August 23, 2003
architectural regionalism
There is a bit of a debate in Adelaide about South Australia developing a regional architecture. It is quite a different concern to the one of a global city, which is more concerned with how to inhabit the megapolis rather than just lodging there?.
A regional architecture, says Francesco Bonato, State President of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects, is one that is appropriate and sustainable for our climate, time and place.
Regionalism is tied to our identity as it involves a vision of a sustainable future. I am sympathetic to this given the airconditioned disasters currently being built by the market in the name of fashionable innercity living. Profit rules sustianability hands down. The SA government talks about sustainability but it does little to fostering a regional architecture in terms of encouraging sustainable design.
Such a regional design involves a considered style. Which is what? Here is a suggestion from Ecopolis. They have adopted and modified the 10 principles of Prince Charles.
Basically, regionalism is a call for a break away from the mishmash of neo-Tuscan, neo-Georgian, neo-Federation suburban houses that continue spring up all over the place in new housing estates. The suburban houses themselves are a problem. Expensive to run they require an ever expanding amount of new land, provision of new services and the development of new infrastructure. They imply that Adelaide can keep extending further north and south and say no to consolidation and different ways of living.
Regional architecture involves a rejection of the old nostalgia that says the Edwardian and Victorian bluestone cottages are a genuine and authentic regional architecture. Well, they once may been but not now. They are dark and gloomy, cold in winter and hot in summer. They are an important part of our history, not a model for a new regional architecture. We need to break away from the old industrial culture in modernity.
In the light of my concern about regionalism I am trying to read a book about Georges Bataille's writings on architecture. The book is by Denis Hollier and it is called Against Architecture. It is hard going indeed and has little to do with regionalism. But it is explosive. It is all about blood. and sacrifice. Bataille takes an aggressive stance towards architectural form that takes us past the worn-out humanist appeal to the good will in everyone.
In a text called 'Architecture' (about three dense paragraphs) Bataille sees architecture as a kind of prison warden, given its complicity with authoritarian hierarchies. Bataille is thinking of Church and State (cathedrals and palaces)--but I think of the corporate skyscrapers in the CBD's of our cities. These monumental forms, which are designed to be seen, express a society's being in terms of order, authority and power. Their repressive forms silence us and inspire in us good behaviour.
This is pretty apt. We enter these repressive architectural forms at 7am and escape them at 6pm to nonwork time, and we are on our best behaviour whilst inside them working for others. And some only see a city at work. There is nothing so beautiful as an industrious metropolis humming away like some well functioning machine. And idle city is bad.
One of Bataille's other architextual texts was about Abattors. He sees the slaughterhouse in terms of sacrifice which he connects to the old temples that served for prayers and for slaughter. The old temples represent sacred horror and religious revulsion before the killing of an animal. Today, the slaughterhouse is a deserted unconscious religion since no one ever attends the sacrifice of the animals. They are sites of revulsion, cursed and quarantined because few can bear the ugliness of sacrificial butchery.
Another Bataille text is about the Art Gallery/Museum. Their beauty attracts those who would flee the unredeeming ugliness of the slaughterhouse. We enter the Art Galley to be purified and refreshed.
Hence we have negative repulsion pole of the slaughterhouse and positive attracting pole of the Art Gallery that define a sacred nucleus. They are linked to one another. One pole is dirty the other is clean. One repels the other attracts.
What to make of all this? I enjoy the way he sees the archaic in the modern. Recall the the old Greek myth about Theseus killing the Minotaur in the labyrinth.
This is usually represented as a humanizing exploit in which the hero frees the city from whatever is archaic and monstrous. For Bataille the sacrifice opens up the labyrinth again. So we have the labyrinth tradition, sacredness and sacrifice around the slaughterhouse.
From my perspective Bataille's conception of architectual form is too polarized. The Art Galley is also a site of sacrifice; the avant garde sacrificed itself on its altar as the price to pay for obtaining mastery over the future. It is the fate of the avant garde to be slaughtered so that others have the opportunity to build anew. And the bloody slaughterhouse eventually become a site of cultural heritage. It is retained as heritage or it become a Luna park for those relaxing from working the corporate prison tower.
But I would go further than Bataille. He talks of a particular site of the city of Paris being marked by the sacrifice of the guillotine Yet the very ground upon Adelaide city sits has the bood of the indigenous people. They were sacrificed in the name of terra nullius and rationality to build a liberal civilization upon what was once a seen as sacred country.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at August 23, 2003 04:09 PM | TrackBack