NOTES: David Beynon, Brandon Gardiner, Ursul de Jong, Mirjana Lozanovska, Flavia Marcello, “An issues paper: the roots/routes of Australian Architecture: Elements f Alternative Architectural History,” in Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand: 31, Translation

NOTES:
David Beynon, Brandon Gardiner, Ursul de Jong, Mirjana Lozanovska, Flavia Marcello, “An issues paper: the roots/routes of Australian Architecture: Elements f Alternative Architectural History,” in Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand: 31, Translation

David Beynon, Brandon Gardiner, Ursula de Jong,
Mirijana Lozanovska, and Flavia Marcello, Deakin University Geelong
An Issues Paper: The Roots/Routes of Australian Architecture: Elements of an Alternative
Architectural History
- Architecture, like culture
o Not static or rooted in place
o Process of locality and mobility.
- The production of architecture in australia
o As in other immigrant rich societies
o Provides a case for reinforcing the theory that architectural mobility
o Travel
 Integral to therchiecture of place
o Re-examine
 Geo-cultural influences
 Australia’s architectural lineage
 Brittish colonial transportations
 Dissemination of modensim
 Contribution of mid-twentieth century european emigre architects
 Asian architecture
o Investigates translations through narratives, processes, networks
 Traces of architectural manifestations
 Lines of influence
An Island Home
- Associations between translation
o Travel
o Migration
- Inevitable sensitivity ingrained in the national psych
- Australian architecture has always been generated through derivation and translation
- Few comprehensive overviews of australian architecture
- Very few subjects about australian architecture have been examined
- Vast comprehensible body on modernism
- Rich body on colonial era
- Growing research on indiginous traditions
- Austrlia’s colonial conditioning and ‘selective trajectory’
- “Australian architecture model has somewhat (uncritically) mirrored the strong social and cultural links with Britain.” (640)
- RAIA mirroring RIBA
- Indigenous architecture has perhaps undergone the most profound translations
- On-going exchange with asia
- ‘lines of influence’ as geo-cultural set of journeys and obilities
- Architecture in Australia
o 9 of 14 chapters deal with 18th and 19th cenury
o Only attempt at a national architectural history
- Essays are too few to contexturalize the work in any depth or offer the reader a way of understanding or approaching a coferent architectural history
- Augmented by periods such as colonial, gothic, renaissance revival
- Uneasy conflation and/or slipping between european and british is addressed later in this paper.
- “most buildings had to be modified if they were to survive at all in the new conditions
- “the mud brick quickly became acclimitized
- Bark buildings became an unequivocally local response to the precence of suitably barking trees
- Reflecting simpler cottages
- England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland
The settlement in new south wales was not seen as independant settlement, not even a potentially independant settlement. It was simply another outpost, an extension of the long arm of the brittish empire. (643)
- Akin to roman modus operandi “was a civilising mission and a sure means of establishing visibility”
o ‘taste and order’ british
o Use of architcture to fabricate unity
o India, China, Australia: Trade and Society 1788-1850 “reveals a lively exchange in trade, furnishings, decorative arts, etc.’
- Foremost provinsil architecture
- Second colonial architecture
- Old east india company
- Old rum hospital
- Seperation of victoria and the discovery of god formed a hub in the region of melbourne attracting immigrants, specifically british migrant architects.
- Melbournes perception of iteself changed radically
o Public
o Civic
o Ecclesiastic buildings
o “these buildings expressed the need to perpetuate western civilisation and its traditions in a ‘new’ land.
- “Melbourne was arguably the greatest 19th century city in the world.” (644)
- “Architecture expression was clearly derrivative” (644)
- “The Queen City of the South” (644)
o Heart of the empire benefitted enormously, both economically and intellectually, from its colonies in the Antipodes
- Architects came from
o Scotland
o Germany
o Canada
o US
 “their own variations of architectural knowledge to australia.
 Geo-cultural relationship
 The bottom years of the 1880’s which see melbourne as the third wealthiest city in the world, followed by a severe recession in the 1890’s
 Allowed art nouveau to flourish
o Subtle changes in response to place and environment occur; thoughts from elsewhere are filtered; ideas evolve, and impositions are influenced by multiple exchanges.
PROCESS: Depression to WWII
- 20th century defined by
o Modernity
o Modernism
o The moderne
- Set of influxes
o Continental Europe
o United States
o Fresh reports for returning wwI soldiers
o Development of shipping technology
- Modern furniture
- Funishings
- Architectural journals
o More speedily recieved and disseminated
o Stops in asia
 Colombo
 Mumbai
 Incorporated in return journey
o Twenty percent of australian architecture profession was working in london
o Major shifts in the mode of architectural education
o Encourage students to complete their education with extensive travel
- australian architects bucked the trend offered by the still conservative beaux arts educational model they trained under and activley saught work in offices
o often headed by continetal europeans
o bringing modern ideas accross the channel
o architects on tour were principally expoed to the work of dutch and scandinavian modernists
o “comparisons of architectural solutions” showed photographs of telephone boxes and tram stops
o Proliferate well entrenched eurocentric ideals
o Modernism something that ‘happened on the continent’
 Term of its ‘freakishness’
o Adaption to overseas models
 Real concern and experimentation with architecture appropriate to climate
 Formation of MARS australian arcitecture group
- NETWORKS: Pre and Post war european emigre
o Route of emegre architects
o Either side of WWII
o Dominant origin in continental europe
o Collective contribution
o Influx of emigre architets 1930-1950
o Impressive potential architectural contribution
- Growing Jewish Community (Edquist, Townsend)
- Lack of discussion about this phenomenon in australia
- Dicourse of eigre is exilic
- Blurring the boundaries between emigre migrant and settler migrant
o Produces confusion in the discourse of australian architecture
o British architects assumed an equal positions
 Superior statu
 Greater agency and access to institutional infrastructure
o English language
 Sysnonymous with a capacity for agency and access to a professional network of institutional infrastructure
 In contrast to brittish architects
• Few emigre able to gain employment
o “rapid and highly concentrated infusion of avant garge european art and thought” and “the tumultuous historical situation
 Modernism entered australia as an inward flow of new and radical ideas and secondly that this was challenging fo australia
 Existing architectural culture
 Critical filter
o Divisions within the borders of its geographical island outline
o Uneasy fit between european modernism and australian architecture
o Context between the 1930’s and 1950’s “brought with them an already mediated, or at the very least, different form of modernism to Australia.
o England has indeed profited from the un-Englishness of the immigrants as they have profited from the Englishing they underwent’ (Pevsner A Different World: Emigre Architects in Britain from The Englishness of English Art). (652 article)
o Pevners thesis that the modern movement was developed by emigre architects is valid but is only a partial account and shows the methodological bias of pevsner.
o Discourse of unquietness and locality screens
 Australias inevitable reference to britain
 Cultural alliance to ‘motherland/colonizing’ figure
 Emegres encouraged by connected jewish community.
Chopstick Traces: A Secret Australian History in Asian Architecture:
(apologies to Griel Marcus)
- Engagement with asia
o First glace as a disparate and isolated cabinet of architectural curiosities
o Sheer physical distance from europe to australia
 Intermediate location of asia
 Inevitability of political and economic and cultural connections
o Post settler colony
o Complicit in being (literally) seen as the progony of empire
o Significant asian immigration
 Chinese settlement
 Afghans develop inland trade routes
 Ninteenth century temples and mosques remain as legacy to this
 Singaporean timber kit cottages
 Interesting but marginal
 Singaporean cottages being imported in response to acute housing shortage in the wake of the victorian gold rush
 Cultual influences
 Marginal interest
 First half of the 20th century
 Capitol Building Canberra:
• Mahoney griffin’s elevation renderings
• Distinct resemblance to the Anada Pahto temple at Pagan in Myanmar
• Japan: visiting
 William Hardy Wilson; merging of china and greece
• Isolated garden pavillions
o Chinese style tea house: Eryldene, Sydney (1927)
- Northern australia has a relative similarity in climate
- Colonial connections between australia, india and malaysia
- Adaption of tropical and sub tropical building types such as the Bengali Bangla pavillion via the East India company’s Bungale to its counterpoints in the Queenslander and Northern Territory Bungalow.
o Formalized by Karl Langer in 1930’s
o Raised floors
o Light construction
o Typological association with
 Austronesian Dwellings
 Filtered through european
o Nations role within the asian region that australia’s architectural influence on postcolonial asia can viewed
o Due to education
o Asian students
o Initial impetus by the colombo plan (1951)
o Assisting the development of Commonwealth countries in south and southeast asia
o Include a number of significant architects
 Architecture an australian export industry
 90% of malaysian architcts have australian qualification
 Broader implications of australia as a growing location for asian architectural education have yet to be fully analysed
 Interest of early western modernists in traditional japanese architecture
 Metabolist works of tange, isozakie, kurokawa greatly boosted popularity from Robin Boyd’s writing on japanese architects
 KenzoTange (1961)
 New Directions of Japanese Architecture (1968)
• Australian Embassy in Kuala Lumpur 1978
• Demonstrate capacity for western architecture to be translated and re-contextualized
• Semantic and compositional bases for regional inflection that were clearly based on experience
• Cultural
o Climatic engagement
o Upswept gable roof of Pooles Gartner House (1990)
o Haustambaran- like composition of Boroko Office and Shops (1978)
o Growth of australian architectonic engagement with asia itself
• Greter visceral level
o Engendered by first major influx of immigrants to australia
o Vietnamese
o Southeast asian refugees
o Particulr typologies
o Religious and cultural architecture
o Commercial
o Inhabitation patterns
o Literal translations of traditional tropes hybridised more by the “emergent provinisality of the present”
o Architectonc deliberation
o Changing demography
o Moved from being framed as a loss (the tyranny of distance between an emigrant people and their origins) to one of surplus (over abundance of identities within a hybridizing/localizing populace of diverse origins)
o Understood as being intrinsically australian
o Blurring the boundaries between traditional and modern
 Asian and australian
 Formal (hihg)
 Informal (vernacular)
o Questions about australias architectural identity
o Asias power and influence is steadily growing in economic, political and cultural terms
o Relation to intra-asian developments
o Conflation of universal with western within the recieved definition of architectural modernity
o Provincializing of europe a chakrabarty has put it
 Conduit for particular forms of modernity from both east and west
 Re-oriented definition of modernity.
REVISING HISTIOGRAPHY AND TRANSLATION:
- On going architectural translation
- Overlapping series of geo-cultural mobilities
- Indicate how understanding these traces can provide clues for a way of reconciling australias shifting geo-cultural identity in the production of architecture
- Context that emphasis that architecture like culture is not static or rooted in place
- Dual process of locality and mobility
- Architectural mobility and travel is integral
o To the architecture f place
o Contribution as an additive set of parts rather than as individual sometimes fleeting moments
- For a national psyche long suffering and identity crisis, understanding australian architecture in an holistic sense can surely only be found in accepting that of the diversity of peoples which call it home
- Build an alternate narrative in the history of austaralian architecture

Notes by: Thomas J. Barker, Arch.Angle.Studios
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

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