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Greg Missingham

ARCHITECTURE,
HERMENEUTICS
&
PLACE SETTING

OPEN LECTURE SERIES

PRINCE PHILIP THEATRE


DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE AND
BUILDING
THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE
THURSDAY 14 APRIL 1994
2

1
OUTER FRAME:
THREE-PART ACCOUNT OF
MEANING & INTERPRETATION
1L GKM's three-part account of interpretation or meaning

1R Mr R Neville at upper window of Groombridge

Place, The Draughtsman's Contract, Peter

Greenaway (1982)

I think of 'the' meaning of a work of architecture as being dependent on the nature


of the work of architecture, on its interlocuters (and what they bring to their
engagement with it) and on the context within which that engagement occurs.
Consider a wall and its meaning. It makes a difference to what will be
regarded as the meaning of the wall whether it is a pair of sculptors who
contemplate it or a pair of demolition contractors; it makes a difference whether the
pair are hiding behind it from sniper fire in one of the world's trouble spots or trying
to pick a spot to sit on a sunny afternoon, to lean their backs against it and to have
their lunch; and it makes a difference whether the wall is a relatively undifferentiated
expanse of wire-cut, extruded brickwork or it is rendered with stone pilasters, string
courses and other mouldings to form superposed layers of blind arcades.

For Ricouer (1976: 71ff), interpretation entails understanding, explanation,


comprehension and appropriation.1 An understanding is a relatively naïve, initial
grasp of the matter in question, the direct and immediate 'reading' of the work.
Comprehension is a sophisticated mode of understanding, with levels of richer
reading, supported by explanatory procedures and which, most importantly, allows a

1 Bill Routt reminded me of Ricouer's account of understanding and comprehension. Cf


Steiner (1989: 71):

"Hermeneutics is normally defined as signifying the systematic methods and


practices of explication, of the interpretative exposition of texts … I shall try
to elucidate hermeneutics as defining the enactment of answerable
understanding, of active apprehension."

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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.

2L Contexts/Frames of Reference are negotiated between Interlocuters

But, the situation is not so simple as this drawing of the three-part model suggests.

2R I(o) = W

"An object o is … an artwork only under an interpretation I, where I is a sort

of function that transfigures o into a work: I(o) = w. Then even if o is a

perceptual constant, variations in I constitute different works."

(Danto 1981: 125, emphasis as in the original)

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2
INNER FRAME: PLACE SETTING
3L Greg Missingham (1984) 'Place and Placemaking'

3R Place setting from Belle (jan/Feb, 1982: 168): crab

& mushroom roulade, mango champagne cocktail,

compôte of fruits in champagne & orange

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.

I reserve the term 'architecture' for a relatively holistic denotation of built-


environment-conceived-of-in-use. 'Event' or 'situation' refer to what occurs within
and through that built environment and, like 'behaviour setting', encompass much
more than the physical setting of activities. The built form, however, does more
than simply enclose the activity within it. It presents or displays it, it provides
supportive features or cues (sheltering and orientating), it marks it off from other
events and articulates an appropriate space (punctuating), and it represents that
activity to others as an activity of a certain kind and status (symbolising), for
example. The cutlery, crockery, glassware, and napkins that constitute a place
setting jointly do these things at the dinner table for the diners. (They also suggest
scale.)

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3
FOUR PARTIAL MODELS OF THE
ARCHITECTURAL TASK

3.1 NUTS & BOLTS


4L Morgan & Lindstrom (c1978) Lindstrom residence, Bainbridge Island,

Washington

4R Greg Missingham (1987) Esquisse/sketch proposal

for RMIT Plumbing School, Cardigan Street, Carlton

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.

5L Yoji Watanabe (1970) Sky Building No 3, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo: facade close-up

5R Ditto: general elevation in context

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.

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3.2 ECONOMIC PACKAGE

6L Window of the Haynes Street Milk Bar, North Melbourne, January 1979

6R Chris Blumrich (1977) 'White Elephants'

Economic determinations of architecture are particularly important in our


culture and arise under a subheading, below.

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.

3.3 SOCIAL ENGINEERING

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?.

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4
FIVE EXPECTATIONS
OF ARCHITECTURE
"You can hide paintings, you can avoid literature, you can – if you're ingenious

– avoid listening to music, but you cannot avoid architecture. Architecture is

the least perishable of the arts and the most public. Architects (perhaps like

film-makers) are supposed to be accountable to art, to finance, to the

specialist critic, to the man in the street and perhaps to posterity."

(Greenaway 1988: back cover)

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:

Shelter and support,


Punctuation and articulation,
Symbolisation (which can entail an invitation to art),
Reification of (collective) selves (which may include a desire for art), and
Orientation or cueing.

The interest in art is important for how architects think of themselves.


Andrew Saint (1983: 61) pointed out that the term 'art-architect', associated
with the idea that architects as architects could be artists, dates only from early in
the last century, from about the 1830s. It was one of the many later manifestations
of the eighteenth-century, romantic model of the individual visionary, the creative
genius triumphing in the longer term of history despite the handicaps of ignorant
adversity in the artist's own time. The explanation for architects' widespread
contemporary claim that architecture is an art form that I find most compelling is
provided by Neils Prak. Prak (1984: 56 ff) borrows the terms 'economic capital',
'social capital' and 'cultural capital' from the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and

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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.

4.1 SHELTER & SUPPORT

7L Anon. (c1830) Barry Cornwall's drawing room, Bedford Square, London

(possibly designed by Thomas Leverton) [Interiors, November, 1981: 125]

7R Edward Hau (c1859) Fashionable St Petersburg

drawing room [Interiors, ditto: 124]

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8L Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c1565) 'The Peasant Wedding (Feast)'

8R Ditto, but showing only Milieu & Props (GKM 1981)

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 &

Richard in the Kitchen, Thursday

9R Ditto: Albert's table in the Dining Room

4.2 PUNCTUATION & ARTICULATION


10L Piazza San Marco, Venice [from William Morgan (1980) Prehistoric
Architecture in the Eastern United States: 150].
10R Trelleborg, Slagelse, Denmark [from ditto: 141].

11L Plan of the House of the Silver Wedding, Pompeii

11R Edmond & Corrigan (1976) Chapel of St Joseph,

Strabane Avenue, Box Hill North: overhead

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

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by proportioning, by giving scale and measure to spaces, and by organising


relationships between them, the built environment contributes to the physical and
communicative punctuation of the stream of behaviour that is everyday life. (Hillier &
Hanson 1984, Preziosi 1979)

4.3 SYMBOLISATION
12L Georges Lemoine (c1972) Tower [La Maison de Marie Clare, November, 1972].

12R Letterbox, 4 Hawksburn Road, Toorak (January

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]

13R Ditto: Diagram of orthogonal structures (above) &

Schematic plan shows Jaguar mask (below)

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.

4.4 REIFICATION OF (COLLECTIVE) SELF


14L Edward Haytley (1744-46) 'The Drake-Brockman Family'

14R Sydney Nolan (1946) 'Ned Kelly'

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15L Dimini, Thessaly, Greece (pre 2500 BC)

15R Paolo Soleri (1972) Hexahedron

'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.

4.5 ORIENTATION (or CUEING)


Orientation in space, time & social context:

16L Nave of Wells Cathedral

16R Beach scene, Victoria

17L Greg Missingham (1988) Jack Lonsdale Lodge, Sebastopol (Thirty-bed Nursing Home):

Plan of House A (Acacia) & Theo Darmos' Corridor Elevations/Colour Schemes

17R Ditto: Explanatory Exploded Axonometric drawing of

House B (Banksia)

2 I am aware of the somewhat different, Marxist use of 'reification' with a strongly


pejorative colouration. Said (1983: 230-242) provides a useful, summary discussion of
Lukács' (1923) account of the idea. A good, brief account of three senses of 'reification'
used in social theory and originating with Marx is given in Giddens (1984: 179-180).

3 "The ordering of space in building is really about the ordering of relations


between people. Because this is so, society enters into the very nature and
form of buildings. They are social objects through their very form as objects.
Architecture is not a 'social art' simply because buildings are important visual
symbols of society, but also because, through the ways in which buildings,
individually and collectively, create and order space, we are able to recognise
society: that it exists and has a certain form."

(Hillier & Hanson 1984: 2)

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18L Ditto: Entrance Hall of House C

18R Ditto: Rear Courtyard in House A (Acacia)

19L Greg Missingham (1989) Mt Eliza Centre Redeveloment, Rosebud: Community Care

Centre & Thirty-bed Rehabilitation & Assessment Nursing Home: Site Plan

19R Ditto, Community Care Centre: Planning principles

Further, we expect architecture to help us orientate ourselves in everyday life, to


provide cues to our place in space, in time and in social contexts. Shelter and
support, punctuation and articulation and symbolisation all contribute to our
orientation in these ways. Orientation is an expectation of architecture in everyday
life (just as of all modes of cultural expression) mediating between the immediacy of
experienced shelter, punctuation or symbolisation and the longer term agenda in
reification of the (collective) self.

20L Greg Missingham (1989) the Quiet Achiever's Yacht: Esquisse for extension to

BP HQ: concept drawing

20R Ditto: view from Albert Road (west)

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 :

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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

18 (Intersecting Gables) Site Plan

21R Ditto: The house in situ from the North (Enterprise

Drive)

22L Ditto: Scheme 3 (Barn Type): Plan & Sketch

22R Ditto: Scheme 10 (Range): Plan

23L Ditto: Scheme 18 (Intersecting Gables): Alchemical Elements

23R Ditto: Shapes

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

24R Ditto: E (Front), ESE & SSW (Rear) Elevations

"... order and relationship in a building must be made apparent to the


observer not only to convey meaning but also to impress upon him that
the building is a planned entity..."
(Raskin 1954: 107)

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.

6 The Hodges' property is part of a subdivision named after a mid-nineteenth century


homestead, 'Emu Bottom', situated only a little over a kilometre away - which may have
suggested this, though I do not believe so.

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25L Ditto: Scheme 25: (Near final) Floor Plans

25R Ditto: Scheme 26 (As Built): Axonometric from NE

26L Ditto: Front Elevation

26R Ditto: Working Drawings: Front & Rear Elevations

27L Ditto: Rear Elevation: Under construction, 30.3.85

27R Ditto: View from NNE, March 86 (with dead tree)

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'

28R Greg Missingham (1985) 'Hidden Lion'

Thus, we are led back to consideration of …

3.4 ARCHITECT AS MAGUS OR ARTIST …


29L Peter Greenaway (1991) Prospero's Books: John Gielgud as Prospero

29R Ditto: Pages from A Harsh Book of Geometry

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.

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5
THREE APPROACHES TO DESIGN
IN ARCHITECTURE THAT COMBINE
IN
PLACE SETTING
30L (BLANK)

30R Greg Missingham (1985) 'Place and Placemaking'

motif (3rd version)

5.1 THE DRAMATURGICAL …


31L Edwin Chu (pre 1982) Additions to Wesley Church, Singapore: Bridge

connection to office building with pulpit/canopy/conversation pit

31R Kerry Wise (1979) 'Entrance with stairs'

Providing place settings is the essence of the dramaturgical approach in


architecture: preparing appropriately structured environments in which particular
kinds of things can be expected to take place and to unfold in more or less
predictable ways, where particular moving images or definitions of the situation are
evoked.

32L Cartoon from New Yorker magazine

32R Diego Velasquez (1656) 'Las Meninas'

At least three designing tactics of a dramaturgical kind occur in architecture: the


first is through providing particular sensory experiences to suggest certain events
that might occur, the second is attempting to invoke particular events by providing
props or sets that cue memories and the third is to arrange the architecture so that
to use it at all is to enact a particular kind of event and to invoke a particular
narrative.

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5.2 THE INTENTIONALLY SYMBOLIC


33L Peter D Cole (1987) Maquette of entrance screen for proposed Wangaratta

Police Station (Greg Anson design)

33R Rod MacLeish (1980) AR691 Architectural Design 3:

State Museum project, Queen Victoria Market carpark

site: sketch

34L Allan Higgs (1987) AJ901 Major Project: Hospice for People with Acquired Immune

Deficiency Syndrome, Bishopscourt, East Melbourne: West & South Elevations


34R Ditto: Overhead Perspective

"The change in the paradigm of contemporary architecture is better

understood in light of the fact that in place of modernist abstraction there

has emerged a new tendency toward symbolization, and in place of pure

geometry and the ideality of primary forms a new representation of contents

by means of narrative fiction. The rebirth of the art of building means that,

beyond fulfilling the basic practical requirements, it must become a medium of

narrative representation again."

(Klotz 1984: 420)

5.3 THE TYPOLOGICAL


35L Greg Missingham (1985) 'Aedicula'

35R Kaija & Heikki Siren (pre 1984) 'Kappeli', Finland

36L O M Ungers (1976) Housing Project, Marburg, Germany: 6 house types:

including two red head/face houses

36R ditto: including OMA & Arquitectonica versions

Geometric simples

37L Greg Missingham & Branko Vidal (1974) Shepparton International Village: Site

Plan

37R Greg Missingham (1992) 'Sweet Allegory' (Edible

Architecture exhibition, ACCA)

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38L Greg Missingham & Doug Grey (1987) Wodonga TAFE Student Housing: Sketch

Axonometric

38R Ditto: Plans & Elevations

39L Greg Missingham (1988) Jack Lonsdale Lodge, Sebastopol (Thirty-bed Nursing

Home): Front of House A (Acacia)

39R Ditto: North Elevation of some bedrooms

40L Ditto: Northern side of House B (Banksia)

40R Greg Missingham (1988) Molina House project, Emu

Bottom: Floor Plan (penultimate scheme)

41L Ditto: NW (Back), N & E Elevations

41R Ditto: Front (SE), South & West Elevations

42L Greg Missingham & Others (1991) Queen Elizabeth Village, Wendouree: Plans of the

Three House Types A, B & C

42R Ditto: House 2 & 3 from NW

43L Ditto: Entry to House 3

43R Ditto: House 3 from E

44L Greg Missingham (1994) Twenty-bed Extension to Midlands Hostel, North Ballarat:

Concept proposal: Plan

44R Ditto: Modelling Study

45L Alex Selenitsch (1980) 'Greenhill 2', St Andrews: Garden elevation from across the

dam

45R Ditto: Floor plan from Working Drawings

5.4 PLACE SETTING


46L Greg Missingham (1994) PhD Fig 7.4: A Field of Meaningful Architecture

46R (BLANK)

I have examined works of architecture deriving from three designers' frames of


reference: dramaturgical, intentionally symbolic and typological. But, as many of the
examples show, works of architecture can be interpreted from within more than one
frame of reference.
The diagram on the previous page illustrates the possibilities. It can be
analysed in terms of regions of four kinds:

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(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:

(i) Architecture responding directly to everyday life (here, dramaturgical


analogies),
(ii) Architecture intended to be symbolic, and
(iii) Architecture deriving form from its own history (here, types).

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

GKM Architecture, Hermeneutics & Place Setting 14.4.94


21

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.

AN EXAMPLE: PHOLIOTA REDIVIVUS

47L E Tanner (1953) 'The Public Servant'

47R Greg Missingham (1987) Photo of boats off St Kilda

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

greatest economy of means - that is, it exhibits maximum richness, maximum

subtlety and maximum mnemonic resonance with the minimum of architectonic

means."

(Missingham 1987: 84)

48L Greg Missingham (1986-88) Pholiota Redivivus: Conceptual Ingredients

48R Ditto: Building Elements

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)

9 Situated rituals contribute to the definition of places as places, but do not of


themselves constitute places. This is true in Melbourne, for example, of the Dawn Service on
Anzac Day (25 April) at the Shrine of Remembrance.

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22

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

GKM Architecture, Hermeneutics & Place Setting 14.4.94


23

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.

49L Greg Missingham (1986-88) Pholiota Redivivus: Section & Elevations

49R Ditto: Model from the West

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)

50R Ditto: Model interior showing aedicule

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

GKM Architecture, Hermeneutics & Place Setting 14.4.94


24

logic asserts itself. After that, why it is as it is becomes inexpressable - because it


has become too subtle, because the integrated richness suggests too much to say,
because it can no longer be consciously grasped or, perhaps, even because why it is
as it is has become lost. With this project, I hope I have passed over into the
inexpressable. Should it be built, I think this private building would make a
contribution to the public realm; I know that I tried to deal with placemaking, with
architectural archetypes, with architecture's 'punctuation' of everyday life and with
suggestively ambiguous form, with memory and figure, collective and individual, lay
and architectural.

FINALLY …
51L The work itself has the same interpretation structure

51R (BLANK)

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25

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DANTO, Arthur C (1981) The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art,

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GIDDENS, Anthony (1984) The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration,

Polity Press, Cambridge in assoc with Basil Blackwell, Oxford.

GREENAWAY, Peter (1988) The Belly of an Architect, Faber and Faber, London.

HILLIER, Bill & Julienne HANSON (1984) The social logic of space, Cambridge University Press,

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LUKACS, Georg (1923) History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans

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GKM Architecture, Hermeneutics & Place Setting 14.4.94

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