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Abstracts
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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