Making in Mind: the Work of Art in the Age of Theoretical Reproducibility Talia A

Making In Mind: The Work of Art in the Age of Theoretical Reproducibility Talia A. Perry For Making in Mind: The Work of Art in the Age of Theoretical Reproducibility: All content produced by Talia A. Perry unless otherwise attributed. Most text and images produced for classes at Carnegie Mellon University, including Architecture Design Studio Materials (48-205), History of Architectural Theory(48-353), and Rights in Representation (79-278); others produced new for this publication. Production estimate Spring 2010. Printed Spring 2012. CC BY-NC-ND.

Ma k i n g in Mi n d

Rereadings of Gottfried Semper offer radically different interpretations of his writing. Depending on the conditions under which Semper was read, he could be a mate- rialist or a functionalist, pioneer of space or of symbols, lean towards the side of historical precedent or innovative creation. But contemporary society demands yet another reconsideration of Semperian theory. Modernists may see Semper’s purification of the tectonics as inspiration to embrace both technique and technology, and post- modernists may interpret Semper’s glorification of textiles ridden with meaning and references as a completely different goal worthy of pursuit. Today, we remain non- committal about architectural declaration. Modernism was the last grand narrative, postmodernism was the last style, but Semper has not yet been wrung dry. If any uni- fying element of our contemporary cultural condition can be found, it is our obsession with information and

5 6 Making in Mind connection. Technology allows for instantaneous communication and exchange. This element of discourse not only appears in Semper’s writing, but begins to mature into a more fully developed position on the relationship between theoretical writing and the physical construct of architecture. So our attention is turned not to the roof, to the mound, nor to the wall, but to the most immaterial element of architecture, the hearth. It is the hearth that is privileged as the “first and most important, the moral element of architecture,”1 anticipat- ing architecture, the coming together of people prefac- ing the coming together of materials. “Around the hearth the first groups assembled; around it the first alliances formed; around it the first rude religious concepts were put into the customs of a cult.”2 Semper sets up the hearth as a social mixing bowl for all other ingredients. It is “first and most important” because it initiated architecture by facilitating exchange of ideas, establishing ideals and goals before putting them into practice. Yet the hearth is Semper’s most neglected element – both in explanation by Semper himself but also in the theoretical discourse that followed in response to his work – because it lacks the clarity and development of his other arguments. The loose connections Semper attempts between the hearth and his physical processes or materials fall short of the Making in Mind 7 complete coupling that seems to work so well with wood tectonics and roof, with weaving textiles and wall. Where the hearth emerges in Semper’s texts, though, offers some clues for interpretation of the hearth’s meaning. In “The Four Elements of Architecture,” Semper acknowledges that ceramics and metal works began to depend on the hearth physically, as the fire provided a way of more permanently fixing these types of materials to a particular shape.3 He also explains in Der Stil that ceramics have a very strong historical association with social development. Semper writes: “The earliest and most general application of this art was without doubt to satisfy needs: eating, drinking, and washing above all. Yet ceramics acquired great significance even in the earliest times because urns were used in funeral rites.”4 While ceramics did not depend on the hearth exclusively, especially when only used for utilitarian purposes, the fire allowed for a degree of permanence. Semper continues: Not only were the remains of the dead interred in earth- enware cinerary urns but vessels were also placed in tombs as pledges of a continuing cult of the dead, as favorite pos- sessions of the deceased, and as mementos of important moments of his life. Remarkably, we find this custom wher- ever a people displays the first signs of a higher culture.5 8 Making in Mind

In its use, the vessel is raised beyond the level of physical- ity – it is a symbolic gesture not reliant upon religious knowledge, but can be read as a social object. The development of ceramic production as a social activity, and the use of these objects as cultural artifacts embedded within a community’s social relationships, suggests that the hearth offers society a way to establish and to keep physically aware these relationships – the hearth fixes immaterial relationships into physical objects that last beyond the biologically ephemeral existence of a human being. The mound, though it remains distinct from the hearth in “Four Elements,” emerges not around the hearth, like the other elements of architecture, but beneath it. And Semper is tempted to combine them on more than one occasion. Footnoting his comment that roof, enclosure, and mound materialize as a way to protect the hearth, Semper attempts to stamp out the complexities of the mound-hearth relationship: “At first glance the mound or the terrace appears as secondary and as necessary only in the lowlands; yet the mound joined at once with the hearth and was soon needed to raise it off the ground […] it is probable that man, not as individual, but certainly as social being, arose from the plains as the last mud-creation, so to speak.”6 He argues against those who might consider the mound a particular architectural Making in Mind 9 idiosyncrasy of some specific climate, because the mound, too, is not just a physical entity; it is necessary to separate man’s artifice from the natural world. Man, “as a social being,” has to pull himself out of the mud before he can create discursive, cultural objects. The mound as hearth gains some clarity in Der Stil: The raised earthen plateau of the hearth represents the ideal type of the mounding of earth that people everywhere have done since the beginning of civilization. It has been prepared or built up so that it may be used, as it were, to detach something from the earth and the world as a whole: a consecrated place dedicated to some entity.7 The hearth is a glorified plinth, simultaneously material and immaterial in its paradoxical ability to separate man from his surroundings while grounding him to a place. Ceramics and sterotomic production may be inher- ently different processes, but both are inevitably bound to the hearth. Social behavior and development arise from their interaction with physical and psychological flame that is at the center of every communal enterprise of man. The hearth can never escape its socio-cultural origins the way roof and wall can detach themselves from geologi- cal or chronological place. And while Semper was able to draw connections between hearth and monumentality, 10 Making in Mind the hearth operates on a level beyond physical creation of architecture. The hearth is not embodied by architectural practice, but discourse. The reason Semper has difficulty articulating its pairing with a physical process or material is that it belongs to a fifth way of making. Theory, socially constructed understandings of what architecture – what man – should be, is a way of making architecture, argu- ably the most important way and undoubtedly the process favored by Semper in his own cultural contributions. Fundamentally, architecture mediates the relationships between individuals, or between the individual and the collective – but our understanding of how it does so is dependent upon language as much as it is buildings. The hearth establishes a mutually-defining relationship between architecture and its inhabitants, placing them within a field of social discourse by their interaction. The hearth is not tectonically oriented, is not about putting things together physically, but is a socially constructed, discursive element of architecture. The hearth yields to a dynamic understanding of architectural style through the dialogue it generates, through constant questioning of what our built environment is and should be. It is necessary to return briefly to the wall in order to understand the hearth’s discursive function, because Making in Mind 11 the wall, too, is seen by Semper as a way to communicate ideas. The wall also strings together conceptual underpin- nings of its architecture to give a greater understanding to the whole. Through its physical and visual presence, the wall influences our perception of space, but it simultaneously serves as a symbolic meaning of that space. Semper writes heavily about specific examples of the textile covering, determining that “the dressing and the mask are as old as human civilization,” and that this covering up of reality “is necessary if form is to emerge as a meaning- ful symbol, as an autonomous human creation.”8 The painting, paneling, and dressing of the wall meant that this element was wrapped in stories and symbols. But the legibility of meaning was, and is, reliant upon a greater understanding of the culture from which it came. It is impossible to read the textile once removed from the cultural conditions under which it was made. The mask does not read as a mask without the context to define it as such. Misreadings of architecture are inevitable, but if meaning is so important to Semper, it assumes a degree of consistency. The textile may be a projection plane for symbolic communication, but it is never literal communication. Theory, written and spoken discourse, is necessary to facilitate discussion across time and place. The textile can be read within the conditions of its own culture, because 12 Making in Mind it consists of symbols of that culture, it is trying to initi- ate an internal discussion, but it is necessary to translate that symbolic making into a form of communication able to transcend time and place in order for architecture to be read externally by other cultures. This is the function of the hearth. A closer reading of Semper’s articulation of the origins of the hearth suggests that the hearth does not bring together the same people, but different people from different cultures, with different ideas and customs: “Around the hearth the first groups assembled; around it the first alliances formed; around it the first rude religious concepts were put into the customs of a cult.”9 Alliances were formed and agreements were made. This kind of assembly, though suggests differences first needed to be overcome. The hearth was first a place for arguments and disagreements before things could be reworked, reorga- nized, and temporarily gathered into harmonic order. To move beyond discord, society must look back, and around. Conditions of the present can only be understood in relation to the alternative. “Nothing is arbitrary; everything is conditioned by circumstances and relations.”10 Relationships are sought amongst differences – Semper recognizes he lives in an age of complex relationships between man, technology, and the built environment. Style cannot emerge, because architecture cannot yet Making in Mind 13 react to the internal battle of the nineteenth century. It is Semper’s definition of the emergence of style that best articulates the cyclical progression of architecture through the passing of an epoch. Chaos and destruction are necessary for the reformation, the reorganization of cultural definitions and the development of architecture: The nocturnal sky shows glimmering nebulae among the splendid miracle of stars – either old extinct systems scat- tered throughout the universe, cosmic dust taking shape around a nucleus, or a condition in between destruction and regeneration. They are a suitable analogy for similar events on the horizon of art history. They signify a world of art passing into the formless, while suggesting at the same time the new formation in the making.11 The hearth is not a fixed element of architecture, its presence dependent upon the ebb and flow of just where society is in the process of becoming culturally defined. The world is in constant turmoil, uprisal, and rebirth, it is absurd and unpredictable, but art offers a momentary relief through its ability to frame, analyze, and give manifested form to the chaos of reality. The physical development of art, though, does not spring forth readily from this muddy reality. Architecture needs an intellectual plinth to pull itself out of discontinuity. Discussion 14 Making in Mind around the hearth works through the agreement of ideas as a precursor to the manifestation of these ideas physically. Chaos culturally necessitates the revival of the hearth, of discussion across cultures. “There is nothing but discord from which the arts snatch us away momentarily by sealing off these battles and conflicts and placing them in a tight framework, in the end using them as elements of atonement.”12 Before this can occur, though, physical making demands intellectual understanding. Semper saw his own time as being in a crisis of confusion, the arts drifting further away from each other and style operating independently of time. Bubonic styles plagued the streets with their dying architecture. These culturally agitated conditions called for clarification, not more symbols, recycled or otherwise. Reordering necessitates a return to discussion among culture across time and place – theoretical discourse allows for this to occur without incurring the fallacy of commitment to a particular style. Today, under similar conditions, we’ve lost any ability to separate our pluralist society into distinct cultural styles. Today, anything goes and so nothing goes – Preston Scott Cohen writes that there are no longer normative systems from which we can understand the mutations of one style to another: “Flush with the excitement of the latest technological advancements or material Making in Mind 15 fetishes, and seduced by the boundless possibilities of the present, [architects today] pursue an architecture that might best be described as postproblematic – an architecture in which few forms are considered inacceptable or unreachable.13 Style no longer exists through a relationship with time and place. Style knows no bounds. Pandemic to culture at large, the issue Cohen recognizes in architecture must be addressed beyond the confines of the architectural community. Contemporary theorist K. Michael Hays sees architecture “as a way of negotiating the real, […] as a specific kind of socially symbolic production whose primary task is the construction of concepts and subject positions rather than the making of things.”14 But the making of things is the making of symbols, and both still lack the clarity of explanation. Architecture needs to take a position, but arguments need reasoning and interpretation. By the 1970s, “architecture reached a limit condition in which its objects were no longer construed as mere elements and assemblages of building, however complicated or sophisticated, but rather as a representational system – a way of perceiving and constructing identities and differences.”15 Hays suggests that architecture began to try to speak for itself, while using a cultural vocabu- lary. This was not a novel concept, though – Semper’s 16 Making in Mind writing would suggest it is found at the very core of architecture’s origins. It was, and is now, problematic, because culture is a dynamic force susceptible to change. Buildings concretize a momentary glimpse of human sub- jectivity, values taken from that time. Architecture sees itself as permanent, monumental, because it changes at an exponentially slower rate than culture. Writing is needed to keep up with culture as our interpretations of architecture change. Theory is necessary because our changing culture demands reinterpretation; we do not need to understand the past with any more immediacy than we need to understand the present – an impossible task anyway – but we need to re-understand, over and over again, differently. Theory is needed to mediate change. Hays seems to be arguing for revitalization of Semper’s textile, for the built environment itself to act as discursive formation. He is ignorant to the fact that his writing acts as a log on the hearth. Through the hearth, architecture can facilitate discussion across time-place. If the hearth belongs to architecture, though, the role of the architect is questioned – has the architect, too, been pushed into the virtual world of speculative drawings and words? At the end of the nineteenth century, Semper lamented, “The architect is often little more than an inconsequential adviser in matters of taste and can expect neither esteem Making in Mind 17 nor profits from his commissions.”16 Theory offers the architect a way in, and a way out – because the hearth bridges the gap between architecture and culture, the architect becomes a participant in both communities; architects must construct cultural spaces through discourse, as well as physical spaces to act as catalyst for the coming together of people and ideas. “We can do everything, we know everything except ourselves.”17 Like Semper, we stand at a moment where we do not know what we want or need to be. We continue to build, but cultural criticality falls short. Rem Koolhaas writes, “Junkspace is the sum total of our current achievement; we have built more than did all previous generations put together, but somehow we do not register on the same scales. We do not leave pyramids.”18 Discourse appears to be everywhere, unrestrained in its hostile take- over of culture; instantaneous communication rules the world with increasing tyrannical power. But the conver- sation no longer progresses. We are caught in an endless loop of delirious graphomania.19 Discourse cannot be allowed to suffer the same fate architecture is currently suffering. “Junkspace pretends to unite, but it actually splinters. It creates communities not out of shared interest or free association, but out of identical statistics and unavoidable demographics, an opportunistic weave of 18 Making in Mind vested interests.”20 Similarities must be reconsidered and disagreements embraced. We need constraints and rules set by society to reestablish a collective around the edges of the hearth. “The individual is created only as nour- ishment for the whole.”21 A discursive collective must emerge for the liberation architecture and the restoration of a dysfunctional society. Theory was an important tool for Semper, a way of clarifying his position on what architecture is and should be, and a way of setting down rules for practice of architecture and participation in society. Theoretical discourse exchanged between different groups of people is what allowed for innovation to occur, allowed for the reorganization of old and new ideas. Through inquiry, explication, and proclamation of ideas regarding the foundation of societal conditions, theory requires total understanding – or an unconditional stance – of the past and present. Semper uses theory as a way to come to terms with the contradictions of his own time, contradictions between thinking and doing. Semper’s neglected element, the hearth, is one that demands our attention today, when we are similarly lost in a sea of styles and extracultural moti- vations. Before physically committing our architecture to the shackles of an alien object, the discussion needs to be taken outside of architecture. En d n o t e s

1. Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 102. 2. Ibid. 3. Semper, Four Elements of Architecture and OtherWritings , p. 103. 4. Gottfried Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or Practical Aesthetics (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2004), p. 467. 5. Ibid. 6. Semper, Four Elements of Architecture and OtherWritings , footnote on p. 102. 7. Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or Practical Aesthetics, p. 726.

19 20 Making in Mind

8. Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or Practical Aesthetics, endnote 85 on p. 438. 9. Semper, Four Elements of Architecture and OtherWritings , p. 102. 10. Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or Practical Aesthetics, p. 72. 11. Ibid., p. 71. 12. Ibid., p. 82. 13. Preston Scott Cohen, Contested Symmetries and Other Predicaments in Architecture (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001), p. 12. 14. K. Michael Hays, Architecture’s Desire: Reading the Late Avant-Garde (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), p. 1. 15. Ibid., p. 2. 16. Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or Practical Aesthetics, p. 76. 17. Gottfried Semper’s first draft of Wissenschaft, Industrie und Kunst, quoted by Wolfgang Herrmann, Gottfried Semper: In Search of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), p. 157. 18. Rem Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” October 100 (Spring Making in Mind 21

2002): 175. 19. See Milan Kundera’s novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. 20. Koolhaas, p. 183. 21. Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or Practical Aesthetics, p. 82. Image: Montage of Public Pool: Looking over Saco Lake, New Hampshire.

Image: Montage of Main Entry to Spa.

Images: Study Models: Two of many models built to understand how the density and patterning of material effected lighting and spatial qualities, as well as contributing to the structural integrity of the flexible construction.

Refer to associated model, Present Aperture, Wild Framed Final Model: The explication of ‘relaxation’ reveals disturbing complexity in a term usually associated with such a passive, pure state of being. Simultaneously an act of reflection and self-induced amnesia, it redefines conventional emotion. Relaxed, one is suspended in a state of limbo, hovering just on the surface of their normative cultural milieu, the contact nearly indiscernible to the person loosened but not detached from reality. Connection abets distance. Images: Connection Details, Sketched.

Ep i s o d e o f V e l o c i t y (48s c )

Exhausted after another four-hour layover in Denver, Ron had fallen asleep on the orange line heading up-town. On the other end of the car, a seventy-year-old woman in Stealth Blue Air Jordans swore at an overweight cop. The fighting ensued for twenty minutes – something about stolen sneakers – before Ron jolted awake. He cursed his bad luck. He had missed his girlfriend’s apartment. The doors opened, but before he could get off the train, the old woman flashed the policeman and ran away screaming, officer in pursuit. Ron sat back down and watched the city disappear again. The layers of architecture and infra- structure weaved in and out as it started to rain. Clouds rolled in and lights came on. Ron found himself somehow fascinated by the grotesque detritus of Chicago. Amidst the rubble, Ron caught sight of a building he hadn’t seen before. He thought he remembered the area being near the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, where he and Hannah

33 34 Making in Mind had gone for their three-year anniversary. He couldn’t think of the performance they saw. He squinted. As the train pulled up to the station, he tried to get a glimpse at what was going on, but once the car had stopped, he was confronted with a solid, dark face. The rain blew hard against the deadpan wall, and Ron could hear it ricochet in an ironic sort of rhythm, filling the momentary silence interrupting the roar of the train. The train pulled away, Ron still sitting, staring, listening. Ep i s o d e o f En c o u n t e r (7m n )

Hank’s lunch break was fading fast. In fifteen minutes, he would have to be back in his cubicle, pounding away ceaselessly at the keys to feign productivity. His boss was ruthless, but ignorant to the rising resistance of Hank and the rest of the team. They had all gone out drinking on Friday and discussed the possibility of doing ‘Office Space’ right. Or maybe the could just stage a walk-out. Hank wasn’t confident in their success, but he wasn’t confident that they would actually try anything, either. It was much easier to keep a crappy job than to find a new one. He turned onto Adams as he contemplated his and the fate of his coworkers. Marveling at the number of pub/restaurant combos in the area, he settled for an orange juice and a fortune cookie from Panda Express. A man with a three- legged dog and a worn bongo drum asked for change, and Hank handed him the fortune cookie. Hank tripped – he would regret only giving the fortune cookie – landing hard on the sidewalk, change spilling out of his pocket.

35 36 Making in Mind

Pulling himself up, leaving his quarters and dignity at the curb, he continued towards the parking garage. Perhaps he should have gone to Russian Tea Time instead. As he neared the corner, the light turned red. He looked up at the now year-old Institute of the CSO. His boss had a daughter that played the cello, or flute, or something musical anyhow, and his boss was a pompous ass. But this didn’t look quite like what Hank was expecting. It wasn’t very big – he could count the floors, which was saying something in a city full of skyscrapers. It wasn’t particularly graceful, sort of screaming quietly for the respect of the more restrained buildings around it. Instead of cross- ing the street, Hank turned the corner, happily finding one lone bench tucked under the twisting façade. A vibrating cell phone fell from his pocket and he watched it bounce its way across the brick. Ep i s o d e o f Re n d e z v o u s (4h r )

Carol hadn’t seen her parents all semester, but wasn’t so sure that finals week was the best time to be showing them around the city. With half a year of UChicago under her belt, she felt already significantly distanced from her family and her home, the life she had before leaving for college. After dropping off unreasonable amounts of food at her dorm, they drove – despite Carol’s objections that she hadn’t been in a car since the summer – towards the harbor, where Carol, unsurprisingly, played tour guide. They, her parents, were being unusually secretive about their dinner plans, something their daughter did not like. Richard and Cathy were both known for their inability to throw a true surprise party and were incapable of holding back any news, good or bad. As the sun went down and everyone started to shiver in the windy cold, they stuck close to the park, ‘looking’ for somewhere to eat. By the time the three reached Adams, Richard and Cathy were practically giddy. The new CSO Institute addition came

37 38 Making in Mind into view, and Carol knew her parent’s intentions were much, much more extravagant. Richard looked down through the glass at the dining room, his stomach utter- ing a particularly well-timed grumble. Cathy chimed in, Let’s look at a menu! Carol rolled her eyes and followed them inside. Stepped back, the entrance was already a relief from the cold and commotion of their walking tour. It wasn’t quiet, but the sound was warmer, even, voices replacing the mechanical rumble of traffic and train. Dinner went by without too much out of the ordi- nary. At a table near the staircases, Carol noted a lot of frantic rushing going on behind her, and it was making her anxious. Maybe it was reminding her of all the study- ing she would need to catch up on for taking an entire day out of her schedule. The waiter mentioned a few too many times the sculptures featured in the gallery on the floor above, and the family took the hint, heading upstairs after their meal. Carol remained on her toes. The space above swirled with people, and Carol was just part of the crowd again. Removed from the street, pedestrians lost their direction and the immediacy that ruled their lives. But to regain contact with the wall was to reposi- tion oneself within the mass, and the labyrinth suddenly revealed its pattern. Carol saw an opening, and went for it. Her parents watched her wander up the stairs and into Making in Mind 39 yet another crowd of people, though this one significantly more by the imposition of sleek rows of seats. Carol tried to shake away the memory, as her fingers danced along the narrow handrail, of animated polished keys… When an usher prompted her for a ticket, Carol glanced back. Her father pushed three into her hand and they sat down, waiting for the performance to begin. The lights shifted from the back of the theater, gathering into a crescendo towards the stage. Carol hadn’t touched the piano in over a year, but when she saw a beautiful black Steinway sitting there, the bench unoccupied, her heart leapt. Images: Chicago From the Ground and (right) Sky.

Ep i s o d e o f Co mm i t me n t (5w k )

The bug stared back at Nicholas. It was nine in the morning and blistering hot. Nick was lying with his stomach on the cold kitchen tiles, gazing intently at an insect he found crawling under the refrigerator. He strummed his fingers against the tile. School would be out in another two weeks, but his weekends would continue to be spent drumming. Two more weeks of fourth grade. No one would have suspected that Nick was a child prodigy when it came to music. He hadn’t even been the type to bang on pots and pans as a toddler. He didn’t talk much, and it was difficult to get him to play in front of other people, but his music teacher, Miss Jezebel, managed to coax it out of him every Saturday. He had gotten into the Percussion Scholarship Program only about a month ago, when his math teacher caught him composing a symphony in the margins of his long division homework. Nine twenty-five and he was standing in the parking lot, his mom kissing him goodbye. How embarrassing. He grabbed his drum sticks and ran

43 44 Making in Mind up the garden stairs, scrambling up the side of the building, still outside despite the heat. He didn’t mind the first two floors, but they were for everyone, and so not really for him. It was bad enough that he had to share a room at home with his brother. The stairs snaking upward, not quite inside but not open to the rest of the city, were for him. They were smaller, a little less grand, but somehow less constricting. Nick burst through the doors of the resource center, a bit out of breath, frantically searching his pockets for a pencil. He scribbled for paper, but only found sheet music. Mozart’s notes taunted him. The beat he had been thinking of when climbing the stairs disap- peared in the classical composition before him. Unable to help himself, he started to write, tentatively at first, filling up the page with modifications. It sounded better that way. Miss Jezebel walked in, shocked to find Mozart so disrespectfully graffitied. Without saying a word, she pulled the sheets from Nick’s hands. He expected to be escorted out, especially after the incident at the Chicago Public Library last week, when he had appended a collec- tion of Wagner’s operas. But instead, Miss Jezebel gave back the Mozart, took him upstairs to one of the open classrooms, and gave him a stack of blank sheets, asking that he please photocopy the sheet music before ‘enhanc- ing it’ next time. His lesson this week, she said, would be Making in Mind 45 postponed until he had some time to write. Nick’s eyes wandered around the room. His room – a room of his own. He slid over to the drum set, with a violin on his lap, whipped up a beat and started plucking away, spinning around every couple of seconds to press his paper against the glass so he could fill in a few more notes. A few hours passed before Miss Jezebel informed him, regretfully, that the classroom was going to be used by another group of students, and that it was a good time for a break. Nick sulked about in the resource center over his pb&j before wandering out onto the stairs. Drumsticks still in hand, he started to rattle them along the handrails, picking up speed and a light rhythm. He skipped a beat when he grazed the edge of the aluminum panels accidentally, but intrigued, continued to experiment. He was rattling about in the stairway, oblivious to the world around him. The first thing he noticed was Leroy, the security guard, walking towards him – Nick again expected to be booted from the school. But Leroy started to clap, and a flood of applause from above and below joined the montage of sound. Image: Final Model: Entry from Adams, at corner of Wabash. Image: CSO Plan 1: Entrance, outdoor park, and restaurant. Note the thick wall (shifting floor-to- floor), primarily serving as acoustic barrier for the raised train directly adjacent to the site, running every twenty minutes or so. Image: Final Model: Looking into west towards ticket desk. Image: CSO Plan 2: Gallery space, ticket desk, restrooms, and waiting space for visitors. Image: Final Model: Location of collision of second skin into the building on third floor. Second skin provides shade to certain programmatic spaces of the building, and, in this case, offers an additional level of privacy to the backstage and dressing room areas alongside the main performance space. Image: CSO Plan 3: Main performance space, backstage and dressing area. Note the separation of circulation for the public audience versus the smaller staircase for the students, which continues to the fourth floor. Image: Final Model: Looking down from rooftop practice rooms. Image: CSO Plan 4 and 5: Practice rooms and storage are located on the building’s roof, looking out on the city of Chicago.

Ep i s o d e o f In t i m a c y (7y r )

The building was never this quiet. At least she typically left before any of the CSO employees arrived – musi- cians have no sense of their own volume. She preferred the quiet. Ironic that she could find so much peace in a building usually filled with screaming children and screaming violins. But she wasn’t really at peace with the building. They were at war. They had been for seven years. Deborah had joined the cleaning staff the first year the Institute opened. Four thirty am was her time alone with the architecture, free to wage their epic war. She always took the elevator to the top and worked her way down, repressing its shortcomings with her disinfec- tant and polish. The acoustic flooring of the classrooms was impossible to clean. How was it that kids could get mud all the way upstairs? Was there even any mud left in Chicago? Last she walked around the city, there was nothing but asphalt. But she preferred to think of it as dirt. At least dirt was natural and easily cleaned. It could

55 56 Making in Mind be chocolate cake – she cringed at the thought. Mud, def- initely. Probably from the garden, tracked all the way up ‘the indecisive stair’, as she called it. She hadn’t cleaned those for a month, the bruise on her calf still tender from the tumble she took down their too-slippery treads. Moving through the offices now. The tilted windows collected physically unrealistic amounts of dust – her past experience working in an antique shop had involved less dusting. She hated acute angles. More windows in the theater. And here, nothing was easily reached. It didn’t help that she was 5’2”. The broken, dead skin that found its way into the building by the stairs made her shudder. Metal panels collected fingerprints like a philatelist col- lects stamps. And the damn railings were always so greasy, residue from the grimy hands of the ‘patrons of the arts.’ What about her art? Did anyone care about the time she put in to restore the interior to its original condition every night? No. There was no appreciation. Her vacuuming continued into the lobby. Electrical outlets too far apart, so there was a small triangle in the middle of the gallery. A small grey dusty triangle. And always hit her head on the underside of the stairs. She hated it. All of it. It was ugly, it was impossible to keep clean, and it had the faint smell of a campfire that even Pine-sol couldn’t erase. She locked the doors behind her and left, disgusted. Sunday, Making in Mind 57 her day off, spent with her grandson in Millennium Park, watching him chase a menagerie of seagulls and pigeons. The two walked back towards the L, Deborah shivering as she passed the Institute at the CSO, the sun dancing down the sliver of space between the classrooms and the brick, picking up again on the sidewalk where they walked. Her grandson caught a glimpse, despite Deborah’s attempts to hurry him past. Wow, Grandma, can we go in? Deborah wanted to say no, but she was partial to her grandson’s excitement, and was curious herself to see it during the day, actually made alive by the public and the artists and the students. They walked in, and looked up, light was pouring in from above, radiating throughout the lobby abuzz with people rushing to buy tickets. Grandma, this is the building you work in, isn’t it? Deborah had no choice but to concede; she had lost her war: Yep, the finest building in all of Chicago.

Image: Section showing location of the train in relation to building’s program.

Image: Main performance space montage.

Image: Space between outer skin and building’s primary enclosure.

Ri g h t s o f In f l u e n c e

Visual anthropologist Eric Michaels confesses, “My own interest in coming to Australia was not Aborigines per se, in whom I had no specialist background, but their experience of coming to the media as a test of and an analogy to questions posed within the modern Western tradition. Ultimately, I wanted to understand our, not their, media revolution.”1 Our intentions are never completely selfless when it comes to research – there is always the under- lying motive to understand oneself. This should not be disregarded, but embraced as an existing complexity to the way we go about inquiries into indigenous culture. That’s not to say, though, that an outsider’s perspective is irrelevant to the ongoing debates about indignity. There are numerous connections through which we might begin to understand Australian Aboriginal culture beyond mere surface effects, and it is important with all of these to remember that universality is a falsely-constructed

65 66 Making in Mind imposition on cultural identity; in architecture especially, Western definitions for particular words denote a different set of cultural cues. This essay explores the pos- sible redefinition of “place” and “architecture” for and by Australian Aborigines, while seeking to understand how both Western and indigenous interpretations of these terms elicits a response through the ways one interacts with space and with others. Australian Aboriginal architecture is undergoing many of the same contemporary problems that are occur- ring globally: modernization and commoditization of culture, a pluralistic postmodern sensibility means stylistic and formal constraints no longer exist. We have strangely dislodged ourselves from commitment to style, accepting influence of extracultural motives2 as a reason to ignore culturally embedded modes of design. But aspects of the aboriginal tradition are able to overcome this montage of the external motif – clashes of culture aside, notions of social space and the value of collectivity can and should be maintained. Sustaining these more complex tradi- tions3 is a way for culture to grow out of itself, to evolve. However, the effects of globalization indicate internal interpretation is rendered close to meaningless without external acknowledgement. If architecture is to become a way to gain cultural recognition, it must have an influence Making in Mind 67 outside of the aboriginal community. With the fleeting exception of Modernism, we have been asking ourselves “in which style should we build?” for more than two centuries.4 Between eclecticism at the start of the Industrial Revolution and the pluralism of the post-modern era, architects have agreed upon very little.5 This desirable confusion was forced upon aboriginal groups at the arrival of the British at the end of the eighteenth century, and has remained a part of Australian culture today. Philip Goad, Professor of Architecture at the University of Melbourne, notes a difference between the gradual development of European architecture and the sudden arrival of new technologies and forms of representation to the continent of Australia: “Unlike Europe, where successive cultures had overlaid layer after layer of urbanization and agriculture upon the land, the introduction of the nineteenth century settlement and modern industrialization in Australia was rather more brutal, especially so on a land tracked and lined by the light- ness of its indigenous inhabitants.”6 The change was made even more blunt by its attempt at complete erasure of what came before – we see similar tendencies with the colonization of America, where the land was seen as a completely blank slate, a tabula rasa, a new world. But it was a new world that could easily resort to the old 68 Making in Mind

– the geographically-distant old that is, as that was the culture the white settlers knew. Goad’s colleague at the University of Melbourne, Miles Lewis, expands on this: Architecture and building in the British Empire was in many respects not so much colonial as simply British. So far as Anglo settlers were concerned there was not a relationship of ruler and ruled, or exploiter and exploitee. They were British citizens in a greater Britain. The status and facilities of Melbourne were comparable with those of Manchester.7 Its historical, geographic, and climatologically differences aside, Australia was just another, bigger, Britain. So where did that leave the people that had been there before? To some extent, they were left to their own devices. Spread across the continent, aboriginal groups could at least temporarily remain relatively isolated from the imposition of European modernization. But the British moved further inland and showed no mercy towards the aboriginal groups they encountered. By force or by curiosity, aboriginals migrated towards the new urban centers. Camps of indigenous peoples emerged from the periphery of these towns and they became gradually more permanently fixed to these “fringe settlements” as more aboriginals arrived. Choices in the materials used for construction of shelter shifted with the new availability Making in Mind 69 of local resources: recycled galvanized iron sheet metal and scrapped dimensional lumbar began to replace bark, tree limbs, and mud-grass waterproofing techniques of construction. The formal choices of structures morphed accordingly, becoming more rectilinear and less condu- cive to the desired flow of air and people between interior and exterior.8 An argument all too familiar to the anthropologi- cal world is the fear that the introduction of Western techniques of representation have the ability to taint truly indigenous modes of production into something somehow less authentic; this is seen at the introduction of photography and digital technologies to certain indigenous cultures, as well as the introduction to certain architectural systems.9 American architect and historian Bernard Rudofsky gives a summarizing account of the detrimental impact of Western culture can have on indigenous architecture: In some places the exclusive reliance on local buildings materials alone guarantees the persistence of some time-honored construction methods. Conversely, when alien materials and alien methods are introduced, local traditions whither away, customs are displaced by trends, and the vernacular perishes. […] Does the disappearance of architectural species native 70 Making in Mind

to the soil upset the balance of civilization in the same way as the disappearance of certain animals and plants upsets the ecological balance?10 This fear of influence not only assumes (wrongly) that the native culture is so fragile it cannot be maintained when faced with the almighty power of Western culture, but Rudofsky misses the point. The species do not disappear completely – they mutate. Complete architectural extinction is rare, because of the large amount of energy and time that goes into the construction of a building. Architectural evolution, though, is as inevitable as bio- logical evolution. Culture is a moving force, not a static condition, and this becomes amplified by the introduction of exterior pressures. The system is never in balance to begin with; it is never a closed system. Interaction suggests reaction, an infinite loop of change.11 Throughout the change, though, there must remain some state of constancy, some normative system from which mutations can emerge. In the case of Australian Aboriginals, this constant is spatial organization. The distribution of space among a collective of indigenous peoples is a reflection of their social relationship, a physical manifestation of the system of kinship connections that rules their interactions. Australian architect and Making in Mind 71 anthropologist Paul Memmott writes: Among […] rules and obligations based on kinship are some that affected socio-spatial behavior, that is, the spatial behavior of people in relation to one another – either their relative spatial positions, their orientations, or the extent of their body contact, as seen as an expression of their particular social relations.12 The meaning of a space grows beyond its function and enters into a realm of knowledge-based awareness, neces- sitating cultural understanding of the space’s meaning. Boundaries are not necessarily physically or visually apparent, but inherent in indigenous apprehension of social relationships. As aborigines move through different camps, as geographic and even cultural conditions may change, their relationship to each other is maintained, because it is a defining attribute of who they are. Kinship rules interaction, and thus their arrangement of space. The layout of the camp itself gains some consistency because the spatial implications of their social lives continue to play a role in movement through interior and exterior space regardless of particularities of shelter and the land. Some parts of a camp can be specified for a particular gender or age group, and clustering of individuals is dependent upon marital, blood, or geographic ties. 72 Making in Mind

We see this spatial distribution as an important part of aboriginal life in the film Ten Canoes: Young Yeeralparil (/ Dayindi) is not permitted to enter the women’s camp as an unmarried male – when he does, it is suggested he wants to be with his brother’s wife, and this would be a potentially dangerously aggressive social gesture.13 Also seen in the film, and described at length by Memmott, there exists a division of space outside of the camp also designated for the use of restricted groups. Specific male and female roles for gathering food remain distinct, for instance, and this allows for strict rules about space sur- rounding the immediate built environment of a sheltered camp. Again, the spatial arrangement is generated by “rules for the sharing of, and access to, food and other materials”, as well as “avoidance behavior” dictating proximity of individuals.14 Domestic places of nocturnal sleep are particularly telling of the social arrangement of a group, but active spaces, tied to particular tasks or rituals, are similarly dependent upon rules of kinship and social interaction in their location within the camp. During the development of “fringe settlements,” regardless of the drastic shifts in materials and form of shelter, these intricate spatial relationships remained, and effected the organization of the new camps. Aboriginals grouped together around the edges of towns; as more came, Making in Mind 73 they attached themselves to the individuals already settled, “on the basis of social links [and] according to “locational principles” such as the direction of travel, or country.”15 Within the camps, social divisions based on kinship, gender, age, etc. were also maintained through spatial distribution. “This style of settlement life provided a type of separatism from white society which became a means of cultural survival.”16 Spatial relationships were preserved and cultural identity relatively unrestrained. Living in a group isolated from the rest of the European-developed urban center, the aborigines had more freedom to practice traditional ritual dances, painting, etc. The independence did not last long, though. Non- aboriginals, including journalists, were permitted to view the camps because they remained so close to the white settlement; constantly “in the public eye, [the camps] thereby attracted criticism from the new settlers, becoming a pressing political issue for them.”17 Due in part to the proximity of the camps, but also arising out of preconceived European notions of cleanliness, order, and civilized life, public authorities feared that “fringe settlements” would have a negative effect on the health of the wider community, viewing the camps as slum-like squalor attracting disease through their overall lack of proper sanitary precautions. Across Australia, attempts 74 Making in Mind were made to disassemble the camps and replace them with new housing solutions and begin assimilation of the aboriginal community. Memmott writes: The shifting of town campers into Western houses as part of a widespread assimilation program often meant the trans- posing of social problems behind walls, and the diminishing or loss of many social bonds that had been maintained in the fringe settlement.18 The Western architects replacing the native builders disregarded the spatial necessities and the relationship to the environment, lacking the quality of “place” of indigenous architecture. There was little to no communication between aboriginal clients and the architects of this “conventional” Euro-style housing. Aborigines no longer had control over their environment. Memmott’s concern, though, was not entirely accu- rate in its predicted negative response to the new housing developments. Dr. Stephen Long of the University of Queensland argues, “Aboriginal people (in the case of Dajarrra people) creatively transformed [these generic buildings] into Aboriginal environments and Aboriginal architecture with particular reference to place and culture.”19 As shown in the fringe settlements, aborigines are able to maintain their sense of cultural place despite Making in Mind 75 their oppressive surroundings. Simply put, they adapt, whether that implies physically adjusting properties of the house, constructing additional elements of control, or interacting with what is given to them in a particular way. Some specific examples Long offers are the construction of additional windbreaks and shading structures, the constant movement of furniture over the course of the day, and distinct behavioral patterns that mirror those of a traditional camp. Again, we must question whether “architecture” of the Australian Aboriginals is actually a material quality at all, or whether it is an interactive concept of spatial organization.20 There are some difficulties that arise with the argument that space can serve as a three-dimensional mne- monic for place. In Western architectural theory, one of the most well-known advocates for the return of “place” in architecture – and an avid scholar of Heidegger – was Norwegian architect and theorist, Christian Norberg- Schulz. Genius Loci was reinvigorated by Norberg- Schulz for an architectural audience to recycle these Heideggerian necessities of belonging to place, knowing one’s own place, developing the character of a place, and put them into an architectural context. Norberg-Schulz writes, “A place is […] a qualitative, ‘total’ phenomenon, which we cannot reduce to any of its properties, such as 76 Making in Mind spatial relationships, without losing its concrete nature out of site.”21 Concreteness is not and never was a concern for the aboriginals, who were largely seasonal nomads in pre-colonial times anyway. Structures were abandoned and materials constantly replaced. But that’s not to say that Australian Aborigines belonged to their “place” any less than a permanent dweller. Norberg-Schulz’s proposi- tion of this “concrete nature” of a place is problematic for cultures that do not depend as heavily upon the crutch of objectified tradition, as we do in Western society. We have, for the most part, lost any spatial sense of place that might have once existed within our own culture – or individual cultures – and so it is difficult to conceive of a society that can move without difficulty from a series of mud huts to a shingled house crowded with interior walls, sustaining their sense of self through socio-spatial arrangements that can be projected upon almost any physical framework. We no longer have space, only Junkspace.22 Style no longer exists in a relationship with time and place. Architecture today has no sense of belonging, and has given up a search for genius loci, lost in the confusion of infinite choice. The Australian Aborigines have a cultural understanding of place that operates outside of Western notions of style in design. This is a strong, positive attribute contributing to their ability to adapt to adverse conditions Making in Mind 77 that may challenge their cultural identity. The concept of social space enhances and expands upon the notion of operating as a collective. Aboriginal culture as a whole already acknowledges the power of community over the individual; take, for example, the dispersal of knowledge amongst the kinship network, suggestive of recip- rocal dependency on each other for the independent bodies of information contained by each person. Eric Michaels explains, “Information is dispersed in time and space through a network that eventually encompasses the continent, and perhaps the world, in which each adult individual has particular, but constrained, speaking and knowing rights.”23 The matrix of relationships that binds the aboriginal community together is amplified by a reliance on socially organized space for cultural survival. To the aborigines, it is not just about being of a place, but of being of a place with others. This comes up in an unlikely scenario in Rudofsky’s text as well, as he attempts to distinguish formal from vernacular architecture. He writes: What distinguishes the two from each other are different sets of idiosyncrasies. […] As a rule, [indigenous] houses are formed and deformed by successive additions of volumes quite unrelated to each other, a drawn-out process that is 78 Making in Mind

the very opposite of the professional builder’s habit to make definite plans and see them through.24 There exists a different kind of order within indigenous architecture that is no readily apparent to our culturally constructed order of symmetry and visual repetition. We define order by classical standards. But Rudofsky seems to think it all bottles down to intent: sometimes, formal architecture intends to be asymmetrical and sometimes vernacular architecture seems to be symmetrical, but they are intentional and accidental respectively. The real difference is that one has been preplanned by the individual, the other a communal effort – it is visually responsive to the fact that it did not have one single hand reordering the entire structure. The architect does not exist as an individual in this setting. Architecture is an additive, communal process. The aboriginal perception of architecture jumps in scale from building to city – they are less inter- ested in housing the individual as they are housing the collective. Seeking to explain the necessary steps for professionals designing for an aboriginal community, Memmott quotes Alison Page, an indigenous interior designer with the Merrima Aboriginal Design Unit: The way I see it, Indigenous architecture is not a style but a culturally appropriate process based on communication, trust, and community development… From the moment a Making in Mind 79

building idea is conceived to the moment it is realized, communication, in whatever form, and community involvement will determine the Aboriginality of an architecture.25 With the exception of strengthening a sense of community, and perhaps pride, this does little to aid in a fight for rights. Is adaptability a trait to be admired, or is a static, visually apparent consistency a more powerful char- acteristic of representation? Who is the true “architect” of the culture? To return to Page’s quote, if communication is so important for the design process of structures for aboriginal peoples, how can communication outwards be so easily ignored? Representation should suggest the act of critically displaying an internal condition. The aboriginals might not need physical representation internally to understand space or to remember place, but they do need some element of their culture that allows for interaction with the outside. Strangers cannot understand social- space because they cannot become a part of it, and they cannot understand. In a more recent article, Memmott clarifies his position on aboriginal housing, or more spe- cifically, aboriginals in conventional housing. It also raises issues of external assessment effecting representational qualities of the architecture: The most widespread of these design dilemmas is that 80 Making in Mind

although [indigenous] clients may well retain their culturally unique norms of behavior when they move into their new conventional houses, many display a strong architectural conservatism, which results in requests for conventional-looking houses. Any deviation from the local white standards of rural or urban housing may be resented. Behind such reaction often lies an understandable desire to achieve equality, to be accepted, to have some modest but recognized status and not to be ridiculed.26 If Australian Aboriginals are after equal treatment, if they want to be completely assimilated into the more Westernized Australian society that has rapidly consumed almost all of the nation, than this is fine. They can have their cake and eat it too, living inside conventional-looking architecture while maintaining socially-constructed spatial relationships on the interior and no one would be the wiser.27 It is difficult to believe, though, that integration is what the Aboriginal community is after. The Aboriginal Tent Embassy is a thriving example of just the opposite: a politically-charged, visually assertive, aggressive claim for rights and recognition. The architectural menagerie has existed on and off on the lawns of the Old Parliament House in Canberra since January of 1972, Making in Mind 81 initially a response to the government’s failure to recog- nize aboriginal land rights. Within the first few months, self-determination and sovereignty became an important addition to their claim for rights. The physical reality of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy is a cacophony of trailers, tents, and brightly-colored makeshift structures. Coral Dow of the Parliament of Australia writes, “One of the enduring criticism of the embassy has been couched in aesthetic terms.”28 It is both “icon” and “eyesore”, a veri- table detachment from the Stripped Classical Style of the government building on the other side of the lawn. Although the aboriginal group maintaining the Embassy has been offered “permanent meeting rooms, memo- rial plaques and reconciliation paths,” the camp remains, waiting to be heard. In her review of Glenn Murcutt’s Marika/Alderton house, Kim Dovey writes, “It has long been clear that the meaning of any work of architecture is strongly dependent on the manner in which it is framed by words, drawings, and photographs in the architectural media.”29 Until very recently, aboriginal architecture did not appear at all in the media; recent efforts have been made to look more closely at projects interior to the aboriginal community, but little attention has been paid to diplomatic representation. Australian Aborigines have proved they can adapt 82 Making in Mind to conventional European standards of living, but have failed to outwardly express how this change has actually allowed them to keep their cultural identity. To outsiders, no cultural identity is apparent, and this is detrimental to a people trying to regain rights to land and control. And so we return to Norberg-Schulz, who writes: When man dwells, he is simultaneously located in space and exposed to a certain environmental character. The two psychological functions involved, may be called ‘orientation and ‘identification.’ To gain an existential foothold man has to be able to orientate himself; he has to know where he is. But he also has to identify himself with the environment, that is, he has to know how he is in a certain place.30 I think the Australian Aboriginal community as a whole has had little difficulty orienting themselves within a changing Australia. They understand the implications of the dynamic environment and have readily adapted the materials given to them to better suit their needs. But I wonder if they have begun to identify this place as their own. In order to more firmly argue for their rights, the Australian Aborigines must regain control of their architecture in a way that compliments the socio-spatial foun- dations already established, and facilitates change under an aboriginal hand, or rather, under many aboriginal hands. En d n o t e s

1. Michaels, 21, 2. 2. I.e. sustainability and false historicism. 3. Intrinsic psychological qualities as opposed to more surface-oriented representational practice. 4. An infinite number of architects have tried to answer this question, the argument particularly prevalent in France and Germany in the early nineteenth century, agitated by the publication of Heinrich Hübsch’s In welchem Style sollen wir bauen? 5. And in most cases, that was exactly the point. Both eclecticism and pluralism were embraced in their respec- tive time periods. In Revue générale (1863), César Daly embraces eclecticism as a necessary transition between two epochs. Similarly, Charles Jencks summarizes in The Post-Modern Reader (1992) the use of pluralism as a way to escape the unidirectionality of Modernism’s grand

83 84 Making in Mind narrative. 6. Goad, 12. 7. Lewis, 81. 8. Details of both pre-colonial and fringe settlement architectural construction techniques can be found in Paul Memmott’s Gunyah Goondie + Wurly: The Aboriginal Architecture of Australia. 9. The issue comes up in many sources. One example is the hesitant introduction of the camera to the Kayapo in Terence Turner’s “Representation, Politics, and Cultural Imagination in Indigenous Voice”: ““Some critics have suggested that introducing Kayapo camerapersons to elementary techniques of camera use and editing is tan- tamount to indoctrinating them in Western cultural con- ventions, thus aborting their potential ability to develop spontaneous, culturally specific, and ‘authentic’ modes of visual organization.” Turner, 79. 10. Rudofsky, 13. 11. Philip Batty reminds us that this is a culture with a particularly strong proclivity to change. He writes: “It would be a comfort perhaps to romantics who tend to regard Aboriginal culture as a static entity, immune from Making in Mind 85 change, located forever in some timeless never-never land, to believe that Aboriginals have rejected the ‘evils’ of global television and banned the intrusion of such spiritually impure rubbish from their communities. Most people, including Aboriginal people, aren’t like that.” Batty, 107. 12. Memmott, 29. 13. Ten Canoes is a film exploring traditional ways of life of indigenous peoples of Australia. 14. Memmott, 115. 15. Long, 146. 16. Ibid 277. 17. Memmott, 292. 18. Memmott, 282. 19. Long, 152. 20. Long notes Memmott’s concern that the suppression of their ability to construct shelter for themselves might limit the aborigines in their quest for cultural expression, but he is also convinced that their seemingly minor adap- tations are important enough to keep the culture alive. Despite this, he does not address the issue of outward 86 Making in Mind expression, that is to say, how an absence of outward expression might have a negative impact on a group fighting for rights. 21. Norberg-Schulz, 414. 22. An essay written by Rem Koolhaas, “Junkspace” con- demns our way of life as a pseudo-reality of overwhelm- ing pluralism stripped of meaning. Everything is different and so somehow it is also the same. “Because we abhor the utilitarian, we have condemned ourselves to a lifelong immersion in the arbitrary. […] Junkspace is the sum total of our current achievement; we have built more than did all previous generations put together, but somehow we do not register on the same scales. We do not leave pyramids. […] Junkspace pretends to unite, but it actually splinters. It creates communities not out of shared interest or free association, but out of identical statistics and unavoidable demographics, an opportunistic weave of vested interests.” 23. Michaels, 31.2 24. Rudofsky, 228. 25. Qtd by Memmott, 305. 26. Memmott, “Aboriginal Housing”, 46. Making in Mind 87

27. This proposal has striking similarities to Pablo Garcia / Point’s Webcam House series, in which two different families are able to coexist together in a suburban home, one living within the projections of exterior windows, visually independent to their neighbors, while another lives within the projections of a series of webcams, virtu- ally commuting to work, etc., also seemingly independent to those on the other side of the webcam – complex layering of space goes by unnoticed to everyone else, and it is assumed that only one family lives a normal life in this large house, although there is actually a complicated arrangement of social space on the interior. See at www. pointprojects.com. 28. Dow. 29. Dovey’s review critiques Murcutt’s presentation of the house, a residence that has gained a wide, even global audience for its apparent success at capturing ideals of Aboriginal culture. She writes that the limited media cov- erage of the house portrays the architecture as an idealist primitive hut, and is a deformed reflection of reality. “By controlling the reproduction, Murcutt controls the cri- tique of his work. The representations have been deployed to make the design fit the theory.” It is suggested by Dovey’s tone that, although the structure is aesthetically 88 Making in Mind reminiscent of what we assume to be Aboriginal qualities, “it is dangerous to generalize” and to make assumptions based on stereotypical visual cues. 30. Norberg-Schulz, 423. Wo r k s Ci t e d

Batty, Philip. “Singing the Electric: Aboriginal Television in Australia.” Dovey, Kim. “Myth and Media: Constructing Aboriginal Architecture.” Journal of Architectural Education 51, no. 1 (September 2000): 2-6. Dow, Coral. “Aboriginal Tent Embassy: Icon or Eyesore?” Parliament of Australia: Parliament Library. 4 April 2000. http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/ chron/1999-2000/2000chr03.htm. Goad, Philip. New Directions in Australian Architecture. North Clarendon, VT: Tuttle Publishing, 2005. Koolhaas, Rem. “Junkspace,” October 100 (Spring 2002): 175. Lewis, Miles. “The Imperial Technology Cringe.” In Shifting Views: Selected Essays on the Architectural History

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of Australia and New Zealand, edited by Andrew Leach, Antony Moulis and Nicole Sully, 81-94. Queensland, Australia: University of Queensland Press, 2008. Long, Stephen. “Between the Georgina and the Great Western Railway: The Transformation and Maintenance of Aboriginal Architecture in North- West Queensland.” In Shifting Views: Selected Essays on the Architectural History of Australia and New Zealand, edited by Andrew Leach, Antony Moulis and Nicole Sully, 143-155. Queensland, Australia: University of Queensland Press, 2008. Memmott, Paul. Gunyah Goondie + Wurley: The Aboriginal Architecture of Australia. Queensland, Australia: University of Queensland Press, 2007. Memmott, Paul. “Aboriginal Housing: Has the State of the Art Improved?” Architecture Australia (January / February 2004): 46-48. Michaels, Eric. “Aboriginal Content: Who’s Got it—Who needs it? “ In Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media, and Technological Horizons, 21-46. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Norberg-Schulz, Christian. “The Phenomenon of Place” In Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Making in Mind 91

Anthology of Architectural Theory 1965-1995, edited by Kate Nesbitt. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996: 414-428. Rudofsky, Bernard. The Prodigious Builders: Notes Towards a Natural History of Architecture. New York: Harcourt Brace Javanovich, 1977. Ten Canoes. DVD. Directed by Rolf de Heer and Peter Djigirr. 2006. Turner, Terence. “Representation, Politics, and Cultural Imagination in Indigenous Video.” In Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin, 75-89. Berkley, California: University of California, 2002. Refer to associated model, Skin of Music Final Model.