Landscapes of Production
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(Landscapes of Production Introductory Essay)
Architecture + Landscapes of Production
Gini Lee, Louis Laybourne Smith School
of Architecture and Design
University of South Australia
The Architecture + Landscapes of Production theme for the ADDITIONS
conference invited authors to rethink the architecture/landscape relationship
through the idea that cultural landscapes may be regarded rather as
landscapes of production and consumption. How do we describe landscapes
of commodification and what have been the forces that have shaped them?
Are post-industrial landscapes opportunities or merely redundant places?
How do the tourist industry and the practices of tourists relate the
actual landscape and the landscape of images? These questions are explored
here through a number of approaches including case studies. However,
in doing so, authors of these essays on ‘architecture + landscapes
of production’ also confront a further question. Cultural landscapes
are where the site/place typologies of architecture and landscape must
collaborate or collide. Thus it is here that the complexities of the
theory and practice of landscape must be explicated. This essay provides
an overview of these issues.
Eating Ethnicity: Multicultural food practice and the production
of urban space
Angela Hirst, Department of Architecture,
The University of Queensland
“Ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull
dish that is mainstream culture.”
The relationship between architecture and landscapes of production
can be literally interpreted by an examination of one of its more mundane
manifestations—the production and consumption of food. In the
spirit of bell hooks’ critique of commodified society, I will
examine the production and consumption of ethnic food spaces in the
inner city. Using Lefebvre’s three concepts of space: perceived
(spatial practice), conceived (representations of space), and lived
(representational space); and Hage’s concept of the cosmo-multiculturalist,
I interpret the way ethnic food practice relates to the production of
urban space. In particular, my exploration deals with what Lefebvre
describes as the doubled, reinforcing illusion of transparency and opacity
in urban spatial practice. This is exemplified by the cosmo-multiculturalist’s
desire for ethnic otherness, which is maintained through what Hage argues
is a mystification of the power dynamic between ‘feeder’
and ‘eater’. The urban eater is seduced by ethnicity if
the ethnic feeder pretends not to seduce. I argue that this valuing
of a consumable ethnicity is intimately tied to the production of spaces
that create the illusion of ‘authentic’ multicultural eating
experiences.
Exploring a holistic understanding of place: Point Nepean, Victoria
Ursula M de Jong, School of Architecture
and Building, Deakin University
$4 million has recently been allocated by the Federal Government for
conservation works and urgent maintenance on the buildings at the Quarantine
Station at Point Nepean. While this work will proceed over the next
few years, concerns have been expressed about the longer-term picture
involving the whole site at Point Nepean. With the Defence Forces vacating
the land on Point Nepean and the subsequent transfer of ownership of
the land from Federal to State authorities in limbo, one has to ask:
how can Point Nepean be set aside permanently for all Victorians and
Australians without compromising the meaning of place, the fragile landscape,
the long ambivalent history, the natural and cultural heritage?
The Nepean Peninsula on the tip of Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula
is an ‘inspirational landscape’. The ruins of the fortifications
(from 1878) and the Quarantine Station (from 1852) at Point Nepean have
been clearly identified as of state, national and even international
heritage significance. Other areas for consideration include the extensive
aboriginal sites; grazing and cattle quarantining; lime burning; military
training; a long history of shipwrecks and the drowning of Harold Holt,
PM, at Cheviot Bay. These apparently isolated events each contribute
to the interwoven and textured pattern of the fabric of this place.
Here memories stretch over eons. Here the landscape allows one to read
the place whole.
Yet place as a notion is not at all clearly defined. Malpas argues
that ‘We are often led to view places as if they were just the
static backdrop to action and experience, rather than being the very
ground and frame for such’. To date numerous short histories,
studies and reports relating to various aspects of the Nepean Peninsula
have been published. In each ‘place’ is a given rather than
an issue. While each specialist discipline contributes to the knowledge
and understanding of aspects of the Nepean Peninsula each allows only
a fragmentary insight. Not one has attempted an integrated approach,
wherein relationships, juxtapositions, multiplicities, layerings, cause
and effect, context and contrast, can be fruitfully explored and a holistic
understanding and appreciation of place can be arrived at. This paper
in investigating the rich multi-dimensional layers of geography and
cultural history, the built form and claiming of the land, memory and
perception, which contribute to the meaning of ‘place’ at
Point Nepean, establishes the importance of a holistic understanding
of place.
Imagining the National Landscape: An exploration of Te Papa Tongarewa
and the National Museum of Australia
Jillian Walliss, School of Design,
Victoria University of Wellington
Within the national museums of New Zealand (Te Papa Tongarewa) and
Australia (National Museum of Australia), representations of environment
and landscape are central to the display of national narratives, informing
exhibition strategies and the spatial and symbolic design of the architecture
and external spaces. As settler colonies, Australia and New Zealand
share many anxieties concerning the construction of post colonial national
identities, particularly in acknowledging the ‘unsettlement brought
about by settlement.’ A consequence of this shared history is
that representations of landscape in both countries are complex and
contested, influenced by the traditions of ecology, colonialism, romanticism,
eco-nationalism, mythology, dispossession and shifting definitions of
national identities. Through an examination of the architecture and
exhibition strategies, this paper explores how these two national museums
conceptually and symbolically construct relationships between cultural
and scientific understandings of landscape and national identity, with
a particular focus on the role of Bush City and the Garden of Australian
Dreams. Through this research, this paper asks how have colonial interactions
and narratives of landscape influenced the production of a contemporary
imagining of the national landscape?
Koolhaas’s ‘Generic’ and Melancholic Indeterminacy
Steve Loo
John Cyril Hawes, architect, priest and hermit, arrived in the goldfields
of Western Australia in 1915. Having acquired his profession in the
milieu of the London architectural scene of the 1890's, a heady mix
of Arts & Crafts handicraft, medieval revivalism and the mysticism
of William Lethaby, Hawes expressed his true vocation as religious ascetic
through a number of idiosyncratic building projects in England, the
Bahamas and Australia. Hawes expressed great admiration for the architecture
of Celtic and early Christian Europe. His regard for the past not only
informed the design and detail of his later works, but punctuate a now
familiar reading of pre-industrial landscapes as places of noble labour
and spiritual syncretism. This paper argues that Hawes's finely scaled
chapels and hermitages make manifest an ascetic ideal, one entailing
a unique view of human nature associated with colonial enterprise and
missionary impulses and which relates the experience of hardship and
deprivation with spiritual transcendence. The paper seeks to re-evaluate
issues arising from the study of Arts & Crafts ideas and theories
by placing them within an Australian context so that the moral concerns
of the movement are evinced in Hawes's commitment to handcrafting works
that drew upon the resources of the past and the unique characteristics
of sites and locales.
Out of Place in the Landscape: questioning the architectural rhetoric of place
Glen Hill, Faculty of Architecture,
University of Sydney
Taking the surprisingly prominent architectural category of ‘holiday
home in the natural landscape’ as its provocation (but not its
theme), this paper interrogates the architectural discourse of place,
and looks particularly at the role of landscape in the framing of this
discourse.
An examination of the writings of the self-professed ‘phenomenologists
of place,’ Christian Norberg-Schulz and Steven Holl, discloses
a desire to bring architecture’s place to presence. Revealingly,
both authors use the ‘tourist experience’ to communicate
the sense of presence that the place of architecture and landscape should
have.
The architectural discourse on place claims the work of Martin Heidegger
as one of its key influences. But when the architectural discourse on
place is brought into confrontation with Heidegger’s seminal thinking
on place and his deliberations on the role of architecture in revealing
place, a significant disjunction appears. Because the formulation of
place in the architectural discourse focuses on ‘presence,’
it is antithetical to Heidegger’s formulation of place as ‘absence.’
The paper argues that the architectural discourse on place unwittingly
aligns itself with modernity’s privileging of presence over absence.
In doing so it conceals the reduction of place (particularly landscape)
to spectacle.
Play and the Production of Meaning in an Urban Landscape
Quentin Stevens, School of Geography,
Planning and Architecture, University of Queensland
This paper examines the complex role which the urban landscape plays
in the representation and transmission of social meanings. Whilst the
city resonates with memories of past events and symbols of cultural
beliefs, its public spaces are also a medium, a stage which frames actors
and audiences. Places constantly gain new meanings because spatial context
is a part of such performances of meaning. The paper focuses on those
social practices through which “the imagination seeks to change
and appropriate” the ‘representational spaces’ of
a city (Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 39).
The paper draws on observation of social rituals and informal play
behaviour in Melbourne’s public spaces. It describes a broad range
of gestures through which people reproduce, refract and refute the social
meanings that are embodied in built form. The paper focuses on examples
of three different kinds of spatial behaviour: celebratory parades,
bodily engagements with public artworks, and posing for wedding photos.
These activities all illustrate a dynamic tension between the reproduction
of accepted cultural meanings through participatory ritual; spaces of
spectacle where meanings are consumed passively; and active interventions
through which new meanings are written onto the urban landscape. The
paper draws together concepts from a range of social theorists, to explore
the interrelation between built form, representation public performance,
and social identity.
Sustaining Cultural Landscapes as Sites of Production
Helen Armstrong, School of Design
And Built Environment, Queensland University of Technology
This paper explains the evolving concept of cultural landscapes which
has led to a new study on landscape meanings. This study, Investigating
Queensland Cultural Landscapes as Contested Terrains (1998-2001), developed
a new model for interpreting landscapes that allowed for complex and
multiple values. Through a number of case studies, landscapes of production,
particularly in South East Queensland, are shown to be vulnerable to
encroaching urban development and tourism. Landscape meanings associated
with productive landscapes are particularly vulnerable to consumption
by mass tourism. The paper examines the current concerns about commodification
of place using a specific landscape to examine the issues. This is a
spectacular landscape on the North East coast of Australia, known as
the Gold Coast and Scenic Rim; containing World Heritage sub-tropical
rainforests, sugar cane and banana plantations, and a Miami-like recreational
high-rise strip along golden beaches, all in close juxtaposition and
integral to the quality of the other. Each of these landscapes has become
the object of the tourist gaze and each has a different ability to withstand
such consumption. Despite the evident deleterious impact, there is increasing
pressure to continue to appropriate and consume landscapes as part of
Late Capitalism’s focus on a tourist driven economy.
Some places, such as modern city centres, are robust and can withstand
or even be energized by this consumption. Other places enter a Faustian
bargain if they use tourism as their economic foundation. This is particularly
true for rural communities who risk becoming self-conscious parodies
of themselves and in the process lose sight of the rich and layered
meanings in their towns and their particular heritage as productive
rural landscapes. Queensland’s cultural landscapes have an usual
history of production as well as a heritage of strongly contested values.
The paper concludes with a discussion about alternative ways of sustaining
landscapes of production which draw from their legacy of complex meanings.
Transplants, Transferences and Translations: Exchanges of strategies
and design ideas, gardens and cross-cultural considerations
Greg Missingham & Alex
Selenitsch, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University
of Melbourne
There have been a number of attempts to design gardens in Australia,
realised and hypothetical, that claim to derive from east Asian precedents
or principles but that aim to be Australian gardens. A number of gardens
have been designed elsewhere on analogous bases and there was a very
famous garden in Qing China designed on European Baroque principles.
These gardens differ in principle from the gift of a ‘Chinese
garden’ such as Sydney’s Garden of Friendship or Vancouver’s
Dr Sun Yat-sen Garden, for example, in terms both of their formal properties
and of their generating motives, and they differ from earlier Japanese
gardens constructed in Australia and North America, and from Australian
gardens in Japan or China.
The gardens of interest, here, entail transplants, transferences and/or
translations (interpretations) from one cultural matrix to another.
This paper sketches a taxonomy of eight design strategies from these
three large classes within which varieties of cross-cultural landscape
garden design might be considered. Garden examples from different periods
and locations are noted and many issues and associated agendas that
arise are set out. The paper opens and concludes the discussion by framing
that sketch within an examination of Melbourne’s Melbourne Tianjin
Garden.
Wilderness in the Garden: the development of an English garden typology
and its influence on the establishment of the Cataract Gorge Park in the
Antipodes.
Richard Blythe, University of Tasmania
The meaning of the term ‘wilderness’ is a rapidly evolving
one. Nineteenth century park and garden designers employed the term
in reference to constructed landscapes that were naturalistic sections
of larger cultivated spaces. The geometries and methods for setting
out and planting such wildernesses is well described by Eighteenth Century
authors such as Philip Miller and Batty Langley. This conception of
a contrived wilderness is at odds with a contemporary and populist understanding
of the term as referring exclusively to an un-cultivated landscape far
from mechanised forms of transport, a view epitomised in the Peter Dombrovskis’
image Rock Island Bend, Franklin River, South-West Tasmania (1983).
In this popular view wilderness is imagined as a people-less, unaffected
place located far from the urbanized centre. The difference in meaning
between these two images of wilderness – cultivated garden/antediluvian
scene – could (and often is) resolved through a dismissal of the
authenticity and value of the first as a ‘true’ wilderness.
This paper questions this contemporary view and explores how a dialectic
between the civilised and the wild was essential to the development
of the idea of the wilderness garden. This is achieved by re-visiting
the eighteenth century wilderness garden and its role as a precursor
to parks in the Antipodes in the late nineteenth century.
This paper will consider whether what appears to be a simple and logical
contemporary dismissal of a category of eighteenth century gardening
reveals instead a complicit history in the development of wilderness
as a cultivated garden idea. If this were so it would suggest a significant
contemporary uncertainty about the nature of nature and of our relation
to it.
This paper will use descriptions of wilderness in Batty Langley’s
New Principles of Gardening (1728) and Philip Miller’s The Gardener’s
Dictionary (1758) as a ground against which to consider the Cataract
Gorge Park in Launceston, the manner in which it has been set out, and
its relation to the city of Launceston.
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