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 return in Australia, Waltzing Matilda, with Peter Cummins dressed up as a ‘fucking kangaroo’ and a machine of some sort.27 The APG was active between 1967 and 1981. It produced experimental plays that examined the question of national identity and social values through actors seeking to establish, in reaction to the mainstream Anglophone theatre culture of its time, a collective yet each time uniquely personal and seemingly under-rehearsed performance that was rough, volatile, brimming with larrikinism, and that kept ample room for the unpredictable.28 Although newly written plays by group members like Jack Hibberd, John Romeril, Barry Oakley, were instrumental in exploring Australian identity issues and political concerns, the script remained subordinate to the group’s commitment to a ‘performance’ philosophy along the lines of Vaccaro. John Romeril’s script The Floating World, directed in 1974 by Lindzee Smith – a play important not only in the development of APG’s visual and gestural style but also in the treatment of the text as open for individual and collective interpretation. It featured a working class Australian and former prisoner of war of the Japanese in World War II, captain Les Harding, who finds himself with his wife on a cruise trip – a holiday which they had received as a present from their daughter and son-in-law. As Les Harding approaches Japan, the social mask of this stereotypical ocker with his gruff voice, racisms and sexisms, and his incapacity to express emotions, falls apart as a thin cover for his damaged psyche haunted by war traumas and

25 Peter Corrigan, interviewed by Wouter Van Acker, (unpublished transcript), p. 26 October 2015. 26 P. Corrigan interview 2015. 27 P. Corrigan, ‘From the Tim Robertson interviews’ http://www.pramfactory.com/memoirsfolder/Corrigan-Peter.html (last accessed 11 January 2016). 28 M. Williams, ‘The Pram Family Show’ http://www.pramfactory.com/family.html (last accessed 11 January 2016).

EAHN Dublin 2016 305 hallucinations.29 One critic noted how during the play Romeril’s ‘prototype ugly Aussie […] is saved from caricature by his suffering.’30

The APG productions were moving away from naturalism, for example by exaggerating and charging everyday language with a poetic tone, but also by many non-verbal means such as the different costumes, props, lighting effects and provocative gestures. These gestural, visual and verbal systems complement the verbal and react to each other, each dealing with the coding of different facets of reality, including the subconscious and hyperreality. For The Floating World Corrigan designed an oval rostrum in APG’s Pram Factory in Carlton, suggesting the prow of a ship, with carnivalesque zigzag lines painted along the side and a green floor cloth on its deck. He provided several performance areas for the fragmented scenes. A green chicken-wire cage was wrapped up around the stage and the audiences’ seating area and closed off by ushers at the start of the play, placing the spectators inside a cage in which the drama of Les Harding’s psyche unfolded.

Larrikinism

Corrigan’s ambition to create a home-grown architecture and his strategies to deal with stereotypes of Australian suburban architecture has clear parallels with the project to create a home-grown theatre by the so-called New Wave theatre companies such as the APG and the Nimrod Theatre in Sydney. Corrigan likes ‘to think that there is a dash of the larrikin architect in me…Australia is about a sort of rough expression of ideas that are true to us. Not about a polished, refined identification of ideas that may well be true overseas.’31 A ‘larrikin’ was originally a term that was used to denounce working-class teenagers causing trouble in nightlife scene in the late nineteenth century, but has now become a rather positive term used to appreciate a characteristic Australian disdain for all that is snobbish, bourgeois and authoritarian.32 ‘Optimistic vernacular larrikins such as Roy Rene, George Wallace, Jack Hibberd and Dame Edna, always seemed to us to have “meaning” and “relevance”’, Corrigan says about his architecture.33

29 G. Wolf, Make It Australian: The Australian Performing Group, the Pram Factory and New Wave Theatre, Sydney, Currency Press, 2008, p. 161. 30 L. Radic, [Untitled], The Age, 9 August 1974, Australian Performing Group Archive, 1974. Box 50. As quoted in: D. Varney, ‘Political Lessons of the “New Wave”: Romeril's The Floating World’, Double Dialogues, no. 11, Winter 2009. 31 G. Missingham, ‘Peter Corrigan’s architecture: a kind of exposition’, Transition, vol. 2, no. 1, March 1981, p. 14-21. 32 M. Bellanta, Larrikins: A History, St Lucia, Queensland, University of Queensland Press/Penguin Books, 2012. 33 P. Corrigan, ‘Church news’, Architect, vol. 3, no. 47, May 1977, p. 8.

EAHN Dublin 2016 306 The attitude and concept of the larrikin clarifies the architectural position that Edmond and Corrigan took in an international context. At the Paris Biennale of 1982 Edmond and Corrigan presented some of their buildings whose surrealism lied in the cream brickwork that was just out of fashion and its colour motifs that were at least a generation old – messages which are easily understood by the inhabitants of the suburbs in Melbourne but not by the French.34 As an architectural critic noted, their ‘larrikin-like ockerisms’ in the brick patterns and colour codes seem to say either ‘don’t take it seriously’ or ‘we’re the same as you, mate’.35 ‘Modernity is a centralist position,’ said Corrigan, summarizing his view for the organizing committee of the Paris Biennale, ‘It can’t be confused with the Bodgie Wolf’– a colourful and irreverent popular Australian tattoo symbolizing ‘home’.36 The Bodgie Wolf also refers to a theatre play directed by Lindzee Smith, staged in a Romanesque church in Bogena in northern Italy in 1980. Corrigan, who acted as its stage designer, and Smith were tired of the audience ‘arriving in Ferraris’ and took the play to the fountain while drinking beer. ‘We believed that was the place of the Bodgie Wolf – reflecting Australian culture and happy to be so disengaged from nostalgia.’37

Alienation

Despite the familiarity of the suburban iconography mined by Edmond and Corrigan, their buildings retain in their regionalism a sense of alienation, of the unfamiliar. This is not unlike the defamiliarization of the familiar that Tzonis and Lefebvre describe as an essential trait of successful critical regionalism, or the sublimation of the ordinary into the extraordinary which Venturi and Scott-Brown consider essential in their work. Corrigan however is not after a critique of a globalist capitalist culture, as Tzonis and Lefebvre want to have it, or a reconciliation of high and low art à la Venturi. More illuminating than the parallels in the field of architecture are the ideas of Berthold Brecht and his stage designer Caspar Neher. The Brechtian technique of unveiling the constructed nature of the theatrical stage – the Verfremdungseffect or the alienation or strange- making effect – is something Corrigan holds dear, just as the other members of the APG did. Theatre creates a double reality – a real world on stage and a world that exists as representation. When Corrigan writes that ‘Brecht presented the stage as a stage’38 he refers to the simultaneous revelation and collapse of that doubleness in order to open up the theatrical reality for social

34 XIIeme Biennale de Paris 1982: Section Architecture, Modernity or the Spirit of the Times, École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 1982. 35 M. Jorgenson, ‘From Whence Comes Form?’, Transition, vol. 2, no.1, March 1981, pp. 38-41, 40. 36 ‘Are the French ready for the Bodgie Wolf?’, newspaper article clipping from Office Archives Edmond and Corrigan. Articles and Press Clippings Edmond and Corrigan (1980), 37 P. Corrigan interview 2015. 38 P. Corrigan, 'Stage Space' [1962] in Holloway, Peter (ed.) Contemporary Australian Drama. Sydney, Currency Press, 1979, p. 34-38, 36.

EAHN Dublin 2016 307 critique. In the Brechtian oppositional space, the reality that is represented on stage falls back through defamiliarization in the hands of the audience, deemed intelligent and ambitious enough to engage in the opportunity of a wider debate and critique of the social themes addressed by the performance.

Not unlike Tschumi’s concept of cross-programming, inspired by Antonin Artaud’s manifesto The Theatre and its Double (1938), Corrigan’s architecture becomes a vehicle to interpret the ‘Australian Dream’ as constructed in suburbia. Artaud wrote that ‘The theatre will never find itself again--i.e., constitute a means of true illusion--except by furnishing the spectator with the truthful precipitates of dreams.’39 Edmond and Corrigan’s Keysborough church (1977) is a key example of the ambiguity they seek. The architecture has lent itself to accommodate both liturgical and non- liturgical activities such as bingo, bucks’ nights, yoga and childcare; the priest once refused to have it transformed excessively into a teenage disco. Like Venturi’s both-and, Corrigan defends a pluralism of meaning: ‘The notion that “if there are two good equal and opposite ideas, then choose one” never really appealed to me. I still do believe that they should both go in.’40 But in the opposition of the familiar and unfamiliar, social commentary is never far away in Edmond and Corrigan’s architecture. Their most notorious building, RMIT Building 8 (1993), carries narratives in its façade, stairs and corridors; they are devices that tell stories about education and identity to the users of the building and the passers-by. More than any other building of Edmond and Corrigan, Building 8 is a fragment of their utopia of a ‘city of hope’; it illustrates their belief in an emancipation of a culture’s interiority. Or as Corrigan summarizes: ‘Narrative builds architecture and architecture builds society.’41

Transplanting architecture

In the closing session of the Pleasures of Architecture conference held in Sydney in 1980, an event of major importance for the reception of postmodernism in Australia, Peter Corrigan, Andrew Metcalf, Alec Tzannes, Michael Graves, Rem Koolhaas, George Baird, Norman Day and Philip Drew were asked to answer the question ‘If Post-Modernism is the Answer, What is the Question?’42 Rem Koolhaas used Corrigan’s contribution to the exhibition to respond to the question of regionalism, making the point that the only regionalism he could conceive of was not

39 A. Artaud, The theater and its double. New York, Grove Press, 1958, p. 92. 40 P. Corrigan, interviewed by [Michael Anderson] ‘Going after the Good. An interview with Peter Corrigan’, p.1. 41 P. Corrigan interview 2015. 42 P. Hogben, ‘The Aftermath of “Pleasures”: Untold Stories of Post-Modern Architecture in Australia’, Progress, Papers from the 20th Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, Sydney, 2003, pp. 146-151.

EAHN Dublin 2016 308 a style but a response to ‘international issues inserted into different contexts’. For the exhibition that accompanied the conference, a group of designers were asked to make a proposal to complete Engehurst, a site in Paddington determined by a development commenced by John Verge (1782-1861). Edmond and Corrigan presented a house for theatre director Graeme Blundell, his wife and all their friends in order to propose a mini-manifesto based on a ‘national uneasiness with the prospect of larrikin energy’.43 Koolhaas found that their entry:

[…] looks different in different regional contexts, which is the first image and soul of Peter Corrigan’s work. And his work is marooned or transplanted here. And this may be the problem of Australian architecture, but it may also be its excitement, in that it could be an architecture of fresh transplantations. The natural environment is so strong and the conditions are so obvious and so different from those elsewhere, that it provides a context to induce something Australian. I can’t understand what the problem is with this. Everything I look at here is so Australian.44

Although Australia is, probably more than other country, aware of the failures of transplants of various species in its ecosystem, Corrigan’s work grew through transatlantic and interdisciplinary implants. The seven years he spent in America were crucial, he said to realise what he held so dear of Australia: public toilets, public parks but most of all his ‘larrikin friends, the larrikin humour, and the scepticism.’45 These friends, mostly theatre people like Bill Garner, Lindzee Smith, Jack Hibberd, John Romeril, and Phil Motherwell embraced ideas about what constituted Australianess, ideas which he transplanted to, what he calls, ‘the public marketplace which is the battlefield of architecture.’46

43 ‘The Pleasures of Architecture Conference, 1980: The Interviews’, Transition, vol.1, no.4, October 1980, p. 5. 44 ‘Rem Koolhaas’, in: Transition, vol.1, no.4, October 1980, pp. 14-18, 14. 45 Peter Corrigan, interviewed by Dale Jones-Evans, Tension, 3 April 1984, pp. 34-36, 34. 46 C. Peake, ‘Suburban Manifesto’, The National Times, February 10, 1979, p. 43.

EAHN Dublin 2016 309

EAHN Dublin 2016 1

PROCEEDINGS OF THE

FOURTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF THE

EUROPEAN ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY NETWORK

Edited by Kathleen James-Chakraborty

EAHN Dublin 2016 2

Published by UCD School of Art History and Cultural Policy

University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin, Ireland.

Copyright © UCD School of Art History and Cultural Policy

No images in this publication may be reproduced without permission of the copyright holder.

ISBN 978-1-5262-0376-2

EAHN Dublin 2016 3 What mattered besides style? On the example of buildings for public food supply in Petrograd/Leningrad, 1918-1932 Diana Zitzman, Berlin * ...... 208 SESSION: Housing and the Grassroots: Rethinking Production and Agency in the Architecture of Dwelling Tom Avermaete, Delft University of Technology; Nelson Mota, Delft University of Technology ...... 218 Arne Korsmo and “Hjemmets Mekano” Espen Johnsen, University of Oslo * ...... 218 Knowledge Formation by Architects and Workers in Assisted Self-help: Recalling the Fractured History of Portuguese Experiments from the Dictatorships to Political Democracy, 1950-1980 Tiago Castela, University of Coimbra; José António Bandeirinha * ...... 232 Berlin’s Building Groups—A Bottom-Up Initiative in a highly Professionalized Environment Florian Urban, Glasgow School of Art ...... 244 Architecture in Utopia? Agencies of design in Zurich’s alternative housing Irinia Davidovici, ETH Zurich * ...... 245 The Battle for the City: 1970s architects between luttes urbanines and rénovation urbaine Isabelle Doucet, University of Manchester ...... 256 SESSION: Architecture of the Antipodes (SAHANZ-supported session) Antony Moulis, University of Queensland; Robin Skinner, University of Victoria of Wellington ...... 257 Deep shade in Australia: Investing the verandah’s universal utility with local character Pedro Guedes, University of Queensland * ...... 257 Ether: an atmosphere of possibility Kerry Francis, UNITEC * ...... 272 “Ciao Australia”, postmodern Australian and Italian exchanges, 1978-1991: from Domus to the Venice Biennale Karen Burns, University of Melbourne; Paul Walker, University of Melbourne * ...... 285 Australia in Modern Architecture since 1900 Macarena de la Vega de Léon, University of Canberra * ...... 295 Larrikinism in Corrigan’s Architectural Theatre Wouter Van Acker, Université Libre de Bruxelles * ...... 302 KEYNOTE ...... 310 Acts of God and Human Folly: medieval building and the empirical process Roger Stalley. 310 FOURTH PAPER SESSION ...... 311 SESSION: Time Travel II Mari Lending, Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, Yale University ...... 311 Obsolete in Reverse Daniel Abramson, Tufts University...... 312 Family of Minds: Plain Arts Eliana Sousa Santos, Coimbra University * ...... 313 Planetarium in Reverse: Reconstructions of the Future in 1930s Moscow Juliet Koss, Scripps College ...... 324 Terragni’s Casa de Fascio and its Afterlife Romy Golan, CUNY Graduate Center ...... 324 Highway Historicities: How Architecture Shaped Developmentalist Time Lucia Allais, Princeton University ...... 325

EAHN Dublin 2016 8