As part of the Modern European Architects lecture series, last night at The National Museum of Australia, Dr Enrico Taglietti delivered a lecture titled: The Portal to the Impossible - one hundred years of Italian architecture. Enrico Taglietti, declaring all architecture preceding the 20th century as ‘Classic’ opened the lecture with an excerpt from the Futurist manifesto,

“A moronic mixture of Egyptian, Gothic and Classic stylistic elements mask the skeletons of architecture. This is the supreme imbecility of the last century’s perpetuating anachronistic models instead of searching for new frontiers……………………….

To the Futurists, architectural expression was developed to express a rigorous ideology, associated with forging culture through war. Enrico talked of Architecture free of dogma and forgery, and of Architects having the freedom to create new work perhaps building on the legacy and freedom created by the Futurists.

It occurred to me that apart from the red tape and process obstacles exerted by the planning bodies in their effort to enforce mediocrity, architectural expression has never, in my experience, been a matter of life and death, or even of rigorous committed ideological debate. Enrico’s lecture functioned as a partly personal, partly historical journey through half a dozen architects and limited examples of key works. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Aldo Rossi, Joe Ponti, Nathan Rogers, Renzo Piano were all discussed in the context of Italian modern Architecture. There were a few human moments that endeared the lecturer to the audience, when the English name failed to come, the quick exclamation in Italian sufficed, with the next slide quickly loaded. Enrico was also quite elegant in his paraphrasing of Marinetti for one and others;

“that a purely architectural man does not exist, but that an artist does exist and with luck can become an architect”

Rumours can be light on fact, heavy on interpretation, or they can be the forerunner of new truths. Either way they often raise interesting questions.

Moral rights in Architecture, the baby of a nameless salaried bureaucrat, has perhaps most famously been played out in 2001 between Architect Col Madigan and the National Gallery of Australia. Col Madigan was the original architect for the Gallery in 1982, as part of the firm Edwards, Madigan, Torzillo and Briggs.

Tonkin Zulaika Greer Architects were awarded a commission, following a limited national architectural competition in 2001, to resolve general maintenance/refurb issues, to create new gallery spaces and to resolve the entry to the gallery so that it had one.

What ensued was a protracted dispute between Col Madigan, the Gallery and the appointed architects. This was played out in the media, with cartoons, letters to the editor and petitions. Eventually this led to the project stopping, though not on a purely legal basis, but rather on a moral/political basis.

But what does a Gallery impatient to get on with the job do?

Wait for the original architect to die? Run a design competition again, appoint the architect as a juror and hope the same thing does not happen again? Or do they negotiate?

The director of the gallery, Brian Kennedy, is quoted below from Directors Comment 2002-2003 and states;

“An improved means of entry and approach to the Gallery continued to be considered throughout the year and we are grateful for the assistance provided by the building’s original architect, Mr Colin Madigan AO, in detailing design principles for the building. These will assist our planning of the new front entrance and future building developments. A Development Manager was engaged to work with the Gallery to secure a suitable design for a new front entrance and to oversee its construction to revised timelines and budget. This work is expected to be completed by the end of 2006″.

According to a Sydney Morning Herald article dated April 9, by Lauren Martin, the Gallery is still without a new Architect or a design. Six weeks ago while in Sydney I heard a different story. This story had a former student of Col Madigan, Andrew Anderson, from Peddle Thorp and Walker, as the new architect for the Gallery extensions.

Peddle Thorp and Walker, PTW have carried out 7 million dollars worth of extensions in 1998 to the National Gallery and have also been involved in extensions to the NSW art gallery.

If this is true, and on the surface it appears probable, what questions does it raise?

How has Andrew Andersons been selected? This is the critical question. Has he been selected, to placate the original architect, and to ensure that the Gallery is in a position to achieve the changes to the building that it requires?

If so, this is an unacceptable situation.

The National Gallery of Australia is a national institution that belongs to the people of Australia. It has a symbolic function both within the City of Canberra and aspires to be the premier Gallery in Australia. It has been funded by the Commonwealth and occupies a prominent site on Lake Burley Griffin. Its function as defined in the National Gallery Act 1975 is outlined below,

excerpt from act;
SECT 6
Functions of Gallery
(1) The functions of the Gallery are:
(a) to develop and maintain a national collection of works of art; and
(b) to exhibit, or to make available for exhibition by others, works of art from the national collection or works of art that are otherwise in the possession of the Gallery.
(2) The Gallery shall use every endeavour to make the most advantageous use of the national collection in the national interest.

This major extension to Gallery can easily be considered an endevour. The appointment, without competition or comment, of any architect, can hardly be argued in the National Interest. That an Architects Moral rights be respected is self evident. In this case however, it may be that a National Institution, to develop and change, is exposed to undue influence as exercised by the original architect.

This situation is not good for Architecture, the National Gallery of Australia or the National Capital.

The plan this weekend was that Matt and I would follow up on Nath’s post, detailing our exploits with Desirable Luxury Items; me with my powerbook, Matt with his Bang & Olufsen Television set. After friday night’s events however, my take on owning Desirable Luxury Items has been somewhat tarnished by the boys with big knife.

And so rather than rattle on about my powerbook, as I have done far too much already, I will direct my gaze to page 481 of Mr Koolhaas’ latest collection of work Content. A follow up to the huge, genre-defying and defining SMLXL, it covers the next seven years of OMA’s work as well as the catalogue for an accompanying exhibition. Named Content, the intended irony is of course that on first glance there appears to be very little content at all; the reader is initially greeted with advertisements for Prada and Gucci and a quick flick through reveals a bevy of blurry photographs and an apparent emphasis on graphic design over architectural projects. Actual reading rather than mereflicking does however reveal an enormous depth to the publication. Of course there is a layer of smugness that pervades nearly every page with with the strive for difference too often being attributed to brilliance: you know, skyscrapers are so not relevant anymore, except of course for their skyscraper proposed in Hong Kong, which isn’t a skyscraper because bits of it are slopey and a fortune cookie told them not to enter the contest for the World Trade Centre… However, where the chapters on the collaboration for the Astor Hotel and the CCTV Building contain just about 3% too much back slapping and ass licking, the interviews with Martha Stewart, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown and the work on display by AMO (the strategic arm of OMA) are completely fascinating.

Where SMLXL spawned about a hundred thousand imitators, four-inch-thick bloated tomes of theoretical projects and intermittent softcore pornography, expect Content to likewise fill the shelves of all good book shops with trash typography and a cut’n'paste aesthetic.

As for page 481, titled ‘The Enemy’ and dealing a sharp blow to Australian Architects in China, well, I feel the need to respond because Rem I know you are reading… There is no doubt that there is some really terrible architecture being carried out by Australians in China and it is not all that difficult to imagine who the “suits, with moustaches, receding hairlines, and suspect waistlines” may be. The irony for me is that Sydney-siders get accused of being grown up preemies of the Bilbao Effect in the same chapter detailing OMAs attempts at delivering Beijing their Bilbao.

A Noguchi coffee table has recently arrived in my possession, remembered from childhood. This is a table synonymous with the modern, wrought as a biomorphic assemblage of three parts, two of wood and one of glass. It will go nicely in my minimalist/modern house one day, I thought to myself, contemplating its addition to my family of pieces with random and unknown beginnings.

The people at Herman Miller, who manufactured this table for Isamu Noguchi, the famed Japanese/American modern sculptor/ designer, are quite fond of it. Referring to the tables “timeless appeal and classic elegance”, leading me to ponder that it is perhaps the Audrey Hepburn of Coffee tables. This table has suffered from modernisms curse, of being “cheap, mass producible and photogenic” to quote Elizabeth Farrelly, writing this week in the SMH. The table has waited, bearing the weight of four potplants for twenty years, the crust on its surface had rendered the entire table top opaque, the legs dirt and grime encrusted. The design had wandered, been replicated, slid from the heady heights of modern fashion and lost into a suburban reality. It’s once friends, Eames sofas and Wegner chairs were nowhere to be seen. Sliding continents, cultures and meanings had left it washed up against a wall covered in plants, denied the fundamental need to express its gleaming transparency and fluid sculptural form.

The restoration process has been slow, the timber legs have been almost cleaned and are in good condition. The table top is however a different story. The leaching of soil and abrasion of heavy pots across the last two decades have left a milky residue and a change of texture across its once transparent table top.

However once again it has begun to express itself, commanding firstly a space for itself. Shyly, it has tucked itself into an alcove and found a friend in a classic 70’s surfboard to share story’s of curves and volumes. Also in attendance, a four of fellow travellers in the form of Breur’s S32’s are taking shape nearby. This Noguchi table displaced by consumerism has reclaimed its position according to Herman Miller as a ‘work of art and a piece of fine furniture’.

As a part of the Talks on The City Talk series for the Year of The Built Environment, last Tuesday evening saw Mark Wigley, Beatriz Colomina (whom I keep wanting to call Condaleeza Rice) and Elizabeth Farelly waxing lyrical on Architecture + Media + Fashion.

It was nice to have have such luminaries as Wigley et Colimina talking in Sydney and the steps of the Town Hall were packed with theory groupies, young and old all itching to hear what the intellectual leaders of two of the worlds most prestigious architecture schools had to say. It all got off to a nearly embarrassing start when attendees were greeted at the top of the stairs by two lunatics wearing giant novelty effigies of the opera house and the harbour bridge on their heads leaving no mistake what city we’re living. For the next talk, I propose a couple of Sydney’s architects up the ante and give the use of novelty head gear a more contemporary flava.

As for the talks themselves, Wigley was in broad brush-stroke territory, labelling engineers as boring and heterosexual whereas Architects are creative and possibly able to incorporate elements of gay culture. His point it seems is that Engineers are interested the boring bits of builidings; the columns and the concrete and stuff. Architects however are Creative and interested in supposedly “weird” things like surfaces… This argument was supported by the Town Hall building where timber columns are painted to look like stone and decoration adorns every nook and cranny. (Wigley was also backed up by a disgruntled engineer who during question time felt the need to defend the engineers as creatives by relating a joke that was not funny and had no punchline.) Hardly compelling and indeed when later he talked about Sydney’s obsession with its Opera House, he did not apply the same logic and talk about how it was the perfect marriage between the twin creative minds of Engineer and Architect rather he merely referred to it as clothing for Sydney. Had the talk been about the body in space perhaps some conclusions could be drawn concerning how we occupy and move through architectural space rather than merely being left with a series of thin metaphors for architecture as clothing something we wear.

Beatriz Colomina on the other hand used architecture to talk about architecture and was wonderfully unintelligable. Her thick spanish accent had me confused and playing aural catchup like I had not had to do since the days of a Gevork Hartoonian lecture. Colomina’s talk centred on the role of the media in the cultivation of avant-garde architecture, in particular how exhibitions, expositions, magazines and editors have embraced new ideas long before built examples have surfaced. It was refreshing to hear architecture talked about in the language of architecture. If these city talks are meant to engage the general public in the discourse of architecture then they need to be in language of architecture. You do not educate people in mathematics by teaching them portueguese. Likewise, talking about architecture as clothing may be entertaining but it is not going to help to lay the groundwork in giving the great unwashed a better understanding on what makes good architecture, what makes for great cities. Being exposed to some of the great modernist houses, I feel will help to raise architectural literacy levels.

There has been some discussion in our office about the deficiences of Microstation as a CAD package. It is Gravestmor’s position that it is a poor tradesman that blames his tools for his poor handiwork. Wednesday’s update will explore this provocation in a little more detail.