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به راه بادیه رفتن به از نشستن باطل ××× و گر مراد نیابم به قدر وسع بکوشم
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UNDULANT IS SUCH a beautiful word. Its generous vowels so aptly match the wave-like motion it describes with a lulling, torpid comfort. Undulant qualifies the form of a surface, beneath which something perhaps more mysterious is at play. Its fluid nature is capable of unpredictable, even monstrous change and holds below its surface our fear of the unseen. The gentleness of form belies an inherent sense of discomfort, and it is from this perspective that I propose to consider the latest collaboration between architect Alice Hampson and artist Sebastian Di Mauro. Undulant is a public art installation for the entry foyer of the child and maternal health and welfare centre in the sprawling city suburb of Logan. It was commissioned under the Queensland Government’s Art Built-in programme, which allocates two per cent of the funding of all new government buildings (except prisons) for the commission of public artworks. Hampson and Di Mauro sought to physically engage both children and adults with this work and to generate a dynamic and memorable set of poetic, spatial and social relationships within its modest waiting room setting. Undulant establishes a dialectical conversation with its context as a primary conceptual tactic: it is giant-sized rather than precious, a section rather than a discrete object, curved and hairy instead of rectilinear and smooth. The section, itself an abstraction of the Australian coastline, is used to extrude an imaginary landscape of lush folds from a surface of artificial grass (Wimbledon Unreal®). The human body is recognizable in this abstracted section through the introduction of a giant bench seat and the archetypal presence of a cave. It is this familiar unfamiliarity which allows the work to absorb multiple roles and to incorporate a certain functionality without losing its qualities of uncanny abstraction. Discomfort is a condition of Undulant. As a public artwork, it is designed to invite interaction. To take the analogy of the ocean, one can choose to observe its gentle folds or to journey on its surface at the risk of becoming queasy. I was intrigued by a palpable queasiness, a slight discomfort, in the public reception of the work. This reaction is testimony to the pertinence of its conceptual strategies – there is perhaps nothing worse for an artist than an indifferent audience. Discomfort forces a physical and emotional acknowledgment of the location of the body in space. Undulant compels its public to observe the present and to be conscious of the immediate physical environment. The waiting room is a perceptually invisible space – one that anthropologist Marc Augé groups in the same category as the airport or the supermarket: a non-place.1 Augé describes the non-place as “the collective without the celebration and solitude without the isolation”. The plastic chair of the waiting room is particularly significant in this light. Codes of representation underpin the perceptual invisibility of non-places and are matched by codes of behaviour ensuring personal anonymity. The visitor is presented with a choice upon entering the new community health centre. To the left one may be seated on a plastic chair and to the right on a giant astroturf bench. Individualized space is contrasted with collective surface and the visitor must choose between viewing and being on view. Undulant creates theatre by subverting the social interactions of the non-place and inverting its power as adult realm. Children climbing on plastic chairs are misbehaving, whereas children straddling hairy benches are having fun. This play on functionality transforms the waiting room, and the act of waiting, into aesthetic experience. Undulant is primarily a representation of “Nature” within the confines of a hospital interior. This is nothing new. Nature is generally understood to be calming and most waiting rooms contain it in some form, whether a sad pot plant or a photograph of a forest. The originality of this work derives from its violent disruption of the codes of the invisible representation of the non-place. This green, organic form can be understood as a landscape or a giant animal brought indoors. Paradoxically, an artificial nature becomes within this space unruly, disruptive and unhygienically hairy. Discomfort is, however, individually experienced and depends on one’s point of view. In this instance the perception of the child differs fundamentally from that of the adult. Children understand the language of this work. Grass is a friendly surface for a child, animals are to be touched and caves are spaces in which to imagine and play. Diametrically opposed was the reception of the work by the director of the centre, for whom there was decidedly too much Nature represented in his waiting room. Hairiness is generally unwelcome in a medical environment and Undulant has particularly long hair. Lawrence Toaldo of Conrad and Gargett Architects, the Art Built-in project manager, is reported to have tackled the aftermath of the unveiling with consummate tact. Percent for art schemes have existed in many parts of the world since the late 1960s. Tasmania was the first state in Australia to implement such a scheme in 1980, followed by Western Australia (1989) and Queensland (1999). In addition to state government programmes, there has been a substantial investment in public art throughout Australia by city councils, development corporations and the private sector. Public art is a slippery term. Where do the boundaries lie between art and architecture, design and decoration? Turf wars and aesthetic discourse aside, does public art have a public? At the risk of becoming just another form of space junk, there is a pressing need in the public arts for frank and critical debate among the many parties involved on both the processes and the outcomes of these policies. | |||||||||
THE SUBURBAN BACKYARD might be hidden from the street but it is certainly not out of the public gaze. On what seems like a nightly basis, “reality television” brings the backyard into our collective living room, to both mortify and delight us. Meanwhile, in the world of popular home magazines, photographs that best capture the quality of the rear indoor/outdoor edge present a ubiquitous, though no less compelling, image of what the Australian backyard has become – a place of comfort and repose, rather than that half-forgotten space dedicated to utility that we might remember from our childhoods. While the child’s imagination could happily produce untold charms from the simple pragmatism of the suburban backyard, our national obsession with domestic life has inevitably seen that space devoured. In this sense, the seeds of change are more to do with the rethinking of the domestic interior and less to do with any lack in the backyard itself. From the point of view of architecture, this formerly distinct outdoor space has now firmly entered the domain of the house In two projects, carried out simultaneously for two growing families in suburban Brisbane, Owen and Vokes present a refreshingly multivalent approach to the backyard. Both projects seek to adapt a “pre-modern” spatial typology to a contemporary mode of living, significantly altering existing patterns of public and private space. Interestingly, neither house is a timber Queenslander of the type you might expect in Brisbane. In the Clayfield house Owen and Vokes have extended a timber bungalow, full of character, by the architect Mervyn Rylance, working responsively with its quirks and curiosities. The Newmarket house is Art Deco, and has been revered for that by the current owners. The generic traits of each dwelling have been both constraining and generative, as they rub up against the new place patterns of the respective extensions. There are similarities and very distinct differences between the works, particularly in the orchestration of the ubiquitous kitchen/living/outdoor nexus within the overall composition. At the Clayfield house, the extension effectively takes up all remaining open space on the rear of block. This space is reinscribed through an architecture of “garden walls” that extends the formal sensibility of the existing house. A gatehouse on the street begins a sequence that culminates deep in the block at the new living/outdoor space. This sequence is developed independently of the existing internal circulation of the house, though the two are connected at the existing front door and entry stairs and again at the rear living space. In bypassing the front stairs, the new sequence to backyard public living allows the internal organization of the house to be reversed – private spaces at the front and public at the back. At Newmarket, the reorganization of space within the house is also felt in different ways. On entering the property, it is clear that the magnetic space is at the rear of the dwelling – a large living/outdoor terrace – but to gain access to it one must pass through a room that was formerly a living space at the front. Now cleared of that lively function, the front room has become a purer place of prospect over the open garden and the street. Once through the flesh of the existing house, the hyper-real spatial and material purity of the extension is experienced. The whiteness of the frame of the outdoor room, set beyond the “humbled” raw concrete ground of the kitchen/eating/ living space and within the extraordinarily vivid green of the lush grass yard, presents a more generous scale than is suggested by the original house. Both renovations are part of a broader set of works by Owen and Vokes that consciously address the idea of the new backyard in the context of Brisbane. In these works the formal and spatial game on this indoor/outdoor edge is no longer about a distinct and orderly transition between interior and exterior in the manner of the time-honoured verandah. This conventional inbetween space is now reconceived as an outdoor room that gathers up both interior and exterior within it, only to make the essential line of enclosure (the weather proofing one) recede or disappear. This “room”, cast as inbetween space, is conjured up in the imagination of the occupants out of their visual and sensual reading of the group of elements that surround them inside and outside – walls, openings, floor treatments, ceiling planes et cetera. Seamless transitions across the line of enclosure are critical to such architecture and these two projects offer a compendium of solutions to visual and material transitions at a fine level of detail. In the suburbs of Brisbane the remaking of the backyard as an open extension of the interior also makes good sense of the benign climate. Yet the image of the Queensland house that we are most familiar with presents the verandah as the archetypical climatic filter, protecting the interior across its depth and harbouring a nest of rooms within. The outdoor room offers a different response, resisting neat or pragmatic distinctions between interior and exterior. It is all about extending and amplifying space rather than parcelling it in a hierarchic manner. Owen and Vokes’ strategy is to describe a larger single room out of walls that frame a space both interior and exterior. The walls of this room are pliable; they may erode, open or close for the purpose of spatial effect. Through this strategy, the scale of domestic living is given added breadth as neighbouring buildings and gardens are visually appropriated into the composition of the whole through the construction of carefully selected views. This obscures the physical property line, drawing in space beyond the owner’s private domain and evoking the suburban surrounds as an interrelated patchwork of rooms. This is particularly evident in the Clayfield house. By blurring rather than formalizing the indoor/outdoor edge, the outdoor room is determinedly ambiguous in its spatial character. It perhaps recalls another archetype, that of the Roman house, particularly the atrium, with its opening to the sky suggesting a simultaneity of openness and enclosure of the domestic interior. The patterns of relationship in the newly extended contemporary dwellings also call to mind, through the contingent reorganization and reassignment of functions in existing spaces, the relationships in those ancient courtyard houses of the cellular spaces to the open, receptive, adaptive ones (typically ceremonial and demonstrative). When the formerly open spaces of suburban backyards are taken up and into the fabric of the home a very deep territorial axis is made, just as in the houses of Pompeii. This is a curious thing to ponder, given the often surprising openness of the swathes of continuous yards in our suburbs, punctuated by a range of possible divisions – from low open wire fences to high brick walls. It means we cannot assume any uniform attitude to the densification and active publicizing of the rear of our plots. At Clayfield, the walls are solid, and boundaries are breached by carefully edited appropriation. At Newmarket, the backyards are more flimsily divided. Fences could be jumped and the neighbour’s dog could lunge against the wire, at a child playing on the grass, so the “ruined fragment” of enclosure pulls back from the real property boundary, suggestively containing the newly fashioned, more hedonistic world of space, while respectfully maintaining the contextual status quo. According to Dutch architect N. J. Habraken, “the distinction between a formal front and a more protected and informal back is very much ingrained in territorial consciousness”. In the patterns of Australian suburbia, a greater intensification and formalization of the space of the back potentially engages what Habraken would call a “horizontal shift in territorial division” (in opposition to “vertical”, the term by which Habraken defines the usual sequence of territorial division; that we typically move “vertically” from most public to most private, from the world of the street, through the various defences and thresholds of the house). While not as extreme as the examples of horizontal redefinition that may be found elsewhere in time and place, the “publicizing” of the space of the rear of blocks does challenge that which we intuit the backyard to be. In seeking a match between added built forms and a regional sensibility, Owen and Vokes have largely avoided architecture of timber filigree and screen (a tectonic that seems to inevitably stalk domestic architecture in our subtropical clime). By opting for an architecture of walls and by exploring the idea of the outdoor room, the architects find themselves in new territories within the context of an appropriate regional response and there is both subtlety and assuredness in their work. In conversation with the architects on our visit to the houses it was interesting to sense their concern not to entirely erase the patterns of use that had characterized the houses, now so greatly altered in the face of contemporary demands. Strangely, those former patterns seem to remain as remnants in the fabric despite the changes, clearly at odds and yet comfortably so – a reminder of that patient search for a “perfect” domesticity. | |||||||||||||||
A GROWING CULTURE of individualism, financial speculation and widespread apathy towards architecture and urbanism has transformed contemporary cities and claimed much of the territory that once belonged to architecture. Historically, the ascendancy of architecture could be measured in the intensity and vibrancy of the cities and public spaces it shaped. Today our cities and suburbs are marked by the absence of architecture. Nowhere is this more acutely felt than in the housing sector, where the discipline of architecture has been relegated to the peripheral role of providing bespoke dwellings for the cultural elite. The difficulties of the medium-density housing “market” are well documented – tight time frames, tighter budgets, labyrinthine planning processes and strong local opposition. Projects are invariably backed by developer clients with little intellectual or emotional investment in the work. The trading of quality for profit is a constant threat and architecture is often viewed as an unwarranted extravagance. Culturally, we remain deeply suspicious of density and inherently resistant to the types of dwellings that are necessary to accommodate the future population in a sustainable manner. Planning and legislative regimes in various states have attempted to mandate density, but they have been met with resistance from communities due to a combination of self-interest and the failure of existing suburban models to convince the wider population that increased density can be accommodated in ways that improve rather than erode accepted ways of living. Alex Popov and Associates is one of a growing number of practices attempting to find architectural solutions to this current impasse. Having built a formidable international reputation on the strength of a series of meticulously crafted detached dwellings for affluent clients, the practice is actively seeking out a more diverse range of work in which to wield the experience and influence that their reputation now affords. The adaptation of architectural and tectonic strategies refined in recent residential work has enabled the practice to be particularly effective in its new role. The Balmoral and Northbridge Houses have proved seminal in terms of their application to more diverse architectural programmes. The Balmoral House is an exquisite suburban model based on the sophisticated assembly of a minimal number of tectonic elements – a simple structural framing and infill system, proprietary glazing suites and standard metal deck roofing. Pushing its mass towards its boundaries, the project structures a dwelling around external courtyards, maximizing solar access and creating a rich layering of internal and external spaces without compromising privacy. For the Northbridge House an eloquent additive tectonic system of paired precast concrete columns and linear vaults was developed. As a modular structural system it offers enormous flexibility – varied planning arrangements, the ability to stage building works to accommodate budgetary constraints and the opportunity to expand a dwelling in response to changing family circumstances. The use of single-dwelling houses as vehicles for experimentation and refinement of more broadly applicable strategies is not a new idea, but has acquired renewed relevance in the face of contemporary procurement processes. Armed with a series of tried and tested tectonic strategies and proven architectural models, the architect is well placed to weather the vagaries of the speculative housing market. An architect of Popov’s standing has a strong opportunity to resist the stifling preconceptions of clients, councils and planners and force a shift in thinking. The Mernda development, currently being documented by the Marchese + Popov joint venture, is a case in point. Marchese + Popov have prepared a masterplan for a greenfield site on the northern fringes of metropolitan Melbourne being developed by Elderslie Property Investments, and are currently working on the detailed layout of the first of a number of superlots. The 1.4 hectare Village Green project is based on the typological strategy developed by Jørn Utzon in the Kingo and Fredensborg housing schemes of the 1950s and 60s. At Mernda, Popov opts for a series of north-south oriented through-streets to provide vehicular access to dwellings, rather than the cul-de-sacs of the Utzon precedents. This move is a decisive one, knitting the scheme into the surrounding street pattern and providing a strong sense of continuity with future adjacent development. The major innovation of the proposal is its attitude to landscape spaces. While the “suburban dream” feeds on the enduring myth of its verdant landscaped character, a cursory glance at any new subdivision reveals that landscape has been the great casualty of recent small lot development. Popov’s Mernda model reinstates the primacy of landscape in the suburban realm. Each dwelling has a private terrace on the edge of large shared communal gardens. These gardens provide high levels of amenity, extensive deep soil areas, space for tall canopy tree planting and opportunities for residents to share facilities and maintenance. They are a compelling alternative to the demarcated ribbons of turf and paving currently on offer in most new suburbs. The communal gardens are defined by small groups of modest, L-shaped, thin-cross-section dwellings. Rejecting the ubiquitous deep square suburban plan with metastasising perimeter of segregated living spaces, the planning at Mernda is tight, considered and formally refined. Clearly evident are the lessons of Balmoral, Northbridge and the body of work the practice has refined over many years. The minimum number of tectonic elements is used to maximum effect and, importantly, all dwellings meet the developer’s target budget. Impressively, the Mernda dwellings are being built for a rate in the order of $1000 per square metre. While the Mernda proposal prioritizes its landscaped spaces, the strategy also affords an equally strong relationship between the house and the street. Each house has an individual expression but also acknowledges the wider public realm, contributing to the definition of the gardens, the formation of the streets and the architectural integrity of the project as a whole. This multiplicity of scales and the rich spatial gradation resulting from the interlocking of public and private spaces creates an understated civic quality that is a welcome alternative to the monotony of individualism typifying existing settlement patterns. Alex Popov and Associates are simultaneously exploring these issues in other forms of collective housing. Building on the success of the recently completed Northbridge Apartments in Sydney (recipient of the Architecture Award for Multiple Housing in the 2005 NSW RAIA Awards) the practice is currently working on a proposal for 124 apartments in Newstead, Queensland for Riverside Marine. The Newstead site is located within an urban renewal precinct on the Brisbane River, adjacent to the heritage-listed Mactaggart’s woolstore. At Newstead, the siting principle of the Balmoral House is explored at an urban scale. Four-storey apartment buildings are drawn to the perimeter of the site to reserve a generous central garden space. The surrounding architecture revels in its position at the interface of the communal garden and the surrounding public realm, forming lively, active edges and varied interrelationships between the garden, adjacent streets and the new public boardwalk along the foreshore edge. Respectful of its place within the wider urban fabric, the perimeter massing of the block is interrupted to retain a mid-block vista through the site for a perpendicularly aligned street which would otherwise lose its sense of connection to the river. The commanding scale and massing of the woolstore are subtly referenced in Popov’s proposal. Playful shutters articulate individual apartments but are set within a larger order of more robust architectonic elements that evoke a more forceful public scale. Generous overhanging eaves with crisply detailed edges cap the waterfront buildings and give an understated nod to the linearity of their heritage-listed neighbour. The Newstead project is currently in its design development phase while Mernda, after initial resistance from local planning authorities, has received Development Approval.Work will commence shortly on the construction of the Mernda display village. These projects have thus far shown that a determined and far-sighted architect with an educated and supportive client can overcome council resistance, conservative local attitudes and the limitations of some of our current housing models. It is to be hoped that on completion, they will start to shift the greater public consciousness and encourage many more architects to roll up their sleeves and reclaim the discipline of housing for architecture. | |||||||||||
