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Architectural Insinuations: on the waterfront with NFK, ARM, DCM, LAB

Kim Dovey, Architecture and Urban Design, University of Melbourne

This paper is an exploration of the relationship of architecture with politics examined through recent work on the Melbourne waterfront which has become a frontier for new practices and forms of architecture, urban design, planning and politics. Here the rules become more fluid and create scope for the production of new forms of economic, political and symbolic capital. Using critical perspectives derived from Bourdieu, Barthes and Deleuze, the paper will explore some ways that political practices are insinuated into architecture, and architecture into politics. Architecture constructs narratives, desires and distinctions. Politics is camouflaged within architecture as architecture is folded into politics. The projects are chosen as sophisticated rather than negative examples; indeed the potency of the work is at once aesthetic and political. The paper will argue against the presumption of autonomy in architectural practice, together with the silences of architectural critique which service and reproduce it. How does one move beyond insinuation and counter-insinuation, towards a critical architectural theory and practice?

Autarchy and City in Italy Between the World Wars: The case of Carbonia, Sardinia

Barbara Cadeddu, Maddalena Mameli & Anna Franca Sibiriu, Building Engineering and Architecture, University of Cagliari

The decade-long creation of new cities in Fascist Italy was bound to the complex operations of autarchy and of reclamation. The Commune of Carbonia, in Sardinia, inaugurated on 18th December 1938, was founded as a residential nucleus for the coal-mining industry of the Sulcis region. This paper describes the experience of planning and construction of the new city in Sardinia, Italy, between, the two world wars, and identifies the local character of a complex political and social reorganization and rearrangement involving the whole country. (Ciucci, Gli Architetti e il fascismo; Ciucci, Architettura italiana del '900)

The principles that guided the planning of Carbonia were rigorous zoning and attention to basic communications. The zoning plan was conceived to highlight access points to the mines (to work), to articulate the civic centre (to cultivate the body and the spirit) and to individualize the areas for the residences (to live). It also was designed so that the urban fabric respected and reflected the hierarchical structure of mining, articulated in executives, employees and workers. The road network (to move) was realized on two road systems: one longitudinal, of communication lodging-mines, the other between lodgings and centre. Not only was autarchy decisive for the foundation of the city, but it also moulded urban forms. An extreme economy of building resulted in an architecture drawing on both simple functionalism and traditional house-building.

The Decorum of Doors and Windows, Fifteenth – Nineteenth Century

Peter Kohane & Michael Hill, Faculty of the Built Environment, University of New South Wales

Doors and windows were among the primary means of articulating a facade from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. In this they were tailored to the orders, while also regulated by, and expressive of, the principal of symmetry that guided the overall design of a building. In addition, the size and ornament surrounding the door or window were important signs of the status of the building and its owners. In short, doors and windows were governed by decorum. In the nineteenth century, C. R. Cockerell actually coined the term “fenestral order”, which proposed that the disposition of windows was analogous to the ornamental role of the column. Doors and windows were thus a central aspect of architecture until the rise of modernist approaches, when transparent walls came to replace the masonry facade pierced with openings. The paper continues research on decorum in architecture theory by examining the topic of framed apertures in solid walls, setting this in the context of the wider debates on ornament and the means by which a building engages the attention of its audience.

‘Everything we do is but the larva of our intentions’: Manfredo Tafuri and Storia dell’architettura italiana 1944-1985

Andrew Leach, Wellington Institute of Technology

This paper offers a critical reading of the Manfredo Tafuri’s Storia dell’architettura italiana 1944-1985. Besides a small body of monographic writing, Storia dell’architettura italiana remains Tafuri’s single broad assessment of the polemics of post-War Italian architectural culture. Given its contemporaneity with Tafuri’s own life and career, this paper questions the text’s ‘operative’ dimension. It likewise identifies and questions Tafuri’s absence as ‘actor’ within the text in terms of his ‘authority’ as a writer. Does absence play an active role in the text? Responding to these questions involves an emerging body of ideas attending to Tafuri’s positions on the tasks of history and criticism. Post-War Italian intellectual history sheds further light on a dialectic of knowledge and action significant to Tafuri’s historiographic programme from the late 1960s onwards. The relationship of Storia dell’architettura italiana to Teorie e storia dell’architettura and Progetto e utopia is consequently questioned. The relationship of Tafuri to his various contexts offers a productive basis on which to assess the history he writes of contemporaneous architectural activity. It suggests, in conclusion, that Storia dell’architettura italiana reflects on two pressing issues: architecture’s status as an institution and the ‘active’ tasks of history.

The Habit and its Fictions: analogy and the appropriate(d) body of architecture

Chris L. Smith, The University of Newcastle

“We will never find the sense of something (of a human, a biological or even a physical phenomenon) if we do not know the force which appropriates the thing, which exploits it, which takes possession of it or is expressed in it.” [Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962).]

There is a productive indeterminacy in the term appropriate. The union of the performative verb and referential adjective forms of the term suggest a conjunction of the disciplinary act of appropriation and the sociopolitical judgment of appropriateness. In investigating appropriation in a normative political framework the paper considers analogy as a ‘force’ in the constitution of the body of architecture. In examining this appropriative force particular scrutiny is made of the politics, the habit and fictions, of analogy propagated in the body of architecture.

The paper explores a body construct that is simultaneously disciplined through appropriation and judged appropriate by the discipline. This concurrence is negotiated through a reading of Dalibor Vesely’s ‘The Architectonics of Embodiment’ in Body and Building (2002), a text published in honour of the scholarship of Joseph Rykwert. The political implications of constituting the body of architecture in analogy are read utilizing Gilles Deleuze’s critique of Aristotle within Différence and Repetition (1968) in a manner that advances both the referential and performative implications of analogy and the appropriate(d) body of architecture.

Laying Siege to the Stadtkrone: Nietzsche, Taut and the vision of a Cultural Aristocracy

Michael Chapman & Michael Ostwald, School of Architecture and Built Environment, University of Newcastle

In 1919, in the tumultuous period following the First World War, Bruno Taut offered a proposal for an ideal town plan which he described as the Stadtkrone (city crown). Based on a cruciform plan, the layout grouped all cultural facilities of the city in the centre of the town, occupying its highest point. This central square became the site for the dominating meditative space of the “crystal-house”, surrounded by residential, business, recreational and industrial zones which step away from the centre giving the city its characteristic pyramid form. In Taut’s plan the political and institutional structures of the city have been replaced unceremoniously by artistic ones that now occupy the pinnacle of the cultural pyramid. Thus, a fundamental characteristic of the Stadtkrone is the emergence within society of a new cultural elite—now embodied and legitimised within the rigid form of the city.

This paper will examine the way that the cultural elitism inherent in Taut’s project was an embodiment of the political thinking of Friedrich Nietzsche. In an era dominated by democratic and socialist doctrines, Nietzsche continually heralded the arrival of a new cultural elite that would transcend mundane and sterile political systems and legislate for the future. This aristocratic vision is often equated by Nietzsche with the metaphor of height and he prescribed an architecture of verticality to counter the horizontal homogeneity he saw as intrinsic to democratic and socialist doctrines. The paper demonstrates close correlations between Nietzsche’s political philosophy and the utopian vision of Taut most clearly depicted in the vertical stratification of the Stadtkrone project. The paper uncovers the theoretical and practical instabilities present in Taut’s Stadtkrone and traces the manner in which the ultimate assimilation of such forms of expressionism by the proletariat paradoxically lead to the collapse of the movement.

Making the Profession Speak: political lobbying and architecture

Paul Hogben, Faculty of the Built Environment, University of New South Wales.

From hosting swish dinners to issuing daring media statements, architects and their representative organisations have tried various tactics for gaining the ears of politicians. Despite the fact that some architects have had very good government contacts, political lobbying for the architectural profession has rarely been an easy endeavour, and as the competition to be heard has grown more intense, architectural organisations have sought more effective ways to put forward their concerns within the brash and often bruising world of politics and government policy-making. It is important for architectural historians to recognise the growth of political lobbying as an area of institutional activity in order to sharpen our assumptions about political influence and how causes are formed and campaigns ‘directed.’ To help build an understanding this paper describes how political lobbying for the architectural profession has become an organised operation in itself and is often led by specialists who do not come from the realm of architectural practice, but from fields such as public relations, the media and community advocacy. Also, what counts as political can be seen as being dependent on a number of institutional, ideological and commercial interests. In order to open this topic for analysis the paper presents the pressure group theories of Dr. Keith Abbott (1995 Political Studies Fellow in the Parliamentary Research Service) and then compares two instances of political activism for the profession: attempts to fight government building policies in the 1930s and the Royal Australian Institute of Architects’ Government Action Program of the late 1970s.

Monumentality and Spectacle: Giedion and Kahn

Maryam Gusheh, The University of New South Wales

At the heart of the post WWII American debate on ‘New Monumentality’ was the socio-political conviction that, through monumental expression, civic architecture and urbanism must reinforce communal life. This paper examines Louis Kahn’s contribution to this discourse, against the dominant rhetoric of Sigfried Giedion and with particular reference to Giedion’s seminal essay “The Need for a New Monumentality”. The appearance of Kahn’s early theoretical formulation “Monumentality” alongside Giedion’s text, in Paul Zucker’s 1944 compilation New Architecture and City Planning, has prompted several comparative interpretations. Whilst some have drawn parallels, referring to the theorists’ mutual promotion of the expressive potential of new product technology and the merits of artistic collaboration; others argue for a divergence, citing Kahn’s emphasis on tectonic structure, rather than spectacle, as the generator of modern monumental forms. This paper contributes to this debate through a twofold discussion. First, and with reference to Kahn’s approach to the design of his American civic institutions of the fifties and sixties, it argues that for Kahn the significance of a modern ‘democratic’ monument lay in its ability to accommodate negotiations between individual and collective rituals. Thus in dismissing ephemeral architecture and the animated façade as relevant modes of monumental expression, Kahn renders Gideon’s ‘spectacular’ monumentality limited. For Kahn an inspired community would emerge, not from the “collective emotional event” but through civic forums that foster dialogue and exchange amongst autonomous individuals and the larger constellations of social groups. Second, the paper distinguishes Kahn’s American practice from his work in Bangladesh. It suggests that, paradoxically, in Dhaka the nuances of democratic institution, gives way to Giedion’s thesis. The Parliament Complex operates as a single and spectacular image; its theatricality and sublime presence confirms collective solidarity through an ‘emotional’ appeal to the masses.

Phronesis, Praxis and Techne: the politics of Sir Henry Wotton's distinction between architect and critic.

Susan Stewart, The University of Technology, Sydney

Sir Henry Wotton's The Elements of Architecture (1624) is unique among the theoretical texts of the Vitruvian tradition in structuring its argument around a distinction between the architect and the critic, or 'censurer', of architecture. The centrality of this distinction to Wotton's text has remained largely unobserved by his commentators. This paper articulates Wotton's strategy in the light of both its Platonic-Aristotelian sources, and his own (somewhat troubled) political identity. In doing so it highlights a play within Wotton's text between praxis and techne; between understanding, order and judgment.

The relationship between architect and critic that informs The Elements is drawn from Plato's Politicus, a text in which both architects and statesmen are drawn into play within a discourse primarily concerned with the cultivation of judgment. Equally, Wotton's conception echoes Aristotle's articulation of the virtue of 'phronesis' into political and legislative wisdom respectively. In recognising the role of these central understandings of Platonic-Aristotelian political philosophy within Wotton's writing on architecture, this paper sheds new light on his often-underrated text.

A Portrait of the Scholar as a Truffle Dog: a re-evaluation of Vincent Scully

A. Krista Sykes, Harvard University

Since the theory boom of the late 1960s, fellow architectural historians have often regarded Vincent Scully as a “light” historian. For example, in 1985, the Italian historian Manfredo Tafuri describes Scully as “a truffle dog” for whom “things only have meaning in relation to the eschatology of their final goal.” For Tafuri, operating in a post–humanist paradigm and thus reluctant to assign great weight to one historical force, the concept of origin contradicts the idea of a fluctuating, open history by enforcing a linear narrative bounded by a beginning and an end; he is unable to conceive of a model of origin that might not constrain history. Troubled by what he believes to be Scully’s instrumentalization of history—positing an origin through a final end point—Tafuri fails to consider Scully’s broader model of origin that revolves around the humanist notions of archetype. This humanist model of origin, not literal and linear but abstract and spiritual, simultaneously appeals to the universal, rooted in the human spirit, and the specific, tied to the culture, environment, and landscape that condition the human spirit. Paradoxically, Tafuri’s harsh critique does Scully a favor, allowing the portrait of the scholar as a “truffle dog” to be reinterpreted as the portrait of the scholar as a Modern humanist.

A Search for Authority: the sketch design of the Beehive

Robin Skinner, School of Architecture, Victoria University

An offer over dinner… an envelope sketch… a weekend design project… a discussion of a matchbox logo… There are several accounts – both spoken and written – of the genesis of the executive wing of the New Zealand Parliament Buildings that almost immediately become known as ‘the Beehive’. However the design has no casual beginning. Sir Basil Spence’s involvement had been organised in advance of his 1964 visit to Wellington and it was driven by the will of the nation’s politicians.

Through original research of government papers and Cabinet minutes, this paper presents and analyses the motives and mechanisms that had a British architect design this most prestigious commission. From archival evidence, the interaction between the Government Architect, the politicians, the officials and the Consultant some 12,000 miles distant, is presented. The circumstance of the Consultant’s withdrawal is recounted. The paper discusses reasons for the persistence of the varied accounts of the design’s beginning, and the continual association of Spence’s name with the project, despite attempts to suppress his involvement.

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