Journal of Civic Architecture #10

JoCA

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DECORUM

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Contents

5 My House is a Topic: Reflections on The D House 30 Years On Geraldine Cleary 13 More Than You Asked Timothy Hill and Patrick Lynch 39 An Extended Family Edward Jones 42 An Art Museum Embedded in the Landscape Kerstin Thompson 58 In Praise of the Town House Amy Young 63 Landscapes as State of Mind Nicolas Feldmeyer 72 Knots: Lacanian reading of Semper’s Practical Aesthetics Filip Galic 76 First Quarter John Tuomey, extract from First Quarter published by The Lilliput Press 79 Harlow Town Railway Footbridge Luke Hayes 89 Substantially Intact John Meunier 96 Poem Patrick Lynch

Editor’s Letter Patrick Lynch

This is the 10th issue of the JoCA, which feels momentous to us and somewhat incredible. The first 9 issues seemed to run naturally one from the other, appearing like clockwork every 6 months each solstice, even in the depths of the Covid 19 pandemic. As you may have noticed though, there has been a longer gap than normal between the last issue, which was published in summer 2022, and issue 10. In the meantime, Canalside Press have published a number of books, including Migrations from Memory by Vokes and Peters (2023), who I interviewed remotely for JoCA 8 in 2021. I was invited last year to participate in the 2022 installment of the Australasian students of architecture congress entitled “Occupy Brisbane”, where I was able to meet Aaron and Stu in person, and had the pleasure also of visiting a number of wonderful buildings by their practice and by other brilliant Queensland architects.

Particularly memorable was the work of Donovan Hill, whose legendary D House is published here along with a reflective essay by its remarkable owner Geraldine Cleary. I met Brian Donovan and spoke alongside him in the practice’s amazingly beautiful and prophetic Queensland State Library. I also met Brit Andresen, one of the architects of The Burrell Collection—alongside Barry Gasson RIP, and John Meunier. Brit contributed to Migrations from Memory. John Meunier appeared in JoCA 2 (and co-authored On Intricacy with me in 2020), and writes here about his reaction to recent changes to The Burrell. Brit suggested, I’m told, that I “found my tribe in Brisbane.”

Why? Well, I think that it is pretty obvious that questions of climatic architecture lie at the heart and soul of Australian architecture. Simultaneously, the primacy of architectural atmosphere has evolved into a poetics of air and acoustics, evolving not out of a bluntly superficial technical sensibility, but from an attitude attuned towards the entangled physical and imaginative character of place and of dwelling.

This aerodynamic and poetic architectural attitude is embodied in the timber Queenslander houses that line the hillsides, and hang suspended above the river valley. These houses are infused with a richly complex spatial character, one that the supremely talented Brisbane poet David Malouf, who I also met last year (at the launch of The New Queensland House by Cameron Bruhn and Katelin Butler), describes in his essay “The First Place: A Mapping of a World” (1985). Brit gives this essay to her architecture students at The University of Queensland, to be read as a primer in Brisbane spatial qualities and effects. The character of the Brisbane imagination, Malouf argues, is infused with weather, topography, animals, etc., and so human ecology and the resulting architectural urbanity “offers a different notion of what the land might be”, he suggests. “You learn in such houses”, Malouf observes, “to listen. You build up a map of the house in sound, that allows you to know exactly where everyone is and to predict approaches. You also learn what not to hear…

Wooden houses in Brisbane are open. That is, they often have no doors… you can see right through it to trees or sky… verandahs, mostly with crossed openwork below and lattice or rolled venetians above; an intermediary space between the house proper, which is itself only half closed-in, and the world outside—garden, street, weather.” In a nutshell—or rather in a Mangrove seed perhaps—I found an architectural culture full of life and refreshingly open, in every sense.

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© 2023 Canalside Press and the authors.

All rights reserved.

CONTRIBUTORS

GERALDINE CLEARY

Canalside Press 66 Regent Studios 8 Andrews Rd London E8 4QN +44 (0)20 7278 2553 info@canalsidepress.com www.canalsidepress.com All opinions expressed within this publication are those of the authors and not necessarily of the publisher.

studied language, communication and psychology at the University of Queensland as well as strategy, planning and management at the Mt Eliza Business School. Cleary has since pursued a career in the public and non-government humanitarian and arts sectors through consulting, providing research, project design, planning, writing and editing services.

N I C O L AS F E L D M E Y E R

Editor: Patrick Lynch and Claudia Lynch Designed by Emma Kalkhoven Printed by KOPA, Lithuania British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISSN 2516-9165 No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the necessary arrangements will be made at the first opportunity.

Photography credits: p 5–11 and 13 Jared Fowler; p 12, 14 and 15 Patrick Lynch; p16 (top), 19, Jon Linkins; p 16 (bottom) Dianna Snape; p 20 Patrick Lynch; p 23 (left) CC licence Seier; p 23 (right) CC licence Timothy Brown; p 24–27 Christopher Frederick Jones; p 28–29 Patrick Lynch; p 30–37 and 42–57 Rory Gardiner; p 38 and 41 Celia Scott; p 40 Peter Cook; p 58 Dennis Gilbert; p 60 Ed Reeve; p 61 Nick Kane.

Thanks to all the contributors, and to Brit Andresen, Kieren Delores, Rebecca Jak, Doug Neal, Hudson Smith and Brigette Veen.

Cover images: Translational Research Institute by Donovan Hill, photographs

by Patrick Lynch.

Previous page: Bundanon Bridge

by Kerstin Thompson Architects.

Photograph by Rory Gardiner.

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is a mixed media artist working with watercolour, charcoal, installations and 3D rendering. Feldmeyer was born in Switzerland where he completed his architectural studies at ETH Zurich before studying Fine Arts at the San Francisco Art Institute as a Fulbright Fellow and The Slade UCL. He lives in London and is a senior lecturer on the BA Drawing course at Camberwell College of Arts, UAL. His work is included in the permanent collections of the British Museum and the V&A. FILIP GALIC

is a Ph.D. student in architecture at Cornell University. Previously Galic studied at the Architectural Association and practiced architecture at several firms in Europe and the UK. L U K E H AY E S

is a London-based photographer specialising in architecture, interiors, cityscapes and design more generally.

In 2000 Luke began practising as an independent photographer, and has since worked on commissions for some of the best creatives in the world.

TIMOTHY HILL

is an architect practising in Hobart, Tasmania. Hill completed his architectural studies at the University of Queensland in Brisbane where he founded award-winning practice Donovan Hill in 1992. After a 20 year period as Founding Director in this practice, Hill then pursued work in London before establishing Partners Hill in 2013, and returned to Australia in 2014. Partners Hill primarily function from within Tasmania and have secured high recognition for the work they do on varying scales from buildings to furniture and larger urban projects.

E D WA R D J O N E S

KERSTIN THOMPSON

is an English Architect who studied at the Architectural Association in London, and established Dixon Jones in 1989 alongside Jeremy Dixon. Jones has held professorships at many universities in Europe and North America including UCD, the AA, Princeton, Harvard GSD.

is an Australian architect who established her own practice in 1994. In 2023 she was awarded the Australian Institute of Architects Gold Medal, only the second woman to do so (the other was Brit Andresen in 2002). Thompson has pursued several adjunct professorships in architectural schools around Australia and is known to undertake design-based explorations into the connection between building relationships and much larger ideas of site and environment.

PAT R I C K L Y N C H

is an architect based in London. He studied at Liverpool, Cambridge and Oxford universities, completing his PhD at The Cass with Peter Carl, Joseph Rykwert and Helen Mallinson in 2015.

He has taught at The Architectural Association, the University of Cambridge, The Cass, The Bartlett UCL since 2020, KU Leuven and since 2016 has been an honorary professor at Liverpool University.

He established Lynch Architects whose work has won numerous awards, and has been published and exhibited widely, in 1997. Patrick is the author of Civic Ground (2017), Mimesis (2015), and The Theatricality of the Baroque City (2011) and editor of On Intricacy: The Work of John Meunier Architect (2020), Change is the Reality: The Work of Robin Walker Architect (2021) and Part of a City: The Work of Neave Brown Architect (2022). He was shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize in 2020.

JOHN MEUNIER

is an architect who studied at the University of Liverpool’s School of Architecture in 1953, from which he graduated with a First Class Honours Degree in 1959 having done over a year of practical training in New York with Marcel Breuer in 1957–8. He went on to pursue a Master’s degree at Harvard University. He, and his wife then went to Munich where he worked for two years for a Professor at the Technische Universität.

He was then appointed to an Assistant Lectureship the University of Cambridge, where he taught for 14 years. During that time he was also a practising architect responsible, together with Barry Gasson, for several published buildings including the Burrell Collection in Glasgow. In 1976 he was appointed Director of the School of Architecture and Interior Design at the University of Cincinnati.

In 1987 he became Dean of the College of Architecture and Environmental Design at Arizona State University, a position he held for fifteen years. He has been Emeritus Professor of Architecture there since he retired from his professorship in 2017. His interests, reflected in print and on television, have been the architecture and urbanism of desert cities, and intricacy as an essential characteristic of architecture and the arts.

JOHN TUOMEY

is an Irish architect who completed his education at University College Dublin and went to London to work with James Stirling, before returning to Dublin where he established O’Donnel + Tuomey with Sheila O’Donnell in 1988.

Tuomey has taught and lectured widely in European and North American schools of architecture including UCD, Cambridge, Harvard GSD and Princeton. He was also president of the Architectural Association of Ireland 1992-93, and in 2015 was joint recipient, with Sheila O’Donnell, of the RIBA Royal Gold Medal.

A M Y YO U N G

is from Kingston upon Thames and is a graduate of The University of Bath.

She is currently completing her postgraduate architecture studies at London Metropolitan University.

DECORUM

My House is a Topic: Reflections on The D House 30 Years On Geraldine Cleary

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On a very small inner-suburban site, in a particularly doleful street, a setting has been established where passers-by experience the building as a garden wall set behind a planted grove of tuckeroos that shades both house and footpath. Entry is via a gate, revealing the inner realm of the walled garden with its reflective walls, bubbling pond and adjustable doors to the adjoining fully interior spaces. Under a parasol roof, large is combined with small, coarse is compared with smooth, public coalesces with private, inside exchanges with outside, what seems prosaic becomes memorable.

—Timothy Hill and Geraldine Cleary, Description for the D House for Brisbane Open House programme 2019.

A N U N L I K E LY P L AC E

I went to London and came back to realise that Brisbane in the late 1980s was a still a new resettled place, subject to land and tree clearing for single house package tracts that contributed to the alienation of suburban sprawl. Brisbane in Australian terms is a ‘branch town’ city. It was not Sydney or Melbourne, the two Australian cities with at least some resemblance to European life. Brisbane was and remains a third city to Melbourne and Sydney. It was not an Australian centre of design excellence; it was a very unlikely cultural setting for building what has become an internationally acclaimed house. I have always encouraged scheduled visits to the house. During the walkarounds I answer questions about features of the house to the best of my ability as a non-architect and explain how I came to the project. I try to talk from the client and architect’s points of view, articulating our interests and preoccupations at the time about the location, site, brief, design process, and the local external factors in play. I am aware that most architectural writers are not clients, and the architect has not written about the house since he described it in an architecture journal in 2002, and in a thesis in 2004. In preparation for this essay I have trawled blogs, articles and chapters in books about the D House and Timothy Hill’s other work. Referring to these, I note that explanation was not the writers’ main game. Description and supposition abound.

My house is a topic.

O R D I N A R Y O R E X T R AO R D I N A R Y

Timothy and I have remained friends and are always in touch. We still have “D Conversations” on many subjects, more topics than have been written about to date. For instance, we talk of the local, national and international interest in the D House, its place and time, its social and cultural contribution, and the impressions that have been communicated to us. We wonder what others find notable, and why.

Looking at images of my home, I wonder why similar examples in other places are rare. When it was first built, I thought there was something here for everyone. Yet it has been deemed exceptional rather than conventional. When the architect and I speak to visitors from our respective points of view, we are cognisant that we found ourselves in trouble at the time for what we thought ordinary. The design reflected the architect’s studies and my experiences then. We were trying to participate in the world. From both of our perspectives we thought it natural to refer to international best practice and evidence, so we were 6

rather amazed that we inadvertently caused such a problem all those years ago. Timothy’s designs initially attracted resistance from the Local Authority, and in fact the garden wall we made was thought to be illegitimate. The design hit a barrier by introducing architectural and social approaches to urbanism and housing quality, rather than simply subscribing to a pre-established shape or form.

M AS S T R A N S F O R M AT I O N S U D D E N LY

The project happened in a very suburbanised place. Today that also seems extraordinary. Even Australians, along with the rest of the world, sometimes forget that Australia was, until recently, so sparsely populated as to be virtually empty; prosperous but generally not very worldly. Owning your own home was the national form of a deposit in the bank. The house would probably be one’s only investment.

I realised that in world terms it was incredible to be able to create something new, in Brisbane the cultural setting determined that everything was a development opportunity; new was presumed desirable; an opportunity to clear, build, assert, speculate etc. I lived in a rented river front flat in a 1940s brick building in the inner-city suburb of New Farm. I had a job with a non-government organisation in walking distance and a small group of friends and connections there.

Staying in New Farm was important to me. Because Brisbane was so not built up and urban living was so undervalued, I found myself being able to buy a complete site with cottage in walking distance of the CBD. The 600m2 corner block with a small vernacular low set ‘timber and tin’ workers cottage, like many Queenslanders and workers cottages in the area the veranda was closed, the frontage mute. Other ‘better’ parts of New Farm had properties with more amenity, views to river, city or park; I could only afford this one and it would suit me well enough for the long term.

In 1992 I took a short secondment as a disability access consultant/ researcher for the Brisbane City Council’s newly established Urban Renewal Taskforce, part of the Federal Government’s Building Better Cities Program. The initiative was designed to revitalise the decaying inner-city periphery—including New Farm and Fortitude Valley.

Because the initiative came from the Federal Government, Brisbane had to address the issue of Planning. A major investment in sewerage infrastructure anticipated inner-city population growth. The Council even embraced ideas about mixed use and high density, possibly to secure federal or state funding. Before the Second World War there were only a few apartment blocks in the entire region. Now I can see many apartment towers at the end of my street. In 1991, that edge of Fortitude Valley comprised low rise residential, commercial and industrial zones with trucks tearing up and down James Street from the Coca Cola Factory with its chain-wired asphalt loading and carparking space at one end to the CSR (sugar) Refinery making for a dusty and noisy location, devoid of shade. Many of its former residents had moved to the outer suburbs.

The “site” that I could afford was on the edge of the suburbs of New Farm and Fortitude Valley where we now find the successful James Street ‘Retail and Lifestyle Precinct’, compete with hotels, a cinema literally next door, and a farmers’ produce market.

MY HOUSE IS A TOPIC

TINY BUT LEGAL

As small lot development had recently begun to become acceptable to the Council, an Urban Renewal colleague prompted me to consider subdividing my property and building a house, thus restoring the site to its pre-1925 density. He encouraged me, along with his experienced architect, to compose a distinctly qualitative architectural brief.

They both understood that I required connection to the street, and management of the intensity of the light, heat and glare experienced there and in the worker’s cottage that occupied the site then. Subdivision produced a narrow 313m2 block with—for the sub-tropics of the southern hemisphere—an unenviable south-west facing 25m-long frontage; essentially the yard of the old house, a piece of baking ground falling onto the equally baking footpath and road. My completely non-heroic site seemed to offer so little to an architect: no features, no views, and the need for protection against heat, glare, dust, crime and grime. Yet I decided to sell the worker’s cottage to finance building a new house. I was a complete novice when it came to commissioning a building from an architect and operating as the client. I was offering my doleful site, a very tight budget, and a purely qualitative brief. However, I was signalling my preparedness to give the time necessary to carefully make a high quality, adaptive, flexible design solution. The desire also to make something useful and attractive to anyone, rather than something

tailored to a specific number of bathrooms, or my personal peccadillos.

Remember, this was an era before domestic building had become the domain for expressing the owner’s personal style.

H I S I M M E N S E I M M AT U R I T Y

Timothy had travelled, but unlike me—and so many of his contemporaries—he had not lived overseas. In architectural terms Timothy Hill was a child in 1991. A 28-year-old local man working as an architect in Brisbane who had become fascinated with international architectural work as the result of spending an enormous amount of time in libraries! He eventually graduated from the ‘other’ local university, having been ejected from the alternative. Timothy had jointly won the Royal Institute of British Architects International Student competition in 1988. Along with Brit Andresen, he and nine other architects were selected to represent Australia at the 1991 Venice Biennale. Per chance, he was invited with representatives of various EU urban development instrumentalities to tour nine American downtown development and city authorities in 1992. To international audiences, it might seem ridiculous, even extraordinary, that a young architect in a city like Brisbane had built so many buildings before he was 30.

To explain, Timothy and I were living in a culture where buildings and change were happening all the time. One of the main features 7

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of Brisbane is that it is continuously in the process of development.

Timothy Hill was frantically working while a student; he built locally rather than travel internationally. By the time I met him, he had designed houses in the 1980s and worked as a student for the Brisbanebased practice Lambert & Smith Architects and the design and craftfocused local practice Andresen O’Gorman, before founding his first practice, Donovan Hill Architects, in Brisbane in 1992. He marched me around and we looked at some of the projects he was working on at the time: the Noble Residence; the Kangaroo Point House; HH House; C House; the Sir Neville Bonner Building, and Q House. The tour gave me the first inkling of his absolute ease and facility with research, and his ability to apply relevant architectural and urban planning precedents and ideas. He showed me images of the accumulation of buildings in civic contexts of old; of Persian and other interiors to show how openings, surfaces and light can be used to create luminosity and comfort. He showed me books about Scarpa, Aalto, Corbusier, the furniture of Eileen Gray and later, Japanese gardens. Through him, I became familiar with the names Lutyens, Schinkel, Le Corbusier, Aalto, and so on. He was busy applying all that knowledge at the C House at Coorparoo (also in Brisbane), and at the D House.

Timothy encouraged me, saying that I probably already knew something about architecture as I had lived in several buildings in Brisbane, in Italy and London. During the design process, and 8

in later years, he was a very generous coach. He ensured I gained a level of understanding of some of the relevant precedents, how many things are a rendition of something that had been done before.

Even though he was involved in many other projects at this time, he appeared to be incredibly centred on mine. Timothy allocated strategic design decisions to things that would make a difference, primarily concentrating on how the building was experienced, focussing on its performance.

E L A B O R AT I N G O N T H E B R I E F

The architect found my brief engaging in fact because it was qualitative. It embodied my burgeoning interest in proportion, light and shade, and the use of contrasting materials, in particular concrete combined with timber and the softness of plaster. I very much like combining old and new technologies. I remember showing Timothy new American material that I was working with in my professional life relating to disability or ‘universal’ access. Also, images from an old Interview magazine showing a building with a residence above a shop in 1920s New York, where the wall on the boundary featured a band of tiles to the pavement. He worked to build his understanding of how I was attracted to the potential of creating a more urbanised way living. Our discussions focussed on how positive experiences of urban participation and connection hinge on a balance of boundary,

MY HOUSE IS A TOPIC

protection and public and private living; and how this balance could support quality relationships and sustain human connection throughout life. We were interested in the potential for combining what is now called “the whole-of-life cycle idea”; with how the project could support several household configurations, i.e., not just a conventional family household. It was easy to arrive jointly at a conscious ambition that the new house would demonstrate an alternative to standard local domestic-residential models and development- densification and achieve it by referencing international exemplars. Timothy observed, that in a city one experiences both contrasting emphasis and reticence: the refined with the coarse; the interior in contrast to the exterior; of vantage points experienced in movement, enroute. We had fun thinking about my small building as a fragment of a larger thing. Timothy showed me an image of an ancient Greek ruin in which only the ground plane had survived intact, fragments of external walls somewhat overgrown by untended plants.

D R AW I N G S , D R AW I N G S , D R AW I N G S As an experienced researcher, I gather evidence and analyse data against key questions—an iterative process in itself—and then integrate and synthesise, making drafts that are often discarded, but which chart progress and clarify my thinking. The architect used drawings to advance the design in much the same way that I write and

rewrite in order to finalise what is said. As I worked alongside Timothy, I enjoyed his tendency of anticipation oriented towards refinement.

He communicated via example, using drawings, analogies, references and roleplaying, to explain how little things would make a big difference to the final building. He would blithely produce drawings as a way of having a meeting, as if they were a piece of rehearsal, or research, to inform the next drawing—then the next, and the next drawing, using drawings as research and as a programming tool.

The purpose was to clarify what to do, chart progress, investigate and clarify thinking; to engage the imagination of both his colleagues at the practice and his client; to test possible scenarios so as to establish forward commitment; to demonstrate what specific options for managing light, acoustics, comfort, adaptability, privacy—and connection to the street—would mean to one’s experience of the building across the seasons, and at different times of the day: and to emphasise the role of the plan in this. I cannot recollect any elevations being immediately contingent upon the plan, although section drawings would suddenly magically appear. This was before the era of digital modelling. I think there were many benefits in not understanding the three-dimensional implications of the design immediately, it left me free to roleplay activity—instead of attempting to prematurely imagine the final form of the architecture.

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ROLES, ROLES, ROLES As a non-architect, I did not know what was involved from the architect’s point of view. However, I recognised and engaged in the way the architect was leading collaborative teamwork: the roles were clearly defined, based on expertise. My role in the team was one of contributing to discussions about options, life-cycle, and budget. During construction, the architect enjoined the builders and craftspeople in the design concepts, helping them to understand how their work would contribute to the final result. As the stages of work progressed my role changed as I learnt more. I learned a little bit about the Venturi Effect and how it would work to pull air through the building when the large doors were open. I did not know until much later that the ground floor plane was to become the major ornament of the house. Neither did I predict that it would remain so thermally neutral all year round. The architect showed me images of 17th century bedrooms in the Dutch style, each showing a miniature room within a room, an idea whose significance I had largely forgotten about until I had lived in the house for some years. When I worked with Timothy to prepare material for some talks with architecture students, I observed that the miniature “room-within-a-room-within-a-building” theme is prominent in his other work too. Arguably, the D House clarifies and further establishes several design strategies that are typical in Timothy’s work, some of which I will attempt to identify below.

MAK I N G S E Q U E N C E S P E O P L E CAN O C C U P Y

Unarguably, refashioning a highly challenged site was the critical design strategy. The architect used cut and fill to manufacture a landscape and sequences of spaces that seem so inevitable; no one now seems to realise that they were in fact very carefully designed.

The rigour with which he designed the plan provided for the potential of open-ended thinking about the other components of the building.

From what he calls, “…flat site falling into the street”, Timothy produced an “elongated entry sequence parallel to the public footpath, a ramp defended on the street side by a grove of trees, a climb up to a walled garden room connected to a public room, a central space with a large window to the street…and off it an arcade leading to private addresses.”

M A K I N G L OV E LY R O O M S

The room proportions are elegant; layering is evident in the compressed site. During a video-assisted visit—by University of Queensland Master of Architecture Students in 2020—the architect’s commentary, during a walk around the house, included the insightful observation that in the D House, “making small things happen” works. Timothy refers to this as “differentiation: Matt versus Gloss; ordinary off-the-shelf versus highly particularised beautifully crafted things; bits of marble in a very cheap house; good taps, cheap cupboards; and an expensive sink in a kitchen that is reticent or even partly denied, is actually part of an arcade running the length of the entire house; large and small openings”. Furthermore, he pointed out that the lovely rooms and spaces relied on the orchestration of a number of elements. For example, a masonry wall to the western and southwestern facing side of the building, thick enough and oriented 10

to achieve optimal heat transfer at different times of the year. There are no big pieces of transparent wall or frames with glazed infill— it is all walls, doors and a window, more like a villa than a pavilion.

There is lots of potential flexibility of room use: this is not just a conventional two-bedroom (Nuclear Family) home. The plan also provides a storeroom and a relatively large laundry.

There is a single, large, sliding window to the street, with no curtains, but a sliding timber screen. All other openings are doors, or fixed glass. Openings, surfaces and colour schemes are organised to bounce light and to eliminate glare and create comfort, indicating the time of day and season of the year. Of primary importance is the operability of openings. These can be securely left open at night and during most rainy days. The angle, widths and spacing of the blades of the timber screen to the single large window at the front were organised and designed with reference the movement of the sun during the day, and throughout the year—I think using calculations.

They cast lovely shadows on the plaster wall at certain times of the day and year, and provide yet another way of registering the world beyond the house, of which it is a part.

The enclosing walls are cut out at the top to allow small glimpses of sky from both the interior and exterior. When the screen to the big front window is open shadows from the group of trees beyond play on the floor at certain times of the year. The outdoor garden terrace is handled like an indoor “public” room. Control of breezes makes it a cool space protected from strong winds, such that it can be furnished as if it were an indoor space, with delicate objects and candles. Both of the “private” rooms are equivalent and managed along similar lines, with four doors for cross ventilation—one of them large and screened.

A fixed glass pane at the top of one corner of the room enables one to register seasons as light falls onto the tops of walls, and the top of the wardrobe recess. The only coloured wall, with a unique texture, is the one that has the greatest exposure to sunlight. It receives and directs a great deal of light. It was tiled according to a pattern derived from a drawing based upon a series of numbers—like painting by numbers perhaps, and it reminds me also of a knitting pattern. Furthermore, sightlines and openings are organised to provide for both privacy and to allow also visual connections to the street beyond the interior. There are no skirting or architraves, so openings share a similar presence to the big window. “Imagine if the big window had architraves”, Timothy declared to the UQ students.

T H E F L O O R I S T H E MAJ O R O R NAM E N T

I came to understand that the floorplate would be the driving feature of the project, and I really liked that. It is made up of two slabs, one structural and one finishing—tinted concrete. It is completely flat and continuous. The indoor and outdoor spaces can therefore be thought of as equivalents. The finishing slab is like a ground surface that varies in what it is made of at points of transition, creating inverse thresholds.

I remember that we used to talk about how the brain registers a liminal space. It is possible that in the first plan drawing the floor surfaces were already decided, and that this was the one element that persisted throughout the design and construction phases (it was not until the very end that we had an up-to-date set of drawings in fact). The

MY HOUSE IS A TOPIC

recesses for drainage, the fishpond and transitional-thresholds, and other insertions, were shown right away. Adding to the indoor-outdoor experience and the beauty of the floor surface as an idea and a thing, full height glazing at either end of the main room is continuous with the enclosing south-west facing side wall. This allows light from the top of the wall to enter, bounce off and illuminate the internal walls and floor of the main living space. The floor is the major ornament.

D H O US E B E C O M E S MAJ O R TOW N P L AN N I N G D R AMA

I still ask myself why it was that what we proposed was considered so transgressive by the Council and so difficult for them to approve. We found that submitting something other than the ‘Heritage Look’ of the typical Queenslander “timber and tin” house form was perceived of as a threat. The Town Planner’s point of view at the time was that the D House seemingly had no contextual references to the forms of neighbouring roofs and suspended platforms. Timothy was proposing instead to deploy a set of internationally referenced standards to this particular situation. He could be seen as naïve, yet he was not resisting or reacting to anything. We were drawing on our familiarity with European examples of houses in warm climates, in particular the type of a tall garden wall set against the street. It made sense to me.

Yet it was thought to be not just careless, but indecent—as the design enabled excellent views to and from the street! Timothy nonetheless advocated tirelessly and generously with the resistant Council planners,

on behalf of what was a for him a relatively small, low-budget project.

Notwithstanding the condemnations, fears and numerous delays, planning approval was finally granted in October 1998.

FINISHING TOUCHES

For a while, passers-by enquired whether the house was a new café or bar, or a furniture showroom. The builders, originally from Italy, thought that it resembled a stable, and nicknamed it The Donkey House—hence the D House! The timber screens, gates, banquettes, and painting of the plaster-board walls took place while Timothy and I first lived in the house (as friends), and the craftspeople stayed over sometimes while discussions, sketches and works progressed in those first months of inhabitation. A little later came the beautiful drawers in the two private ‘addresses’, or rooms off the main room; and then the little seat at the northeast corner of the garden terrace overlooking the street. The architect brought the house to Practical Completion in July 2000, and for me then it was all planting—or rather trying to learn about planting. I learned that architecture is never completely finished.

T H E D H O U S E H AS A L I F E O F I T S O W N

It seems extraordinary to me that after the D House was announced as the winner of the 2001 national Robin Boyd Award for New Residential Architecture, the local council started to publish the urban consolidation paradigm and façade of the D House as the one of the 11

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best examples of its own planning policies. It is possibly still not really understood quite how unusual the house was in its location at the time. It was radical and unlike anything else built in Brisbane then. Although the D House exceeded architectural expectations when judged by Timothy’s peers—for its insightfulness, proficiency, elegance, etc.—and has achieved international recognition as a major cultural achievement, it was an intervention ahead of its time in Brisbane. I think we sometimes forget this. Our little transgression turned out to be influential though I think, and paved the way for ‘innovative’ designs for new houses and extensions in Brisbane to make their way smoothly through the council approvals process.

Almost immediately, Timothy and I hosted many international architects and students who came to visit my lovely small house.

I hovered around, and continued to learn how the house functioned as a place that enables and accommodates many different scales of events. Today, the D House continues to be enjoyed, visited, studied and commended for its capacity to be used for several purposes.

Also, for its “energy conservation and economy of construction”…its “timeless atmosphere and astute landscaping”. Timothy no longer lives with me at the D House, but he generously continues to help me to be its facilitator and custodian. I have enjoyed observing it become a cultural artefact that contributes to civic values—in Brisbane itself, and to an international audience too. It engages the general public, architects, designers, artists, lifestyle and fashion practitioners, journalists, photographers, students and academics. My house is a topic.

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From the 19th century onwards a small proportion of Australians with family connections to the UK and Europe travelled ‘abroad’ to study and pursue their careers.

Had someone in my parents’ generation been in the professions, they would have been required to spend time in Britain to finalise their qualifications. The late 1970s, and early 1980s, saw the tail end of a generation of young Australians able to obtain a British working visa until the age of 27, regardless of their nationality. Often newly qualified, off we went to travel and continue our studies or, our early careers in professional practice interspersed, perhaps with odd jobs. In 1980, I left a very suburbanised world in Brisbane for London, in order to experience a connection with the wider world.

I was a recently graduated speech pathologist with a teaching diploma in drama on the side, and an interest in things international; music and cuisines were passed on by my

parents who were readers rather than travellers. Understanding societies, cultural and professional conventions interested me, and that interest prevails today. I used public transport, I ate out, drank real coffee, ordered wine at bars and was served even if wearing ‘pants’. I made friends, visited other cities in France, Italy, Germany, Holland, Spain, North Africa, and North America and returned to Rome for a longer summer stay.

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Hill wrote about the house in 2002 for Haig Beck and Jackie Cooper’s UME Architecture Magazine. The article remains a good starting point for students, architects and others interested in the house.

The reason Brisbane had its funny little moment in the sun about ‘timber and tin’ was because it was interested in the colonial vernacular, and it was an idea that related to houses and somehow became

embedded in the town planning culture that everything should be made to look like a house.

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I think that the image came from a book about the Greek architect and town planner C.A. Doxiadis.

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www.jamesst.com.au/about

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At the Department of Architecture at the University of Queensland Timothy was exposed to international and multidisciplinary practitioners and educators, in particular Steven Szokolay, Brit Andresen and Michael Keniger among others.

Timothy Hill speaking during D House video assisted remote visit

by University of Queensland (UQ) architecture students, 2020.

9

Ibid.

10

Timothy Hill, in discussion with Geraldine Cleary in preparation for hosting a UQ Masters of Architecture student visit—and discussion about tectonics—in 2018.

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The 2001 Robin Boyd Award for Residential Buildings (Jury Verdict: The D House). Architecture Australia November 2001. Accessed on line 23 02 2023 at: www.architectureau. com/articles/robin-boyd-award-forresidential-buildings-6

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Architecture Australia 2001, see note 11.

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Under Hill’s supervision at Donovan Hill Architects at this time were a number of interns and students who have gone on to become notable practitioners themselves.

Michael Hogg (now Hogg and Lamb Architects, Brisbane) was working on my commission with Damian Eckersley (now BVN), both of whom then became architects at Donovan Hill; and Adrian Spence (now of Richards & Spence, Brisbane).

DECORUM

More Than You Asked Video call between Timothy Hill (21 February 2023 7:30am Hobart) and Patrick Lynch (20 February 2023 8:30pm London)

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PAT R I C K LY N C H : I am so happy to talk to you Timothy. As you know I visited Brisbane in September last year. I knew of your work, which was one reason why I was very happy to go to Brisbane, and seeing it in the flesh was very physically stimulating and intellectually satisfying. It was moving. I immediately began to do a bit of research about you, and I read the article in the Sparkkle magazine. Doug Neale and I became good friends over that week, and he sent me the UME journal as he was having a house clearance. I was very fortunate as we visited HH House the day after I arrived, and then D House.

Geraldine Cleary very kindly showed us around the latter and gave us a really fascinating talk where she quoted, I think, recent and also older conversations with you. I’m really curious if you wouldn’t mind unpacking something about the chronology of events, and I’ve also written down some themes which I hope I’ve gleaned with a degree of precision from what you’ve written and said, which relates to, in part, the role of reason in architecture and perhaps also law, and even perhaps Natural Law or convention, in your architectural philosophy.

You were going to study law I believe, and I am curious about that, but I think it leans into something else that you’ve spoken about, which is the role of collaboration. I’m interested in the meaning of collaboration as social action, and the issues that you’ve touched on where you’ve talked about “a house being a city”— which, I think is an Albertian allusion?—and also the role of climate and multiplicity

Opening page, above and opposite: D House

and it struck me, and it’s probably very pretentious and I’m sorry if it sounds pompous, that this is where the law and human well-being and goodness intersect?

T I M O T H Y H I L L : Oh gosh, don’t worry, I’m in charge of being

pretentious. It is a bit embarrassing how many people are in conversation about our conversation, but we have finally managed to have it. What a relief to finally have someone ask me about this, you have no idea.

P L : The D House is a kind of model of an ideal society, I think.

The thing that Geraldine set out to do, and of course you being the architect and subsequently housemate were embroiled in this too, was to create a kind of vision of an ideal society, one might argue.

I’m interested in the role of law and the role of reason in architecture in its ability to constitute civic life, even in the domestic realm— where there’s justice and friendship, and a kind of utopian possibility for a form of city life, even in a suburban setting; this really struck me rather palpably. It’s a practical and beautiful house of course, but it’s also a landscape, a garden, a room for talk and playful sensuality, pleasure, and serious play. I think it’s the best house I’ve ever been in, and I’ve been to lots of Siza’s and Aalto’s.

Whereas architect-designed houses are often for rich people, and are often kind of villas or retreats, or if they are in the city they are ostentatious and yet private; the kind of territorial character of the plan of D House, with open drawing rooms, an intermediate open 15

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service zone, and bedrooms beyond this, is an incredible climatic, temperate instrument—you know, like The Well Tempered Klavier

by JS Bach? The house feels as if it is a piece of perfectly calibrated music. It felt like I was in an instrument for social life, one designed for being a fuller version of a human being than is normally possible.

Does that resonate in any way?

T H : It’s interesting to have that played back to me because I suppose

I’ve slightly forgotten. I mean, what else would you do? In the sense that I think of those things as minimal, and that one day one might become kind of, I suppose, like a good architect as well. I guess there’s a few things that would likely be active for me to have taken what is, in a way, a very conservative position, which is not only to serve, but also thinking of any commission as an occasion; and that remembering, in the Australian cities, and Brisbane in particular, a lot of attributes of “civitas” and conduct are not taken for granted, and they’re not very present in the bigger sphere. A lot of the momentum comes from trying to slightly repair that, on the basis that if you can rehearse it in miniature, it might replicate in the larger.

So, that is fairly deliberate in the bigger buildings the same set of, I guess, obligations. For instance, at the State Library, in a deliberate attempt to try, and, on behalf of the city, reinforce the geniality and possibility of public places, there’s that huge outdoor terrace which is overlooking a roundabout; and yet it’s very un-tough. One side of it is completely open to the air, but the interior walls are made of mirrored teacup cabinets. The teacups have a beautiful overlay of becoming collections, especially as they’ve been celebratory. When various members of the British Royal Family visit Brisbane there

would be a tea service, or when you’ve had a cyclone, or something, you know it’s all over when you meet and have a cup of tea after the whole thing. And having the tea itself is one of the things that’s at east acknowledged as a ritual in Australia, I guess. So, the idea that in somewhere like rough and tumble Brisbane, a civic place beside a road would have walls made of beautifully built cupboards where the shelves are trapezoidal mirrors and the teacups are stacked… to make a room out of something so delicate, and to make it so heavyhanded about reminding people about that opportunity, and then to use as a form of ornament something that is self-supported, not only a library concept of collecting, but also the rituals of doing things together… to do that in Brisbane is kind of reactionary. I suppose it’s a very “Please, please, please be gentle”, kind of move.

It’s something we perhaps would have to decide on pretty early on, I think, how much energy to divert into this. Many of these outcomes are conditioned by practice because practice in Australia is extraordinarily regulation focussed, and in legalistic terms very harsh. So, the actual contractual processes required to yield the building in the end very typically involve a lot of not only argy bargy, but exposure to what you would hope never to see in people when you’re trying to do a project with them. On the whole, making buildings tends to bring out the worst in Australians. I think we better not divert there, but I guess there are just some soaked-in legality, and that the action of the reasoning in my experience necessarily overlaps with the action of trying to achieve the thing at all. To actually proceed through procurement I mean.

P L : So, are you saying that the thinking in legalistic terms is the event

of designing itself, part of the reasonableness of imaginative design?

T H : One was trying to look for how the overlap of thinking about

Above and opposite: Queensland State Library

the design would apply with how you would also achieve it; so they 17

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are inextricably overlapped in my mind. You just have to rely on so much reasoned argument to be able to get the thing built. It has to go through preposterous town planning processes, which are very adjectival and amateur, then through very challenging contractual and legal things. So, unless you can reason your way through these processes, nothing good gets built. I’m not sure how other people manage. How one practises, and how one designs seem necessarily to me to need to overlap, especially if one is just honest about it.

So many architects rely on narratives and storytelling which has two features I realise. One is that narratives are much easier to accept by groups. If you have a group of people it’s very easy for them to agree to a story, compared to having them agree to something of importance that they would need to agree about otherwise. And then the other thing, is that which is just the dynamics of dealing with the many, many people one has to negotiate with on the way to making a building. Design of a building is just so easy in comparison to actually ever making the damn things.

P L : I completely agree.

T H : And hilariously efficient too.

Above and opposite: Queensland State Library

P L : David Chipperfield once said to me that designing a building is

relatively easy, if you can do it well, but designing an office is really, really difficult. I agree. It’s interesting because the role of rhetoric in design in the Ciceronian sense of being statesman-like and the way he was a lawyer defending the republic, seeing rhetoric as an art, is replaced by this “Metaphoratitis”…

T H : Thank you for saying that, yes.

P L : … adjectival shit about shapes rather than…

T H : Or anything, anything, not even a shape. Just a story about,

any kind of story. The other thing it does is, it’s a trap because it leaves open architects being exposed as sort of rattlers or hucksters.

I suppose you can see the profession is resorting to trying to have something that it owns. So, if they can appear creative and mysterious in a way that other people can’t be, then at least that’s something that they’ve got still, I suppose. From an ethical point of view, I don’t think it’s necessary for architects to claim to be “creative” or worse still, to ever use the pronoun, meaning “I want”. The worst thing an architect can say is “I want”. It’s a banned phrase: anyone in the office that uses it has to stand outside for half an hour, and I’ve completely ground whole critique sessions to a halt when I’ve said, for the whole afternoon, to go forward, you can’t use any pronouns. It’s not Your 19

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Building, and you can’t say what you want, but otherwise please proceed… and then the thing freezes up. In other words, I think that there must be something very powerful there.

P L : I completely agree. I’ve spent 25 years saying to students, “Please stop saying I want!” You’re not a billionaire or a sociopathic celebrity, you are a professional person with expertise based upon observation and evidence, and based on professional knowledge and skill you might suggest that this may happen, this is appropriate, this is a reasonable assumption, this is a good idea, etc.

T H : And the fact that there is a discipline.

P L : Exactly. Architecture is a discipline.

T H : The whole thing in Australia with the Metaphortitis, is that it’s

become such a kind of thing of personal storytelling, and the words they use like “weaving”, and all this kind of nonsense, that actually they’ve kind of turned into caricatures. Whereas, I think it’s much more constructive just to establish—or I suppose in a project I’m simply trying to assert—that architecture is a profession, and there is a very substantial and useful body of architectural knowledge.

The reason to use an architect allies with this idea. It just has so many overlaps with why we treat and consider professions to be professions.

One is that a profession has a recognised body of knowledge; but a professional, like a doctor, is the one that can make that knowledge applicable to circumstance. In a sense, that’s what differentiates the nurse from the doctor. The nurse knows the procedure to help, but the doctor has to configure what is actually happening here, and that diagnostic capacity, and then the movement to convert diagnosis to treatment, is exactly what you’d expect of a lawyer or a doctor or a dentist. And so, it is very interesting in Australia that the term Architect is a legal term. And yet since Grand Designs, of course, everyone is now an “architect”. So, the thing about the profession and the professional aspect of architecture is I think—it just occurs to me—is worthwhile because it gives a clue to how the profession could function in society. It gives direction to what would happen with the resources that are used in making the built environment, and it has the potential of being respectful, in that if our profession would offer knowledge, and be able to recount the benefits of this, then it would be joining a much bigger history, both in terms of city making, and in professional histories, i.e. than to have been diverted to trying to participate in pleasing, and in the enigma of popularity and all that stuff.

P L : I completely agree. I’m interested in the fact that you use the term

ethical, which I think is key to this.

T H : Yes, yes, it is.

Opposite: Queensland State Library

P L : Ethical action that is situational, responsive, empathetic, but also— I think that what you’re talking about is—the world of praxis, and the type of imagination that is required for praxis. I was very impressed when you said, “the drawing is the site”. I suppose it’s difficult to know who has produced a drawing if it’s a collaborative process, with many hands, and the site drawing is an aspect of skill, a form of poetics, where conscience is enacted ethically for a designer I believe. Perhaps this is close to what craftspeople do, i.e. making skilled work with a conscience? I’m thinking of architectural conscience as an expression of skill and craft, i.e. where issues of tectonics, practicality, the material, economic, climatic and the poetic potential of architecture reside in an ethical way?

Instead, I think we’ve got into a cult of drawings in architectural education now, where graphics and comic illustration stand in for buildings, and therefore the architect is operating like a kind of idiot savant impersonating a stupid person’s idea of what an artist is, i.e. the Ayn Randian model of the architect depicted in The Fountainhead.

You know, in a bullshit society you get Bullshit Jobs, as the late LSE anthropologist David Graeber suggested, and I think that architecture has become a kind of strand of bullshit culture. I think there’s a lot of bullshit in architecture, in an attempt to make it into an art, and something that you can sell; but this pseudo-art doesn’t transcend the pragmatics of situations, it just sidesteps the things that we are good at, e.g. like making drawings that make sense to people when we have to participate in a public consultation event or forum, stand up and talk in a planning committee meeting at a Town Hall, talk about design ideas to politicians, talk to money men, talk to the general public, our informed, intelligent fellow citizens, etc. in favour of pseudo-creativity, bullshit creativity.

T H : Because there really are things we do know that are useful to

society, rather than useful to trying to position the architect as being important.

P L : Yes. T H : The other nice one is the North Americans, in fact, are very good

at writing about design as the action of deploying logic. Meaning, that the processes of deduction, where you simultaneously review and project, is very interesting. Michael Benedict…

P L : … who wrote An Architecture of Reality (1988)…

T H : Yes, Benedict was the one who came up with that great term

about “urban machismo”. Anyway, I think Benedict’s work is excellent because he also encourages me to completely ban the word “creative”, and because he’s done all that work on value. Poor thing, he became so educated that he went off and wrote this incredible book from start to finish about the concept of value. He has a nice little thing about points for more reasonable architecture, where he actually goes into an area where most architects wouldn’t dare, and suggests a tax structure for poor performance; and also a very clever thing about suggesting for society that if you just orchestrated something systemic involving people who are truly skilled and prosecuted 15 years’ worth of very good 21

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schools, then this is the most difference you could make: you would be producing all these people who had had contact with the benefits of sensible environment, and who would therefore commence to expect it.

Again, he is just so pragmatically brilliant.

You were speaking about craftsmen, and the enthusiasm for what can be produced, but again that’s where it’s handy to resort to the definition of professional. The craftsperson is very skilled in their territory, but it is the architect who is expected to have judgement. And so, for instance you see a lot of craftspeople who make things that are absolutely a total testament to skill and commitment, but they didn’t kind of hit the mark in terms of style—it’s often a style drama. You see the thing is, if you start to look at it from a professional perspective, it lets you use some naughty words—style and taste—that are actually value-neutral. Unfortunately, if you can’t use those words within a professional and reasoned dialogue it goes off on a tangent, because to say that there is a certain taste or a certain style means that you’re dealing with a certain sort of person: the professional position does let you use the necessary terms, I believe, with a lot of precision.

So, for instance, professionally, there’s really no need to use the word “context”, because context is sort of a drummed-up word that means that administrators can get involved; it really doesn’t serve any other purpose. Meaning that you have town planners who say that because of “the context” you should “break it up a bit’, which is the major Australian Town Planning concept, e.g. “because of the context you ought to break it up a bit.” The immensity of the inbuilt fearfulness in that statement is really alarming. And then the idea that the only thing that might matter is the idea that something is perceived of as a bit bigger, or a bit smaller… whereas character, composition, performance are much more important. You know, I’ve had so many conversations with people trying to get things approved in terms of the streetscape, where you’ve just got to go back to Architecture 101 and explain that the streets they often like tend to lack driveways; and they particularly tend to lack driveways onto ramps into basements, and they are most extraordinarily devoid of vast amounts of fire alarms and exhaust equipment and control valves.

So that one of the ways you produce a streetscape is not with shapes, it’s with configuration, and so you must be able to deal with legislation, or it’ll just be a mess, no matter its scale.

We’ve a project in Melbourne, which is very ambitious, because it tries to reconcile the town plan with the National Construction Code for the purpose of being able to occupy the building legally for commercial use or residentially. Which, if you just look at the history of the world, is the standard inner urban condition. What is incredible though is that many Australian architects don’t seem to notice that in European cities people lived on top of the shops. And then think that they are working over here in a sort of zonal prison camp, where these things just make so much immense and conditional difference. You know, if you don’t put the carpark under the building, so that people from the carpark have to use the footpath, that contributes to street activity. I’ve just got a hundred of these examples. Where you take this proposition, there’s the roleplay, an important word for me. And it has a companion word which I try to encourage myself to use more, which is “dramaturgy.” So, I think that next time I get challenged about being a designer, I think I’m just going to say, “actually no, I’m a dramaturgist!”

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P L : Talk about dramaturgy to me please, because you talked about

occasion and ritual, so carry on, I know what you mean, I think.

T H : You’re the first person I’ve ever spoken to who said “I know what

you mean”.

P L : I know exactly what you mean, I wrote a book called The Theatricality

of the Baroque City and a PhD about artworks and civic space.

T H : Orchestrating for the dramaturgy of life, especially because

dramaturgy implies the public and private: Dramaturgy is about how, when there’s an occasion, then there are certain things, another suite of things that apply. The difference between being public and private is what keeps us alive. There is a whole chapter to be written about the misunderstanding of “transparency” and Freudianism—and everything about trying to make the continuous person, the transparent person.

The person you see through the glass in the flat, in the apartment, is somehow the same person that conducts themselves on the street.

They are the same person, but with completely different manners.

P L : I completely agree—I think we were perhaps separated at birth maybe to some degree Tim, because I know exactly what you mean.

It’s this dimension of the theatricality of selfhood, and how buildings are not just one thing, and that the functionalist paradigm—and The Enlightenment and The Reformation understanding of selfhood as something which is inviolate and autonomous—is what led to what Aldo Rossi calls “Pathological Types” i.e. buildings whose use dies out after twenty years. You can’t do anything with these building so you have to throw them away, as opposed to what he calls “Projective Typologies”, which is how most Italians and European cities are made. Their architecture and people are oriented, in a dramatic way, towards an idea of urbanity as life taking the stage—a civic stage—to play out a civil role where issues of decorum, character, the proximity of commercial domestic and civic life interplay…

T H : … and deference…

P L : … yes, and with decorum.

T H : In every situation, the architect, as professional, has to configure

what the building is going to defer to. And that’s the opposite condition of, “Well, because I’m the architect what I am going to do here is What I Want”—which is a completely different condition to the professional one.

P L : Most architects seem to not look at what’s there already. Or at

least most 20th century architects, post Second World War didn’t, and architects still don’t seem to situate themselves, or look around.

It’s like a drunk person walking into a party who just starts talking into a megaphone. In contrast, despite all the guff that’s written about the supposed “autonomy” of his work, right at the beginning, Palladio says, “The greatest glory in architecture is knowing what is appropriate.”

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T H : Correct, great word.

P L : And from that—appropriate—you get decorum, dignity, deference…

T H : … Judgement…

P L : Judgement, discernment, exactly.

T H : On the first page of Book 1 he’s valuing judgement, he’s making a

professional declaration.

P L : Exactly, I think that’s it. What I’m getting at is I’ve been trying to write something, having studied moral philosophy and theology recently on top of a PhD (about theatricality and the relationship between architecture and landscape and festivity and the role of sculpture in this) is that the role of an architect is like the role of any other craftsman, if you understand making as “poesis”, i.e. as poetics. Poetics has to do not necessarily just with making physical things, but also rhetoric; it’s also about making judgements. It’s the ability to convince people— reasonable people—politicians, business people, that what you’re doing is making a contribution to the continuity of the collective imagination that we see manifest as the city: and to do so that it might be necessary to be deferential to other things, such as cathedrals, town halls etc.

T H : Or what’s pre-existing generally. The whole thing is the tremendous

arrogance of thinking that when you’re making a building that you’re

Above: Asplund’s Town Hall at Gothenburg, Aalto’s Säynatsalo Town Hall

not adding or subtracting from something that’s already there. I mean, there’s already a design there. Anyway, it’s particularly poignant in Australia where so many places have had a building placed there for the very first time, ever. And yet if you look at most Australian architectural domestic outputs, the glory of the site is sort of, you know, enough, you’re halfway there. And so, we’ve got this tremendous thing in Australia about views, as if the view has got a lot of competition as a value. …I think there’s another thing to be mindful of, and be a bit sad about, because the need for the architect to “convince”, I think, is very new, and very embedded in the silly way that students become inducted in the idea that to make a building requires you to be persuasive, which I think is false. It’s very interesting to read pre-modern biographies of architects, and so forth, because persuasion was not an issue, especially looking at the competition results and jury comments and so forth in the very early Scandinavian situation, for example Asplund’s Town Hall at Gothenburg (1936). And, you know, Aalto’s project in a timber camp, the Säynatsalo Town Hall (1949) too. It’s not that people needed persuading: the presumption was that they were after quality, and that’s how they judged the schemes that were submitted to them.

In a funny way, it’s really about the closing down of the big Italian patrons, the Florentine families that didn’t interfere with what the Renaissance architects were doing for them. They just wanted it to be incredibly good. And so, the collaboration was about facilitating that.

So, they facilitate the opportunity, and in exchange the professional does their best work. And that makes sense to me because at the moment, it is presumed that everyone has to be persuaded and convinced, and when the architect is involved, they are just introduced into a battlefield.

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P L : … I went to the TRI building in Brisbane and was also in the State Library of Queensland; there was a conference there, and I spoke, and had lunch in the beautiful room that you describe. I think you’ve always been working with very close attention to the situational and have created a kind of super-ecstatic abundance of possibilities. It’s a talent of mind and a brilliant super-fluidity of crafting space.

T H : And capacity to lie.

I think is an ontological orientation of the imaginative person which allows…

T H : … no, not a creative person, of the relevant professional…

P L : … nonetheless the creative capacity of the imagination of the professional to encourage people to do something better than simply gawking at a spectacle or being impressed by something that has a certain kind of glamour and allure, and instead live well.

P L : …to find something akin to Natural Law, where everybody can

agree upon its inevitability, and I think what I found so exciting about seeing your work was not only the beauty, the attention to detail…

T H : … Oh yeah, well of course you would attend to detail, that’s just

conspicuous in the location, it’s international practice…

T H : Then you touch on the other thing, because there is the thing,

I described earlier about the necessity for the professional to apply discrimination to particular circumstance based on their immense knowledge base; the other thing about the professional is the presumption that one would deploy that knowledge and that opportunity to do more than one was asked.

P L : … was that it was strategic. That was the thing that I think was so

amazing, that I could see how you could jump from the small houses to the larger projects really quickly, and I think they retain a sort of strategy towards climate…

T H : … absolutely…

P L : … and human beings, and the situational intelligence of how you can encourage interaction and a way of being fully human, which

P L : Yes, for the common good?

T H : For any good. Like, if you go to the doctor, you don’t just want the

knee fixed. You expect the doctor to make either a really good go of the knee, or to discover that you’ve got blood cancer, or something, at the same time. And you see the nurse is just going to stick to the knee, it’s not going to occur to the nurse that you might have blood cancer, they are just in a procedure.

It’s that whole thing which I end up having to explain to people: “Of course, we did more than you asked, it’s our obligation.”

Above and opposite: Translational Research Institute

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This spread and overleaf: Translational Research Institute

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This spread and following pages: Daylesford Longhouse

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An Extended Family Edward Jones, 15 September 2023, Dublin

I am very happy to be here. This occasion feels like me coming home.

People ask, “Why are Maxwell and Scott exhibiting in Dublin?”

My response to such inquisitors is that architecture is an extended family with an indifference to national boundaries. Certainly antiBrexit, and in Bob and Celia’s case theirs was one of the most quietly influential and extensive of families. This family has many branches in surprisingly different and diverse places; Liverpool, London, Ulster, the Ivy League, the Veneto and of course, Dublin, all represented by many of the characters in Celia’s, extraordinary display of busts and in Maxwell’s projects, books and, above all the words of inspiration, forming the collaborative basis of this occasion and not forget his inspirational jazz piano, which I wish we had on this evening and particularly his Teddy Wilson right hand.

Unlike the polarity closed shop represented by the functional determinism of the high tech lobby, as one extreme and on the other hand, Historical Revivalism, Maxwell and Scott have occupied that more complex Other ground—a whole topic raised by Kenneth Frampton in a recent book about Modern Architecture—the Other Modern Architecture, this other world is exemplified by two of Bob Maxwell’s Liverpool contemporaries, Colin Rowe, and Jim Stirling, and also by Alan Colquhoun, who met Bob in World War Two listening to Mozart under the canvas in India, very different the origins in Liverpool. These characters and the practice of Colquhoun and Miller might be said to represent the four most influential corners of my architectural world.

Bob and Celia in combination with this particular society, have maintained a discourse for the revival, the architecture of humanism, and the continuing relevance of the Modern Movement, an important presence of art in our lives. Bob’s revival of the Festival Hall on London’s Southbank in the early 1960s should be mentioned, as London’s most distinguished modern place, followed by his commitment to urban housing, of which I gather Ken will talk about the Southwood Park housing in Highgate. The architecture of space containment has been vigorously advocated by Bob for the existing city as in his support review of Temple Bar here in Dublin, by Group 91, and in opposition to the current enthusiasm for object fixation as represented by the City of London’s most unfortunate skyline... I mean, it could be anywhere in Texas, maybe Houston actually.

And so the busts of Celia Scott were also welcome return to representation. As Alan Colquhoun has observed, “the work recalls that of Lucian Freud in painting, but their sensibilities are utterly

Opposite: Irish Architectural Archive, 2022

different”. And so they remain on this occasion in the other two rooms, as silent but knowing observers of events.

I have known Bob all my architectural life and it was my good fortune to have been taught by him in my second year at the AA in 1959. And also by Alan in my thesis year, and then have worked beside Bob in Douglas Stephen’s office in 1963 during his production of Southwood Park housing in Highgate, and then to teach with both of them in Princeton in the 1980’s A brief word about Douglas Stephen, another Liverpool contemporary. It was Douglas who gave support in his office at the time, so that Le Corbusier’s maxim, architecture AM, paint PM. Well, if not painting, Bob and Ken both taught PM and in Ken’s case, he also was technical editor of Architectural Design, during one of its most celebrated periods. I think this is an important Maxwellian legacy combination of theory and practice. The combination of theory and practice, in opposition to that dreadful adage, “those that can, build, those who can’t, teach”.

In all these situations, I’ve been impressed by Bob’s appearance, particularly at the AA in the late 1950s. Whereas Peter Smithson wore Brutalist boiler suits and flowery shirts, Cedric Price, starched white collars, and Peter Cook, the inevitable green spectacles, Bob had a certain George Smiley appearance, of undistinguished raincoats and NHS glasses. But behind this quiet camouflage, not unlike Le Carré’s hero lurked something else. He was the consummate chairman, the room fell silent when he spoke in that mellifluous voice. He was just the best, he would find something not uninteresting to say about the most uninteresting project, but leaving us in no doubt as to its quality and value. And so, when he became dean of Princeton School of Architecture, this came as no surprise to his many ex-students.

So, young Irish architects sought conversation with Colin Rowe at Cornell, resulting in Derek Tynan’s splendid Phoenix Park project for Dublin, whilst others gained employment with Jim Stirling, Alan Colquhoun and John Miller in London, and there are also those who attended Bob Maxwell’s School of Architecture at Bartlett and later Princeton University, again, with Alan Colquhoun. And not to forget those inspiring conversations with the late Kevin Kieran at the GSD in Harvard. It was the result of Ivor Smith’s flying circus following the closure of the UCD School of Architecture in the late 1960s, which introduced me, with others from the Grunt Group in London, and from Glasgow and most notably, Andy McMillan and Izzy Metztein to the school, a marvellous overlapping period of teaching.

I would say what was to become known, I think, rather condescendingly, as the Irish architectural Renaissance, was partly due to Ivor’s initiative. It should also be observed that this renaissance 39

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was further consolidated by the return of Shane de Blacam from Louis Kahn’s office in Philadelphia. And in 1972, the directorship of UCD passed the to the late Cathal O’Neill, presently returning from Mies’s office in Chicago, who genuinely encouraged a younger teaching staff in the Ivor Smith tradition, of which many of those at this occasion today formed part of his teaching staff.

Then followed John Miller’s School of Architecture manqué, as Peter Cook described it, again, rather condescendingly, at the Royal College of Art in London, in the 1970s. Here Sheila O’Donnell was a student, then on to Stirling’s office before re-joining John in Dublin to start their practice in 1988. It was here Paul Keogh met Rachel Chidlow before taking a similar route home via Big Jim’s office. And then I remember Yvonne Farrell, Shay Cleary and Tony Murphy, who I described as the ‘early Graftons’, working for the so called ‘Grunt Group’ in the early 70s, on housing terraces by the half mile in length in Milton Keynes and with Neave Brown in Camden.

For some reason we were regrettably denied Shelley McNamara’s company. Tony Murphy, then much to everyone’s admiration, went on to build Corb’s house for his mother of 1925, for his own parents on 40

a hillside, outside Dublin, at Sandyford in 1977. And so, I ask, “where are you, Tony? Does anyone know?” Now, Grafton, as you all well know, are building with many awards, in Toulouse, Peru, and closer to home, at Kingston University, and the LSE and have just completed a building for Selfridges on Oxford Street. O’Donnell and Tuomey have also built impressively at the LSE and will soon complete the new School of Architecture at Liverpool, Bob’s alma mater, thereby squaring the circle where monologue began.

Hopefully, in the not-too-distant future, the now annual Maxwell Memorial Lecture in Liverpool will be delivered in John and Sheila’s new building a class for them to be awarded the Stirling Prize for it.

This hopefully answers the question, why are Maxwell and Scott exhibiting in Dublin, today?

This essay also appears in Ideas, Faces and Places: Sweet Disorder and the Carefully Careless, by Celia Scott, Robert Maxwell and others, published by Canalside Press, 2023.

Above: RIBA exhibition Opposite, clockwise from top left: Edward Jones, MJ Long, Peter Eisenman, Leon Krier

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An Art Museum Embedded in the Landscape Kerstin Thompson 42

AN AR T M US E U M E M B E D D E D I N T H E L AN D S CAP E

For millennia fire and flood have shaped this landscape. Bundanon’s buildings and landscapes are designed for resilience and resistance, incorporating radical solutions to a changing climate with a net zero energy target and defendable against fire and flood. Two years ago fire tore through the adjacent forest, then flooding followed months later. So the building and landscape design approach was necessarily driven by resilience, resistance and ecological repair.

Gifted to the Australian people by Arthur and Yvonne Boyd, Bundanon’s purpose is to foster an appreciation and understanding of art and environment.

The new works enable expanded programming towards this and open up this extraordinary place and its $46.5M collection to the public with an art museum of national significance. Developed as a rich ensemble of distinct periods in Bundanon’s evolution, the new site wide works are equal parts subtle and dramatic, preserving and transforming, defendable against fire and flood.

The Art Museum, with Collection Store, is resistant to fire. It is subterranean.

Precious artworks are housed and exhibited in an underground building, which protects the works from diverse climate conditions and offers thermal stability in the form of the reinstated hill (which also maintains the setting for the Boyd Education Centre by Murcutt, Lewin and Lark), reducing the demand on mechanical systems.

By contrast the Bridge is resilient. Treated as flood infrastructure the architecture supports rather than impedes the overland flow and sporadic floodwaters below it. A 165-metre-long by a 9-metre-wide structure that at one end abuts the Art Museum within the sloping hillside, bridges the reinstated wet gully and accommodates 32 bedrooms, breezeways, creative learning, dining spaces and a public cafe.

This response also engenders an appreciation for climate and its vicissitudes.

The thermal stability of the subterranean museum, the feeling of coolth from being within the hill is counterpointed by being on The Bridge which, in the spirit of Boyd’s practice of painting en plein air, is where climate variation is central to visitor experience and a way to connect with place.

The concept preserves aspects of the current setting, especially around the Boyd Education Centre,while an array of new and compelling visitor experiences are enabled. It responds to the landscape as both subject and site of Arthur Boyd’s work and draws upon key interests evident in his paintings: the dynamic landscapes of fire and flood, the contrast and interplay between natural and cultural, indigenous and exotic landscapes as fundamental inspiration to new works.

The trans-disciplinary approach to the site masterplan embeds a major shift in thinking about significant landscapes: from a purely picturesque to an ecological one that takes account of the natural and extended environmental systems at its heart.

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In Praise of the Town House Amy Young

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IN PRAISE OF THE TOWN HOUSE

Sitting proudly on Penrhyn Road, the Town House by Grafton Architects has a striking grandeur and maturity, giving Kingston University the long overdue civic presence it deserves.

Generous precast columns are pushed from the building’s envelope, forming loggias along each elevation. The façade has a clear rhythm and order, providing space for occupation and activity.

After entering through an understated revolving door, the full height of the building is revealed; a winding staircase leading you from ground to level six. Moving upwards into the main library, tables and bookshelves look out over the atrium; your eyeline directed to the roofscape of Kingston and the Thames beyond. Large expanses of glazing to the West not only open the institution to the street, but flood light into the space, casting a series of shadows through the open balustrades. The rhythm of the day and the seasons results in an everchanging atmosphere and light display; the interaction between the architecture and the sun creating a sequence of small moments of art.

Inside the Town House there is both an openness and intimacy, with Grafton cleverly accommodating a dichotomy of user needs.

The diverse programme is arranged in such a way that the dance faculty, library, café and project spaces sit harmoniously besides each other, encouraging chance encounter and mingling between faculties.

Nestled in the centre of the plan, the ‘Courtyard’ provides a dignified space for the users to perform and teach, facilitating both festival and play. Internal openings allow the onlooker to peer down into the ’Courtyard’, extending the invitation of performance beyond the audience, to those simply sitting in the library.

A hum of chatter fills the Town House as students gather, basking in the late March sun. Bodies longue relaxed on chairs, with groups segmented and organised by the structural grid, as the precast concrete columns define various scales of spaces. At 6.4m centres, the long spans create a fluidity of movement throughout the building, giving the user freedom to roam and occupy the space as they please. The structural grid is an integral part of ensuring the ‘Town House’ is able to adapt to user needs; floors can be removed and partitions added, creating more appropriate spaces for the institution throughout its lifetime. The building was envisioned by Grafton to operate like a useful piece of equipment, ensuring its function today doesn’t intrude onto its future potential.

This functionalist approach at the ‘Town House’ is noticeable throughout the building’s interiors, as the structural elements are left exposed. Lighting, data, AV, security and other conduit is placed within the columns, neatly concealing the servicing and removing the need for clunky boxing out. Looking up, soffits are bare, revealing the double tee units and slab, which radiantly cool the Town House through an integrated thermo activated building system.

The precast concrete structural frame is precise, each element fitting together like a jigsaw, with control exercised from conception to completion. Internally, the concrete appears buffed, with a slight shine reflecting the carefully positioned lighting. The cool tones of the grey are balanced by the warmth in the hardwood floors and anodized window frames, reliving the Town House from the harshness of the concrete mass. Moving outside, the colonnade is treated differently; the columns are lightened to a dusty white, a tectonic nod to its the

Portland stone neighbours. Despite its slightly clunky form, the assertive and confident street elevation is home to deep terraces that shade the library, preventing the summer sun from overheating the space. Doors and windows are opened manually, eliminating the complexity of a mechanical ventilation system and providing the user with complete autonomy over their environment.

In conversation with Grafton Architects earlier this year, the team spoke with such modesty about the success of the Town House. As they unravelled their processes and methods, a stance of a deep empathy and care towards the architecture they were designing dominated the dialogue. From continual consultation with various user groups, to building respectful and understanding relationships with the project team; it felt as if the architecture was born out of a genuine desire to carefully craft a building of joy.

Grafton director, Gerard Carty, explained that as a result of the brief written by the Kingston University jury committee, even from the early competition stages the student was at the heart of the scheme. There was a clear need for the architecture to be welcoming and inclusive, as for many studying at the institution, it could be their first interaction with third level education. Carty noted that the head of pedagogy had a particularly pivotal role in the brief formation, as she had ‘an incredible outlook for building spaces for students.’

‘The student needs space to grow into themselves and into the institution. Going to college and being in a place where you are meeting so many different people, is such an important part of life at university. Their time in Kingston could be such a positive experience and that positive experience can be engendered by the structures that surround it, by the architecture we inhabit.’ (Kingston University Jury Committee, 2012?).

The Grafton team alluded that the Town House always set out to be a building that could transform the lives of the people it served; an idea borrowed from early modernism. Boasting a series of beautiful and dignified spaces, the project offers the community at Kingston University an opportunity to flourish; which in the realm of higher education architecture, is usually only reserved for the elite institutions of Oxford and Cambridge.

Whether done knowingly or not, since its completion Grafton’s Town House has acted quietly as a political symbol; a reactionary to the neoliberal capitalist system it finds itself within. It might not be a loud anarchist statement, but Grafton have managed to create an architecture that pushes back against the governments nearubiquitous position of profit making as a core principal of life, to instead celebrate the arts and facilitate critical thinking. At the Town House the student is not a consumer, nor education a commodity; the marketization of higher education by Cameron’s coalition is rejected, to instead promote learning and knowledge acquisition as the sole purpose of the institution.

Despite the social successes at the Town House, when the project won the 2021 Stirling prize, it faced a sea of harsh criticism for its (assumed) negative environmental impact. The six storeys of concrete and array of indulgent finishes presents the building as a carbon guzzling entity, seemingly complicit in the climate crisis. Upon speaking with the Grafton team, they acknowledged that the building 59

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most likely has a high embodied carbon and that the criticism they faced was based on truth, but insisted that fact alone does not constitute the ‘Town House’ to be unsustainable piece of architecture.

Through the process of listening and learning, the architects worked in unison with the wider design team to ultimately produce a piece of holistic architecture; navigating the complexities of ‘sustainable’ western design and often convoluted regulations. From the integrated environmental systems to the flexibility of the plan, the Town House exercises a high level of efficiency at both the micro and the macro scale; minimising energy consumption and maximising building performance throughout its lifetime. The carefully considered design of the ‘Town House’ grants it the opportunity to become an architecture of permanence; anchored in place for decades to come and weaving itself into the very fabric of life; existing in harmony with our ecological and social landscapes.

Perhaps the partial disregard for the immediacy of the climate crisis, in exchange for high quality and durable design is an anthropocentric way of operating, but creating a caring world means 60

rebuilding and democratising social infrastructures and shared spaces across all scales; expanding support and creating alliances with progressive movements and institutions in the process. Unless a full societal shift to a degrowth economic model occurred overnight, resulting in a complete abstinence from building, the Town House signifies one of the most ‘sustainable’ models of praxis currently on offer; responding to the constraints of the present and accounting for the demands of the future.

Since its Stirling prize win, one hopes that it is not the masterful concrete caverns of the Town House that are remembered, but instead the sensitivity and consideration Grafton poured into the project; the affinity they created between themselves and the design which ensured the building was a successful translation of all the contradictory requirements, expectations, needs and constraints thrust upon it. In a time when building undeniably places the future of our planet on the line, my hope is that where new architecture is the only feasible option, it is given the same rigour and care as the Grafton team devoted to the Town House.

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Landscapes as State of Mind Nicolas Feldmeyer

The landscape images in the present selection don’t depict actual places. They are imagined compositions. Sometimes I like to think of them as states of mind—there is a strange symmetry between contemplating wide expanses and introspection— as beautifully studied in the chapter “Intimate Immensity” of Gaston Bachelard’s book The Poetics of Space: And this contemplation [of grandeur] produces an attitude that is so special, an inner state that is so unlike any other, that the daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of immensity. (…)

Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone.

As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense.

These images are constructed either with 3D software or with watercolour. The two processes couldn’t be more different. The first one is iterative, digital, laborious.

Fractal landscapes are bathed in algorithmic sunlight. The images are created by adjusting numerical parameters—sometimes for months on end—controlling every aspect of the image, from the position of the objects, depth of field of the virtual camera to the density of atmospheric particles. The second process, watercolour, is one of flowing restraint, of lightness of touch, immediacy of hand, and letting go (someone said that the best point to stop working on a watercolour is 20 minutes before you stopped).

What both media do have in common is their use in architectural drawing.

Before sudying Fine Art I did a Masters in architecture. I got so drawn into architectural representation that it actually distracted me from doing architecture— early on I bought a book about 18th century architectural drawings (Boullee, Piranesi, …), pointing out the poetic power of architectural images, which left a particularly strong impression on me.

Other sources of inspiration, in no particular order, include Sublime Romantic paintings (C.D. Friedrich, Turner), the windows or arches at the back of Renaissance paintings looking out onto distant landscapes, looking at small things as if they were huge (an exercise recommended by John Ruskin to his students), childhood memories, and dreams—I have recurring dreams of landscapes.

I love to think that inspiration can be older than we are, somehow. I once found a painting my grandmother worked on in her youth, almost a hundered years ago—a melancholy sunset over wide fields. She had to stop her fine art studies to look after her family. Maybe the landscapes still need finishing.

Opposite: Archway 2, 2020, 3D rendering, giclee print on Hahnemuehle Photo Rag paper, 60 × 90 cm Overleaf (left to right): Archway 3, 2020, 3D rendering, giclee print on Hahnemuehle Photo Rag paper, 60 × 90 cm; Pleiades, 2020, 3D rendering, giclee print on Hahnemuhle Photorag paper, 67.5 × 90cm

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Above: Hyperborean 5, 2022, watercolour and pencil on paper, 36 × 26cm Opposite: Nocturne, 2023, watercolour and pencil on paper, 20 × 29cm Previous spread (left to right): Cataclysm, 2021, 3D rendering, giclee print on Hahnemuhle Photorag paper, 71 × 100cm; Hyperborean 2, 2021, watercolour on paper, 40 × 60cm

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Terrain Vague 03, 2023, 3D rendering, giclée print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag paper, 150 × 100cm

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Knots: Lacanian reading of Semper’s Practical Aesthetics Filip Galic 72

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The intellectual turmoil of Gottfried Semper’s time was the result of a particular tension that ripened in the following century between continuity and innovation in the architectural discourse: the problematic desire to maintain tradition while at the same time finding genuine expressions of contemporary culture. As a response to the polarization of the discipline, torn between materialism and idealism, proto-functionalism and eclecticism, Semper sought to reconcile the crisis of his time by formulating a “fundamental principle of invention that with a logical certainty could lead to true form.”1 To turn architecture and art into a comparative science through the writing of Der Stil was his road out of the intellectual crisis.

The arrival of artifacts to the British Museum from the excavation of ancient Assyrian cities revealed a completely new civilization to the Hellenophilic 19th century audiences. The collection intrigued Semper and served as a key example in his attempt to trace the origins of art and explain its development through history. The “excavation” of historical layers would evolve into a method (ger.

Bekleidung) that links the primordial motifs and techniques to the more complex contemporary ones;2 that traces all architectural activity to transformational morphology based on the four critical crafts of the “willing hand’s working of inert material”: textiles, ceramics, carpentry, and stonemasonry.3 After tracing the origins, Semper attempted to determine with scientific certainty the correspondence between the laws of form, cultural praxis, and architectural representation with a formula in which art is the product of a functional relationship between definable coefficients (U= C(x,y,z…)); a practical aesthetics to explain the methods of artistic creation and invention.

This text seeks to construct an interpretative template that complicates Semper’s work beyond the established categorizations and argues that the often presented opposition between materialism and idealism in architecture is flawed. Employing the concept of Borromean knot, Semper’s Practical Aesthetics is read through a Lacanian lens.4 THE SYMBOLIC

The three turns of the Borromean knot represent the three registers of reality: the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real. The manner in which the strings pass over and under one another reveal their woven interdependence; should any string be severed the entire knot would come undone. As per Slavoj Žižek, the game of chess provides a clear illustration of the triad. One must follow certain rules to play the game which are its Symbolic dimension; from the purely formal symbolic standpoint, a ‘knight’ is defined only by its rightful moves.

The Imaginary dimension is the way different pieces are shaped and characterized by their names; it would be easy to envision a game with the same rules but a different imaginary. Lastly, the Real is the entire complex set of contingent circumstances which affect the course of the game: the intelligence of the players, unpredictable intrusions, time, etc.5 Perhaps then the board is the world whose order is revealed only when the pieces are at play.

What orders the “world” for Semper? Although his pursuits were found in archaeological artifacts, he does not trace the origins of architecture only through material structure. Instead of understanding the Vitruvian primitive hut as the first artifact sprung

from unadulterated human need, he sees it as a complex product of a long historical process, insisting the origins must not be sought in architectural form but in the preconditions which shaped it; the constituent parts of form that are not form itself but the idea, the force, the task, and the means. These are not then archaeological facts but principles of creativity—Semper replaces the primitive hut with ritual action, and poses architecture as a kind of imitation of rituals.

Architecture’s symbolic domain then emerges from the interactions between its dwellers. It has to do with the conditions and circumstances that determine events in a space, and prompt their formal structuring.

Circumstances here are the changing relationships between all that is situated in a particular space, not the temporary outcomes of nature versus culture that presupposes nature as a passive inert thing to be grafted upon by a culture. Consider rather nature as a turmoil that involves humans, and culture as something that emerges from trying to make sense of it by writing events into a story comprehensible to humans. Imagine the Vitruvian fire—the violence of primordial atmosphere, winds tossing boughs and lightning striking them aflame.6 Primitive folk famously congregate around the curiously warm light.

What they gather around is irrelevant to us though; this example is not to trace the origins of architecture, but to rather interpret the story as a simple event that prompts comprehension and structures the behavior of individuals involved. Caught in the occurrence of the event, individuals map out their sensory environment—loud thunder, cold wind, warm fire etc.—and calibrate their reactions to it. These prompt performative coordination between the individuals, and in turn the performance itself signifies the event. Beyond the mere reactions, however, the interpretation of the event and the transmission of the story among the group renders the repeating set of performed actions symbolic. The particular set of actions starts standing in for the event, symbolizing it without it necessarily even occurring again: nothing needs to be burning for you to understand my yelling and waving “fire.”

Implicitly, the objects and events constituting the environment are imbued with motivation, and can therefore be mapped out as both a sensory experience and as a behavioral implication. By transmitting the information and actions tied to experienced events, individuals become engaged in mutually modifying interactions and what emerges from the infinity of those interactions is an ultimately stable set of behavioral conventions. These are a set of prescribed actions—performances—that (re)make each event as unique. The repetition of the performances defines the canon, setting the limits of normality. The canon does not only prescribe actions, but also sets restrictions by defining what is deviant. It can only be recognized if shared. It fundamentally defines interiority and exteriority, and its performative aspect signals who knows the social choreography and therefore belongs to the group. Eventually a society is derived as a regenerative configuration of these conventions (of the canon) shared amongst a group of subjects. Subject then does not equate to an individual, but to one that subjects to the canon. The canon spans languages and gestures, relating arbitrary signs to things and events in constant attempts to make sense of turmoil of life. These signs Opposite: Fig. 1. Larousse’s taxonomy of knots. Le Larousse pour tous: nouveau dictionnaire encyclopédique, Pierre Larousse and Claude Augé, Librairie Larousse, 1907.

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and performances stand in for occurrences of the Real, thus constructing the lament of reality we primarily occupy: the Symbolic.

How does architecture reflect this? The symbols and rituals were arguably created to anchor meaning—the implication to behavioral schema—to a certain form; be it a spoken or written word or a prescribed movement. Thoughts relied heavily on gestures (motion spatialized notion) and the physical enclosure of this performance space became architecture. The very form of the enclosure thus coordinates its dwellers’ collective performances and is in turn (re) determined by the ever-evolving signification of events.

Semper in his analyses reveals how gestures of symbolization are intertwined with and embedded in the process of collective practice.

He finds the simplest translation of ritual into tangible form in the textile arts: the knot (ger. Noht). This was the primal art: the primordial embodiment of the ritual act of joining parts into a whole.7 The knot is both a functional technique and symbolic means of representation; the mediating figure between the ritual, the making and the object itself. Tracing the knot through the complex techniques of the braid and the seam, Semper established that the original spatial enclosure was not tectonic but a primitive fence woven by branches and grass.

The wickerwork “wall” builds the spatial-symbolic home and “separates the inner life…from outer life” and formalizes “the spatial idea in its original conception.”8 Thus arguably before the mere pragmatism of a shelter, or of a load bearing wall, there was a space delimited by form imbued with a shared ethos, implying a specific behavioral conduct within a specific enclosure. Understood this way, architecture becomes a cultural production that orders the world. Fundamentally symbolic in itself, it structures our behavior and becomes one way of attaining the verb “to be”; it comes to operate ontologically.

The Symbolic order of architecture itself is ambivert. It does not exist only with regards to a specific culture, but to its own history and body of work. It lies both within its disciplinary and professional aspects: the disciplinary insofar as there is a symbolic restriction coming from the “inside”—the inherited knowledge, code of behavior, ethics of agency etc.—while the professional ones communicate the “external” conditions—the contractual frames that determine the budget, the execution, client’s desires etc.9 It provides a relative order that functions as a datum line against which all professional and disciplinary activity is measured. Architecture as a medium is then governed by authorial powers working through the creative potentials set by the external constraints—the Symbolic—that represent different pacts between the members of its culture and all the conditions momentarily spurred within the Real. Every project comes to be an intervention into the Symbolic and manifests as an attempt to order the Real.

T H E I M AG I N A R Y

Semper’s knot is both a functional technique and symbolic means of representation; the mediating figure between the ritual, the making and the object itself. It is as if the weaving gestures are captured in form and the form itself is not merely pragmatic but varying based on the situation it symbolizes. Signification and function are intertwined with regard to its purpose. This is what constitutes architecture’s Imaginary domain: it is precisely the appearance of the knot that makes it immediately 74

distinguishable from any loose rope, and signals its purpose. Its Imaginary implies that it occupies a distinct place within the Symbolic. Such as in the game of chess: the appearance of the knight is what gives away its assigned moves—its role within the overall Symbolic of chess. The Imaginary order thus is the capturing of a specific status of cultural conditions into form, into an appearance, into an image. What Semper was concerned with was not simply the tracing of the evolution of form (Imaginary) but with the ties between the Symbolic and the Imaginary—what “image” signals what in the overall structure of symbols. This brings us to a conundrum: to what extent can the image (the form) be distorted while still standing in for the same instance of the Symbolic? At what point do we stop recognizing that a knight moves in an L-shape? Moreover, to what extent does the symbolic function of form change when we alter its image? The “image” has to be understood here as aesthetics; as the way reality affects our sensory interface.

Perhaps a parallel could be drawn with the Aristotelian notion of mimesis. Mimesis is imitation in the sense of re-presentation rather than copying.10 It is a creative interpretation of the ordering of reality as a whole, bringing human order into being. It is not the redoubling of presence, but rather a break that opens up space for fiction.11 Semper’s wall-as-wickerwork was an attempt to reconcile the autonomy of form and referentiality. It is concerned with the nature of its material presence. Saying “wickerwork is the essence of the wall,” Semper implies that no distinction between the superficial, the decorative, and the functional should exist.12 What might be considered decorative today signals outdated modes of production and radical shifts within the Symbolic over time. A notion of “function” is thus subject to conditions of particular cultures and times.

The effect of the wickerwork is necessarily connected to the operation of its material. The wall is not simply identified with its empirical presence, but with what it effects. The wickerwork can be a wall precisely because of its essential capability to form a spatial enclosure. Therefore, walls are how materials realize their effect, and the realization of division—the creation and “programming” of space—is in turn what defines the essence of a wall. Function and expression are then entangled. Once the idea is no longer understood as external to the material possibility, then the architectural object is no longer standing in for the idea. Architecture’s material presence thought outside of structure of expression is not outside of its inter-articulation with function. The wall is understood in the process of its becoming and of its realization. Within it lies the inherent order that becomes apparent in the phenomena of architecture. It is an “accord with its genesis, and with the preconditions and circumstances of its becoming.”13 This page: Fig. 2. 1.14. Laban’s tracing of choreography (Dynamospherique). “Danse et Architecture,” Nouvelle de danse, 42-43, Rudolf Von Laban, 2003.

Opposite: Fig. 3. And 4. Wicker huts in Mesopotamian marshlands. Vanished Landscapes, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, “Through the Lens,” July 17, 2021, https://bit.ly/3QNyy5T.

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THE REAL

Semper’s formula falls short with regards to the Lacanian Real. It is predicated upon the presupposition that the inherited meaning has remained unchanged. The side-effect of his comparative method is the collapse of the hierarchy of representation that results in ontological flattening of all phenomena. The Lacanian Real is that which is the authentic, unchangeable “truth.” It is the primordial external dimension of experience, as opposed to a reality contingent on the perception of sense and the material order. It cannot be directly symbolized, only discerned in its traces, effects and aftershocks. It is the pure experienced affect of that Vitruvian fire set by the lightning-struck bough. The symbol for fire—the drawing of it on a cave wall, or a diagram on a road sign—can never fully represent fire or the total experience, but only a notion of it.

The Real of architecture can be seen in two ways. Firstly, in terms of object’s becoming, where subjects upon encountering architecture dismiss the reality of its becoming in order to interact with it: they suppress all the extractivism, messy construction, coordination of labour, legal ramifications etc. that had been part of its realization.

Rather, they deal with the presence itself: the image, the meaning, the object’s symbolic dimension. Secondly, if space is the result of surfaces’ operation—it is not a given which is divided, but rather created—the surface becomes something with workful nature that operates within the architectural object. Such inter-operability is the structure within which being is given organization. In this sense architecture can be understood as something that intervenes into the Real. It never does so in an obvious or violent way, but rather creeps into our quotidian rhythms. Architecture does not simply stand in for reality, representing or duplicating it, but it becomes its principle of construction.

Intervening into the very processes of subjectification by mediating between the Real and the Symbolic, not only does it imply the rules of conduct for anyone present, but it has a presence of its own.

How we are struck by the presence of an object, lies within its own “ontological incompleteness.” The object as conceived by its authors can never be completely realized. It is always a reconciliation between its imagined being and everything else that is limiting its absolute realization. To function as a part of the Symbolic, the architectural object has to become the resolution of a conflict between symbolization and the pure reality of its construction; between the symbolic form itself, material possibilities, and the will of natural proclivities. The imagined form of a knot will eventually be altered due to the physical and material possibilities of a loose rope. The

knot comes to declare its presence by affecting our Symbolic.

Witnessing its conceptual inconsistency—an irregularity in its structuring of our being—a little bit of the Real manages to pass through the sieve and causes a halt. This encounter unconceals the very structure of representation precisely because it is that which failed at representation in the first place. This particular rope could not be quite bent in that particular way. The image of the knot, its symbolic presence, becomes slightly distorted; its ImaginarySymbolic link is almost not quite right. This slight irregularity, the absence of total consistency is the non-represented remainder that enables us to circumscribe the field of representation—the Symbolic—and to account for any eventual outward burst from the Real. It disturbs and prompts our subjectivity to reorganize by grounding the emerging unfamiliarity into a new Symbolic present.

It allows us to be fascinated by the knot beyond its ability to tie something up.

On a substratum level we can always sort of discern where these irregularities are within the object. They are physical indicators of the gap between the object’s Real and Symbolic; between what is present and what is represented. The object’s capacity to affect then lies precisely in the traces of its conceptual inconsistency; in traces of the struggle for its total realization. It is almost an inverted subject—subject “comes” from the Real and subjects to the Symbolic, while an object enters the Real from the Symbolic and objects to it. This gap of objection becomes a window into the reality beyond the constructed one, through which we gaze into the tragedy of the object. We feel the presence of an absence, and conjure up a lost part that was sacrificed on the altar of the Real; the ineffable promise of ontological completeness forever out of reach, that ultimately, for a single breathhold, completes the object for us.

1

Gottfried Semper, ein Bild seines Lebens und Wirkens, H. Semper, Calvary, 1880, p. 12

2

Mari Hvattum’s focused study was used extensively as a map to navigate Semper’s theoretical heritage. See Gottfried Semper and the Problem of Historicism, Mari Hvattum, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 70

3

The Necessity of Artifice, Joseph Rykwert, Academy Editions, 1982, p. 42

4

Livre XX. Encore, Jacques Lacan, Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Seuil, 1975, p. 112

5

How to Read Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, W.W. Norton & Co, 2007, p. 8

6

See the illustration in: Vitruvius: The Ten Books on Architecture, Vitruvius Pollio, trans. Morris Hicky Morgan, Dover Publications, 1960

7

Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics, Gottfried Semper, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave, Getty Publications, 2004, p.13

8

The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, Gottfried Semper, trans.

Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann, Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 254

9

‘Disciplinary’ and ‘professional’ are here categories as set up by Will Orr drawing from Tafuri in his PhD dissertation at the Architectural Association. See: Counterrealisation: Architectural Ideology from Plan to Project, William Hutchins Orr, PhD Thesis, The Open University, 2019

10

Gottfried Semper and the Problem of Historicism, Mari Hvattum, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 75

11

Time and Narrative, Paul Ricoeur, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, University of Chicago Press, 1983, p. 45

12 “Surface effects: Borromini, Semper, Loos, The Journal of Architecture, Andrew Benjamin, Routledge, 2006, p. 21 13

Style, Semper, p. 229

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First Quarter John Tuomey, extract from First Quarter published by The Lilliput Press

We were Irish in London through the 1970s and early ’80s, but considered ourselves outside the cultural category of the London Irish, far removed from the loneliness and loss of the mailboatdisplaced emigrant generation of the 1950s and ’60s. We thought of ourselves as belonging to a new crop of European Irish, cosmopolitans of a cross-national, anti-nationalist inclination.

Our London employers, of course, saw us as Irish, liked us for this, maybe envied our sense of identity, made us feel welcome wherever we went. The London we admired was a reflection of Britain’s post-war, civic-spirited, reconstructed society. Its National Health Service, its social housing programme. We enjoyed its down-at-heel liberalism and benefited from its tradition of measured tolerance.

All of this civility has unravelled long since, but not then, not until the rot set in when Mrs Thatcher allowed herself to declare, ‘There is no such thing as society.’

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We liked to think of ourselves in some sort of devotional continuity with the architecture culture of our tutors and mentors, drinking at the York Minster, the so-called French House, where the Brutalists of the 1950s used to meet on Saturday mornings. No sign of them when we showed up, but still a wonderful place for fevered discussion between sips of Pernod and downing bottles of wine. It became our spiritual home for the time being. We spent nights staring at the black-and-white photographs framed in a frieze along its walls.

Dreaming up life adventures for the long-distance cyclist Lilian Dredge, with her racing bicycle at full tilt on her lonely way from Land’s End to John O’Groats. Talking with regulars like Chicago the boxer, the ‘Chicago Kid’, who had once boxed in Kilkenny. He held

Above: John Tuomey and Sheila O’Donnell UCD student days 1970s

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his own at the corner of the bar, answering every question with affable resignation—‘Could be better and could be worse, but by the grace of God, I live to fight another day.’ Talking with Ron the boiler-coverer, who taxied in every Thursday evening from his home in the East End. We met the man who drew Biffo the Bear for the Beano, a pinstripesuited gent with a rose in his lapel. Gaston Berlemont, the patron, who told us he had been born in the bar, became another avuncular figure in our London life.

Sometimes, half-ashamed of ourselves, half-lonely for home, we slipped down, dipped down, into the basement pub built into the Underground at Piccadilly Circus. Ward’s Irish House was well established as a landmark before the self-styled Irish pub became an international brand-marketing phenomenon, penetrating cities well beyond the diaspora. Ward’s was divided into rooms around a central zinc-topped bar, rooms named for the four provinces, Munster and Leinster, Ulster and Connacht. One night, having settled ourselves in the Leinster lounge, maybe one foot in Munster, no feeling of entitlement to the other two, Sheila made her way up to the bar to order another couple of pints. She was approached by a besuited man on the make, on for a chat, keen to try his luck—would she pull up a stool? She pointed to the long-haired bespectacled fellow over there in the corner, explained why she was at the bar, it being her turn to buy the drinks. He eyed me up with a single glance, turned back to her, his back to me, to repeat his offer, adding, I’m told, by way of persuasion, ‘You’ll never get anywhere with that hypothetical-looking fucker!’

London’s rudest restaurant was well hidden down the tiny passage of Rupert Court. The lane-facing room looked small and inviting, an authentic hideaway in Chinatown, big pots of steaming noodles and flattened ducks hanging in the window, Chinese people at every table.

Might we find a vacant seat in some cosy corner? We never found out.

‘Upstair please!’ came the cry from all sides, and upstairs we went every time. The best available table in this vertically stacked, racially stratified restaurant was by the first-floor window overlooking the neon-lit laneway, within touching distance, almost, of the building opposite, like a big ship docked in a busy harbour. Simple fare, very tasty, swiftly served, no complaints. Once, with visiting family to impress, we asked for dishes to be served in sequence, starting with Peking duck and pancakes for all to share. ‘This no high-class restaurant! Food ready, you eat!’ Ah, we loved the old Wong Kei. ‘Upstair please!’

And sometimes, to clear the palate after Chinese food, we made our way through Soho to Bernigra’s for an ice cream cone, noce or sorbetto al limone, or an espresso lungo at the Bar Italia, and then back to the French House for a nightcap glass of port. We had emerged from a monoculture where everybody’s ethnicity was the same. Holy Catholic Ireland, not ever wholly Catholic, but altogether homogenous nonetheless. Now we were relishing the change to multicultural

London, out and about in the downtown metropolis, its distinctive differences maintained in close adjacency, so handily side by side for us to mix and match. All the while discussing, over noodles, ice cream, coffee and our next choice of alcohol, the meaning or the message of some new European film seen earlier in the evening.

More about ice cream. The ice cream shop local to Primrose Hill, Marine Ices at Chalk Farm, had franchises in cinemas and theatres around London, halfway downstairs to the Gate in the Brunswick Centre, on the way into the Screens on the Green and the Hill, and, most memorably, in the foyer at the Royal Court. We went with a friend to see, to watch, to witness Billie Whitelaw in Beckett’s Happy Days. Three seats right in the middle of the very front row, spitting distance from the centre of the action on stage, or lack of action, given the restricted action of this great play. Marine Ices were on sale at the interval. The theatre was hot, the performance intense, why not three pistachio cones to cool us down? Sooner than expected, the bell called the audience back to their seats … ‘between the bell for waking and the bell for sleeping’. And there she was, the magnificent Winnie, uncomplaining, up to her neck in a mound of scorched earth, under the heat of the stage lights. And there we were, well within her spitting distance, closer than the first act by some stage magic, licking our ice creams. One by one, quickly and quietly, we slipped those subversive cones under our seats, ashamed by the contrast between our stupid behaviour and her stoic example. Live theatre is never the same as cinema. Another lesson learned.

London was an extended education for us, a second schooling in how to live like architects, with the regular stimulus of lectures and exhibitions at the Architectural Association on Bedford Square or Peter Cook’s rallies at Art Net, just around the corner from the AA. We learned to cook from Elizabeth David’s Italian Food, this old classic first, then moving on to her French Provincial Cooking. Both paperbacks survive, battered and burnt, in our kitchen today. If you can read you can soon cook, and the more attentive the reading, the better the cooking. We went to the cinema as often as we could manage, to the Phoenix East Finchley, the Gate in Notting Hill or down in the basement of the Brunswick Centre, or to the Academy in Oxford Street where they made their own hand-printed posters for every film screened. It was a time when European cinema could be looked to for moral enlightenment, film directors being the poets and philosophers of our generation. Late-night movies were part of our daily routine.

Wim Wenders’s cinema-loving Kings of the Road. Werner Herzog’s mysterious Enigma of Kasper Hauser. The playful fantasy of Jacques Rivette’s Céline and Julie Go Boating. The longitudinal loggias of the Lombardy barns that formed the backdrop to Ermanno Olmi’s Tree of the Wooden Clogs. Agnès Varda’s brightly feminist One Sings, the Other Doesn’t. Sam Peckinpah’s sad-eyed and lonely Pat Garret and Billy the Kid, with Bob Dylan in a cameo role as Alias—‘Alias who? Alias Alias.’

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DECORUM

Harlow Town Railway Footbridge Luke Hayes

I have been walking over and taking photos of this bridge for a decade or so. For me it is a great example of how form, function and material come together, alongside an interesting landscape, to make something beautiful. The bridge connects Harlow Town park to the river Stort valley. It sits, nestled amongst the trees and marshes alongside the mainline railway from London Liverpool Street to Cambridge. It is a ramped bridge, with no steps, which gently rises up and over the railway, takes you down over a pond, and into the marshes next to the river. Recently, we had heavy snow, the first for many years, and this really helped to pick out the delicate shape of the bridge against the backdrop of trees. The soft snow and ice were a direct contrast to the concrete solid form rising out of the frozen pond.

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Substantially Intact: A Report Following a Meeting at The Burrell Museum John Meunier

At 12:30 pm on Tuesday September 13th, 2022 we had a meeting at the Burrell Museum with Duncan Dornan, Director of Museums at Glasgow Life, a charity that delivers cultural, sporting and learning activities on behalf of Glasgow City Council, David Logue, a partner of Gardiner and Theobald and the Project Director of the construction of the refurbished Burrell Museum building, and Graeme DeBrincat, a senior engineer with Arup with expertise in building envelopes, particularly with glass.

The occasion was my first visit back to the Burrell Museum after the major campaign to refurbish the building had been completed. As one of the team of architects with Barry Gasson and Brit Andresen, that won the competition for the design of the building in 1972, I had been involved, in extended discussions and debates about the proposals to refurbish the building since the appointment in 2016 of John McAslan and Partners as the architects.

Although I had been outspoken in my criticism of many of the changes proposed by McAslan, I had decided to delay taking a public position on the modified museum until I had this opportunity not only to make an extended visit but also to meet with some of the key individuals involved.

The work had two clear goals: resolving many of the building fabric problems that had emerged over the period from 1983 when it opened until it was temporarily closed in 2016; and modifying the layout of the museum to meet the evolving goals of the community as articulated by Glasgow Life on behalf of Glasgow City Council, the building’s owner.

Both of those goals were qualified by the recognition of the special qualities of the original building as a work of architecture, qualities that had earned it Category A Listing by Historic Scotland. This leant a certain cultural inertia resisting radical changes to the building.

This meeting, plus my exploration of the building over the course of my two-day visit, has led to at least one clear and very positive conclusion, that the first of these goals has been met in a spectacular way. Not only has the fabric of the building been restored to a condition that belies the visual and performative aging of more than three decades, but it now meets a host of new criteria that have emerged during that period, criteria that we would now associate with concerns about energy consumption and climate change.

The improved glazing solar control across the building will save 70 tonnes of carbon per annum in operation, whilst thermal and airtightness improvements will contribute a further 130 tonnes of carbon reduction per annum.

These contributions, along with improved UV filtering and security, are helping to safeguard the collection in the newly refurbished museum. The refurbished building has achieved a

BREEAM rating of Excellent putting the building in the top 10% of energy efficient buildings in the UK—a significant achievement for the refurbishment and conservation of a Category-A listed building.

—Arup 2022 Retaining the original character and form of the building fabric but at a significantly higher level of environmental performance.

The modifications to the plans and sections, the layout of the building, are naturally more problematic for one of the original team of architects to accept. Duncan Dornan, the Director of Museums for Glasgow Life, rehearsed the reasons that have been given, reasons that amount to a critique of the original design and its ability to respond to a brief that has evolved from the original programme.

Changes in patterns of use are natural and normal in all buildings as they accommodate evolving expectations and behaviors as well as technologies. The fundamental question is whether the built responses to such changes enrich or erode the cultural achievement of the original work of architecture, in this case the Category A listed Burrell Museum.

A question to be asked is, which physical changes were necessary?

A case in point is the new entrance to the museum. Was it necessary?

And, perhaps more important, what were the consequences on the rest of the museum of installing it?

Note the presence of a staff member to guide visitors who enter here.

Also, a significant area of the stained glass exhibit has been removed, and one side of the reconstructed Hutton Castle Dining Room has gone.

The archway leads to the Gift Shop, not the main exhibit area; is this the beginning of a logical route exploring the Museum and its collections?

Two of the reconstructed Hutton Castle rooms, the Dining Room and the Hall have been eviscerated and effectively destroyed. The third, the Drawing Room, has been reorganized and only one of its windows remains transparent, although that one window has a very happy relationship, unfortunately unique, to the rest of the museum.

The three reconstructed Hutton Castle rooms, the Drawing Room, the Hall, and the Dining Room, were requirements of the programme for the 1972 design competition. It was intended that they should be reminders of the history of the formation of Sir William Burrell’s collection, parts of which were used to furnish and decorate the original rooms. In our plan we positioned the rooms around a central glazed winter garden atrium which would provide light and views through the windows of the reconstructed rooms.

Opposite: The improved glazing solar control with UV filtering and new entrance

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It has been argued that the rooms were infrequently visited, and, it has to be admitted, they constituted a problem for the Keeper and his/ her Curators. The objects that the original rooms contained were some of the most interesting and valuable in the collection. If left in the rooms they would have been relatively inaccessible for viewing in normal museum conditions. Only the furniture, which constitutes a significant part of the collection, would benefit from being situated in its normal functional locations. As initially organized the rooms were not available to be explored by visitors, they could only be seen from a confined area just inside the entrance doorways. Other ways of using the rooms might have been more successful, such as borrowing the ways in which National Trust properties allow visitors to explore their grand rooms.

It was clearly a great temptation to the architects of the restoration to claim back the space occupied by a couple of the rooms. The Dining Room became a lobby behind the new entrance, and the Hall became a transition space between the winter garden atrium and the new amphitheatre and stairs that replaced the original lecture theatre.

Whether these moves enriched or eroded the architectural quality of the building is worthy of discussion.

Before that discussion we must explore one of the most important changes, which was to move the experience of the regular visitor to the museum into three dimensions. As the original building was designed in response to the competition brief, it was envisioned that the regular 90

visitor would remain on the main entrance level, with the sole exception that the café/restaurant would be at a lower level following the fall of the land in the park from west to east. The mezzanine level was to be the home of the extensive collection of prints, drawings and photographs that would reward the attention of a more specialised visitor. The lowerlevel storage space was intended to only be available on appointment to a visitor with focused needs pursuing some research interest.

At that main level a lecture theatre was required, following well established precedents in many other museums with a programme of regular lectures or discussions, which would not only support a public’s need to know more about the works in the collection and their larger cultural contexts, but also stimulate repeated visits to the museum by the larger community. To that same end there was set aside a significant area immediately above the café/restaurant, and adjacent to the lecture theatre, for a pattern of changing exhibitions. I find myself puzzled and disappointed to learn that the lecture theatre was little used for this purpose, and also thinking that the critical loss of visitor numbers in later years may well have been a result of this inactivity. Nonetheless the decision was made to replace the lecture theatre with an open

Top, left to right: 1983 Single entry; 2022 Two entries Bottom: 2022 New entry.

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3 6 1. Entrance 2. Atrium 3. Dining Room 4. Drawing Room 5. Hall 6. New Entrance

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amphitheatre and a generous flight of steps leading down to what had been the relatively inaccessible storage level but is now partially converted into more exhibition space and a storage area visible to the visitor via an occasionally transparent screen. On our visit much of that newly accessible space was being used for the exhibition of the history of the Burrell Collection and its various settings.

A fundamental question when an architect is working on an older work of architecture is what architectural language to use for the new developments. There is an argument that favours a radical contrast so that the new should never be mistaken for the old. The opposite approach is for the architect to use a language that provides continuity and coherence between the old and the new, whether it be in terms of materiality, scale and proportion, or choice of technology. It is not a question of mimicking the old, it is respecting it and ‘having a conversation’ with it.

It could be argued that these new developments at the lower level of the Burrell derive their architectural language from the pragmatically spare language of the original basement, a part of the building that

Left: 1983 Main Floor Plan with three Hutton Castle rooms Right: 2022 Main Floor Plan with a new entry and the removal of the Lecture Theatre, with just the Drawing Room.

1. Entrance 2. Atrium 3. Dining Room 4. Drawing Room 5. Hall 6. New Entrance

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was originally not required to share in the architectural ambitions of the major public areas. That is probably the reason why the new developments have an anonymous generic quality that precipitates the critical comments that they could be in any other clean and decent modern institutional building or school.

Hanging panels of back-lit stained glass on the side wall does not integrate this new part of the building into the architectural language of the whole. In the older building a great deal of effort was made to avoid artificial back-lighting of the very important collection of stained glass.

One of the more productive moves in the 2022 refurbishment of the Burrell Museum was the removal of the easternmost dividing wall in the northern half of the plan. It opened up big spaces for the very large carpets and tapestries that were a major part of the collection, well away from the potential damage from the natural light coming through the northern windows.

However, a major problem becomes very clear here, one that is less an architectural one, but one of exhibition design. A low light level is required wherever exhibits contain natural fibres, as have carpets and tapestries. But in the effort to help visitors, particularly the schoolchildren that many urban museums now accommodate, there is widespread use throughout the refurbished museum of information technology (IT) screens. As can be seen from these photographs, these screens, by their nature, are brightly illuminated from within 91

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at a much higher level than the carefully lit adjacent exhibits. This generates discomfort for the visitor whose eyes tend naturally to adapt to the brightest light in their field of vision, leaving them the challenge of appreciating the delicacy and colour of the ‘dimly’ lit tapestries alongside.

Brightly lit IT screens luminate the 2022 reconstructed Hutton Castle Drawing Room, where the windows into the winter garden are blacked out. It was this typical museological attitude towards light as being preferably artificial and therefore controllable that the 1983 design for the Burrell Museum took exception to. While still recognizing that many exhibits need protecting from the infra-red and ultra-violet rays in natural light, the original museum design joyously opened the building as much to natural light and views of nature as possible given the nature of this collection. Happily, much of the openness of the 1983 design, and its use of natural light and views, has been carefully retained in this 2022 restoration.

At the beginning of this report we asked: The fundamental question is whether the built responses to such changes enrich or erode the cultural achievement of the original work of architecture, in this case the Grade A listed Burrell Museum?

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We have already recognized that the renewal of the fabric of the building has been a huge success, leaving only the question of the impact of the spatial and material design changes. The balance of this report reflects on the new entrance, the reduction of the reconstructed Hutton Castle rooms, the replacement of the lecture theatre and changes at the lower level, the removal of a wall, the introduction of IT screens, and lighting.

These were not the only changes in the design, but these are the changes that have the most impact on the architecture of the Museum.

Top, left to right: Original Hutton Castle Drawing Room; 2022 reconstructed Drawing Room.

Bottom, left to right: 2022 Hutton Castle’s Hall is now just a transition between the Winter Garden and the new amphitheatre access to the lower-level; Drawing Room window from the gallery; The gallery from the Drawing Room.

Opposite, clockwise from top left: Amphitheatre down to lower-level; Storage space converted to exhibit space; Visual Access into the storage area; Access at the lower level to the park and the café/restaurant; Hanging panels of back-lit stained glass on the side wall does not respect the role of the stained glass in a building; Amphitheatre down to the elevator.

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It is my considered view that although the changes within the Burrell Museum are careful and thoughtful responses to feedback from Glasgow Life who had sought public opinion about the future of the museum, asking how it may better serve the community, a consultation that generated opinions about increasing access to more of the collection, exploring alternatives for a new and potentially more inviting entrance, as well as internal conversations that questioned whether the museum needed as many Hutton Castle reconstructed rooms, and decisions about centralizing elsewhere functions such as the restoration suite that had dominated the top floor and the visiting scholars apartment, all of which represented changes to the programme for the museum, I am left disappointed that they do not generate a significant enrichment of the architectural achievement of the building.

Much of the original design of the building has been lovingly restored. That adverb is carefully chosen having met and exchanged thoughts with David Logue and Graeme DeBrincat, the Project Director and the environmental consultant. The architects, John McAslan and Partners, have exercised considerable restraint in their handling of the very important northern half of the building where the signature experience of ‘the walk in the woods’ is to be found. Although there was serious thought given to the abandonment of the original entrance, I am relieved to find on this visit that it seems to have recovered its place as the appropriate way to embark on the exploration of the building and the collection. It does occur to me, not least because of its direct connection to the gift shop, that the new entry would be more appropriate as an exit.

So, one may ask, what do I mean when I write about the architectural experience? I mean a lot more than functionality although that is of course a necessary precondition. Recently I have written about intricacy as the quality that all good works of art, whether music, literature, drama, painting or architecture must necessarily possess, and by that, I mean complexity and coherence (On Intricacy: The Work of John Meunier Architect, edited by Patrick Lynch, Canalside Press 2020).

I suggest that intricacy in Architecture: 94

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rewards a careful “reading” by telling an Architectural story. has a rich array of scales, from that of the hand, the foot, the arm, and the body, up to the scale of the city or landscape of which it is a part. rewards the senses: sight, sound, touch, smell, through its orchestration of light and shade, silence and echo, rough and smooth, cool and warm, high and low, close and far, soft and hard, simple and complex scents. both conceals and exposes. is both diverse and unified. like an intricate city, can have multiple authors, so it can include older structures, but it must be coherent. may derive its intricacy from the interaction between its formal language and a rich programme, its physical and social context, and its technology. not only responds to, but also contributes to the richness of the culture of which it is a part. It accepts and celebrates its role in a historical continuum. can be compared to serious music, literature, film, art in that it rewards multiple encounters. is rich in resonance with other phenomena and experience. may be formally simple or formally complex, but it cannot be banal.

I would like to suggest that the original Burrell Museum was recognized as a significant work of Architecture because it met many of these criteria, but that many of the amendments in this later version do not meet these criteria and indeed threaten the qualification of the current version for this recognition.

Above, left to right: Note the very different architectural language in the adjacent café/ restaurant.; new exhibition space Opposite: The original Entry Sequence leading through the Hornby Arch to exhibits from the Burrell Collection juxtaposed with the woodland setting in Pollok Park.

S U B S TA N T I A L LY I N TAC T

The architectural language of the original building was derived from its presence in Glasgow, a city of industry as well as a historic culture; the availability of the natural environment of Pollok Park; the use of natural materials, particularly metal, stone and wood, linking the building to both that context and the materiality of many of the exhibits; natural light and sunlight, both direct and reflected; and heating and air-conditioning channeled through thick walls rather than in the ceilings. Little of that language can be found in the modifications, which leads towards a lack of coherence in the whole. Indeed, the language of the modifications is that of main-stream modernism, which could lead towards banality.

This is not to suggest that it was wrong to attempt to address the need for changes. It is simply a request for the exercise of more architectural sensitivity, wit, and imagination in meeting those needs.

In summary, after this visit, it is my view that the changes in the programme and organization of the building, while meeting the recommendations from Glasgow Life, do not enhance the architectural quality of the building, they may even somewhat erode it, but that the refurbishing and updating of the fabric of the building has been enormously successful. That, together with the reinstitution of the original entry as the primary entrance and the careful restraint shown in restoring the primary galleries in the northern half of the museum, yield, on balance, a tolerable outcome.

These images show the original Entry Sequence leading through the Hornby Arch to exhibits from the Burrell Collection juxtaposed with the woodland setting in Pollok Park, and thereby summarise the signature architectural achievement of the Burrell Museum, an achievement that remains substantially intact.

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Poem Patrick Lynch

B R I S B A N E L OV E

“Downstairs here means under-the-house, and that is in many ways the most interesting place of all… It’s a kind of archaeological site down there… a time capsule underworld…”

—David Malouf, “A First Place: The Mapping of the World”

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The leg of a table: Hard, thin, wooden leg Poking beneath a linen table cloth, hanging

Converted in nostalgia via New belief, this aedicular memory Of a heart house transformed itself Into David Malouf’s Queenslander

I can see the whole city upside down in this glass of wine: the inverted skyline, the trees, parts of buildings, our friends.

Above me like a white tent in whose shadow I sat, observing my mother’s and grandmother’s

Undercroft. And in mimetic wonder, Then into an upturned hull of a timber ship, it’s roof a white linen sail held down in tension by maternal strings and wooden

Everything in your glass Is clearer than in mine.

Legs, walking and talking The room into memory.

A still shadow In a liquid, moving world.

pegs. A subliminal layer of city-nature: Sex, snakes, pottery, saplings, cultivated darkness within a hollow guitar-life.

Resonating with rocks and water, A crypt beneath a boat, the shadow of a river, echo of a glacier, imprint of a flooded Subcontinental shelf; gulf, basement, Empty beneath one’s sense of self, silently witnessing deck life in a slatted shadow world more underwater than subterranean, the Brisbane light glittering like reflections off an ocean; like an inland sea within us, moving us deeply.

A water anchor, Magnetic south.

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