’s Composite ideogram as a technique of Architectural Composition”, Ralf Weber & Matthais Albrecht Amann (eds), Aesthetics & Architectural Composition: Proceedings of the Dresden International Symposium of Architecture 2004, (Dresden: Pro Literatur Verlag, 2005), 209-215.

4

The work of Jean Jacques Lequeu’s is appropriated by Corrigan in his working collages for the theatre production Mahoney Masques by Peter King. See: Frank Lowe, “Frank Lowe interviews Peter Corrigan” in, Schaik & Bertram, Building 8, Vol. 3, 114-118.

5

See: Philippe Duboy, Lequeu, An Architectural Enigma, (Cambridge, Mass. The MIT Press, 1986). Perhaps not, some would say, though as many as who would deny this argument would hope it true, not least because of Duchamp’s own penchant for female attire.

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DOUGLAS DARDEN, SELF PORTRAIT,

DOUGLAS DARDEN, MELVILLA: AN UNDERLINE READING, NEW YORK

1. Oliver Cromwell Locomotive

2. New England Meeting House

3. Iroquois Meeting Hut

4. Iroquois Hand Loom

27

DIS/CONTINUOUS GENEALOGY & COMPOSITE IDEOGRAM OF MELVILLA Images courtesy of the Darden Estate

similar though no less affronting image of Lequeu’s bare breasted nun to conceive of his own self-portrait.6 The beautifully conceived frontispiece to Darden’s monograph, Condemned Buildings, depicts a moustached and bespecked self-portrait framed by an architecturally conceived capital ‘D’ (also drawn from a Lequeu image, this one originally the frame of an opening through which a female nude almost tumbles in pursuit of a small bird) dressed in a nun’s habit exposing two perfectly round breasts, their nipples peeking just over the top of a blouse. From Darden’s Duchampian procedures; from Duchamp’s Lequeu to Lequeu’s nun; to 6

See: Michael Chapman and Michael J. Ostwald, “The Underbelly of an Architect: Discursive Practices in the Architecture of Douglas Darden,” Harriet Edquist & Hélène Frichot (eds.) Limits: The 21st annual conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, (Melbourne: Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, 2004 ), 93-98.

Lequeu’s nun now labeled ‘Peter Corrigan’, we traverse a series of citational shifts all of which re-envisage the architect. In Darden’s case, it is a swag of cloth that decisively informs us that this indeed is ‘Douglas Darden architect.’

This resistance to a nominalisation further exaggerates the paradox of the Ship of Theseus, in such a way that the architect can not be excluded from the architectural imaginary presented. A Clinic for the Exhausted also represented Theseus’ ship as a collage that depicted Building 8 as the stern of an ocean liner, “in readiness to depart its concrete foundations and sail the urban oceans of the world.”7 This ‘composite image’ appears at first an obvious amendment to Darden’s own thinking. What this building-boat composite realises is the vision of an infinitely rapid movement through an innumerable number of images that compose A Clinic for the Exhausted, rather than the circumscribed number offered by Darden’s own accounts.

In comparison to Darden, A Clinic for the Exhausted makes further demands on its audience, because every digression from one image to the next, marked by the exertion necessary to discern each and every image across the grotesque excess of images, sustains the genesis of this one collage. Rather than being hampered by the excessive density of potential images, the building-boat makes evident at the outset the encirclement of references from which it differs.

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The accompanying project statement points to “the ship as the greatest reserve of imagination,”8 reiterating the French philosopher-historian Michel Foucault’s assertion that the boat is a “heterotopia par excellence.”9 The ship and by extension Building 8 is presumably considered as neither a utopia nor a dystopia, but an other place, or ‘heterotopia’, located just beyond our habitual architectural preconceptions. From the outset, A Clinic for the Exhausted, unknowingly, exaggerates a claim on the spectacle of an ocean liner made in a letter published in Schaik and Bertram’s monograph on Building 8. The letter, dated 22 December 1993, is addressed to Peter Corrigan from Howard Raggatt, who as director of ARM was at the time of writing commencing the redesign of Storey Hall adjacent to Building 8. It outlines Raggatt’s hopes for the proposed renovation of Storey Hall against the backdrop of the adjacent Building 8. Raggatt, who admits in the letter to the influence of alcohol, on taking note of the illuminated interior, tenders the image of Building 8 as it “began to lift off as though released from its anchors, or set free from its foundations, now departing like a P&O liner.”10 overleaf: sections, elevations and details from A Clinic for the Exhausted, Architecture Australia Unbuilt Prize 2007 7

As quoted in “2007 AA Unbuilt Prize for Unbuilt Work,” Architecture Australia, Vol. 97, No. 1, (Jan/Feb, 2008), 87.

8

Ibid.

9

Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. J. Miskowiec, Diacritics, 16:1 Spring (1986), 27.

10 Schaik & Bertram, Building 8, Vol. 2, 10-11.

Building 8 in readiness to depart its concrete moorings

yes John 1:20

Anyhow as I watched your building, your wall, lit up inside with lots of lights, it began to lift off as though released from its anchors, or set free from its foundations, now departing

Hopefully our little building down the street can be a gate for that same wonderful city. But I suspect if there’s going to be a dozen gates to this city, our little gate will not be for the pure and simpleminded, but more likely for the dreadfully earnest, for the doubtful or for those ashamed of their silent joy. And its certainly a gate that’s lost its single pearl or will it be reinstated on that day.

transcription by Michael Spooner

{

it moving that here was a little bit of that great city we shall someday see. Your building is a lovely vision of that blessed city but these are not hopes to interest many

Transcript of letter from Howard Raggatt to Peter Corrigan, 22 December 1993

And indeed a joyful wall no longer seemingly concerned with mere seriousness; a wall that cries out yes yes, like Molly instead of No, or Not. In that light I found

I began to see it as a segment of a new City wall, a pretty wall, the wall of a new Jerusalem, sparkling, inexplicable and yet gritty; hopeful as though hope could still be so easily achieved.

Dear Peter On walking past your building the other night - it must have been after the Battlers Lunch - I propped against the Oxford wall and realised that you have indeed make a building after the heart of Nathaniel (I think it was) of whom our Lord referred as a man without guile. Your building seems to stand without guile.

22 12 93

}

Best Regards for Christmas Howard R.

I’m looking forward to the party when we’re in. Now I can see it as a city of Hope.

Anyhow it was nice to walk past pretending to discuss these matters with a close companion imagining them dressed in white and longing for that new City for the guileless, and buildings no longer saddened by the necessity of secret joy.

like a P&O liner, streamers bells and whistles, never to return but waiving to everyone and calling yes yes yes but Perhaps I was merely drunk, or still dreaming under a Nathaniel like fig tree.

e x h a u s t e d

FOR THE

c l i n i C

A

MR MUDDL E MR MUDDL E

MR MUDDL E

f ãtÇá à É Ç

É y

f xt

N

Scale of Miles.

With Love, The Author

.. ..I ha ve thrown a twig into th e ocean for the drowning sailor

To my dearest beloved or wh o e ve r m ay b e s o u n f o r t u n a te as to read this.... .

m r m ud dle

m r m ud dle

Peter Corrigan

Professor Jane Rendell, Vice Dean of Research, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, London

A Clinic for the Exhausted

“With the current flourishing of architectural design research, the time is ripe to consider the role of writing in defining a new relation to design, one not of opposition, negation, or subjugation, where writing documents, comments and critiques the inventiveness of design, but rather where writing is employed as a technique alongside drawing and other spatial and visual processes as a speculative design strategy. In confronting the limits of both architectural research and academic writing, words – fictive, poetic, philosophical – can play off images and in so doing reconfigure architectural design research … there is no finer an example of how exquisite such work can be than this project by Michael Spooner, which is witty, erudite, precise and highly imaginative.“

Michael Spooner

A Clinic for the Exhausted In Search of an Antipodean Vitality Edmond & Corrigan and an Itinerant Architecture

Dr Michael Spooner is co-editor of Frederick Romberg: an architectural survey (2013) and Practice of Practice 2: Research in the Medium of Design (2010). He has exhibited work in Procuring Innovative Architecture, DESSA Gallery, Ljubljana (2012), and with Peter Corrigan realised City of Hope, Venice Biennale (2010). He won the inaugural Architecture Australia Unbuilt Prize (2007). He is currently a lecturer in the School of Architecture at RMIT University, Melbourne, where he received his PhD. A Clinic for the Exhausted commences from a vision of a landmark Australian architectural icon, RMIT University Building 8 by Edmond & Corrigan, apprehended as an ocean liner taking leave of its concrete moorings. Conceived as both a literary and an architectural project, A Clinic for the Exhausted ministers to an architecture of unforeseeable effect, and attempts to ascertain how one can architecturally act on behalf of the unknowable.

ISBN 978-3-88778-392-1

Michael Spooner

AADR publishes innovative artistic, creative and historical research in art, architecture, design and related fields.