Technics// Memory// History//and the Architecture of Interstices// Under Construction Symposium University of Tasmania Launceston 25-27.11.2011 Book of Abstracts// Key Paper Abstracts// Abstract// The example of “Archives of the Planet”, perhaps the most significant legacy of the lifework of the French Jewish banker of Albert Kahn (1860-1940), provides an extraordinary entry point for the study of one of the key moment in the history of representation when the introduction of new technologies of mechanical reproduction induced a radical transformation in the thinking about memory, perception and knowledge. Inspired by the philosophy of Henri Bergson, lifelong friend and tutor of Albert Kahn, and functioning under the scientific direction of the human geographer Jean Brunhes, the Archives de la Planète operated between1908 and 1931. Completely funded by Kahn, eleven independent photographers and cameramen - including the biologist Jean Comandon, a pioneer in the fields of micro-photography and scientific cinema-, collected an immense ethno-geographic visual catalogue of the planet composed of 72,000 colour autochrome photographs, 4,000 stereographic images, and nearly 100 hours of mostly black and white documentary films. In two decades, the teams of the Archives of the Planet visited more than 40 countries to fulfill the mission defined by Albert Kahn in one of his rare written pronouncement, i.e. to record the traditional costumes, modes of production and ways of life that rapid processes of modernization were erasing all over the globe. Beyond the opportunity of reconnoitring the redefinition of memory prompted by new technologies, the case of Kahn’s collections offers therefore an opening to explore and scrutinize a crucial phase in the history of the twentieth century re-foundation of the notions of archive, milieu and habitat. The Archives of the Planet: Cinema, Photography and Memory, 1908-1931 Alessandra Ponte Bio// Alessandra Ponte is full professor at the École d’architecture, Université de Montréal. She has taught history and theory of architecture and landscape at Pratt Institute (New York), Princeton University, Cornell University, Instituto Universitario di Architettura (Venice), and ETH (Zurich). She has written articles and essays in numerous international publications, published a volume on Richard Payne Knight and the Eighteenth century Picturesque (Paris, 2000) and co-edited, with Antoine Picon, a collection of papers on architecture and the sciences (New York 2003). For the last four year she is been responsible for the conception and organization of the Phyllis Lambert Seminar, a series colloquia on contemporary architectural topics. She has recently organized the exhibition Total Environment: Montreal 1965-1975 (Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, March- August 2009). She is currently completing a series of investigations about the North American landscapes and preparing a show and catalogue on François Dallegret (AA School, London, Fall 2011). 02.01. Spinoza’s Geometric Ecology Dr Peg Rawes Abstract// This paper explores the construction of a radical and ‘technical’ expression of Nature/Substance in Spinoza’s geometric text, The Ethics (1677). It suggests that Spinoza’s seventeenth-century geometric analysis of subjectivity provides a fascinating historical technicity in discussions of aesthetics, matter and subjectivity, which engages with contemporary ecological politics and agency in the production of the built environment. Spinoza’s geometric method is driven by his powerful theory of Substance through which he locates a complex biodiversity of life. Substance constitutes a kind of proto- materialist theory insofar as it is the primary univocal ‘cause’ of all realities, the immanent ‘life-force’ in all things, including architectural design practice and geometric thinking. Ecologists and philosophers (e.g. Arne Naess and Eccy de Jong ) have discussed the ‘deep ecology’ of Spinoza’s metaphysics of substance or nature. However, this paper considers Spinoza’s invention of these ethical ecological relations through a geometrical technicity in which a plenitude of geometric figures and human, living and natural subjects are constructed. This genetic method therefore opens up the space to discuss geometric thinking, not just as a reductive technical operation of form-making, but as an exemplary mode of biological and material diversification. An ethical technicity of human emotions or affects is also developed through his psychophysical understanding of geometric relations, constituting a radical critique of subjectivity and ecological relations. As such, Spinoza’s thinking resonates with contemporary visual arts and spatial practices, including, Agnes Denes’ Wheatfield: A Confrontation, 1982, which re-purposed New York’s Battery Park into urban agriculture and which was reconstructed in London in 2009 as part of the Radical Nature exhibition at the Barbican. Under these terms, Denes’ critical and aesthetic (that is, sense-based) spatial intervention recalls Spinoza’s promotion of radical geometric ecologies. Each demonstrates the capacity for a ‘natural’ geometric technicity to generate new figure-subjects and critical spatiotemporal relations and, consequently, to contribute more productively towards contemporary discussions about the wellbeing of diverse modern subjectivities and societies. In addition, considering Spinoza’s own formidable technical and aesthetic labour in geometric thinking (which Bergson identified with the force of a ‘dreadnought’ and an immaterial ‘lightness’ of thought) we might wish to explore the value of his radical aesthetic technicity for generating critical geometric ecologies for contemporary visual arts practices. Might Spinoza’s ‘natural geometry’ enable debates about the need to design for the diverse social and environmental needs, for example, by contributing to contemporary critiques of agency, or for developing diverse cultures of dwelling? Might his ethical thinking about nature and geometry also help to rethink the commercially-driven fascination in formal geometric production that continues to dominate the discipline (trends which still operate on the basis of understanding geometry as an abstract disembodied set of functions)? In the face of these, and other pressing questions of human difference and well-being, together with the need to protect ecological difference, this paper suggests that Spinoza’s philosophy may provide opportunities through which architecture, and the visual arts, can rethink and value human and environmental biodiversity in the built environment. Bio// Peg Rawes is a Senior Lecturer in Architectural History and Theory and Director of Architectural Research at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. Abstract// Memory and place are inextricably linked. Moreover, memory stands in a special relation to built places – to corridors, rooms, buildings streets, neighbourhoods, towns, cities. Thus Bachelard explores memory as given in the house; Benjamin as present in the city and its streets. To understand both, one cannot treat memory as merely some subjective quality attached to the built. The built is formed from memory and memory from the built. Often overlooked in those forms of architectural practice given over to the technical and the representational, the intimate connection of building and memory nevertheless indicates the centrality of building in the formation of the fundamental fabric of human life. The weave of memory and of meaning is accomplished in the built form of house, street, and city, rather than in some inner sanctum of the mind. Building Memory Prof Jeff Malpas Bio// Jeff Malpas is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tasmania and Distinguished Visiting Professor at LaTrobe University. He has written extensively on issues of place and space and his newest book, Heidegger and the Thinking of Place, will appear in January 2012 with MIT Press. 03. 04. failure. This paper seizes on two contradictory moments in the commissioning and work of the mural cycle as symptoms - “the suddenly manifested knot of associations or conflicted meaning” - of the mural cycle’s sudden aporias around settler activism in frontier violence and the racialised borders of the new Australian state. This paper examines the role of architecture at Purrumbete in framing the boundaries of past and present, in accommodating the mural cycle’s shifting viewing positions – from intimate witness to minority white Australian – and of the homestead as a powerful indexical referent constructing the meaning of the mural images as documentary site histories. The skilful architectural composition maintains and absorbs the mural cycle’s contradictions without having to resolve them. Ideology is the logic of the dream not analytical reason. Signs, Symptoms and the Index: Depicting Past and Present at Purrumbete, 1901-02 Dr Karen Burns Abstract// This paper examines the wall mural, a traditional medium for constructing spatial exchanges between architecture and images. I focus on an unusual 1901-02 mural cycle designed by Walter Withers for the Manifold family at Purrumbete in Victoria’s Western District. The cycle was commissioned as part of an extensive rebuilding of the late Victorian homestead, culminating in a set of public reception rooms decorated with imagery of the pastoral frontier. In situ murals were key forms of architectural decoration until the late twentieth century. Murals can narrate both the sited-ness and virtuality of architecture. Since the late Medieval period, western architecture’s window frames, doors and enfilade systems have framed the mural as a view, and later as a picture, making the mural’s otherness consonant with the logic of the interior. However murals can also have a powerful immersive quality, projecting the viewer into another world: in media res. Another function was found for murals as the medium was reinvented towards the end of the nineteenth century when in-situ images were fashioned as external projections of interior psychic states. The Purrumbete murals reveal another function of the architecture/in-situ image intersection. In the Withers decorated reception room architectural systems of spatial articulation produce a powerful counter-weight to the image, constructing a cohesive interior that mitigates against the inconsistencies of the interior image world of the mural narrative, its ideology and viewing positions. In his book Confronting Images (2009), Georges Didi Huberman argues against art history’s desire to discover legible, coherent narratives in the surface of images, to make the art image “identical to the work of symbolic reason” (Bryson, 1993) Norman Bryson reviewing Huberman’s text was rightly suspicious of any generalised claim for the failure of images to represent, but persuaded by Huberman’s endeavour to historicise “the text or image that builds representational failure into itself”. (1993) Whilst Huberman rightly identifies the widespread failure to represent he also gives meaning and legibility to that Bio// Karen Burns is a Senior Lecturer in architectural history and theory in the Department of Architecture at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Her current research projects include a history of Anglophone feminist architectural theory, practice and research from 1974- 2010, a study of fortified civilian architecture on the Port Phillip and Van Diemen’s Land pastoral frontiers and a book length study of architects, commodities and the industrial marketplace: The Industrial Muse: Architects, Aesthetics and Manufacture in Britain, 1842-1862. Her essays have been published in Assemblage, AD, Transition ,Architectural Theory Review and the Journal of Architectural Education (forthcoming and in the following books: Postcolonial Spaces, Desiring Practices and Intimus. 05. 06. Abstract// Reconstruction discourse for a number of post-disaster settings and scenarios has led to a renewal of typological studies. This has commonly involved a turn to architectural history and analyses of vernacular architecture in the effort to propose novel building types more likely to protect communities against loss of life and property. Varied arguments for the adaption and ‘improvement’ of traditional Southeast Asian village architecture, the New Orleans raised cottage or Queenslander (to name a few cases) prompt a number of questions relating to conference themes. How does the appropriation of historical building forms engage different pasts in order to predict and forestall future catastrophe? What building types are chosen, how are they adapted and how does this process elicit understandings of memory and architectural heritage? How are communities defined as socio-logical and psychological entities by the selection of building forms that aim not only to resist cyclonic winds, floods and earthquakes, but also provide for community recuperation and emotional catharsis following a catastrophic event? How can culture and politics enter the picture? Architectural Typologies and the Mnemotechnics of Rebuilding in Recent Post-Disaster Scenarios Prof William Taylor Bio// William M. Taylor is Professor of Architecture at the University of Western Australia where he teaches architectural design and history and theory of the built environment. Recent publications include The Vital Landscape, Nature and the Built Environment in Nineteenth- Century Britain (Ashgate 2004) and a co- edited collection of essays An Everyday Transience: The Urban Imaginary of Goldfields Photographer John Joseph Dwyer (UWA Publishing 2010). A co-authored book Prospects for An Ethics of Architecture (Routledge 2011) results from his collaboration with Professor Michael Levine (Philosophy UWA). He is currently researching the subject of architecture and transience. Abstracts// 07. 08. Abstract// An enquiry into the appropriate methods for understanding and representing architectural and urban histories is complicated. These questions increasingly dominate the field of history studies of the insufficient and contradictory tendency in conventional historiographies that rely upon iconic recollections of history, which utilize the ‘visible’ and the materialistic approaches in representation rather than opening up to approaches that maintain strong and diverse relationships with vast range of social and human sciences. The growing debate on the significance of historical studies that challenge the loss of memory in modernity emphasizes the role of history as a cure to the problems of humanity despite the fact that it is a realm of ambiguity. Michel Foucault considers history as “the mother of all the sciences of man” (Foucault, 2002). He suggests that “all knowledge is rooted in a life, a society, and a language that have a history: and it is in that very history that knowledge finds the element enabling it to communicate with other forms of life, other types of society, other significations”, and that “the different positivities formed by history and laid down in it are able to enter into contact with one another, surround one another in the form of knowledge” (Foucault, 2002). However, the concept of history is abstract itself, as history cannot communicate itself directly to people; it relies on the historians who collect, constitute, and transmit historical ideas through societies. The knowledge, intentions, and methodologies used by historians have great impact on historiography. In relation to the crisis of architectural history representation, Paul Rabinow suggests that the problem was in the shift of the vocabulary of architectural forms from architectural type and its historicization and formalization, to architectural style: “the meaning of style in architecture gained an entirely new value, or more accurately, took on value” (Rabinow, 1989). Yet for Mark Crinson, the problem is in the extreme memory loss and the loss of familiarity, as post-modern urbanism “treats the past as something to be quoted selectively, something already deracinated” (Crinson, 2005). And for Sibel Bozdogan the Between the ‘represented’ and ‘representing’: The Crisis of Urban History and the Techniques of Historiography Iman Al-Attar problem is that architectural history is mainly Eurocentric and historiography emphasizes cultural difference rather than cultural diversity. (After an elaborated discussion of the matter, she concludes that “history of architecture is a particularly fertile ground for new interpretations”) (Bozdogan, 1984). The wide use of terminologies like ‘past’ and ‘memory’, and the application of affixes like ‘pre’ and ‘post’ establishes a huge cut in the concept of the time flow and give the impression of greatly separated periods of time that lack any sign of unity or coherence. I believe that this approach is among the obstacles that hinders the advancements of integrated urban history studies. Yet the distinctive aspect of all historians’ critiques of conventional historiography is its vague and incomplete image of social histories, which urges for a search for unconventional methods of representation. This paper attempts at a discussion of the possible methodologies to establish alternative methods in historiogrphy. The paper focuses on the urban history of Baghdad in late eighteenth century as an exceptional example of an indistinct urban history representation. References Bozdogan, S 1984, ‘Architectural History in Professional Education: Reflections on Postcolonial Challenges to the Modern Survey’, Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 37, pp. 207-215 Crinson, M 2005, Urban memory : history and amnesia in the modern city, Routledge, London [England] ; New York, NY. Pxi Foucault, M 2002, The order of things : an archaeology of the human sciences, Routledge, London ; New York. Rabinow, P 1989, French modern : norms and forms of the social environment, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. P47 Bio// Iman Al-Attar is a PHD candidate at the University of Tasmania’s School of Architecture and Design. Iman Research is largely focused on the textual representation of the socio-urban history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Baghdad. 09. 10. Abstract// In light of massive catastrophes, tragedy, and the question of reconstruction that invokes the uncertainty of remembering, I wish to respond with a personal experience, one I recently investigated resulting in a PhD on the subject. I used the case study of the 1979 Mt Erebus aviation disaster in Antarctica to explore degraded visual functioning, a condition resulting from variable perceptual experiences. The landscape of Northern Tasmania was surveyed from the cockpit of an aircraft – mediation by technology – the ‘flight view’, where sound recordings and video data were collected as raw material for the project. “Barega, my childhood home, is only minutes away. Barega, winds from all directions, where my mind and body begin to understand nature, even before I give it another thought…light falling on landscape, linking me to place and space, forming my perceptions. Barega, is part of my mental set.” (Extract taken from World Beyond the Horizon. The Journey: the pilot as artist, 2010) Part of the project was to reconstruct the childhood experience, image-objects of the past intervened with the present. This reconstruction included a visitation to my childhood home in Northern Tasmania – this time from the air. Barega was the place where I spent my childhood and my adolescence where my mind formed an understanding for things – they became part of my mental and psychological sets – my past shaping the present. To Alva Noë, contemporary philosopher and cognitive scientist, such events can be defined by the science of phenomena in the context of something that impresses itself upon the observer as being ‘extraordinary’ – a remarkable thing or a particular happening. These concepts can be applied to the way individuals perceive their environments. Alternatively (as I have done), they can find expression of these ideas through the creative processes of painting, photography and new media. As individuals, when in the process of negotiation and reconstruction we call upon mental sets that have been successful in the past. Wayne Weiten, psychologist defines: ‘a mental set exists when humans persist in problem-solving strategies that have worked in the past’. Our mental sets become key image-objects that assist in the conceptual structure of our methodology – one that informs our narrative history. American contemporary video artist, Bill Viola seeks to reconcile the power of video with human consciousness by combining visual, aural, and temporal elements with technology as he probes the essence of being. Functioning as a surrogate for the mind’s eye, Viola’s video explores the interaction of image and memory, the subconscious and its dreams. I attempt to create this experience within the framework of my work World Beyond the Horizon, with a new architecture of imagery and sound relating to environmental systems that are in concert with my own sensory experience and mental sets. The result was a reconstructed landscape – a synthetic journey of a past landscape – relocating a notion of the past into the present as seen through the flight view and its associated technics. The connection between the two (the past and present) has been demonstrated in this immersive, engaging and transportive video sound installation. These technical processes took the work out of the realm of pure documentary resulting in a project that I consider speaks for itself regarding its effectiveness as an artwork in an attempt to memorialise the past triggered by the flight view concept. Bio// Dr. Simon Bourke has a PHD from the University of Tasmania’s School of Visual and Performing Arts. Simon’s research is an investigation into light and its effect on the landscape, including a project is entitled ”The World Beyond the Horizon.” Interstices and the Aerial Viewpoint: Reconstructing the complexity of the ‘normal’ experience. Dr Simon Bourke. Abstract// This paper reflects on Santos City of Lights, a performance event created by lighting designer John Rayment, which ran nightly for the duration of the 2011 Brisbane Festival. The work gives rise to a number of questions that pivot within broader discourse about the capacity of urban arts festivals for re/constructing senses of place, community identity, optimism and collective memory. There is the issue of whether and in what sense the arts have a role to play in assisting communities in trauma recovery, the case in point being the major Brisbane flood of January 2011 in which thousands of homes and businesses were inundated. Festival promotional material and media releases from the Premier’s Department certainly made claims in this direction and were clearly keen to encourage positive public reengagement with the river and its urban precinct, Southbank. Santos City of Lights provokes consideration of the boundaries between ‘art’ and ‘design’ in a festival context and ways in which public expectations of and responses to specific events may be directed accordingly. Sponsored by Santos, one of the biggest mining and energy supply companies in the country, the work could be read as a piece of extravagant advertising, with the company motto “We have the energy” blazed in neon lights at the entrance to the public viewing area on Southbank. In promotional material, the work was positioned as a spectacle of novel lighting design – “the first laser light show of its kind in Australia” - one created with Brisbane’s unique geography in mind. Yet without ‘Santos’ in the title of the work, City of Lights could arguably be experienced as a site-specific art installation, with an invitation to more heightened reading of its cultural content and critique from aesthetic and ideational perspectives. There are further complexities to be teased out around the technicity of the festival spectacle – the productive processes and the commercial agendas that support high level resourcing, impacts of technologies employed and ways in which audiences are enabled/constrained by Projecting Brisbane: lines of f/light in the 2011 post-flood Festival Dr. Jen Brown them, the detritus of images and sounds captured by media active audiences and their potential to serve as mnemonic devices via social networking sites on the Internet. As a native of Brisbane who grew up beside, in, on, across, under and over the muddy brown waters of the river, I have a particular interest in contemporary positionings of the river in the cultural life of the city. Bio// Dr. Jen Brown is a designer and educator who works with soundscapes, interactive multimedia, video and photography. She holds a PhD in creative arts and is currently undertaking her second PHD Jointly between the University of Tasmania’s School of Architecture and Design and School of Visual and Performing Arts. Jen frequently collaborates with Tas Dance and freelances in design & development. Jen is currently based in Launceston, Tasmania 11. 12. Abstract// The construction and reconstruction of urban environment after calamitous events and urban shifts is a historically persistent phenomenon, one that can be slow/abrupt, confronting/intangible, material/spiritual, and literal/ abstract. John Ruskin responded to the erosion of the historical fabric in European cities, particular Venice, by promoting preservation, through delayed physical deterioration, complemented significantly by parallel practices of collection and documentation, such as writing, drawing, photographing, and taking plaster casts. Ruskin presented his rejection of the practices of reconstruction and/or restoration in five dense pages of “Lamp of Memory”, Seven Lamps of Architecture (242-247). These declarations were either dogmatically adopted by institutional framings (such as the International Committee for Monuments and Sites), for instrumental purposes of decision-making, or construed by historians as advancing the picturesque ideal of the ruin. The paper focuses on the premise that repairing the surface of a historical building was like patching up a dead person, and therefore unthinkable. It was a form of architectural uncanny where the building hovered indeterminately between animation and lifelessness. However, this death was reversible. If the cladding and the ornamentation was completely ripped off and the structure re-skinned, the building could be ‘reborn’, as a different building. The paper will explain this seemingly unusual premise by presenting Ruskin’s theory of life, death, and rebirth in architecture, through multiple lenses of dress, labour, gender, and spirituality. It argues that for Ruskin life was not innate to an object. The building was brought to life through surface ornamentation, which was the life and the energy of the craftsperson imparted to the building through creative labour. The ornamentation was disposed as dress like veneer and the analogy of clothing had gendered orientations. The building was a humanized and a feminized entity, dressed and brought to life by the male craftsperson. Hence, not unlike Pandora, the mythical first woman, architecture was born dressed. Also following Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1843), Birth, Death, and Rebirth: Reconstruction of Architecture in Ruskin’s Writings Dr Anuradha Chatterjee Ruskin believed that dress was the soul of a human being, which meant that the destruction of the ornamental dress like veneer of a building marked its death. This alluded to the key premise in Ruskin’s writings that spiritual life was more potent than biological life. Ruskin’s writings have often been considered as specific historical utterance. However, their potency is palpable and has wider relevance. First, ornament is viewed as more than formal object. Instead it is considered as a discrete event, which could not be replicated, only succeeded by a subsequent event. Second, the notion of birth, death, and rebirth cuts through the dichotomy between the original and the copy in debates on authenticity, disabling forever the possibility of return. The paper will discuss the implications of these lesser known theoretical alignments in Ruskin’s writings. Bio// Dr Anuradha Chatterjee is an architect, academic, and writer/critic Through her teaching and writing, Anu is pursuing simultaneous research agendas of Ruskin studies; dress, body, and gender and architectural theory; cultural history of surface and vision through architectural theory; and emergent practices (Australia and Asia). She is the founding editor of The Eighth Lamp: Ruskin Studies Today (Rivendale Press), and the author of ‘Travelling The Surface: John Ruskin And The Production Of The New Theory Of The Adorned “Wall Veil”’, Ruskin, Venice and Nineteenth-Century Cultural Travel, Eds Keith Hanley and Emma Sdegno, Venezia: Libreria Editrice Cafoscarina, 2010; and ‘Ruskin’s Theory of the Ideal Dress and Textile Analogy in Medieval Architecture’, Persistent Ruskin – Studies in Influence, Assimilation and Effect, Eds Keith Hanley and Brian Maidment, Ashgate 2012 (in press). Abstract// On September 11, 2001, when the World Trade Center towers came down, I was at Columbia University in New York City. In the immediate days following the tragedy, New Yorkers responded in many ways – posters of the missing were plastered on every surface and spontaneous memorials emerged on every street and in every park. In the subway strangers struck up conversations eliciting connection in a city that has as much potential to render the individual anonymous as it does to create fifteen minutes of fame. In the city, underlying the grief and disbelief, there was a feeling of a vast interconnected and international camaraderie – a physical manifestation of the aspirational spirit and defiant enthusiasm that led America to imagine and construct a city of glass and steel skyscrapers. That feeling, of aspiration and defiance, is a powerful thing – it has the power to create great things but it also has the power to manifest a vast silence and leave criticality and discursive nuance in its wake. In the months following the event the American popular media, in line with the Bush administration’s political agenda, re-positioned an event that was international in its scope – the missing and the dead from the World Trade centre alone formed a micro-demographic of the world’s population – rewriting it as a wholly American event. This ‘Americanisation’, through the exploitation of defiant sentiment and patriotism, created a singular meta- narrative that galvanized the Bush administration’s war machine and silenced any critic. The twin towers were by no stretch of the imagination exemplary models of architecture. Instead, their power resided in their iconography. As objects transmitting meaning their images proliferated in a global media economy and were traded upon in their physicality and in their destruction. In many ways, the architectural responses to the fall of the twin towers were part of this spectacular consumption. In light of this, the ‘heroic’, well intentioned visions originally put forth for the master planning of the World Trade Center site seem empty and Catastrophe and Memorialisation: Reflecting on the Architectural After-effects of September 11 Tania Davidge devoid of critical engagement. This paper will explore processes of media memory and memorialisation in relation to the architectural responses to the events of September 11. In light of this it will examine the initial master planning proposals for the site, the World Trade Centre Memorial proposal, the Pentagon Memorial proposal and two speculative proposals I developed while living and studying in New York in the years following the event: a World Trade Centre Archive and a proposal for the World Trade Centre Memorial competition. Positioned as counter narratives these proposals were developed as a critique of the singular narrative espoused by the mass media and investigated ways an architectural proposal could articulate the complexity of the narratives that surrounded the tragedy. In light of the 10 year anniversary of the tragedy it seems relevant to re-visit and re-assess the architectural responses to the event, including my own, and to explore and discuss the potential an architectural project might have to act as a tool for political critique. Bio// Tania Davidge is a registered architect and sessional academic at Monash University and RMIT. In 2002 she completed a Master’s of Science in Advanced Architectural Design at Columbia University in the City of New York. In 2009, Tania founded OpenHAUS Architecture with Christine Phillips. Described as an ‘alternative’ or ‘non- traditional’ architectural practice OpenHAUS does not currently make buildings but engages in architectural activism and advocacy. The practice’s primary aims are to explore the relationship of the public to architecture and to develop new ways of engaging the public with architectural practice and architectural ideas. In 2012 Tania hopes to begin a PhD at Monash University exploring, through the design, development and execution of ‘architectural events’, innovative and non-traditional ways in which the public can actively engage with architecture. 13. 14. Abstract// On New Years Eve, 1922, the massive double-domed timber structure of Rudolf Steiner’s First Goetheanum was engulfed in flames and reduced to ashes. In an effort to make his spiritual teachings accessible to all people through the medium of architecture, Steiner had dedicated ten years to the project. Growing hostility towards his occult philosophy however, pointed to arson as the probable cause of the blaze. Not to be defeated, Steiner embarked upon a new design for a second Goetheanum that endeavoured to fulfil the same aim as its predecessor but on an even grander scale. Yet despite being borne out of the same ideational basis, the architectural expression of the second building was vastly different from the first. This paper examines these differences and investigates how the methods Steiner used to create his architecture influenced the final architectural products. Steiner recognised drawing as a creative instrument that could enrich the conceptual potential of his theoretical work, however, with no formal training as an architect and limited drawing ability, this exchange was somewhat limited. The ambiguity of Steiner’s drawings is countered to some extent though by the maquettes and models he produced, which help negotiate the gap between the immaterial idea and the material object. The shared three-dimensional nature of model making and architecture allowed Steiner a more direct means of articulating and mediating his esoteric ideas in built form than the two-dimensional nature of drawing, particularly given the undulating organic forms he enthusiastically employed. Nevertheless, models are still a form of architectural abstraction capable of leaving their own trace on the built work and the distinctive character of Steiner’s non-conventional models serve to illustrate this point. A comparison between Steiner’s models and the buildings themselves reveal the intimate relationship between process and product that exists in his work. While the loss of the first Goetheanum came as a crushing blow to Steiner, its destruction and reconstruction offered him a unique opportunity to reconsider aspects of the design that may have been flawed in the first instance – a situation he embraced unequivocally. What images recurred in his work and why? How did his architecture evolve? This essay Paper and Fire: The Images and Ashes of Rudolf Steiner’s Architecture Fiona Gray will demonstrate how paper and plasticine were utilised in a highly individualised manner by Steiner as a bridge between idea and artefact, to allow new architectural forms to rise from the ashes and produce one of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary buildings. Bio// Fiona Gray is a PhD candidate in Architecture and Building at Deakin University, Geelong. Her research investigates how the architectural theories of Austrian philosopher, Rudolf Steiner, are translated into built form, within the context of both twentieth century modernism and contemporary architecture. She is also an architect and director of Soul Dwellings, an architectural practice dedicated to environmental, economic and social sustainability in the built environment. Abstract// This paper examines the ways in which visions of idealised landscapes have shaped the historiography of Tasmanian architecture. Since early European settlement and the expansion of settlement and agriculture across the former colony, colonial buildings have been understood as framed by a re-shaping of the Tasmanian landscape, based on a remembering of a foreign land. Yet as recently argued by James Boyce, while early colonists re-worked of the Tasmanian landscape, the environment simultaneously re- shaped them. More than a century later, in the 1950s and 1960s, the presence of the environment was re-asserted in the formulation of local architectural discourses, at this time shaped within a wider community of environmentalists, photographers, artists, architects, designers and political activists, among them: landscape photographers and activists Olegas Truchanas and Peter Dombrovskis; heritage photographer Frank Bolt; artists Steve Walker and Max Angus; as well as architects including Dirk Bolt, Barry McNeill, Peter Dermoudy, Terry Barwick, Brian and Bill Howroyd, Jimmy Moon and Bob Nation, among others. Here, the state’s powerful natural environments provided an essential point of reference and resistance. When Hobart hosted the 10th National Convention of the RAIA (1960), Tasmanian Architect invoked the potentially restorative effects of a near and ever-present Tasmanian wilderness against the perceived scourge of a place-less, technologically-derived modernism. More recently still, the significance of landscape for understandings of Tasmanian architecture has been reified in contemporary architectural photography of Hobart urban designer and architect, Leigh Woolley. In Woolley’s images, architectural objects are self-consciously located within multi-layered cultural and physical landscapes, inevitably framed by (or with buildings positioned to frame) the theatre commonly afforded by the Tasmanian topography. For Woolley, such images serve as visual documentation, as well as tools for the interrogation of place. Of course, Tasmanian landscapes – both constructed and The Landscapes of Tasmanian Architectural History Dr Stuart King wild – aren’t constant. For example, shifting perceptions of the iconic structures of the former Port Arthur penal settlement have been affected by shifts in the immediate landscape, which have included a series of bushfires in the late nineteenth century; the maturing of an exotic plantings on the site; and most recently – in July 2011 – a rare storm surge that inundated the historic ruins and provided a new ‘ground’ for the remembering of difficult colonial and recent pasts. In this last dynamic instance the constructed landscape was momentarily erased, simultaneously re- framing and threatening the historical image-objects of the memorialised site. This paper examines the viewing and positioning of objects against the particularised terrains of the Tasmanian environment, at certain moments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, contending that such images have framed a specific historiography of architecture in the island state. Bio// Dr Stuart King lectures in the School of Architecture & Design at the University of Tasmania, in Launceston. He graduated with a B.Arch (Hons I) from the University of Queensland in 1996 and a PhD in architecture at the University of Melbourne in 2010. Current research interests include the history and theory of nineteenth century architecture and the history and historiography of Australian architecture, with particular interests in Queensland and Tasmania. 15. 15. Abstract// Over the past year or so the Stony Rises Project, devised to bring the histories and cultures of the volcano country around Camperdown, Victoria to presence, has been touring as an exhibition of crossing practices and multiple visions. A program of fieldwork, unaccustomed collaborations and production of visual and installation work has produced new readings of the indigenous, settler and contemporary landscapes of the region. The underlying material is stone, volcanic stone, in all its forms; as topographic flows, cone shaped hills and field detritus, interspersed with architectures such as caves, houses and the ubiquitous walls for which the cultural landscape is known. The project reveals the presence of stone that inculcates the land with both promise and pathos and suggests uncertain futures. This paper and installation proposes to review one of the Stony Rises projects, A Deep Mapping for the Stony Rises, as it explores the layers of existence that wrought such change across the landscape. Seeking to test Cliff McLucas’ deep mapping methodology of ten conditions about deep maps, A Deep Mapping is ‘…an experiment in the superpositioning of gathered and invited material interleaved with a stratigraphy of text – as a kind of writing over writing over writing where points once separated in time are made adjacent. The ten elements for a Deep Map are guides for peripatetic travelling through stony terrains shaped by curatorial fine-tuning and further informed by instructions from collaborators, when such advice exists. Arrangements of collected, invited and offered fragments of impressions gathered across these landscapes are ordered and layered onto conceptual ground – the mat to be folded up and carried about as necessary.’ii At each installation in the gallery tour the resulting works, gathered and at times offered by fellow travellers, are repositioned to suit the confines of gallery space resulting in material superimpositions that curate and re-write histories each time. A Deep Mapping also juxtaposes the stone country of another place, the high country of the Flinders Ranges, resulting in an abstract yet material tuning of the stone topology of these dissimilar territories. Re-enacting Stonescapes is a textual examination of the mapping methodology and accompanying traversing field practice written of the historical record, reframed through three elemental stonescapes which bring a consistent thread to the work: hill topography, aboriginal working ground and the gardened landscape. The proposed installation transports the volcanic Stony Rises mapping to Interstices and laid out on an available floor, with the intent to commence a corresponding stone country mapping for the Launceston region. The intent is to seek out hill, garden and working ground and invite a range of collaborators into the open-ended project: an Under Construction work for the Symposium. A Deep Mapping for the sedimentary and dolerite stone country of northern Tasmania will be generated over time; its genesis arising in the Interstices community. ihttp://metamedia.stanford.edu/~mshanks/projects/deep-mapping.html, accessed 26 April, 2008 iiByrne, L, Edquist, H and Vaughan, eds, Designing Place An Archaeology of the Western District, Melbourne Books , Melbourne, 2010 Bio// Dr Gini Lee is a landscape architect and interior designer and is the Elisabeth Murdoch Chair of Landscape Architecture at the University of Melbourne. Prior to this she was the Professor of Landscape Architecture at Queensland University of Technology (2008-2011) and Head of School at the University of South Australia (1999- 2004) as a researcher and lecturer in cultural and critical landscape architecture studies and spatial interior design. Her PhD entitled The Intention to Notice: the collection, the tour and ordinary landscapes, investigated ways in which designed landscapes are incorporated into the cultural understandings of individuals and communities. Focusing on the arid environments of Australia, her multidisciplinary research into the water landscapes of remote territories contributes to the scientific and cultural and indigenous understanding and management strategies for fragile landscapes. She is a registered landscape architect, executive editor of the IDEA Journal, a councillor of the Queensland Heritage Council and Chair of art + place for Arts Queensland. Re-enacting Stonescapes: Territories Under Construction Brought to Presence Prof. Gini Lee Abstract// The proposed presentation reflects on iconic or significant houses that in some way or another have been transformed into a genre of image-object that ‘architecturalise historiography’. Of particular concern are twentieth century houses that have been preserved or embalmed in their eternal state of newness because of their importance to the historiography of modernism: a history intimately bound up with elevating the domestic and the private to the realm of architectural significance. The paper will tease out often made claims about the potency of shared memories that reside in museum-houses, and the role they play as document-objects of history. This is also an account of how interpretation techniques deployed in museum- houses – that seek to show and tell us stories of historical and architectural significance – borrow from the genre of drama and performance to create environments that are, inevitably, part ‘real’ and part ‘fabrication’. The paper will focus on one close study of one particular house that is part of a longer-term project investigating the modern museum-house. The Manning Clark Foundation has been the custodian of Manning Clark’s house since 2000. The house, designed by Robin Boyd in 1952 and located in suburban Canberra is now valued for its architectural significance alongside its biographical attachment to one of Australia’s most well known and most controversial historians. The account documents the author’s unfolding experience over the duration of a three day stay to understand how museum-houses blur the boundaries of embodied personal and collective memory to, sometimes, uncanny effect. And how, in this particular scenario, the house as dwelling and place of work became intimately entwined in the process of producing history and the interiority of the psychic of Clark the historian. Appropriate (albeit if self-indulgently) to the unraveling of the notions of house as public history and home as private contemplation, the mode of research and documentation here has been concerned with charting my own intimate experience of such houses over the course of an extended visit – in words and photographs. The presentation will therefore experiment with a somewhat episodic and unorthodox narrative approaches that allow for the voicing “Deranging Oneself in Someone Else’s House” Assoc. Prof. Hannah Lewi of the narrator alongside the more traditionally disengaged academic author. There are some awkward bumps of personal experience and revelation that stray across academic territories of biography, history and architectural documentation, in order to – quoting the historian John Docker – ‘derange oneself’ and ‘cultivate methods as a kind of madness’. Bio// Dr. Hannah Lewi is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne. Her research interests span heritage theory; new media technique in the representation of place and Australian architectural history. She is the co-editor and co- author of the book Community: Building Modern Australia, UNSW Press, 2010, and is the current chair of Docomomo Australia. 17. 18. Abstract// Australia was booming in the 1950’s. The television and the car gave the Australian populace new found freedom and opened their minds to ideas and influences from overseas like never before. In many respects, however, this inundation by other cultures swamped the fledgling Australian Identity and without a solid cultural base many of the ideas from abroad appeared in Australia as undigested lumps of mimicry and duplication. Within the realm of Architecture Robin Boyd, in his book “The Australia Ugliness”1 described this phenomenon as Featurism which he believed stems from the desire, either consciously or subconsciously, to display something but without the knowledge of how best to display it. The object becomes a self justifying showpiece, a feature for the sake of featuring. This is then compounded by the desire, especially in the suburban home, to display an eclectic mix of accentuated, selected, separate features, creating a fractured veneer of features that subordinates the essential whole. It would appear that this idea of ignorant exhibitionism does not reappear in architectural literature until Charles Jencks explores the idea of the iconic icon in his book “The iconic building: The power of enigma”2. Jencks tracks the development of this particular strand of controversial post modern architecture and presents a compelling argument for the iconic building as the natural product of the consumer based, media driven, international society that is prevalent today. Through his writing Jencks tracks the development of this typology from its beginnings as structures such as the colossus of Rhodes then through the monumental architecture of pre-industrial history. The Iconic building experiences drastic transformations firstly by the technological upheaval of the industrialisation of civilisation then again by the creation of the capitalist consumer society. The development of the architectural corporate image and the branding of architectural practices all become part of the iconic icon. This essay will look to expand on Jencks’ analysis, one that is very much concerned with the visual, to include a deeper reading of both the social and the spatial context within which these buildings crystallise. This analysis will be aided by the writings of Robin Boyd, a renowned Australian architect, author, critic, and public educator who’s theories on Featurism offer critical insight into the social environment that preceded the rise of Jencks’ Iconic architecture and Anthony Vidler the Dean and Professor of the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union in New York, who’s writings on spatial violence3 serve to reveal some of the innate tensions between the Iconic building and its immediate context, largely unexplored in Jencks’ writing. 1. Boyd, Robin. 1960. The Australian Ugliness F.W. Cheshire Pty, Australia 2. Jencks, Charles. 2005. The Iconic Building: The power of Enigma. Frances Lincoln Ltd, UK 3. Vidler, Anthony. 1993. Spatial Violence Assemblage No. 20. 84-85 Bio// Understanding the Iconic Icon James Lewis Abstract// Everything new simultaneously contains a regression, since it evokes reactions from long unused layers [of memory]. A tectonically new art will awaken suppressed memories of earlier tectonic tendencies: Sumerian, Greek- archaic, Byzantine art will be moved closer thanks to the present...History is formed from the present and the selection of things past is made in accordance with their contemporary relevance.i i Einstein, Carl. 1926. Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts. 1931 Edition. Berlin: Propyläen-Verlag. My own translation, p.210 Adorno suggested that the German word museal connotes ‘objects to which the observer no longer has a vital relationship and which are in the process of dying’. Museums are understood as places where past and present are portrayed as distinct and separate entities in an attempt to factually represent a singular historic reality. In contradistinction, Carl Einstein acknowledges that the relation between the past and the present is one of imbrication. Museums and exhibitions are understood as environments that have the capacity to construct meaning from contemporary perspectives through their curatorial choices. The spatial experience of the exhibition environment - its architecture, spatio-temporal organization, materials and techniques of display - mediates historic, aesthetic and cultural values to audiences by presenting art objects in particular ways to demonstrate evolving relations and construct changing narratives. In that sense, a museum or exhibition is more about the various methods it utilizes and the experiences it stages than about the art objects it contains - it is essentially ‘alive’. Donald Preziosi identifies two fundamental ways of staging history in museum and exhibition contexts, each deploying different techniques of shaping the space and time of memory and corresponding to distinct methods of knowledge production and mediation: The first is the psycho-analytical model based on an interpretative approach that construes art objects as visible indicators or symptoms, and that permits an open system of infinite relations; the second is the scientific model Techniques of Display: On Constructing and Mediating Cultural and Aesthetic Values in Exhibition Environments Sandra Karina Löschke with a causalistic-deterministic approach similar to an evolutionary progression, where there is a prototype or ‘Vorbild’ and a series derivatives and whereby the last element in the sequence is the most derivate and directly results from the influence of the ‘Vorbild’ in relation to form, style etc.. Against this context, the paper investigates three exhibition spaces with distinct display strategies: Alexander Dorner’s ‘atmosphere rooms’ at the Provinzialmuseum Hannover, and two exhibition rooms commissioned by Dorner: El Lissitzky’s ‘Abstract Cabinet’ (1927), and Moholy-Nagy’s ‘Room of the Present’ (1930). Both rooms had been originally constructed as part of temporary, international exhibitions - the Internationale Kunstausstellung Dresden 1926 and the Deutsche Werkbund exhibition in Paris 1930, but they were not mere reconstructions of the previous spaces and represented further developments of the original concepts that bear witness to Dorner’s influence, and point to synergies as well as differences in their respective curatorial approaches and techniques. Bio// Sandra Karina Löschke is an architect and academic. She has studied at the Bartlett School of Architecture/University College London and the Architectural Association London where she was awarded the AA Bursary. A Doctoral Candidate at the University of New South Wales, her research focuses on aspects of materiality and mediality and in modern German museum and exhibition architecture. Her architectural work includes projects for Foster and Partners/London, where she has been responsible for technologically innovative façade designs (Tower Place) and interior/ workplace designs (Electronic Arts). Prior to Fosters, she has worked on museum and cultural buildings in England and Germany for Avery Associates/ London (British Film Institute) and Stephan Braunfels/ Munich (Pinakothek der Moderne). Her own architectural work has been exhibited at the 11th Venice Architecture Biennale and in galleries in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Singapore, Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur. 19. 20. Abstract// I. Kleist’s ‘Earthquake in Chile’ as an architecture of collapse The moment of recognition for this research was reading the late eighteenth century writer Heinrich von Kleist’s (1777 – 1811) observation that an arch is only held in place because the stones that construct it want to collapse. This image-object by Kleist engenders the unsaid of architecture: that an arch as something technical, devised and engineered is collapse held in temporal abeyance - consequently his remark is provocative and transgressive. Kleist’s seemingly empirical reflection holds in it the seeds of its own philosophical, metaphorical and material destruction. Kleist’s concept of the immanently collapsing arch appears at a significant historical moment at the turn of the eighteenth century. When Kleist read Kant’s critical writing his understanding of the world collapsed. Kleist’s tormented transition between empirical and critical thinking became the foundation of his writing. This paper considers the construction of architectural and temporal space as destruction in Kleist’s story Earthquake in Chile (Das Erdbeben in Chile) 1807. This early story was based on the historical event of the earthquake that devastated Lisbon on All Saints Day, 1st November 1755. Rather than his later critical work, it is likely Kant’s earlier writing on natural phenomena led to the themes explored by Kleist. Soon after the Lisbon earthquake Kant wrote three essays applying practical scrutiny to observations by survivors, revealing his evolution from natural to critical philosopher as he worked to reconstruct and advance scientific knowledge. In Earthquake in Chile collapse occurs as earthquake levels a capital city and as social collapse caused by superstition and disorder. The earthquake in Lisbon displaced the earth’s crust and European thought, creating a crack into which the certainties of the Enlightenment disintegrated. Most of the devastation in an earthquake lies in the connection between people and architecture, in Earthquake in Chile Kleist gives literary form to the terrain of collapse in space and time. The Space of Collapse: A Two Part Terrain Jane Madsen II. Portland as a time-image of collapse Portland as a site made by architecture’s uses applies the image-object of collapse to space, time and material. Portland is identified as a landscape that demonstrates Kleist’s vision of collapse. Recurrent costal landslips exposed the strata of Portland’s Jurassic limestone showing its potential as architectural material. Four centuries of quarrying have left Portland scarred by dislocation and absence. Portland’s landscape has been created by the removal of its stone, it is a built environment made from the voids left by quarrying. I have been exploring the island of Portland as an unstable space of collapse. The time-based medium of moving image is used to survey Portland as place and material inscribed by time. In 16mm film installations showing technical and material images of stone being quarried, the spaces left behind in the quarries, and cracks in the cliff faces as sites of immanent or potential collapse and will be projected continuously as approximately two to five minute loops on plate projectors. The duration and mechanics of the film running through the projectors makes the material of the film scratch, deteriorate, and break down: collapse continues to occur in time and in the presence of the viewer. Bio// Jane Madsen is a film maker whose work includes experimental films, installation and documentary. She is researching a practice-based PhD at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. She teaches at the University of the Arts London. Originally from Melbourne, she has lived and worked in London since the early 1990s. She has exhibited widely and written and published on film, art and architecture. Portland No. 3 West Weares 16mm loop 5 mins Portland No. 2 Independent Quarry 16mm loop 5 mins Transnational Public Spheres: Large Screens and Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism Nikos Papastergiadis Abstract// In the past decade the visual form of urban spaces have been transformed by the proliferation of large screens. The use of bright neon signs that announced the commercial triumphalism in places such as Times Square in New York has now been overtaken by the rapid rollout of large screens in cities all over the world. These large screens have been used to display information, advertise products and telecast major events. Large Screens also provide a new medium for extending the boundaries of architectural and aesthetic forms. As a step towards exploring the role of large screens in the formation of transnational public spheres we initiated a unique creative and intellectual partnership between two organizations, Federation Square in Melbourne and Art Center Nabi in Seoul. This project was designed to address the logistical issues concerning the compatibility between different communication systems, civic policy issues of public display, as well as aesthetic concerns over what would be meaningful and attractive to different audiences. Against this awareness of the technical, curatorial and artistic challenges there was the recognition that urban space is already a media rich environment, and that everyday life is increasingly shaped by new patterns of global mobility and transnational communication. There is already extensive discussion on the formation of transnational cultural spaces. Our aim was to commission artworks that utilized the technical possibilities for establishing a mediated transnational public space. Priority was given to artists because there is now a strong trend in contemporary art practice that engages with issues of global scope, proposes interactive methods of public participation and experiments in critical forms of cross-cultural dialogue. By bringing together these globally oriented art practices with the communicative potential of large screens we expect to witness the emergence of new forms of ‘publicness’ and transnational cultural agency. The focus of this presentation is on recent theories of cosmopolitanism and the forms of globally oriented contemporary art practices. In particular, I will situate our project within the context of recent tendencies within contemporary visual art and argue that the philosophical and aesthetic discourses on cosmopolitanism can provide the vocabulary for a conceptual framework for the new forms of transnational public spheres. Bio// Nikos Papastergiadis is Professor at the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. He studied at the University of Melbourne and University of Cambridge. Prior to returning to the University of Melbourne he was a lecturer at the University of Manchester. Throughout his career, Nikos has provided strategic consultancies for government agencies on issues relating to cultural identity and worked on collaborative projects with artists and theorists of international repute, such as John Berger, Jimmie Durham and Sonya Boyce. His current research focuses on the investigation of the historical transformation of contemporary art and cultural institutions by digital technology. His publications include Modernity as Exile (1993), Dialogues in the Diaspora (1998), The Turbulence of Migration (2000), Metaphor and Tension (2004) Spatial Aesthetics: Art Place and the Everyday (2006) as well as being the author of numerous essays which have been translated into over a dozen languages and appeared in major catalogues such as the Sydney, Liverpool, 21. 22. Abstract// Andrey Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker, relates an expedition of three men into a location in which the promise of wish fulfilment can take place. The context from which the three men travel and the landscape they traverse, the Zone, is littered with the detritus of a post-apocalyptic event. The journey takes them through an uninhabited post- industrial landscape to a location, the Room, in which, their innermost desires may be made real. While the event of this transformation is functionally implied almost to the end of the film, it is a deferred promise of cause and effect in an environment where all other forms of technology are completely useless and in various states of decay, including architecture. While the state of decay in Stalker is the effect of failed attempts to control the unknown presence in the Zone, Tarkovsky’s employment of specific architectural settings is a salutary lesson in the persistence of the material of (an) architecture’s history. In the film every object is subject to the corrosive effect of entropy, in part a demonstration of the Zone’s power but also as evidence of the despair of the world that is now having to contend with this presence. And though the film eerily predates and predicts the events surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, this is not an allegory on the (mis)use of the environment. Instead Stalker presents a persistent argument for the abandonment of all modes of instrumental recovery and of the effectiveness of technical apparatuses as gathering points, doing so by painstakingly showing the dissimulated forms and fragments of the buildings through which the protagonists travel. Tarkovsky creates this world by specifically employing a form of film-making that foregrounds the material, diagetic reality of the narrative world. Within film theory, diagetic and non-diagetic elements constitute components of the narrative that respectively are internal and external to the narrative-world of the film. In Stalker, the characters, location, actions and events are all diagetic elements. Tarkovsky consistently employs shots that scrutinise the diagetic richness of the world the characters inhabit, making the synaesthetic experience of A Memory of Entropy: Architecture in Tarkovsky’s Stalker Dr Sean Pickersgill the architecture and landscape one of over-determined materiality, relentlessly and unwaveringly present. His opposition to Eisenstein’s theory of montage presents itself as a ‘time pressure’ that occurs within the duration of the take. As the camera pans, usually slowly, over a scene, the inherent visual and acoustic rhythms of the image present a narratival pace that is, inherently, spatial . It is not the pace of the editing itself that determines the (un) reality of the narrative world, but its very lack of a tempo. Inevitably this means that we look closer at the interaction between the characters, their actions and the environment. In Stalker every fragment of the decayed world has time to appear as an argument for the enduring events of entropy . This paper will closely read a number of scenes from Stalker and show that the superfluity of visual elements present a narrative world in which, paradoxically, their insistent material presence shows how close they are to decay from unseen forces. It will be shown that the technical aspects of Tarkovsky’s directorial approach afford us time to see the temporality and mortality of the film’s architectural environment. Ultimately it will be argued that the final mesmerising scene gathers together and validates the fundamental surreality of Stalker. Biographical Note Bio// Dr Sean Pickersgill is a Senior Lecturer in Art, Architec- ture and Design at the University of South Australia. He conducts research into the relationship between archi- tecture, digital culture and critical philosophy. Sean’s work has been published nationally and internationally in peer reviewed journals and conferences. He is currently, with Jennifer Harvey, the Journal Manager and Editor of Ultima Thule: Journal of Architectural Imagination,(www. ultimathule.com.au ). Abstract// In 1928 the Austrian Architect and Engineer Franz Löwitsch (1894-1946) published the article “Sensation of Space and Modern Architecture” in Imago, the psychoanalytical journal edited by Sigmund Freud. Although mostly forgotten today, Löwitsch was a prolific writer, critic, and urban planner as well as a designer of stage costumes and sets. His contribution to architectural theory of the 1920s consists of numerous texts. Based on Richard Semon’s theories of Mneme, which Löwitsch connected to psychoanalytical theories, the prevalence of dissimilar sensations of space throughout the stages of the development of western architectural history is presupposed, and Löwitsch offers an explanation of how their symbolic meanings reflected psychological conditions of a particular time and culture. Semon’s notion of Mneme encompassed more than the conventional understanding of memory as a collection of remembered events that occurred in the past. Its scope includes habits, instinctive behaviour and other phenomena that Semon observed and which led him towards the hypothesis of Mneme as a form of inherited memory that connects an organism to its predecessors. Based on Semon’s assumptions Löwitsch concluded that, if some engrams (stimuli that the mind receives through the senses) were inherited, there would have to be some that relate to perceived space. By connecting Semon’s theory with psychoanalytical deliberations that equip the inherited memory of spatial sensations with pleasurable or unpleasurable emotions, Löwitsch furthermore argued that spatial sensations produce spatial concepts, and that the dominating shapes and forms of the architecture of a time therefore reflect the dominance of a particular inherited sensation of space. The unifying psychological make-up of a populace thus leads to spatial concepts that form an architecture which reflects these concepts and contain symbols that possess ‘satisfying powers’ valued by the majority of people of that particular time and place. The probable reasons for the publishers of Imago to have accepted Löwitsch’s paper for publication can be found in Freud’s 1922 essay “Some Remarks on the Unconscious” in which psychoanalytic theory is not only put forward as a discipline that focuses on the investigation of the unconscious as a therapeutic method, but also as a method through which aspects of culture can be researched. But Löwitsch’s theory speaks of more than a mere justification for the usefulness of psychoanalytic theory as a methodology for the humanities. Löwitsch contrasts his findings meticulously with Oswald Spengler’s controversially critiqued book The Decline of the West, Karl Scheffler’s The Spirit of the Gothic and Eckhart von Sydow’s Primitive Art and Psychoanalysis. The discussion of these contemporaneous writings that essentially sought to find the driving forces for the development of styles helps in formulating Löwitsch’s final hypothesis. Here, he proposes the emergence of an ‘energetic space’ in architecture, which is the prevalent sensation of space that he predicts to emerge in the near future. His ultimate aim, however, was not to enter academic discourse but rather to provide a scientifically based explanation with which the impact of space on the inhabitant can be measured, explained and utilized in architectural practice. Bio// Dr. Tanja Poppelreuter is Lecturer in Architectural History at the University of Ulster in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Previously she was at the Department of Art History at the University of Auckland in New Zealand where she conducted courses on 20th century art, theory, and methodology. Her research interests are situated in 20th-century art and architectural theory with the focus on the impact of politics, sociology and medicine and on the question of how utopian ideas developed and took shape in modernism. Recent papers have analysed Walter Gropius’ appropriation of the sociology of Franz Müller-Lyer, Theo van Doesburg’s defence of ‘superfluous’ space, and the concepts of a ‘new man’ in German architecture of the 1920s. Mneme of Space Dr. Tanja Poppelreuter 23. 24. Abstract// Outmost care must be taken to negotiate the terrain between memory, culture and sustainability. Whilst recalling the past, the eyes of the viewer should also survey the present and the future. Ring Trees located along the Murray River in Wadi Wadi Country provide an opportunity to explore the nexus between memory, culture and sustainability. Ring Trees are culturally significant trees that have had their branches fused together to form ring-shaped openings. These trees occur at carefully designated locations, marking culturally significant sites and boundaries. Ring Trees provide a tangible expression of a cultural practice that no longer continues. Yet the trees continue to play an important role in Wadi Wadi culture. Ring Trees mark locations where ceremonies are performed and provide the opportunity for Elders to pass on cultural knowledge. However, these highly significant trees have not been recognized under state based cultural heritage management and are not listed on the heritage register. Somehow these trees fail to meet the criteria to be regarded as the ‘right’ kind of image of the past (and present). The continued importance of the Ring Trees to the Wadi Wadi community and their need for future protection has failed to be recognized. Who are the gatekeepers to these image-objects? Why do some image-objects fail to be regarded as valuable? What happens when our memory is selective and non-inclusive of that which falls outside the orthodoxy? This presentation will explore these questions taking the form of a photographic installation. The photographs will be presented at a small scale presenting an intimate interstice between the image and the viewer. The installation will be accompanied by a short wall text of several hundred words. The photographs will include not only Ring Trees but also the rich landscape surrounding these trees that form their broader curtilage. Aspects of this broader curtilage include scarred trees, bush foods and clay balls. A Ring Tree beyond the Forest will also be shown (Figure Intertwined: Ring Trees in Wadi Wadi Country Jacqueline Power 1), highlighting the impact of colonization. Like a number of the Ring Trees it is no longer living, and many of its branches have been removed. Although no longer fully intact, the Tree remains significant in its vulnerable state and metaphorically speaks volumes about memory, culture and sustainability. Ring Trees are little known beyond the Wadi Wadi community and few representations of them have been published. The installation of the photographs will provide the opportunity to show a number of these trees as well as create a space for exchange and intertwining of ideas. Bio// Jacqueline is a lecturer in interior design in the School of Architecture and Design at the University of Tasmania. She is currently completing her PhD. Her PhD research is in- vestigating Australian Indigenous interiors. Figure 1 Koraleigh Ring Tree, 2010. The Ruins are Wonderful so Why Worry? Ruins as Historical ‘Image- Objects’ for Aalto and Utzon John Roberts Abstract// Architects Alvar Aalto and Jørn Utzon embraced the past as a creative resource, referring to experiences and images of ruins in various works of architecture. Two key ‘image- objects’ provide vehicles for us to think about architects’ transpositions of history, and history’s role in architectural aesthetics: the courtyard of Aalto’s Muuratsalo house; and the platforms of Utzon’s Sydney Opera House. These architects’ imaging of the past is evident in Aalto’s travel sketches of Classical and vernacular fragments, and in Utzon’s images of Pre-Columbian ruins. Both saw the aesthetic values of site, landscape and poetic memory in this historical material. This paper discusses how such ruin-related ‘image-objects’ are used to form strategies to deal with (read, comprehend, exploit) history – firstly, as drawn ‘image-objects’ used by architects to imagine and make architecture; and secondly as built ‘image-objects’, cited by historians to make the narratives of architectural history. This investigation is informed by writing on the methodology of history by Greg Dening and Hayden White: their approaches to writing history offer frameworks for looking into the image-objects of Aalto and Utzon, and their reception by architectural historians such as Demetri Porphyrios, William J. R. Curtis and Richard Weston. The Aalto and Utzon drawings and images are of architectural fragments, in landscape settings: buildings, ruined through human and natural agency, can turn into landscape-related elements. Aalto’s courtyard and Utzon’s platforms inhabit an in-between zone where discourses of landscape (‘nature’) and architecture (‘culture’) interlace, producing meaning out of drawn, built and written materials. Understood as tropes (metaphor, metonym, synecdoche, irony) of ‘the past’ élided into architecture, ruins can suggest either melancholy and endings, or latency and beginnings. Aalto maintained that his buildings had to be experienced to be understood; John Dixon Hunt suggests that landscape needs an ‘addressee’ to feel and sense its qualities. Curtis, remembering Utzon in 2009, wrote in first-person, to suit his rhetorical needs; and Dening’s first-person historical ‘performances’ tell stories from both sides of real and metaphorical ‘beaches’. Here, where the work of architecture is ‘the beach’, first-person narrative negotiates both experience of built works (in ‘the present’), and words and images about ruins (from ‘the past’). This ‘fragile’ kind of story-telling presents evidence in a way that allows doubt and ambiguity about ‘historical truth’ to permeate its performances. Aalto and Utzon, in exploiting ruins as tropes for the past, may be said to ‘perform’ both landscape and history in their architecture. This paper tells a story of architectural images, objects, image-objects and experiences, from the author’s and other perspectives. Its narratives and reflections concern not only architecture and architects, but also history and landscape, whose nuanced presence in works of architecture is interesting, subversive, and always too rare. Bio// John Roberts is a lecturer in the School of Architecture and Built Environment at the University of Newcastle, NSW. He teaches Architectural Design, Advanced Drawing, and Site Studies. He also supervises M.Arch research students. John’s research interests are in the historical, theoretical and technical spaces between architecture and landscape. His 2009 MPhil thesis was a study of landscape aesthetics in the architecture of Alvar Aalto. Recent publications have considered the Chinese garden; prospect and refuge in Australian architecture; and courtyards and high-rise in the work of Aalto and Jørn Utzon. 25. 26. Abstract// Soon after the destruction of the World Trade Centre towers in September 2001, architects and architectural commentators began to comment on the loss of these buildings. While many focussed on the questions that the circumstances of their destruction posed for the future of the skyscraper as an architectural form, what should be rebuilt, or how this event might be commemorated, others took the opportunity to reflect upon the buildings themselves. In many cases these reflections were in distinct contrast to the reception of the complex during its lifetime. Many of these comments nostalgically involved a misremembering, or a ‘discursive reimagining’, of the buildings with fond declarations for the lost towers. Prior to their destruction, these buildings had been widely criticised for their form, scale and aesthetics – likened by Mumford to “filing cabinets” and by another as “a parody of the modern skyscraper”, even prompting environmentalists to lament the trauma the towers caused for migrating birds. Paradoxically, the reversal of critical and public opinion towards the World Trade Center buildings following their destruction inverted the response to the earlier destruction (under very different circumstances) of another set of buildings by the same architect – the Pruitt-Igoe Housing Estate. These buildings that were widely celebrated upon their completion, were demolished in disgrace only sixteen years later. Yet it was five years after their demolition that these buildings would undergo their most famous critical transformation, with the assertion by Charles Jencks in his 1977 book The New Paradigm in Architecture that “Modern Architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 3.32pm (or thereabouts) when the infamous Pruitt- Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grace by dynamite.” In 1991, recognizing these stages in the historical reception of the buildings, Katherine Bristol argued that the accounts of the problems of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe Housing Estate in the popular media as well as by architectural historians transformed historical events into a myth that transferred blame from complex social circumstances to an architectural issue. Bristol argued that this constituted Destruction and the Dialectics of Memory: Reimagining and Re-Remembering the Works of Minoru Yamasaki Dr. Nicole Sully what she termed ‘the Pruitt-Igoe myth’. While destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe complex was responsible for discrediting Yamasaki, the destruction of the World Trade Center Towers, arguably represented the redemption of his architectural reputation. This paper will consider the misremembering and discursive reimagining of two Twentieth Century building complexes designed by Minoru Yamasaki, each destroyed in circumstances more iconic than their architectural forms. It will argue that despite the differing circumstances, the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe Housing Estate and the destruction of World Trade Centre buildings both represent a dialectical median in critical and public opinion of the architecture of each complex. Examining the critical reception of each project, this paper will discuss the role destruction, and its representation, has played in the transformation of these projects, with particular emphasis on the reimagining and re-remembering of these buildings. Bio// Dr. Nicole Sully is a lecturer in the School of Architecture at the University of Queensland and a member of the ATCH Research Centre. Nicole’s research focuses on the interdisciplinary relationship of architecture and memory, the pathologies of place and the ethics of heritage. In 2005 she was awarded a doctorate from the University of Western Australia for her thesis titled: Architecture and Memory: A Philosophical and Historical Inquiry. Recent publications include: Leach, Moulis & Sully (eds) Shifting Views: Selected Essays on the Architectural History of Australia and New Zealand (UQP, 2008); Sully, ‘Travelling within Memory: Vicarious Travel and Imagined Voyages’ in Anderson (ed) Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration, Convergence (Miegunyah Press, 2009); and Sully, ‘Memorials Incognito: The Candle, the Drain and the Cabbage Patch for Diana, Princess of Wales’, ARQ: Architectural Research Quarterly, (June 2010). Abstract// Jean-Luc Godard contends (via Virginia Woolf) that cinema exists and is thinkable only in the intervening sequences between shots and acts—in the entr’acte, the interval. Cinema is therefore an art of the interstice. Its proper sense does not emerges in a scene as such, but in its transition to other scenes or shots, whether through long sequences, cuts, superimpositions or transpositions—that is, in the passage and passing away of the image. In-be-twixt, to be two, to be radical ambiguity: the interstice stands as a zone of indiscernibility that is simultaneously present and absent, that separates and affords access between regions in the same dimension and that yields passage through into other dimensions and worlds. This deterritorialising capacity of the interstice produces the radically uncanny. The interstice is the foundational architectural condition, since architecture is not possible aside from the interval, aside from difference. In the interstice, and in the interim, architecture encounters the strange and irremediable catastrophy of its own deconstitution. The cinema of Andrej Tarkovski provides an instructive parallel. Mirror (1975) achieves such an intensity of overlay in the image that the coordinates and logics of space and time begin to waver, become undecidable, fold and yield into worlds within worlds. These instances convey what it might be like to experience that moment betwixt remembrance and forgetfulness when a memory withdraws into oblivion at the same time as it presents itself with the highest certainty of delineation. Memory is poised on forgetfulness and remembrance is in fact the iterative, rhythmic play between appearance and disappearance, recollection and oblivion, presence and absence. This is why the proper field and operation of memory is not ascribable to the contrast between light and dark, but to the gloaming—an ambiguous and precarious, interstitial condition, or shade of darkness, wherein delineations fluctuate and become indeterminate. The experience might be like awaking from a dream that, at the same time as it is present to us as sharp recollection, fades and withdraws into uncertainty and erasure. We seem to know it with certainty—we have a definitive sense of it, of its shadows and contours, of its narrative—but at the same time as we are unable to articulate it in any coherent way. Each time we try the narrative is dismantled into incoherence. Or the experience might parallel one’s presence and attentiveness to the systematic withdrawal of another in death; of one who is palpably present and with us while simultaneously fading and absenting themselves. Such moments require delicacy and care. They call for a kind of disengaged solicitude that watches, wakes and waits; that cultivates a countenance of being-with and being- for whatever eventuates. This is the ethical power of the interstice that architecture remains to confront. Bio// Dr. Michael Tawa is an architect and Professor of Architec- ture at the University of Sydney. Between 2006 and 2009 he was Professor of Architectural Design at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. He has practiced and taught architecture in Alice Springs, Adelaide and Sydney. Recent publications include Agencies of the Frame. Tectonic Strat- egies in Cinema and Architecture (2010) and Theorising the Project: a Thematic Approach to Architectural Design (2011), both with Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Cur- rent projects include the web-based Design Lexicon and research on the concepts of emergence and translation in architectural design. He is currently editing a forthcoming issue of Architectural Theory Review on Emergence and Architecture. To be two. Interstice and Deconstitution in Cinema and Architecture. Prof. Michael Tawa 27. 28. Abstract// In January 2011 a swollen Brisbane River broke its banks flooding riverside houses and buildings. The river’s water spread and rose up through storm water drains inundating some 20 000 houses in low-lying land. As the water receded those residents affected by the floods returned to their homes to assess the damage. While some returned to find their personal belongings and homes intact, others were devastated by the overwhelming damage. Over the next few weeks the landscape of Brisbane was altered not merely by the mud and debris left by the torrent of water, but by the piles of domestic contents occupying Brisbane streets. Beds, toys, cabinets, plasterboard, tiles and household furniture lined curbsides waiting for collection. Later they would accumulate in public parks and sports centres to await disposal, temporarily creating an unsettling landscape of discarded domestic interiors. Thousands of volunteers flocked to help those affected by the floods to purge the damage left by the water – removing wall and floor linings, discarding furniture and spoilt belongings. In a collective effort between volunteers, government organisations from all levels and those directly affected, the aftermath of the floods were cleaned away in a remarkably short amount of time. For many of the post- flood restored homes and buildings entire interiors have been replaced, eradicating any trace of the significant event that disturbed them only months earlier. Items that would have survived the floods were discarded and with them the patina that marked an important event in history. The patina is beyond technological reproducibility and as Walter Benjamin writes, this being the whole premise of genuineness1. It is the patina that is most valuable in its ability to narrate the history of an object and it is the role of the French Polisher to maintain the patina. The French Polisher works to maintain, but not repair the surface of the artefact, preserving the appearance of significant damage and markings inflicted on the piece over time. If the patina is a record of an important happening, how do we recount history in the absence of these artefacts? How does the patina reflect a collective and individual memory of a significant event? This research investigates the dying trade of the French Polisher through a series of conversations with furniture restorers and a visual study of flood damaged objects. Exploring the processes of maintaining the patina and its relationship to memory. 1. From Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Bio// Kirsty Volz is a Research Masters of Arts student and a graduate from the Masters of Architecture program at the Queensland University of Technology. Kirsty currently works as a research assistant at the University of Queensland while also tutoring design, theory and technology subjects at QUT in both architecture and interior design. The French Polisher and the Unsentimental Interior Kirsty Volz Abstract// I propose in this paper a consideration of writing as a making-of-space, or a process of building, so as to slowly awkwardly invent another living; this means, the writing of another writing. And, the inviting of writings of different (other) kinds into the public realm (of publishing/reading), into what comes to be the history of texts within a particular field of practice. Writing, as a field of practice in its own right, is a mutable substance, expressive of existence as plastic/ity, as the “… very material of presence (… capable of receiving any kind of form, and [with] the power to give form to itself”.(1) What is curious in/about writing is what it is conditioning (how its tone or orderly procession affects) of what-it-is-to-know (and possible to be): what it inscribes into the thinking of ‘the problem’ or ‘the time’ or ‘the subject’ – what it inherits and what it is as inheritance; for example, how one comes to speak about something – a thing, an event, an issue, a topic, etc. Memory is fragile; memory exaggerates. What is not-written about, what is not-witnessed (when do I not do my best to bear witness to …)? What is not-broached, what is excised, assumed or cancelled from our possible creative resources in the name of function, program, plan, value, or ‘the real’. Writing is mythical, magical, it is art, and yet it is used/wielded as if soulless (as if inanimate, as if dumb instrument), as if the enemy of art (as if art is its enemy), as if a system (to be feared; and, fear it can incite). Writing is human, it is the human-one and the human/animal-other who/that tells or pours a history into the collective fact of living and dying, into the collective fact of impermanence, into the collective fact of terrified and alarmed authority (of disaster, sadness, mourning, and administration). The writing of another writing does not look different on the page, instead, it’s an internal act, it’s in the way it tells what it tells, the way it forms, the way it composes words and sentences, the way it swirls and swishes ideas, the way it impossibly remembers, the way it connects, relates, imposes, puzzles. Writing that (just) leaves a small bare image may be ample, plenteous. Hélène Cixous says of the writing of Marguerite Duras: “What … Duras creates is what I’d call the art of poverty. The further you get into her work the more monuments and wealth she strips away. … meaning that she whittles away more and more decoration, furnishings, ornaments until it’s so impoverished that something remains lodged there and then gathers up, gathers together everything that refuses to die. It is as if our every desire were being reinvested in something very small indeed that at the same time becomes as big as love. And I don’t mean the universe – I mean love. And this love is nothing at all that is everything.”(2) It was Duras’s writing that I first glimpsed as ‘writing’ – where the bareness of writing was the very space within which one could be oneself without loss or nostalgia. That in the bones and cells of that writing, I/one was not expelled (or on the other hand immersed), but was, rather, intensified in my/one’s awareness that nothing was demanded of me, there was no past, no development, no climax, no future, one was reading the writing. It was writing for reading, for fascination, and for the acceptance of death. Through Cixous’s philosophy/theory/poetic of writing, and with reference to the written life-space of Duras’s narratives, I will discuss writing without-method, without memorializing – yet wandering (presently) like various bodies and voices (who are memory), in various tenses and times; an indeterminate writing/making. 1. Catherine Malabou, Plasticity At The Dusk Of Writing, trans. Carolyn Shread, Columbia University Press, New York, 2010, p. 81 2. Hélène Cixous, White Ink, interviews on sex, text and politics, ed. Susan Sellers, Columbia University Press, New York, 2009, p. 158 Bio// Dr Linda Marie Walker teaches in the School of Art Archi- tecture Design at the University of South Australia. She also practices as an artist/curator, and writes in the areas of the arts, academia and literature. She likes to live near the sea, and has a dog called Lily. Her writing aspires to be a garden of some peaceful sort. Untitled Procedures (Working Title) Dr Linda Marie Walker 29. 30. Abstract// The New Zealand Villa is a significant cultural icon of New Zealand. Its architecture encapsulates a rich story of New Zealand’s’ colonial heritage, but preserving this legacy requires respect and understanding in the face of societal change. Currently, villas are being ‘modernised’ by owners pressured to maintain the public respectability of the traditional villa, while simultaneously demanding that their private realms reflect contemporary concerns. Differing expectations and conflict in architectural values results in an irretrievable loss of the villas cultural integrity; a loss that we might well look back one day and describe as catastrophic. Catastrophe, as a process of rapid change stimulates crisis through systematic destruction. The result of change associated with static cultural values can be predicted and controlled prior to loss or regret. As the villa becomes permanently entrenched in New Zealand’s cultural heritage, an ‘authentic’ depiction of the architecture becomes subjected to facadism. Heritage conservation becomes an element of catastrophic behaviour. The method of facadism is presented to the nation as a positive approach to architectural change, however it is being applied without people understanding the long term implications. This paper questions the nature of facadism and its resultant impact on architectural heritage in New Zealand. A methodology for rendering an authentic depiction of the villa will be supported by the Catastrophe Theory, originated by Rene Thom in the 1960s. It will be combined with the theory and matrix of authenticity presented by contemporary academics Joseph Gilmore and James Pine. This will further be strengthened by the Minkowski space and time model, originated by Herman Minkowski and reinterpreted by Gilmore and Pine in their depiction of authenticity. An architectural model will be developed from this theory and based on the change associated with contemporary society and the consequences associated with architectural alteration. We use this model to predict the catastrophe before it occurs, using qualitative, not quantitative, attributes of the relationship between time and change relative to time. The desire to achieve an ‘authentic’ image of an idealised streetscape results in a Potemkin City: replicated façades, without sufficient appreciation of New Zealand’s architectural history. District plans and heritage rules promote the ‘authenticity’ of facadism; however the term authentic is presented to the populace under a false pretence; resulting in spurious imitation forced upon Villas. Architecture of the past will never regain its original state. A reproduction of a past typology disrespects the aging architecture and is not suitable for contemporary living. An understanding of catastrophic behaviour, combined with the theory of authenticity will help define how we can enrich an architectural integrity to the villa in its present state. Bio// Hayley Wright is a Masters of Architecture (Prof) student currently completing her final year at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Her skills and research are based in 5 years of architectural study including both a university exchange to Rhode Island School of Design and architectural work experience in London. Hayley’s research interests are linked to national identity and the issues that restrict architecture from aging with society. She is currently in the process of completing her Master’s thesis ‘Catastrophic Facadism’. Her thesis addresses the position of the New Zealand Villa in contemporary society. It questions the nature of facadism as a method of achiev- ing an authentic depiction of the past. Catastrophic Facadism: The Authentic Imitation// Hayley Wright Notes//