|
November 9, 2003
I'm down at the holiday shack at Victor Harbor this weekend. I'm puzzling about a phrase I came across--"geometries of living" in relation to lines of different kinds in a building on a site.
I'm working on the large garden, the conservatory, and planting drooping sheoaks (Allocasurina Verticallata) in the reserve to create a habitat for the critically endangered Glossy Black Cockatoo.
The Glossy Black Cockatoo was once widespread through South Australia, but now only around 260 birds survive on Kangaroo Island. The Island is just across the water from the holiday shack and the birds occasionally visit the mainland looking for the seed pods of the drooping sheoak. They feed almost exclusively on these seedpods. Most of the sheoaks were cleared by farmers to run their cattle and sheepfarms. They stripped the landscape and left it denuded. No strands of dropping sheoaks, no Glossy Black Cockatoos
Whilst doing these mundane tasks I was very conscious how I'm grappling with the problems of rootedness, continuity and place. The surrounding seaside environment cannot be wished away, nor can the way that we live be arbitrarily changed. Materials and plants must be chosen that can cope with the salt blown by the winds. These conditions need to be taken into account when we build our conservatories, verandas or decks. They are the ecological limits we live within.
That was the problem with modernism. It recognized no limits as it looked at things from above. It held that we work within an infinite field of creative possibilities.
The reality is otherwise. The site is a layered with history. History in the sense of inheriting a regional tradition of building or architecture that expresses the character of this particular place shaped by the forces of nature. This building creates a place--the seaside town with its historical style that owes very little to modernist architecture. This regional architecture can be continually renewed in spite of the fashionable turn to the debased Tuscany look as the assertion of the modern by those who still want to repudiate the past and liberate themselves from the dead weight of traditional styles.
History is in the sense of ecology of the place that requires us to extend the range of architectural vocabularies within which we work. One needed is a simple and funky beachside architecture full of coastal character; an architecture whose geometry of living would throw odd features together that would release movment and figure allowing them to go off on unexpected paths or relate to one another in diverse ways.
This colourful funky beachside architecture would work with an eco-vocabulary that harvests stormwater, sewerage and solar energy whist protecting the sensitive coastal strip with board walks and walking trails. Green architecture should be a requirement-----eg., regenerating the habitat for our Glossy Black Cockatoos----not a sales pitch.
The argument is twofold. The site at which a building is to be constructed is never a tabula rasa, since it has a history that haunts the spot, like a spectre. This spectrality of the site manifests itself in the traces, the relics of a certain past that stays alive on any site. So the architect would acknowledge these traces in a place and integrate them into the architectural whole.
We should dump a utopian modernism that wanted to leave the past behind, construct buildings like signs on a blank page and do so through ideal forms based on geometric purity, perfection, and order as in the villa Savoye. We should develop an architecture that draws attention to impurity, imperfection, and disorder---the uncanny or disturbing --- because the human history on this coast is one marred by violence of the destruction of aborigines, landscape and whales.
|
I once turned a corner on my regular old walk along the Yarra, opposite the heavy industrial landscape of the breweries, the CBD some 2 km away, to see five (yellow tailed) black cockatoos perched on a gum in front of me. Probably drought had brought them down to the city, but it was one of those moments that 'startle'.
I hope we can also replant sheoaks as part of the seaside strategy - for the coninuity of this lovely bird.