Professional Documents
Culture Documents
ARCHITECTURE,
HERMENEUTICS
&
PLACE SETTING
1
OUTER FRAME:
THREE-PART ACCOUNT OF
MEANING & INTERPRETATION
1L GKM's three-part account of interpretation or meaning
Greenaway (1982)
person to appropriate the richer reading, 'to make his or her own what was alien'.
Thus, comprehension entails both explanation of that enriched understanding and a
commitment to it through appropriation. To intrepret what is before us is to engage
in an activity that is subtle and layered in complexity.
But, the situation is not so simple as this drawing of the three-part model suggests.
2R I(o) = W
2
INNER FRAME: PLACE SETTING
3L Greg Missingham (1984) 'Place and Placemaking'
As part of the preparations for the 1985 PAPER conference to be held in Melbourne,
Place and Placemaking, I made a drawing of what I would now call a 'place setting':
basically, an armchair that looks as if someone is about to sit in it or they have left it
temporarily (their coffee still steams, the pencil still rests on the notes made).
(Dovey et al 1985: cover) It was meant to look inviting – which is why the seat tips
forward to the viewer. Additionally, I tried to make the drawing work as an image of
a place setting at a number of scales simultaneously: the cushion is marked with a
version of Michaelangelo's Piazza del Campidoglio, Rome, and rests in an urban
square based on Siena's Campo – in which a game of cricket is being played; the
armchair is a steep, wooded hill in a landscape that is at the same time a domestic
front garden and its fabric becomes both the pattern of stretcherbond brickwork in
a wall and a streetmap of a city, traversed by Melbourne trams and dotted with
some of its landmarks. (I have pondered a number of times since over why it was
apparently impossible to include a notion of place in the drawing appropriate to the
scale of architecture.) The notion of place refers to phenomena of many scales.
3
FOUR PARTIAL MODELS OF THE
ARCHITECTURAL TASK
Washington
Here, the making of the building (materials, construction - especially detailing - and
structure) is the making of a building beautifully, efficiently and elegantly. This can
be an attitude of any designer with any building, however, who asks the question
'how may I best express through the detailing and grosser construction of this
building the governing conception I am working with?'. Designers in this mode know
their building construction thoroughly and exploit it for aesthetic ends - although,
the distinction between what may be aesthetic and what may be supremely
pragmatic or constructionally proper is difficult to draw with confidence. Certainly,
architects designing in this mode would not draw any such distinction. (Very popular
elsewhere in Australia.) Unlike with design in many another Frame of Reference, in
this Frame of Reference much of the designing work is accomplished in the
preparation of the working drawings.
High-Finish architecture is not particularly concerned with how things are made or
with pushing the frontiers of technological invention in the construction industry.
High-Finish architecture is essentially an aesthetic enterprise yet one conceived of as
a celebration of the man-made, the vitreous, the metallic and the high sheen, the
highly polished. It is, above all else, slick - the antithesis of any back-to-earth, wood
butchery or mud-brick 'earthy', recycled architecture.
6L Window of the Haynes Street Milk Bar, North Melbourne, January 1979
The commodification of all art styles or trends is said to proscribe the right to
life of an adversarial avant garde. Thus, the 'cutting edge' must justify itself
on other grounds – usually those of a rhetoric-driven, in-group taste culture
(often enamoured of French ctitics). I have a deep antipathy for such
approaches.
Which leads into the consideration of the ('other') social tasks of architecture
and of our expectations of architecture in everyday life – my principal source
of answers to the question of Why do we care about architecture?.
4
FIVE EXPECTATIONS
OF ARCHITECTURE
"You can hide paintings, you can avoid literature, you can – if you're ingenious
the least perishable of the arts and the most public. Architects (perhaps like
Architecture and film do differ in important ways – and not only in terms of the
phenomenological experience they afford. There are other, more global expectations
of architecture in everyday life that entail its being accountable both to the man in
the street and to posterity and that could entail that it be a work of art:
explains that if architecture is an art form then its practitioners can earn cultural
capital through their labour.
Unlike the accumulation of economic capital, which confers control over
goods and services, social capital bestows control over other people's desire for
access to you. Though the accumulation of one form of capital does tend to lead to
accumulation of the other, the accumulation of social capital is more difficult. For
example, it is far easier to organise that the family to which you belong should
become wealthy than to organise retrospectively that it should have an aristrocrat's
title. Cultural capital is yet more difficult to accumulate since it must be earned
individually, even if the economic or social power of your family could provide the
opportunity, for accumulation of sufficient cultural capital confers immortality. It is
this that Prak believes architects, in claiming to be artists, seek.
The romantic model of the individual creative genius is at the root of the
matter. Architects rarely receive the kudos from their peers for being successful in
business, for being excellent teachers, for the conduct of important and sound
research, or for the political advocacy of a local community's building program needs
that they can if they are regarded as good designers. Commonly, who are the
beneficiaries of the awards programs established within the profession?
Architectural designers. Why? Firstly, because, after it has been granted the
dominant place in the curricula of schools of architecture, in the way that
architectural design is taught and assessed, its resemblance to the mysterious
process of artistic creation is emphasised. It is taught in design 'studios', after all.
Secondly, because, in the way that the history of architecture is usually taught and
discussed (especially in design studios), the role of individual creative figures is
continually emphasised. That is, as they are initiated into the mysteries of the
profession of architecture, architects are infused with the romantic model of their
activity. Thus, also and thirdly, will awards, which are themselves items of cultural
capital, be bestowed on those who are most obviously in pursuit of it.
At its simplest level, the built environment serves to provide shelter for events and
ensembles of them, to support them and to shield them from the elements. But this
is not to say simply that buildings are expected only to keep off the rain and to
provide walls and floors. The built environment is expected to provide adequate
ambient conditions and to provide the physical accoutrements needed for those
events envisaged as taking place within its embrace. An expectation of architecture
in everyday life is that it support the definition and maintenance of social situations
and of ensembles of them and to do so, additionally, by cueing and supporting what
we can expect in them.
9L Peter Greenaway (1989) The Cook The Thief His Wife & Her Lover: Georgina &
perspective
Secondly, the built environment is one amongst many means for punctuation and
articulation of what would otherwise be the continuum of everyday life.
Architecture, like other objectivations of individual and cultural mind (clothing, music,
language, food, social occasions, economics …), punctuates our experience,
providing anchorage for meaning. In this respect, architects are designers of
membranes between things, of underscorings, of parentheses, and of strategic gaps.
Boundaries, cleavages, barriers, and partitionings both structure and are structured
by everyday life. By providing partitions between events and obliging us to make an
effort and to take our time over passing from one event to another, by shaping and
4.3 SYMBOLISATION
12L Georges Lemoine (c1972) Tower [La Maison de Marie Clare, November, 1972].
1979)
13L Olmec ceremonial centre (1200-900 BC), the island of San Lorenzo, Vera
Cruz, Tehuantepec [from Henri Stierlin (1981) The Art of the Maya: 29]
According to Sperber (1974), any symbolisation is a way of knowing the world, a way
of structuring our comprehension of it. Architecture, just like film and other art, is
expected to be a symbolising activity, whether designers intend it to be so or not.
Architecture (or, more accurately, its physical manifestation), because it endures
and because it is so public and will be encountered by so many members of a society
and by visitors to it, helps provide longevity for a culture's vision of itself.
Constantly, we modify that image through the contributions we make in the acts of
our everyday lives to the material and conceptual worlds we inhabit. We are
engaged in continual negotiation of the image we have of ourselves as a collectivity
and of the supporting conceptual structures that are embedded in our culture and
that provide its continually transforming intellectual scaffolding.
In these ways, if punctuation articulates the spatial realm (and, to a large
extent, the temporal), then symbolisation articulates the inextricably associated
realm of meaning, and much punctuation will be symbolic.
'Reify' comes from the Latin res, a thing, and means to make into a thing, or to make
an idea or concept physically manifest. I use reification of self to mean something
like: bringing into being what is implicit, potentially or germinally already present in
the self, constructing it, and then maintaining it in that state or guiding its evolving
trajectory through the unfolding possibilities that present themselves. Here, I am
speaking of reification of collective selves – perhaps many of these, copresent,
superposed in the individuals through which they are manifest.2
Because the built environment endures materially, it tends to institutionalise
the measured distribution of the events of our daily lives and to make physically
manifest the social, economic and political fabric of a culture – and that is, literally,
to reify itself as a culture.3 Shelter, punctuation and symbolisation are powerful and
principal means – architectural or other – to the reification of collection selves.
17L Greg Missingham (1988) Jack Lonsdale Lodge, Sebastopol (Thirty-bed Nursing Home):
House B (Banksia)
19L Greg Missingham (1989) Mt Eliza Centre Redeveloment, Rosebud: Community Care
Centre & Thirty-bed Rehabilitation & Assessment Nursing Home: Site Plan
20L Greg Missingham (1989) the Quiet Achiever's Yacht: Esquisse for extension to
The principal task of a work of art might be to orientate us in one or more of these
ways, but we also expect to be orientated within the work. We expect works of art
to let people know how to interpret what is going on, to indicate to them how they
should interact with what is before them. Somehow, the work has to help suggest
an appropriate attitude to it, its maker has to provide cues to the fact that it is
intended to be treated as a work of art, as a work of art of a particular kind and as
having some particular intent as a work of art. To communicate as a work of art, a
work of architecture will have to orientate those who experience it to the particular
game of the conception that underlies the work of architecture and it will have to
orientate those who experience it to where they are within the game of the work of
architecture as experienced. Further, as with other works of art, orientation to the
work of architecture entails simultaneous orientation to an unfolding hermeneutic
heterarchy: cueing the 'architecture game', cueing the game of the work of art that
it is, cueing an act of interpretation, cueing an interpretation, cueing an
interpretative context (in which it might be considered a work of art, say), and
cueing overarching rhetorical frames (of reference).4 Where film must work through
4 For example :
relatively immediate emotions and fallible memory and ideas that arise, in allowing
less ephemeral experience, architecture can provide cues continuously, slowly or
forcefully.
We are orientated to the ways in which we can think of our collective self as reified.
This is the principal subject of my discussion of the architectural features of The
Cook The Thief His Wife & Her Lover (Missingham 1990) and was recently most vividly
demonstrated in Zhang Yimou's film Raise the Red Lantern (1991).
21L Greg Missingham (1983-86) Hodges' House, Emu Bottom (Sunbury): Scheme
Drive)
I began with the idea that those who seek in the suburbs a house surrounded on all
sides by its own land subliminally desire an English mansion country house in its
garden park estate.5 I naturally savoured images of Arts and Crafts houses
glowering beneath an expanse of sheltering roof, with low side wings and very tall
chimneys silhouetted against the sky. The rural landscape also suggested images of
Australian homesteads with verandahs, widespread wings and scattered subsidiary
buildings.6
24L Ditto: Scheme 25 (Portico): Plan & Elevation that resolved the scheme
5 This is particularly true of those who, having had just such a suburban house in a
satellite town 30 km from Melbourne move to a satellite position relative to Sunbury, 5 km
further out, to a plot of land roughly eight times larger.
After twenty-six cathartic, job-retraining schemes the house sorted itself out:
It pivots on Marion Hodges' kitchen as the bridge of a house-ship afloat on the wave
of the knoll's contours. A north-south axis though the living tree, the family's
worshipped pool and the kitchen pins the square courtyard onto the semi-circular,
garden terrace - the place for outdoor gatherings with family and friends. The main,
two-storey block is orientated at right-angles to this axis, one great brick gable end
blankly facing west and the other, the entrance facade, the rising sun and the front
gate in the east - completing a geometry founded on the cardinal directions and the
other alchemical symbols of hospitality, water, food and family. A low 'range',
orientated to the site boundaries, introduces a second, clashing geometry allowing
the entrance facade to open welcoming arms. A third large rural house type
suggested itself: this elevation is a loosely Palladian scheme with piano nobile,
children in an attic, with the contemporary steeds in their stable with the cellar/store
occupying a partial basement/plinth level.7
28L Greg Missingham (1985) 'Where more is meant than meets the ear'
7 Ivan Rijavec pointed out the church-like facade of the main wing – a symbolism never
intended, yet one picked up by the bricklayers building it: they put a cross atop the main gable
at the end of a day's work on one occasion. Had it been intended, it would have been a
parallel of the device Woolley claimed for Palladio.
5
THREE APPROACHES TO DESIGN
IN ARCHITECTURE THAT COMBINE
IN
PLACE SETTING
30L (BLANK)
site: sketch
34L Allan Higgs (1987) AJ901 Major Project: Hospice for People with Acquired Immune
by means of narrative fiction. The rebirth of the art of building means that,
Geometric simples
37L Greg Missingham & Branko Vidal (1974) Shepparton International Village: Site
Plan
38L Greg Missingham & Doug Grey (1987) Wodonga TAFE Student Housing: Sketch
Axonometric
39L Greg Missingham (1988) Jack Lonsdale Lodge, Sebastopol (Thirty-bed Nursing
42L Greg Missingham & Others (1991) Queen Elizabeth Village, Wendouree: Plans of the
44L Greg Missingham (1994) Twenty-bed Extension to Midlands Hostel, North Ballarat:
45L Alex Selenitsch (1980) 'Greenhill 2', St Andrews: Garden elevation from across the
dam
46R (BLANK)
(a) The whole trefoil shape: this is the set of examples that could have been
discussed in Chapters 5, 6 and 7. It is a subset of the set of all works of
architecture.
(b) The circles, one for each of the sets of works that could be assigned to any
one of the designers' frames of reference:
Now, certainly the descriptions of the three frames of reference as I have presented
them are of my making but they are clearly distinct. My descriptions are, also, in
large measure ostensive – defined by the examples offered in evidence. Again, the
examples are of my choosing. It is probably because the frames of reference were
not defined on stylistic grounds, however, that many examples had features relevant
to more than one frame. It is the sets of works of architecture that belong in the
overlaps between frames that are most interesting and most instructive …
(c) The vesica pisces, the three areas where any two circles overlap:
(i) The overlap between the history of form and symbolism (here,
architectural evocation of archetypes, but could include geometric
simples),
(ii) The overlap between symbolism and everyday doings (here,
participatory narrative, but could include ceremonies), and
(iii) The overlap between everyday doings and the history of form (here,
poetic situations, but could include ritual, genotypes of behaviour
settings, types of narratives and dramas, generally).
The assignments of labels to the kinds of works that could be located in the overlaps
is necessarily loose (rituals have symbolic features, for example).
(d) The central region, the triangle with arcs for sides, the intersection of all
three frames.
This can be labelled 'place settings'. Places have attributes of all three domains.
Those places that endure have characteristic and imageable forms, they are
meaningful for those who participate and there is a strong suggestion of how
participation in their unfolding should or will happen. From a design point of view,
the important ingredient likely to be missing from a place setting that would make it
a place is anchorage to geographical specificity. (Place theorists would still regard it
as lacking the most important feature: an unfolding event relatively peculiar to it –
see papers in Dovey et al (1985).) For architects, place setting has to do with
creating or providing particular (built) environments for particular kinds of episode to
take place.8, 9 Then, the lingering ghosts of the events intended to take place, past
and future, remembered ghosts and immanent ghosts, if not the actual
performances, ensure that even the empty place is redolent of meaning.
Pier
"I think that the richer the associational resonance, the richer the possible
interpretations and the richer their interlayerings the better the work of
architecture. Further, I think that the richer the possible experience, the richer
the possible uses and the more the modes of appropriation invited the better
the work. That work is best that simultaneously achieves these ends with the
means."
8 Note that there are structures that could warrant membership of the central region
but that are of much larger scale than could be appreciated at one time. In Australia,
songlines are particularly pertinent examples. (Chatwin 1987)
For the self-conscious contemporary architect, the programme for any project deals
with at least three matters - with the project itself, with the subcultural interests of
the architectural community, and with various personal concerns. With the project,
there are the tasks set by the brief, an appreciation of the client, an attitude to the
site and reflection on the embedding contexts. Addressing the architectural
community is to comment on mutual concerns, to suggest new ones and to reflect
on the literature of the discipline and, in the design of any new version of a given
type, implicitly to provide a critique of others' work. Beyond those provoked in
these other ways, some personal concerns play an important part in each of an
architect's projects and begin to suggest a stylistic signature. Disentangling the
strands of sources for form remains difficult - particularly as relative emphases
change with time, from project to project, with variations in enthusiasm, confidence
and concentration.
For this exhibition, the task is to design a new Pholiota as a tribute to Walter Burley
Griffin and Marion Mahoney Griffin. I have designed a building of the same internal
dimensions, of one storey, and of similar function.
A supplementary task is to comment on the nature of male/ female roles and their
rightness for the individuals that carry them. For this I locate an ensemble of places
on the directional flow of an implicit spatial succession: tight public interface, central
social place, the couple's room - opening onto the unfolding prospect, the ultimate
context. For, in the fabric of time's passing on into the future only some men and
women weave closely parallel lives - for periods of varying length. The maleness and
femaleness of the relations between them is biologically founded, but there is more
than biology and the symbolism of the alchemical verities. The unfolding definition
of any relationship in its personal and social dimensions and the development of the
individuals participating will be negotiated continuously in terms of and in the
context of many inequalities - hopefully, more often a source of pleasure than of
pain.
I do not know Griffin or Mahoney but have the impression that their Anthroposophy
and artistic/cultural pursuits were at the heart of the relationship. Access to their
(his? her?) beliefs is now only possible through the screen of a plethora of political
and other, perhaps apocryphal, anecdotes (despite the texts). Access to the built
ideas is available through direct sensory experience or through her drawings, but the
embedding context that so contributes to the architecture is lost. However, their
strong interest in the careful placing of buildings in the land and in crystalline
geometries is evident. The geometrical parti of my design represents the Griffin and
Mahoney couple and their interests: a pentagon is at the heart of the enclosed four
of the nine squares implicit in the plan.
I have designed the pavilion for my wife, Deidre, and me - but with a certain luxury in
the materials, furnishings and accoutrements. It is a fantasy. It is not a minimalist,
universal dwelling. The ensemble of places includes: Entry (from which the building
can be understood), Bath, Couch, Table (with kitchen, and for work) and Library -
around the place of the Rug, under the aedicule. A bed-settee by Mario Bellini can be
used facing back into the central place and toward the hearth in Winter or within it,
facing the view, in Summer. Further, like other couples, each tries to accommodate
the stronger predilections of the other. In this case, the pavilion is my design and
should, therefore, be approached through a parterre walled garden, of some lawn,
herbaceous borders and predominantly European flowering plants - roses, camelias,
daphnes, bulbs, rhododendrons - but with fruit trees, a hedge of holly and an alder or
two (I'd add some maples).
Ideally, the building would be located at the end of Smith Street, Daylesford, looking
north towards Mount Franklin. Pholiota did not reflect Griffin's and Mahoney's
interests in the close association of building with land for it had no particular
orientation, was inward-looking and the interior engaged not at all with its grounds,
with the landscape or with Australian sunlight. This building does.
50L Greg Missingham (1986-88) Pholiota Redivivus: Model from the East (slightly above)
This is an exhibition piece and thus could fade quickly, a brief whisper among the
clerisy. Inside the white cube the discussion can be only with those interested in an
intellectual engagement with architecture, including that slightly larger group of
interested students, friends and non-practitioners. There are, thus, allusions both to
greater architecture's rich musée imaginaire and to my own theoretical concerns.
The piece is, nevertheless, a realisable, everyday habitable building.
There is a limit to which the explicit intentions of an architect should interfere with
'what the building wants to be', a point in designing after which a project's internal
FINALLY …
51L The work itself has the same interpretation structure
51R (BLANK)
R
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