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Larrikinism in Corrigan's Architectural Theatre Wouter Van Acker

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Larrikinism in Corrigan's Architectural Theatre Wouter Van Acker Larrikinism in Corrigan’s Architectural Theatre Wouter Van Acker, Université Libre de Bruxelles * Reviewing “Architecture in the Antipodes” in 1984, RIBA journal editor Peter Murray, put Peter Corrigan in a van of Australian architects searching for an architecture that was positively, proudly and distinctively Australian. Besides through his completion of a postgraduate programme at Yale under Charles Moore, and his work experience in the offices of Paul Rudolph, Victor Gruen Associates, and Philip Johnson, Corrigan played a crucial role as an attractor and translator of a postmodernist model of regionalism in Melbourne and Australia in the latter half of the 1970s and well into the 1990s, through various media: journals in which he published or that he co-founded like Smudges, discussion groups like Half-Time, conferences such as the “Pleasures of Architecture”(1980) conference, and most importantly university lectures and his legendary studio training at RMIT. While the current literature on Corrigan points especially to his familiarity with the ideas of Venturi and Scott-Brown as the main source for the way in which he a celebrates the unique ordinariness of suburbia in his architecture, his long-standing engagement with stage design since his student years seems to have been even more important. Australian identity was also one of the main themes that The New Wave theatre explored, in particular the Australian Performing Group (APG) in which Corrigan was deeply involved intellectually. Following Caspar Neher, he adopted as a stage designer the Brechtian technique of unveiling the constructed nature of the theatrical stage, which rhymed well with the self-parodic stereotyping of larrikinism through performance and gesture in the APG plays. Transferring carnivalesque, grotesque and burlesque design experiments from theatre to the field of architecture, Corrigan forged a unique brand of regionalism that challenged the dualistic centre-periphery model accepted by modernists such as Robin Boyd who assessed Australian suburbia as inhabited by a public that “knows no better, has seen no better design.” Corrigan’s anti-authoritarianism led him to a subversive postmodernist stance that found in the suburban ‘periphery’ the material to find a way out of the casting of Australian architecture as peripheral. EAHN Dublin 2016 302 PAPER Introduction In the late 1970s and early 1980s a group of Australian architects celebrated a regionalism that was more pluralistic than the regionalism pursued by the generation of modernists before them. 17 The renewed interest in the concept of regionalism was, besides a response to the so-called ‘cultural cringe’ and Australia’s stigma of cultural isolation and derivation. In the 1960s, art historian Bernard Smith found that Australians, before they would dare to call Europe equally the antipodes of Australia, they had to overcome their embarrassment over the suggestion that they “stood on their heads at the bottom of the world.”18 But the new embrace of Australianness was also a consequence of the appropriation of the postmodernist movement in Australia. According to Melbourne architect Daryl Jackson, postmodernism had ‘freed things up’ and allowed for a distinctive mode of hybridisation for the Australian architect who no longer had ‘to look over its shoulder to see what is happening elsewhere.’19 The National Times reported in 1981 about Australian ‘new wave architects,’ most of them in their mid 30s, advocating a new postmodern style that will be ‘more interesting to the public because it is easier to understand.’20 In analogy with new wave music it incorporated a pop feel while keeping the experimental and wayward ethos of punk. Besides architects such as Greg Burgess, Peter Crone, and Norman Day, it was Peter Corrigan, leading an architectural firm with his wife Maggie Edmond since 1972, who played a pivotal role in giving direction to postmodern regionalism in Australia. The regionalism of Edmond and Corrigan explores the iconography of the suburban world Australia has built on its own; a regionalism that is very different from the evocation of a mythical harmony of nature, dwelling and building in the work of Glen Murcutt and others. Yet, just as the architecture that Kenneth Frampton labelled as ‘critical regionalism’ can be critiqued for falling back all too easily into the 17 On the ‘antipodean’ regionalism of the Australian modernists in the 1960s, see: Doug Evans, ‘Centre and Periphery: Melbourne Regionalism and its Global Context in the 1950’s and 1960’s’, Universal versus Individual, Conference Jyväskylä, Finland, 2002, http://www.alvaraalto.fi/conferences/universal/finalpapers/doug.evans.rtf (last accessed 9 February 2016). 18 P. Beilharz, Imagining the antipodes: culture, theory, and the visual in the work of Bernard Smith, Cambridge/New York, Cambridge University Press, 1997; p. 122. 19 P. Murray, ‘Architecture in the Antipodes’, RIBA Journal, vol. 91, no. 2, February 1984, p. 21-28, 23. 20 J. Sandeman, ‘New wave architects show their wares’, The National Times, 30 August to September 5, 1981, p. 56. EAHN Dublin 2016 303 domain of world culture, one can wonder if Corrigan’s regionalism does not suffer the same fate in following the international project of postmodernism.21 Although Corrigan’s architectural approach seeks to distinguish itself in its Australianness, it is also greatly influenced by the appropriation of ideas that were part of the international discourse on postmodernism. Corrigan studied and worked for seven years in the United States after his studies at Melbourne University. His completion of a postgraduate programme at Yale under Charles Moore, and his work experience in the offices of among others Paul Rudolph, Victor Gruen Associates, and Philip Johnson, functioned as a sort of accelerator for the development of his postmodernist approach of which he had sowed the seeds already before his departure and, after his return back home, enabled him to play a privileged role as a translator and propagator of postmodernism in Melbourne and Australia in the latter half of the 1970s and well into the 1990s. It is not surprising therefore that current literature on Corrigan points to his familiarity with the ideas of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown who ran the Learning from Las Vegas studio when he studied at Yale as the most important source for his strategic sampling of ordinary architectural features of Australian suburbia. The current literature on Corrigan tends to neglect the personal assimilation within his architecture of ideas derived from his long-standing engagement with stage design since his student years and in his later work for directors Lindzee Smith in the 70s, Peter King and Graeme Blundell in the 80s, Barrie Kosky in the 90s and Michael Kantor in the late 2000s.22 In several places, Corrigan states that his architectural practice has always had the ambition to create ‘poor architecture’ as in ‘poor theatre’, a concept launched by the Polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski in 1965, promoting a return to ‘the personal and scenic technique of the actor as the core of theatre art’ in response to ‘rich theatre’ using new media techiques.23 Corrigan translates the idea of ‘poor theatre’ into architecture as ‘an attempt to make public statements within tight budgets.’24 One of the most important statements that his architecture makes is one about Australian identity. It is in this interdisciplinary exchange, which also crosses many geographical borders that this paper seeks to account for the larrikinism that characterizes his regionalist model of postmodernism. 21 P. Walker, ‘Kenneth Frampton and the Fiction of Place,’ in: A. Leach, A. Moulis, and N. Sully (eds.), Shifting Views: Selected Essays on the Architectural History of Australia and New Zealand, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2008, pp. 70-80. 22 An exception to this is Michael Anderson who has published about Corrigan’s trajectory in theatre, notably: C. Hamann, Cities of hope remembered/rehearsed: Australian architecture & stage design by Edmond & Corrigan 1962- 2012, Fishermans Bend, Vic, Thames & Hudson Australia, 2012, pp. 149-158. 23 J. Grotowski, ‘Towards a Poor Theatre’ [1965] in: E. Barba (ed.), Jerzy Grotowski. Towards a Poor Theatre, New York, Routledge, 2002, pp. 15-27, 15. 24 Peter Corrigan, statement as foreword to R. Munday ‘Passion in the suburbs’, Architecture Australia, vol. 66, no. 1, February/March 1977, p. 52. EAHN Dublin 2016 304 Anti-naturalism Corrigan recounts that while hanging round LaMama during his residency in New York he was most fascinated by John Vaccaro and the Theatre of the Ridiculous. One moment that he will never forget is when at a rehearsal John Vaccaro asked an actor to stop ‘this acting shit:’ That struck me as significant. Acting was about technique. It was primarily English mainstream. What he was proposing was a radical model of performance – to bring your own life experience on stage rather than simulate life experience.25 In analogy with theatre, Corrigan says he could not help to think ‘Stop this design shit’ when seeing much of the architecture produced in his time. ‘I really lost as a very young man the patience with the whole methodology of architectural design. And this happened in theatre,’ he remembers.26 After returning from New York to Melbourne in 1973, Corrigan immediately joined the Australian Performing Group (APG) as a stage designer. He recalls how ‘slightly smutty’ and funny the first show was that he saw after his
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