The architectural community has joined in expressing great sadness at the passing of Col Madigan. There have been several moving personal tributes to the man and his buildings. His buildings are amongst the most complex, distinctive, and intelligent public buildings in Australia. I’m going to attempt to get some thoughts down about the intriguing pair of The High Court of Australia and The National Gallery of Australia. It’s going to be pretty idiosyncratic I’m afraid.

The High Court and NGA are the only two buildings that remained after Robert Johnson revised his 1969 plan for National Place. It should be said that Johnson was clear from the outset that his design departed from Griffin’s intentions, that a new paradigm was coming into focus.

“Although Canberra may represent centralised government, we do live in a democracy and in a loosely knit, rapidly evolving society. The physical representation of this might be a looser and more open composition of buildings…” he goes on to argue that the new approach would have “the drama of asymmetry and calculated irregularity”.

“…enhancing rather than defying the larger Griffin concept. I do not believe that a close re-hash of the Griffin design either makes any sense today or is the best way to pay respect to Griffin.”

Madigan himself said that the his buildings “reacted strongly against the asphyxiating order of conformity and responded to the halcyon optimistic spirit of the early 70s… In short the buildings hold a demanding asymmetrical balance, in some ways matching, in other ways threatening the illusionary safer symmetry.”

The buildings were meant to be two great set-pieces in National Place, as it is they stand by the water like The Swagman and The Squatter waiting to be born into mythology.

They do not pretend to tiptoe across the landscape but rather are a part of it, born of the landscape and yet resolutely modern and monumental.

Edwards Madigan Torzillo and Briggs’ initial competition entry for the NGA shows a very low slung building, almost a landscape and certainly a bunker. It recalls Uluru or a reclining figure. The Buildings is plugged into a network of bridges, ramps, and roads that form a complicated landscape or perhaps a new mote and drawbridge.

The intention from the start was for a fortified repository for the nation’s art – for its identity.  There is something like fear built into this idea that art needs protection like a secret delicate commodity.  We see it still in Wood Marsh’s ACCA or Fender Katsalidis’ Museum of Old and New Art.

The building as built is closed and not a little tortured, subordinate to the High Court yet creeping toward the lake.  There are cracks in the armour. The galleries have fissures at their seems that afford views to the gardens beyond.  The grand entry with its tower and portico lifting away from the ground plane breaks down toward the water to become more like a village than a fortress, more settled into the landscape while still resisting domestication it is featureless, abstract, and mute.  The entry is highly articulated with massive columns split into blades, levels interspersped, carrying a top heavy load that signals entry but also something beyond reach, some ancient complexity now out of hand.

We like to think of art as a distilled idea, as somehow reflecting the complexity of human desire and culture. The NGA, while outwardly a willful bunker is internally complex, labyrinthine, almost Piranesian. There is a kind of artificial nature to this interior.  The complexity here is not merely formal, it is cerebral.  Madigan said the work sought “a purposeful tendency to become more complex more free and man is at his best when he is…embracing complexity”.

The building’s underlying tetrahedral structure suggests an evolution of natural structures, space is squeezed and then released, long ramps that double back on themselves, tightly knotted triangular chamfered stairs, grottos and cracks afford unexpected encounters with sculpture and painting. It is as though high modernity has encountered the Australian landscape been weathered and formed by the environment – rather than resisting timidly or touching the earth lightly – the NGA internalizes the land in which it sits.

It reminds me a little of Picnic at Hanging Rock.  The building has the sense of ineffable age and sunbaked claustrophobia.  I recall a sense that Miranda might stumble out delirious; torn between fear and eternity.

Next the High Court…

The three issues of Backlogue, The Journal of the HALFTIME Club, under the editorship at various times of Peter Brew, Felicity Scott, Paul Minifie, Michael Markham, Dean Boothroyd, and Gina Levenspiel.  Became the apotheosis of that period.  Edited and contributed to by the students of the original HALFTIME founders and members Backlogue 1-3 reads like a  compendium of pamphlets bound together in a distillation of history and production.

“ The Half-Time bibliography was undertaken as a way of providing a tertiary visual library to the material presented at the meetings. It contextualises the club’s intuition within a body of knowledge as well as providing historical ballast. This bibliographic weave intersects issues raised at the club with histories as documented by official journals, books and institutions of the day. While not exhaustive, it is the initial mapping of a contemporary history which seemed always to understand that local is international.”                       Dean Boothroyd & Gina Levenspiel, Backlogue Vol 3.

  Despite the slick production, Backlogue maintains the sense of a provisional culture, an architectural culture built on contested ground.  Ideas are up for grabs.  Architectural likenesses still being formed.  Backlogue signposts another metamorphosis for the pamphlet.

Subplot and Subaud were independent publications.  Diane Peacock, who spoke earlier today, founded Subplot as a personal missive.  It was printed using a dye line printer.  Several artworks were produced in conjunction with the pamphlet forming a single cohesive body of work.  Eventually the ammonia ran out.

Subaud was founded as a fanzine by Christos Kastaniotis, Damon Otto, and myself out of frustration with mainstream architectural criticism at the time.  Subaud, from Issue 2, was designed by Urchin Associates, each issue a different and more eccentric format. Our belief was that Subaud was not a series, not representing a progression, but born anew each time, born of the ever-present.  It was initially photocopied, hand made bound, and stamped with various slogans including Make Awkward Advances Towards Women Not War, This is Not For You, and Seidler Sux.  We, too, were threatened with litigation.

Subaud later evolved to be part of the conjoined publication Mongrel – a single bind of Issue and Subaud.  The earnest with the undergraduate.  Mongrel, while shortlived, was an experiment in pamphleteering; an attempt to conjoin the aggressively propositional with a document of record and analysis.

But perhaps this is not the place of pamphlets and fanzines.  Pamphlets, and perhaps architecture, cannot resolve the crises or reconcile the volatility of our discourse.

Peter Corrigan, as is so often the case, put it best.

 The whole effort of man was to get his life into direct contact with this great cosmic force, the source of vitality which gives strength and energy, sun-life, earth-life, and to thus translate “dream-power’ into their everyday lives.  The relationship of these original Australians to the outback left the office at something of a loss.  What clues could they offer?  The “dream time” seemed real enough, but our nerves failed, as well it might.

The rhetoric of the pamphlet cannot sustain the magnitude of the idea, it is left without the vocabulary or the nerve to tackle the ineffable.  Pamphlets are most at home with the provisional.

Recently ARM have begun another metamorphosis in pamphleteering.  The Pamphlet as vanity publishing.  This publication is edited and produced in-house by Amanda Wallace, Simon Castricum, and myself.  We are used to seeing the beautiful architectural monograph.  Many lusciously produced and critically engaged.  But is there another way to write an architect’s history?

The pamphlet allows us to write history on the fly, a provisional history, not authoritative, not final.

The first of a bi-annual series to be produced by ARM directly documents the conjoined projects of the Melbourne Theatre Company and the Melbourne Recital Centre.

Several of the old voices are trucked out.  Peter Corrigan, Ross Jenner, Ian McDougall and, for good measure, Naomi Stead writes her way through the architecture.

The vanity pamphlet treads a fine line between cynical commercialism and a genuine engagement with the architectural discourse.  Only available through the AIA and at the venues.  It is a fanzine.  It invites analysis and heckling in equal measure.

So after all that, no talk of new media.  The medium is of less interest than the intent toward critical insight.  It seems to me that the best pamphlets and/or blogs are born out of or are in the process of forming a clan, they have their own patois, their own obsessions and propositions; they attempt to form a likeness of our times by writing architecture.

This paper was given at the Writing Architecture Symposium held in Brisbane. There were some very interesting (and slightly heated) questions afterwards regarding the role of women in the pamphlet scene, a role I have almost entirely omitted. While the role of women was not my focus for this particular paper there are others who a paying the subject its due attention. Please visit the Women in Architecture Forum and engage with their ongoing work.

Their first editorial staked out the territory:

…the development of architecture in this country has been retarded because architects, both practising and teaching, have not sufficiently debated or discussed their work with much candour or profundity, or in a manner that would be of use to others.  So partly in consequence, each generation of architects hold many of the same misconceptions and make many of the same mistakes as those of preceding generations…

      Editorial Transition Vol. 1 No. 1 

Founded in tandem with the HALFTIME club (founded by Grant Marani) it played a crucial role in the practice of architecture in Melbourne.  That is that the intellectual life and output of the practising architect was entertained, informed, and held to account by the clan.  Angry and involved letters to the editor and heckling from the shadows where common and encouraged.  My own memory of HALFTIME is of uncomfortable vivisection and the occasional fist-fight over myth-making in the Australian suburbs.

Transition rejected progress – it was a very self-conscious pamphlet.

But change is a different affair.  Frames of reference shift periodically (theoretically they shift continually), ideals and theories internal and external to architecture are introduced or, in most cases, revived.  Situations are examined and the results interpreted, matters come to light, interests flare and fade, different figures, guided by their percipient certainties, animate the present and make their pertinent contributions.  This is iterative and inevitable and measurable, the ever-present.  But it is not progress.” 

      Editorial Transition Vol. 1 No. 1 

Pamphlets represent variation as they adapt to the times – they mongrelise – to survive.  Ideas have sex.

Pamphlets beget a mongrel architecture.  The pamphlet does not presuppose a fixed nor perfect architecture.

When Pamphlets get old they become books.

By writing about architecture, Transition overtly manifests a concern with architecture at this “enunciative” level – with that level where the visual clues it proffers to our images of self and society, to our relationship with the past and to architecture’s own habits of self-reflection,are inevitably moved to the foreground of discussion.

Transition Vol 2, No 1

The 20thC seems to have deadened and cheapened the Australian character… The Wild Colonial Boy is selling used cars.

Robin Boyd, Australia’s Home, p.278

That’s what Boyd thought.

In 1971 the RAIA conference had been “The Consequences of Today” by 1980 it was “The Pleasures of Architecture”.  Transition saw the impetus towards an Australian architecture.    An architecture that mined the artifacts of Australian urbanism. In this the Melbourne clan became the bastard children of Aldo Rossi.  There was a kind of garbled lineage there – garbled by distance – perhaps, but not ignorance.

Peter Corrigan in Transition Vol 2. No 1:

Australia is about a sort of rough expression of ideas that are true to us.  Not about a polished, refined identification of ideas that might well be true overseas.

So as far as Corrigan is concerned “the imagery is ruthlessly suburban, but with a bit.  There’s a window there that owes a bit to Mendelsohn and there is a bit of Mies and I suppose there is a bit of Barry Humphries.”

The Transition editors in response get pretty lyrical:

Australia could well be cast as a wilderness out of which reckless and hairy latter-day satyrs are now emerging, into the light of a clearing that is European culture, to revive fey courtiers with their rorty play.

It is comforting to be so located, to find that kind of affirmation of an interpretation of the present in the past, to imagine that if we should pause and turn, then we may see human history smiling indulgently in our direction…Transition attempts to map as accurately as possible, in effect to re-make, the elements and the form of an existing situation, but using the elements and forms of another medium…

It is interesting to consider the effect that this attitude of ‘words actually matter’ on the methods of architectural production. If words, that is, the distinct elements … of any medium do matter then logically an immersion in the medium, in this case architecture – is demanded. It must be known if likenesses are to be constructed

     Ian McDougal & Richard Munday

     Transition Vol 2. No. 3 & 4

In short, architects should write about architecture.  Further, architects should know their medium in order to create cultural likenesses in their buildings.

Howard Raggatt drags Venturi’s Mother’s House across a photocopier, adds a water tank, a blue roof from Modena, and then leaves it unceremoniously in Footscray.

Paul Morgan wanted to build a huge tram stop.

Neil Masterton felt you couldn’t possibly build a public building in Melbourne without some of those white pipes.

And maybe he was right.

The editors of transition, unlike Boyd, were not public intellectuals – they were not trying to shape public opinion – but develop erudition toward a local production.  To create an Australian image of architecture.

They pursue the issue with Rem Koohaas in 1980.

Koolhaas :  “the only regionalism I could conceive of is not the sort of literal development of a regional style, but is derived from…international issues inserted into different contexts.  The first time I saw Peter Corrigan’s work it struck me not as an Australian building, but as an Australian image… 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 transplantation… Everything I look at here is so Australian.

In the same issue the editors launch the clan’s next assault on Melbourne architecture.

Practising architects should be given access to architecture schools for the purposes of study and research, and undertaking teaching as a means of reviewing their work and concerns, and extending them under these rigorous but sheltered circumstances

RMIT takes them at their word and to this day RMIT is staffed by practising architects who, whatever you say about the production, are living the dream.  I include myself in that category.

Transition ultimately lost its staples.  Richard Munday left for New York. The debts were bought out by RMIT and the editorship fell to academics more interested in writing writing than in writing architecture.  Transition lost its staples, grew up, and became a book.

Next Time… Backlogue and the Subs.

We longingly await the day when some Great Publication taking public duty to its heart, will offer regular, informed and utterly frank criticisms of all major buildings. Meanwhile we present these humble comments in all sincerity, and expectantly continue to await the Armageddon when the mysteries of design shall be honestly displayed to a waiting world.

            Smudges Vol. 1 No. 1

This age of the pamphleteer begins with Ornament and Crime.

We, over here, like degenerates; had fallen for Queen Anne and called it Federation Style.

We quite liked all that exuberance, all that featurism, we quite liked the two-tone Holden Special.

Robin Boyd did not.  He called it our Ugliness and we loved him for it.

In 1956 Ron Clarke burnt his arm lighting the Olympic flame.

Peter McIntyre, John and Phyllis Murphy, and Bill Irwin had a red hot go at some pretty exuberant modernism.

Robin Boyd quite liked it.

In this age the Villa Savoye fell to ruin and was raised again as a cenotaph in the suburbs.

We had followed the crow Towards a New Architecture  – but in the end it wasn’t so fast or so new.

Robin Boyd went to the dentist in 1971 and died. Architects in Melbourne read his stuff a lot.

Aldo Rossi crashed his car in 1971.  He crashed it again in 1997 but not again after that.  He wrote and said some things about buildings he’d done and cities he knew.

Architects in Melbourne read his stuff a lot.

Richard Munday and Ian McDougall were among them.  They wrote about architecture too.  Some of us still read what they wrote.

Richard Munday left Melbourne for New York.

Death of The Pamphleteer began as an RMIT elective run by Dean Boothroyd, Nicholas Hubicki, and later, myself.

The pamphlet is a tradition in Melbourne architecture.  Desbrowe Annear was a pompous pamphleteer of sorts.  Robin Boyd, of course, was the consummate pamphleteer. Later Richard Munday and Ian McDougall took on the mantel, riding close on the heels of Boyd’s legacy.

The publications included in the study were Smudges, Cross-Section, Architectural Papers, Tension, Transition, Pataphysics, Backlogue, The Half-Time Club Minutes, Subplot, and Subaud.  It should be said that this study was not exhaustive.

The published documents of record dovetail with an aural history – the HALFTIME Club, Process, 3RRR’s Burning Down the House, and The Architects, amongst others.

There is a local lineage to be found in this list, something that is in the architectural blood of Melbourne.  The pamphlets and pamphleteers gave voice and sustenance to architecture in Melbourne.  The pamphlets are not esoterica but are bound directly to the practice and production of architecture.

Death of the Pamphleteer attempted to plot the history of writing architecture in Melbourne.

To make sense of information – to understand it – one has to put it into fruitful relationship with other information, and grasp the meaning of that relationship; which implies finding patterns, learning lessons, drawings inferences, and as a result seeing the whole.”                     

The Mystery of Things A.C. Grayling

The timeline plots key events, articles and buildings published in our pamphlets.  Through it we can follow Ariadne’s thread as it unravels, bifurcates, and tangles it’s way through half a century.  I’m just going to pull out a couple of these knots.

Smudges was almost Robin Boyd’s first step into writing architecture.  He was 19.

Smudges was published by the Victorian Architectural Student’s Society of the RAIA.

Smudges was the archetypal Melbourne pamphlet – a single sheet, double sided, it was folded down to fit in a shirt pocket.  Each issue had a different folding pattern.

Smudges was irreverent, cutting, and insightful.  It was also generous.

Famously Boyd awarded a Bouquet and a Blot of the month to the best and worst acts of architecture.

When Boyd wrote of the Tudor shopping village called Castle Towers

“It is as though a giant garbage tin had been shaken over Melbourne for about a decade and then, when it had seemed that the contents had all come out, a particularly fruity, juicy hunk that had been jammed in the bottom suddenly became dislodged and fell into the middle of one the most snobbish retreats in the city.  If it lasts six months of the post-war world we may well ask: “what were we fighting for?”

The irate Blotter, Arthur Plaisted, sued Smudges for £3000. Boyd published an apology in a Gothic font.

In Smudges we see the genesis of an irreverent clan of architects in Melbourne that evolves  into an architectural culture.

The Pamphlet like the pamphleteer belongs to the clan.  With it’s own patois, the pamphlet is by and for the clan in a particular place and time.

Smudges was the training ground for Robin Boyd, the undergraduate rag afforded him the opportunity to hone a gently subversive wit against the smug conservatism of Melbourne architects.

Cross-Section is a different beast, it is regarded as a newsletter for the construction industry – notices of new building products, who’s doing what where and the like, and while it is an exercise in brevity it is also a selective document.  It’s Boyd’s How-To for the modern city.

He extends this into direct advice as the director of the Small Home Service.

A very productive outworking of Boyd’s pamphleteering.

But I’ll leave the real Boyd History to Phillip Goad.  Suffice it to say that Cross-Section was an open letter to the whole clan – the construction industry – Boyd is building the clan, sharing the knowledge with which to build a new Australian architecture.

Cross-Section has a long innings: 1952-1971.  With a succession of editors Robin Boyd, David Saunders and finally Neville Quarry.  We actually logged every entry from that 20 years into a spreadsheet.  It makes for some interesting if obsessive compulsive reading.

Cross-Section, too, is sued for libel.

David Saunders, went on to edit the Architectural Papers.  Those of you who are historians will be aware of the SAHANZ founder’s grant in his name.

Architectural Papers published Sydney Architectural Conference papers by Miles Lewis, Conrad Hamann, Jennifer Taylor  among others.

The lack of access to and circulation of these papers became part of the impetus for the founding of Transition.

Next Time… Transition and the Melbourne Clan

With thread firmly in hand we now take a turn into the Barcelon Pavilion.  It , like the child with syphilitic eyes, reminds us to be careful.  The pavilion does not represent failure / equivocation/doubt; it manufactures it.

The Barcelona Pavilion is a Doric temple.

We don’t look at Doric temples anymore.  If we do, we see columns.  this is not what the Greeks saw.  The Greeks saw an image of the discontinuous, of the disintergrated.  They saw past the columns, past the proportioned mass of the building, to the cella; where god lived.  The Doric temple was the house of God, a house that did not admit visitors.  The Doric columns are a screen; a prohibition doubled by the base.

The Barcelona pavilion is  a Doric temple.

It is canonically composed: cella, stylobate, and columns.  Here the Doric order is grotesquely deformed in having outgrown the stylobate (as observed by Jose Quetglas).

There is a problem here, of course.  Mies did not design the stand of columns, rather they pre-date the pavilion, the forbidden house; they stood as a monument to the spatial dislocation.  Mies, however, was a master of the collage.  In his many compositions he shows a lust for assemblage, for difference and for the discontinuous.  In particular the aplique of the landscape on the surface of a window.  The world in abstraction.  The pavilion is a built collage.

In the architecture of Mies van der Rohe we find an obsessive suppression of the vertical.  Even in his skyscrapers there is the desire to prevent the vertical from impacting the expression of the horizontal.  The Glass Skyscraper of 1920-21 is like the stylobate of a temple, an elevated platform – alien to the ground of the viewer – stacked infinitely.  The vision is not vertical, rather an affirmation of the horizontal, a gradual piling, one upon another.

At the lake Shore Drive Apartments (1948-1951) Mies superimposes I-Beams over the structural pillar thereby negating the vertical, condemning it to shadow (we are here reminded of the buttress at Gloucester).

The pavilion is an affirmation of the influence of the Babel Fiasco is Western architecture.  The pavilion affirms the event in its understanding and acknowledgement of the will to the vertical and is an exception from the will in its insistant negation of the vertical and the struggle for eternity.

The building turns in on the view, at once containing and expelling them, it does not (like Virgil) guide the pilgrim through purgatory to another realm.

The Barcelona Pavilion is an enclosed space.

“The pavilion encloses nothing but space and yet does so geometrically rather than in a real physical manner.  There are no doors and yet each room is but imperfectly enclosed, on three sides, by for instance, three walls.  More often than not these walls are great, continuous planes of glass which only limit space partiallyt.  In some of these walls the glass has been tinted a sombre, neutral colour, and they reflect both objects and people in such a way that what you see on the other side of the glass and what you see reflected on its surface seem to blend together.  Some rooms, which are ceilingless, are veritable demi-courtyards in which space is limited only by three walls and by the horizontal surface of the water in the pool, and yet where space is ‘conained’ by geometry” NM Rubio in J.Quetglas, Fear of Glass, Barcelona, 2001

Nicolau M. Rubio’s shrewd description of the pavilion tells us that it “encloses nothing but space” that it can never be filled.  The pavillion can never be filled, not because it is imperfectly sealed but because of its materiality.  The Barcelona Pavilion is made of reflections.  The path we take through the pavilion leads us on into a landscape of infinite depth – the panes of glass, their transparency and reflection, the walls of veins and stone and their reflections, the silent chorus of columns and their reflections.  When we arrive the building vanishes, as we move, the building escapes.  The building is replete in kaleidoscopic finery – the veined marble is quartered, becoming a reflection of itself – the image of narcissus.

Mirrors impoverish rooms, the more crowded a room becomes the greater the mass of the impassable mirror and the emptier the room will be.  The building becomes a stage set in which the crowd are the players but the set makes their image, their names, irrecoverable; it deprives them of their place and condemns them to wander like derelicts.  It is the antithesis of Babel, or rather, it is the recurrence of the event, the building manifests the event rather than being subject to it.  This is why a Miesian plan is anathema to the building.  What is the plan of a mirror?  What is the plan of a Miesian Wall?  A plan is a section through the vertical plane but the vertical is not possible with Mies, there are no walls in the Forbidden House, only mirrors.

Frank Lloyd Wright wrote a letter to Philip Johnson in which he says, in reference to the Pavilion, “Some day let’s pursuade Mies to get rid of those damned little steel posts that look so dangerous and interfering in his lovely design.”  There was no need for Wright to go to the effort, Mies did not need convincing.  The columns are masked in reflectivity.  They, like the wanderer, impoverished by reflection.

However, they do serve a master.  The cruciform pillar is machine for defining space.  The pillars form immaterial tangencies that define imaginary space that can never be arrived at.  Unlike the heavy space of the Cathedral of Erotic Misery, the space of the pavilion is weightless – the space is defined by the extended tangents of the cruciform columnm especially so as they define a series of empty boxes each discreet from the other while beckoning the wanderer from ghostly box to ghostly box.  The mirrored stone that segment the spaces defined by the columns further confuses the spaces, preventing a reading of the whole.  The columns become harbingers of the discontinuous.

There is one pillar that stands alone.  In the throne room, by the black carpet, like a sentry it forbids entry despite the emptiness.  It is this centre that both attracts and repels us as we travel throught the pavillion.  We find oursleves standing,waiting unable to step onto such hallowed ground, repelled by the centre which cannoth hold.  This is not a unifying whole, the pavillion cannpt resist consuming itself.  Thus, behind us, we find the hope of another centre – a shining, radiant backlit wall – at last (we think) another Porta Coeli, behind which must be the centre to which we can hold.  We are mistaken.

The wall may be the only source of light but it is encased in white glass, not reflective but placed amidst a sea of concavities; our hectic path brings us upon wall upon wall, we cannot reach the white centre – there is no access to the other side, as the apostle Paul wrote, “God dwells in a light to which there is no access.”

So we continue to crisscross our thread, hurrying now for we feel hot on the trail, entering and re-entering rooms from which it seems someone has just left.  The labyrinth is getting the better of us, our prey will never be found.  It is only when we stop, perhaps back on the edge of the black carpet, that we realise we are our own prey; it is ourselves we have been chasing.  The pavilion, cruel in reflection, forces us to leave just as we arrive, passing the mirror and thereby emptying it.  We come to the end and the beginning of Ariadne’s Thread and all we find is ourselves.

The Babel Fiasco Part I: Stalks Us Like A Black Dog

We tread toward Die Kathedrale des erotischen Elends (KdeE), Ariadne’s thread in hand, along the narrow corrifdor of a house in Hanover.  Not without some apprehension, we follow the art critic Rudolph Jahns: “we entered the column itself through a narrow door, which was more like a grotto… there were grottoes of various types and shapes, whose entrances were not always on the same level… I then experienced a strange enraptured feeling.  This room had a very special life of its own.  The sound of my footsteps faded away and there was absolute silence.  There was only the form of the grotto whirling around me.”

Die Kathedrale des erotischen Elends or Merzbau was the life work of Kurt Schwitters, an artist of the radical avant-garde in Germany between the wars.  Kurt called it a column.

He also called it a Kathedrale.  Schwitters’ Kathedrale begins with a column – the highly mutable First Day Merz-column.

The column rises from a rectangular base it holds a myriad ‘offerings’ that reach their zenith at the death mask of his infant son, Gerd.  The base is adorned with several of Schwitters’ earlier collages, one of which is entitled The First Day Collage.  The collage is an intriguing addition, it contains several extra-textual references to religious and/or esoteric art including winged Renaissance putti and the folds of fabric from the virgin mother’s clothing in a Stefan Lochner painting, Madonna in Rose Bower (c. 1448).  The image is replete with a host of seraphim and cherubim, angles at the cloth of the Blessed Virgin.

A significant figure of the collage is a column, a visual device in the manner of a literary trope it is made up of a “…composite (columnar) form-shaft, fluted capital, and an animal bust, apparently a lions head, perched on top.”  Next to the column stands an angel who reaches out to touch the column.  It is this collage that gives us our first clear evidence of the themes that would guide the development of The Cathedral of erotic Misery.

Kathedrale… the use of the word is not incidental.  Schwitters avoids concentrating on the direct representation of the Gothic – as in the Gothic Revival of the 19thC.  Rather he seeks the underlying discourse projected by the cathedrals; he incorporates their hermeneutic content into the body of his kathedrale/column.  It is this hermeneutic streak that allows Schwitters to explore and, indeed, transubstantiate the profane into the sacred within the many layers and grottoes of the KdeE.

The Kathedrale is an attempt to apprehend the mystical underpinnings of space and form.  Elizabeth Burns Gamard, in her book on the Merzbau, sujjests that the German word Aufbau is fundamental to our understanding of the design arts in Germany during the early years of the 20thC.  Aufbau reflected the search for primary origins.  Literally, the term means “of building,” conceptually, however, the term refers to the construction, organization and structure of living systems.  We are here reminded of Hegel’s reading of the Babel Tower as being a living system where the “community was at the same time both the ain and the content of the work.”

The Dada-Constructivist Hans Richter describes how the Kathedrale pulsed with the stuff of the world, with the profane refuse of his community.  “he cut off a lock of my hair, put it in my hole.  A thick pencil, filched from Mies van der Rohe’s drawing board, lay in his cavity.  In others there was a piece of a shoelace, a half smoked cigarette, a nailparing, a piece of Doesburg’s tie, a broken pen.  There were also some odd (and more than odd) things such as a dental bridge with several teeth on it, and even a little bottle of urine bearing the donor’s name.  All these were placed in the separate holes reserved for the individual entries.  Schwitters gave us several holes each, as the spirit moved him [...] and the column grew.

The poignant memoir describes Schwitters’ friendship caves.  Much like the small prayer chapels in a Gothic cathedral the caves and grottoes are meditations on Schwitters’ friendships.  The profane object captured from an individual is transformed into a sacred object – a reliquary – like the body parts of saints.  Stored, adored, and adorned as if they contained the very essence of the individual – the ‘grotto saints.’  This is Schwitters at his alchemical best; like lead into gold or water into wine, Schwitters takes the profane and transubstantiates it into the sacred.  Thus, the grottoes become like the Porta Coeli of the Gothic Cathedral, they are like a myriad of gates into heaven, no longer singular but ever multiplying like the Hathedrale itself, for the KdeE was not staatic but emerged like a spatial palimpsest, layer on layer built upon another.  In order to transverse it one needed an Ariadne’s Threead with which to find ones’ way.  The Kathedrale/Column in this way can no longer be the ever heavenward will to eternity but becomes the labyrinth residing within the column.  The successive layers become memories of Schwitters’ attempts to negotiate a path through the chaos of his existence.  In a bid to understand this idea we turn to Gilles Deleuze and his understanding of the spontaneous line extracted by Paul Klee, a close associate of Kurt’s.  For Klee, according to Deleuze, the point is not firm but moves alsong an inflection such that one “will never be able to fix upon a certain precise surface in a body”.  Similarly the Kathedrale undermines the normative categories of measurable space and time by creating spatial and temporal dimensions that, through the intense interplay of symbology, superadjacency , and form is immeasuable.  The inflection of our line through the Kathedrale and through architecture is the pure Event of the Line but for now it is not in the world; it is the world itself, or rather it si the beginning, as Klee used to say, “a site of cosmogenesis,” “a non dimensional point” “between dimensions.”

It is this principle of the KdeE that prevents us from finding a vector through its space.  We are weightless in the heavy space of the immeasurable, we are unable to find a point of rest.  We se infinite variation – not due to the form of the KdeE but because it functions as a living system, itself a discreet fragment of the world beyond its walls.

It is in this way that we understand the prohibitive aspects of the Cathedral of Erotic Misery.  For Schwitter was protective of his Merzbau, few were allowed in and fewer still explored the layers of its deep space (six layers deep in places).  Kurt even whitewashed the windowpanes from the inside.  For Schwitters, the KdeE is both a refuge from the worl and the reflection/personification of it.

Thus schwitters acknowledges the Babel Fiasco, he begins with a column and builds a labyrinth, fighting to find a way into heaven.  There is a twofold recognition: in the first, a hope for the eternal and in the second a recognition of the worldy.

The KdeE truly becomes an erotic misery in a glimpse of the last diorama, in Schwitters’ own words:

Shiny-fissured objects set the mood.  In the middle is a couple embracing: he has no head, she no arms; between his legs he is holding a huge blank cartridge.  The big twisted around child’s head with the syphilitic eyes is warning the embracing couple to be careful.  This is disturbing, but there is reassurance in the little bottle of my own urine in which Immortelle [everlasting flowers] are suspended.

This is the Post-Babel Family, a pisture image of fear and impotence, the syphilitic child warning the lovers in the very act of a hiopeful union.  It is rare indeed that a bottle of your own urine might be thought of as a reassurance.

The Babel Fiasco Part VII: The Forbidden House.

For more on the Merzbau please read Elizabeth Burns Gamard’s book Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau The Cathedral of Erotic Misery.  This essay owes much to her excellent book.

Peter McIntyre’s Snellemen or ‘Coil’ House is to be auctioned for the first time since its construction in 1953.

40 Keam Street, IVANHOE EAST, VIC, 3079

Here are the inspection times:

Thu 17th Feb
6:00pm-6:30pm

Sat 19th Feb
2:00pm-2:30pm

Thu 24th Feb
6:00pm-6:30pm

Sat 26th Feb
3:00pm-3:30pm

Images sources:

Modern in Melbourne II

realestateview

The parti of the Snelleman House in Ivanhoe (1953) was directly generated from the prevailing site conditions. An initial scheme involving an elevated design in precast concrete was flatly rejected by the clients, McIntyre’s response was a house that coiled around two existing eucalyptus trees on the steeply sloping site. ” The house was then apparently ‘set out’ by the architect scraping a line down and around the trees with the heel of his shoe. — The house was a sweeping gesture, its curved external brick veneer wall painted leaf-green with small punched openings containing the latest Cowdroy sashless sliding windows, and an interior light-weight court wall, a carousel of red, yellow and White Mondrian window walls. — Inside, curtains served as doors throughout and the house was furnished with Clement Meadmore string and steel chairs and Indonesian wood carvings. The walls were blue, pink and grey. Instead of Wright’s earthy natural textures for an earth-bound house, McIntyre’s colors and finish were an exercise in Mondrian’s Boogie Woogie jazz.”

Goad, P., ‘Optimism and Experiment in Melbourne: The early works of Peter McIntyre 1950-1961′.

Architecture is fat.  And so is Art.  Politics isn’t fat but Poetry is.   Science is fat most of the time, like Oprah, Fear is fat.  Comedy is not fat. Design is fat but religion is not.  Let’s talk about fat.

Let’s talk about a fat house.  Specifically Fat House (2003) by Erwin Wurm, it came after the Fat Car (2001) which is the usual order of things.  Let’s take a look at them.  They’re funny, aren’t they?  But not that funny, they’re serious too, just not that serious.  The Fat Car was seen in the Fat House when exhibited together.  Fat in Fat is more than a little unnerving, it seems a bit over the top just a bit too fat, really.  Don’t you agree?

The Fat Car, let me just say, really isn’t nice at all.  It goes on in this real deadpan, kinda creepy jive sounding like it’s got guns and drugs in the glove box, if only you can get past the rolls of fat.  It rants on and on about how hopeless everything is, about how confusing and how full of rage we all are.  It really is beyond the pale.  Fat cars really shouldn’t comment.

The Fat House is nice though, all pudgy and warm, just as a house should be.  I wish My House was fat like the Fat House. See, the house is like the womb (from which we are all homeless), it’s a place away from the scorching sun and flooding rain.  The fat walls of the fat house get between us and the elements; isn’t that nice?  But it does occur to me that maybe the Fat House protects just a little to much, it occurs to me now, as I think about owning a nice fat house that it’s there’s a bit more cushioning there than is strictly necessary.

It’s got me thinking about other fat things that we’re told are there to save us from all the nasties.  That Great Wall of China is pretty big, you’d have to say it’s bigger than strictly necessary; rabbits, after all, aren’t that militant.

The Berlin Wall was way too fat, much fatter than was comfortable for anyone.  All those people in thin cars trying to get from one side to the other, from the thin side —I’m told­— to the fat side.  So much fat there it held the world apart.  That’s just fat architecture that got out of hand.

That fence in Israel, that fence needs more fat —just enough to make it soft and friendly­— that fence is too thin, I’m sure that’s why it’s a fence and not a wall.

Peterborough Retrochoir (16thC), Peterborough Cathedral (c.1201)

It is this hermeneutic line that becomes an arc/surface in the Peterborough fan vaults.  The extraordinary vaults of the Peterborough Cathedral (c.1201) were, in fact, built early in the 16th Century.  The hermeneutic surface of the vaults describe a fully comprehensive three-dimensional projection, not the simpler variety restricted to two-dimensional slices.  The fans spread, such that the quatrefoil gaps are nearly eliminated, thereby enclosing the space of the cathedral.  It is here, perhaps, that we see the precursor of Leibniz’s statement that there can never be “a straight line without curves intermingled.”  Deleuze’s discussion of the folds in the soul also come to mind for we see, in the vaults, a cavernous porous world constituting more than a line and less than a surface.

While symmetry remains, despite the transformation of the inflections in the surface, the line of symmetry is no longer flat, no longer residing on a “favoured plane of projection,” rather symmetry courses along in shallow waves, slicing through the splayed lips of the pouting fans”.  This, then, is how we can think of the hermeneutic lin/arc/surface/ fold of the Gothic soul: in approaching the perpendicular, the Gothic must turn from perfection and infinity back to the enclosed world.

Henry VII chapel, Westminster

Standing in Westminster Abbey, looking heavenward, we seek clarification – not from the God of the Gothics – but in the hope of resolving the hermeneutic space of the cathedral.  at last, in the Henry VII Chapel we find the total inversion of the Gothic upward mobility.  In the vaults of the nave the fans are hung, pendant-like, from the ceiling.  They drip with the memory of babel – turning away from the heavens in a coruscated landscape.

Robin Evans writes of the chapel “there are few creatures as pathetic as the swan that sang while dying, and there are few buildings that solicit so much pathos as the Henry VII Chapel playing itself out.”

The Henry VII Chapel at Westminster is at the extremity of Gothic aarchitecure.  It is not a summit, rather, it is an apotheosis.  As Peter Kidson writes “It leaves the impression that there was very little left for anyone else to do afterwards”

Next time… MERZ!