Australia express: musings on urbanism, I

December 30, 2017 / coordinatinggoldhagens / 2 Comments

MOST people probably know many things about the Land Down Under, but if it happens that it’s only one or two things, likely these include the tale of how, when the British began colonizing Australia’s eastern shores in the late 1800s, boatloads of jailbirds were involuntarily hauled in tow. Prison wards in England were crammed full, dark and tight (just read Dickens’ Little Dorrit); offloading convicts to the colonies was one way to relieve overcrowding. Many of those forcibly resettled unfortunates had been found guilty only of minor crimes — forging checks, unpaid debts, that sort of thing. Others had committed worse. Either way, once they’d served out their sentences, many stayed.

Old Melbourne Gaol, 1838-1845

From this single, oft-tapped historical spigot of a fact, a fountain of cultural stereotypes continues to gush. Such as: Australian bodies, especially male bodies, come blonde, big-boned, and saturated with unusually high alcohol content. Australian social practices tend toward the big-hearted and ever-so-slightly crass. Australians incline toward the provincial; inward-looking, they can be a bit quizzical if not suspicious about the pertinence to them and theirs of knowledge harking from beyond their continent’s shores.

Time to shut that spigot off for good. It’s all nonsense. (Indeed so much so that I predict that Danny will object to my writing the paragraphs above, maintaining that one shouldn’t risk perpetuating untruths by recyling them, even if only to discount their veracity.) Since 1996, year after year, the largest percentage of immigrants settling here hail from South and East Asia (you can see the statistics here: http://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/about/reports-publications/research-statistics/statistics/live-in-australia/historical-migration-statistics). And though it’s true that around 20% of Australians claim a convict in their ancestry, that means 80% don’t — and one distant convict in one’s otherwise full ancestral tree is hardly a mark of Cain. Besides, what does it matter? The last flotilla of villainy landed here in 1868, 160 years and many generations ago.

Nonetheless, architectural artifacts of the country’s penal heritage constitute its earliest landmarks. Some, as in Sydney, are buried beneath later infrastructure near the shoreline (near the Barangaroo Reserve in Sydney, below); others, like the splendid, if forbidding Old Melbourne Gaol (above), are historic monuments.

Barangaroo Reserve, Sydney

Today, these are but tiny, obdurate reminders of Australia’s early history, buried in the urban fabric of its cities. So what can we say, even provisionally, about Australian urbanism given our scant exposure to Sydney and Melbourne?

Sydney and Melbourne’s sites differ, for sure. Hilly Sydney boasts of its fun-in-the-sun, 150 decadent miles of shoreline, and that’s not even counting ever-hungrily-land-sucking suburbs. Melbourne’s largely undifferentiated flatlands are slung lazily along the muddy, unprepossessing Yarra River. Even so, their patterns of urban development and growth vary less, or so it seemed to me. And if Sydney and Melbourne’s urbanism represents any sort of larger reality (I wager they do), then Australians have by and large embraced, and more or less consistently practiced admirable social democratic ideals: what we saw evinced a well-considered, well-constructed, well-ordered civil society, even with predictable infelicities of all sorts notwithstanding. We saw this in the residential areas and in the city’s newer public spaces, the topic of the next post.

WE situated ourselves in the so-called “inner ring” suburbs, which seems to denote a distance from the urban core of approximately 4-5 kilometers. Our first stop in Melbourne was tiny Middle Park (population ca. 4000), conveniently proximate both to the City Center and the Pacific Ocean. The neighborhood retains an impressive stock of diminuitive Victorian residences (many with ornate cast iron porch details, as below), most in reasonably good repair.

Scattered around, tucked between the older homes, are a number of modern single-family dwellings. It’s one of the better ones of these newer places that we managed to score. Tiny: two bedrooms upstairs; kitchen, living and dining room down. A nice patio in back, though.

The recessed light well, at right, broke up the linearity of the main living area and admitted all manner of light and weather, including the torrential rains with which we were greeted –four seasons in a day, Uber drivers told us again and again, pontificating about the city’s fickle weather. Anyway, our little Middle Park abode proved a hospitable place to enjoy even the downpours, presenting them artfully, at a slight remove.

Itinerants we are, ever subject to the booking impulses of Airbnb’ers the world over as well as our own changing needs, we had to move after a fistful of days. We landed in a that-much-smaller place, an apartment in a residential high-rise in South Yarra, a decidedly more upscale, far denser district (population ca. 25,000), although its distance from the city center equivalent to that of Middle Park. From there, we got to survey Melbourne’s horizontal and vertical spread.

Scattered hillocks of towers, residential and commercial, pop up from the lilyponds of two-to-four story mixed-use buildings which spread in nearly every direction, all the way to the horizon.In commerical and higher-density residential neighborhoods, the taller structures indicate that Melbourne, like Sydney, takes its towers seriously.

New ones, and old ones, too.

In any case, in both cities, it seems that they’re erecting a lot more of them. I tried to discover statistics on new residential and office space real estate, but curiosity vanished in the deluge of Google hits beckoning me to bankers’ and developers’ websites, so I’ll just go with the information offered by Meaghan Dwyer of John Wardle Architects: in both cities, there’s a lot of building going on.

Much of it good, and good in ways that indicate a heartening — or shall I say big-hearted?– vision of a social realm that supports sociability for all city-dwellers, not just the wildly privileged.

For notable public spaces and landscapes in both cities and what they might mean, stay tuned.

— Sarah

Australia express: art

December 20, 2017December 20, 2017 / coordinatinggoldhagens / Leave a comment

One cannot but judge the architecture of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV- International), on St. Kilda Road in Melbourne, as falling somewhere between the unfortunate and the disgraceful — this photo of kids playing in the plaza outside it makes it look more serenely seductive than it is. And the interiors! Mostly they’re grim, just grim, especially after a renovation completed in 2004 by the Italian architect Mario Bellini, who created new gallery spaces by dropping opaque stone boxes into the existing building’s glass-covered courtyards, thus destroying what was in all likelihood the principal redeeming feature of the original design.

Even so, it’s the premier museum in one of Australia’s two most cosmopolitan states (Victorians will assert, usually only half-jokingly, Melbourne’s superior cultivation and cosmopolitanism in comparison with Sydney, which we heard characterized — more than once — as some kind of over-the-hill Lady of Questionable Virtue). So, as this building houses National Gallery of the State of Victoria, whatever that means, one is obliged to look.

We found: some nice moments, a couple of welcome surprises, a few terrific pieces, and one stunner, a work of contemporary art.

Inside the dark gray perimeter facades sits a single a light-drenched atrium. If you stay on the ground floor and venture toward the rear, you stumble into this.

In the 1960s, Leonard French, a celebrated Australian artist, worked for five years on a stained glass ceiling for what’s called the Great Room, as if this were some kind of edgy update of the great rooms in historic British manor houses. Impressive, and to my eye more pleasurable to behold than the verging-on-kitsch Tiffany glass compositions that the ceiling recalls. The museum’s curators seem a bit flummoxed as to how to use this space; basically, they’ve thrown a few cushiony pieces in there and invited the children in to play. And they do.

Upstairs (where the windows are, on the upper right), we found galleries devoted to the decorative arts, including one offering up an abundance of very fine Wedgewood — all those aspirant 19th-century Australians adopting British tastes, I suppose. I’ve come to appreciate Wedgewood’s refinement quite a lot, thanks to the enthusiasm and beneficence of my beloved mother-in-law, Norma. This amusing Egyptian piece struck my fancy, though Danny predicted that Norma would not take to it.

Though we agreed that this one, below. was just her sort of thing.

The NGV and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney exhibit a good deal of Aboriginal Art; this, from Sydney, captivated me with its absolutely perplexing pictorial space.

Back in Melbourne’s NGV-International, this beautiful installation, below, of medieval sculptures made these works-from-another-world arresting in a way that the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s installations in its medieval galleries are not. One oddity: in this openly Christian-dominant country (nativity crèches and decorated Christmas trees appear everywhere in the public sphere), the NGV’s wall texts assume not an iota of background knowledge about the religion or its traditions. One went something along the lines of this: Christians consider saints intermediaries between humanity and the divine. Another offered a careful definition of just what an attribute is, and explained how they function iconographically in Christian art.

Saint Catherine of Alexandria, a scholar-princess who converted many wayward souls to Christianity merely by dint of her incisive intellect and oratorical powers of persuasion, has always been a secret favorite of mine, and this ca. 16th century Catalan representation of her holding the wheel, a torture device that shattered when her persecutors tried to use it on her, stuck with me. I love the combination of her serene, aquiline features and her slightly dynamic but not-quite-contrapposto-esque pose. Then we practically ran straight into one of the best Hans (aka Jean) Arp sculptures, from his “Growth” series, that I’ve ever encountered. I was really tempted to hug it.

Finally, looking at the art at the museums in Sydney and Melbourne heightened my appreciation for that artist whose work Danny is so taken by, Del Kathryn Barton. We included one image from her exhibition at the NGV-Australia (which is in a different building from the NGV-International, down the street), a couple of posts ago. Danny loves DKB’s complex compositions, jewel-like colors, the over-the-top patterning and refined detail; I appreciate these but just can’t get over the questionable mythologies she’s drawing on in her depiction of women and their bodies. In any case, this painting is quite typical of what’s on display at her solo retrospective exhibition, and I appreciated it more after reading the catalogue essay, which discussed how influenced she is by medieval painting, with its lapidary colors and lack of recessive spaces.

It did occur to me, too, that the busyness of DKB’s surfaces bears affinities to Aboriginal painting — here’s one particularly good example, from Sydney.

And those big, haunting eyes that appear everywhere in her paintings evoke the haunting eyes in some Aboriginal sculptures, like these two, below.

The NGV Triennial was still in the process of being installed when we visited, but luckily, this piece had already been hung; it became the crème de la crème of our art-scouting day.

Entitled the PET lamp, this is by Alvaro Catalán de Ocón, a Spanish designer, who worked with the Bula’Bula Arts Aboriginal Corporation to find a group of weavers with whom he could collaborate. They gathered reeds, along with the plants necessary to make the dyes, produced the tints, organized the composition, and wove it. Technically, it’s a chandelier, I guess. Whatever: it’s a stunning, inspiring piece, which the NGV-International’s installation team displayed brilliantly, placing the lamps themselves just above eye level; the large weaving several feet above your head, suspended from the ceiling; and placing circular mirrors on a dais just above floor level. Since mirrors can be used to visually diminish the scale of the object they reflect, you get to experience the piece both as it envelops you, spreading majestically over your head and bleeding into your peripheral vision, and at the same time, regard its entirety by glancing toward the silvery pools of light near your feet.

Seeing this piece set off the kind of all-encompassing, full-body experience of a work of art that is often craved, and rarely realized. Really superb.

Danny’s been complaining that, since I’m always behind the camera, we run the risk of having few pictures of me from the trip. He gets the photo credit for this one.

— Sarah

Australia express: architecture

December 18, 2017December 18, 2017 / coordinatinggoldhagens / 1 Comment

Of the bits of Australian this-and-that that Danny and I did manage to take in, the takeaways reside in the realms of architecture, art, and urban landscapes. (This may not surprise our faithful readers.) These impressions are as fugitive as was our time in the Land Down Under en tout, but there’s no stopping the camera from shooting what it shoots (deliberate cognition plays at best a supporting role), and once images become digitally imprinted, a record of sorts emerges.

Architecture first. Australian cities, or at least Sydney and Melbourne, are organized more like Boston than like New York City, meaning that a relatively small core, usually coincident with the Central Business District, constitutes the eponymous legal municipality, and surrounding it are progressively expanding arcs or rings of suburbs. What differentiates Sydney and Melbourne from Boston is that the size of that inner core is really small, so once you start walking away from the core the suburbs start almost right away. Still, as in Boston, Sydney and Melbourne’s inner suburbs contain older as well as new buildings; spatially, their layout varies, and they bear traces of an orientation toward pedestrians. We’re told that as the distance from the urban core increases, Australian suburbs’ density diminishes, along with the varieties of experience they offer.

The parts of Sydney we walked through to get from Rushcutter’s Bay, the suburb where we stayed, to the downtown harbor area took us through many ranges of tiny, older residential buildings, some in wood, and others masonry. A few of these areas snuggle up to, or surround a little open area akin to a village green– below, look how some kid just dropped her bicycle and walked in her front door with no thought of locks or bike stands. Just as we all used to do, growing up. Right in the middle of Sydney!Nearby stood larger buildings that served the original community — perhaps a library, a school, a church. What the building below was or now is remains a mystery, but it’s fairly typical of the small Victorian public infrastructure in both Sydney and Melbourne.

Then there’s the more majestic stuff. Victorian architects in Australia, it seemed to me, relished their distance from the stodgy old colonial mothership. They seemed to take a good deal of enjoyment in designing over the top– these two building are both in Melbourne, the bottom is the central train station on Flinder’s Street.

Others, of course, contented themselves with Monumental and Sedate. This the former Royal Mail Exchange Building, now the Whitehouse Institute of Design in Melbourne. That red-brick/yellow-ochre detailing is a common combination in public buildings in both cities.

As for more recent buildings, our impression was that the general design quality is higher than in the US — see below, an ordinary luxury residential tower, where the architect at least tried to entertain the eye as it travels, wittingly or not, from base to crest.

Then, there was the special. I’ll wait on a wonderful project by the ever-uneven Jean Nouvel, because it fits best into the urban landscape entry, but here’s a surprising success by the also ever-uneven Frank Gehry, a business school at the University of Technology Sydney.

The canting of the windows on the exterior did just wonderful things with the clouds. (Lucky we caught it on a nice summer day.) And the texture in the brick façade, created by projecting and recessing passages of bricks as they followed the building’s complex curvature, was very successful.

Inside, the building had the same spatial mess of “some cool moves and a lot of afterthoughts” that I’ve come to expect in most Gehry buildings, except the superb Guggenheim Bilbao. Here, the cool move was an element built up of wood blocks that looked as though it fell out of some Brobdingnagian child’s playpen.

The real treat was seeing the Melbourne School of Design, designed Nader Tehrani of NADAAA and John Wardle of John Wardle Architects, which, in the central element-within-atrium motif, may look similar, but I assure you, the resemblance is only superficial. I will write about the masterful MSD elsewhere, so I’ll spare my breath and fingers here. Here are a couple of images, though.

The architects transformed the internal corridors into habitable spaces (see tables and desks at left) and the wire mesh allowed them maintain a degree of visual openness to other floors while abiding by safety regulations.

Through that crisscrossing network of family relations that life is, Nader introduced me to John, with whom I spent a good deal of time. One afternoon, Danny and I scoped out a library he did for the Melbourne Grammar School, a tony private school whose original buildings must have been designed with Oxford or Cambridge in mind.

Respectfully, Wardle did something very different, with some beautiful details, inside and out.

Look (below) how the vertical brick headers (are they headers?) project out of the surface as the wall’s plane cants back!

The library’s stacks become an object of curiosity when you get just a peek, from above.

We also saw OMA’s MPavilion 2017 in Queen Victoria Gardens, just because. When you’re passing something branded “Rem Koolhaas”, you stop to poke around a bit– although in this case, not even long enough for a cup of coffee.

Finally, a very nice new building which is the cornerstone of a billion-dollar campus upgrading ongoing at the University of Technology Sydney, by Durbach Block Jaggers, buddies of John Wardle. Appropriately enough, it houses the Graduate School of Health. A ton to say about this one, too, but I’ll just leave you with teasers and eye candy.

— Sarah

All’s new in Christchurch

November 22, 2017November 25, 2017 / coordinatinggoldhagens / Leave a comment

In Auckland, in Queenstown, and most dramatically, in Christchurch, one’s overwhelming impression of NZ is new, new, new. Partly that’s because of the ever-flourishing greenery (Christchurch calls itself “the green city”), yet many other factors contribute to the country’s perpetual sense of freshness. Owing to its isolation –a bunch of islands seemingly floating around in the Pacific – this was one of the last terrains that humans settled, with Pacific Islanders arriving sometime between the 11^th and the 13^th centuries CE. Since the Maori lived in tribal settlements in wood and thatch, which they rebuilt over and over, the country’s oldest surviving buildings, as far as I can tell, are a handful of dwellings by British colonists from the 1840s onward.

William’s Cottage, now an art gallery, in Queenstown (1864) — note oval bronze plaque to left of front door

Many if not most landmarks date to the early 20^th century, including (surprise!) a sumptuous little Carnegie Library in Hokitika on the west coast, which we stumbled upon en route to Christchurch, driving up the South Island’s west coast.

Carnegie Library (1902), Hokitika, now the Hokitika Museum

Despite, or perhaps because of these comparatively slender historical pickings, everywhere we went, we were struck by the determined celebration of local history. (Having spent my 20s with my head, arms, and mind buried in archives, it occurred to me that the availability of records, and the manageability of their number, surely helps facilitate this apparent preoccupation with history — NZ’s land area measures around the size of Great Britain, while its peoples number fewer than five million, which is one-fifth the population of New York City’s metropolitan area). Wherever we went, we frequently found ourselves standing in front of bronze plaques and laminated wood signs, telling tales of the explorer who first navigated this or that fiord, who first huddled into this spit of land, accompanied by his herd of sheep; of the colonist who planted this or that specimen tree, died here, did that.

Also, references to and artifacts of Maori culture pervade linguistic and visual culture, appearing in place names and dual-language signs; celebrated in museums, alluded to in decorative patterns on printed clothing, jade jewelry, statues, stenciled wallpaper. The Maori people were never very numerous on these islands; currently, they account for three per cent of the country’s population. Such gestures go part way to redress past wrongs to these indigenous people, to be sure, but I suspect it and all these other historical markers serve a larger function: that of constructing a robust narrative of NZ nationhood and identity.

Even with these historical markers, in cities, the impression is that you are immersed in the recent or the now, and Christchurch, a city of 240,000 on the east coast of the South Island, is the newest of all this new. In 2011, “the shakes” – a 6.3 earthquake – devastated the central area of the city, severely damaging its large cathedral (built between 1864 and 1904), as well as many other historic buildings.

Rebuilding a small church downtown

95% of the buildings in the central business district were either destroyed in the earthquake itself, or declared unsafe, and subsequently demolished.

Yup, that’s adjacent to the Central Business District

In residential areas, of the 100,000 homes damaged, approximately 10,000 had to be demolished.

Built environmental junkie types will know Christchurch from Shigeru Ban’s gorgeous, inspiring Transitional Cathedral, aka Cardboard Cathedral, which stands in as the seat for the Anglican ministry, as Christchurch’s old, heavily damaged Cathedral continues its embattled way toward reconstruction.

Entrance, Shigeru Ban’s Transitional Cathedral

The first major building completed after the earthquake, Ban’s TC was constructed largely of recyclable and/or inexpensive materials: huge cardboard tubes comprise the nave’s vaults; translucent, polycarbonate for the roof;

The four rectangular rooms with windows are recycled shipping containers

disused shipping containers serve as the ministry offices. The slight curve of the roof off-axis (the shape is not a perfect triangle), which creates a subtle, compelling dynamism in the nave,

matched the bubbly personality of Hilde, a sweet, lively woman who welcomed us by proudly revealing that she was “in her tenth decade”, before she told us, quite informatively, about the city, the church, and her congregation.

All in all, in Christchurch you get to see something both rare and thought-provoking. If you were to build the best city you could ex novo, what would you do? Other such experiments exist. In the past: Brasilia, New Delhi, Chandigarh. Today: Masdar in Abu Dhabi by Foster and Partners, and countless new cities in China, but the former remains largely unexecuted, and the latter exercises are so vast in scale that speed of execution and developer profits were systematically privileged over sophistication in design.

Christchurch may be different. It’s too early to tell for sure. Much of downtown remains a vast construction site littered with empty plots of land, monuments to the city’s ravaged state. But even the way the city has approached those voids is impressive. To keep people’s spirits up amidst all those vacant lots, public art has been installed.

Glulam arches make a pathway downtown

The brightly colored animals resemble the sheep, for which NZ is justly famous

And there are murals, along with informal installations, too.

Mural to the left, temporary stage for impromptu performances at right

Building has proceeded slowly in the Central Business District — Christchurchians grumble about it, then shrug, adding, it’s a great city. The CBD has been divided into precincts for retail, “innovation” (which I gather means hi-tech), health, performing and visual arts, and “justice and emergency services”. Dozens of large new buildings are under construction: a new metro sports facility, a new central library, a new convention center. A new transit and bus station opened recently.

New park under construction, with Ban’s Transitional Cathedral to the left

Large green strips of new parkland and green plazas solves one of the central problems of rebuilding; namely, so much less office space is now needed downtown because of people’s increasingly mobile work practices.

If the residential areas are any indication, the results promise to be both instructive and impressive. Christchurchians needed to build homes quickly, so residential development has outpaced commercial and governmental projects. Our Air BnB, called the Little Black Hut, served as a temporary residence for husband-and-wife real estate developers, who had lost their own home during the shakes. Vertical wood siding, stained black, encircles the exterior, and white-stained plywood sheets line its interiors.

Little Black Hut, Christchurch: A place to stay

A couple of days of walking around the city suggested that the Little Black Hut’s design finesse was not unusual: most homes are small, but the detailing and compositional sensibility even in little cinder block, wood, or corrugated-metal-sided homes looks pretty well done.

How little we missed the “sense of history” so prized amongst Americans! Running into the few remaining Victorian houses, grand and modest, provided enjoyment but not the sense of relief one finds when stumbling upon even modest historic structures in the United States. What we found in Christchurch substantiates the argument I advanced in WtYW that the problem in the US built environment is less old (better)-versus-new (clueless), but the poor design quality and craftsmanship of new construction. In Christchurch, high quality new homes, commercial, and retail buildings could be found everywhere. Even the mediocre buildings are good. Stay tuned, then, for the new iteration of New Zealand’s garden city — and dream.

— Sarah

Morocco’s Architecture and Tradition

November 2, 2017November 1, 2017 / coordinatinggoldhagens / Leave a comment

Frozen in time. From the first day we entered the Kasbah in Marrakesh through the end of our trip to the UNESCO World Heritage site Aït Ben Haddou, that was my overwhelming impression of Morocco.

The exception was Casablanca, but Fez, people tell me, confers this impression with even greater intensity. In its sense of arrested time, Morocco felt very different from other developing societies I’ve encountered. Take India. In India, people’s lives are saturated with tradition, but they do not, or at least did not appear to me to reject modernity. In some of Morocco’s most distant reaches, people seem only dimly aware that modern societies even exist. What are they watching on satellite TV?

Traditional Moroccan architecture, which is most Moroccan architecture, can be characterized thus. Walls, walls, and walls.

That’s first. Next: extreme complexity in surface patterning.

Last: extreme simplicity of spatial organization. Whether it’s the riad courtyard houses, or a palace complex such as Bahia Palace, or the Ben Youssef Medrasa, spatial arrangements vary very little. Small rooms, or concentric layers of smaller and larger rooms, encircling open air courtyards.

Sometimes, in larger buildings, internal rooms with tiny windows butt up onto rooms opening onto subcourtyards with skylit roofs.

Spatial organization, spatial sequences – all are straightforward, even banal. (If the site varies topographically, sometimes there’s a little more action, as in the palace at Telouet.) So the colorful, intricate patterns constitute the only means of arresting our visual interest — or, to invert the formulation, to compensate for the lack of design complexity.

On the drive from Aït Ben Haddou back to Marrakesh, Danny, Gideon and I discussed this, noting that although we’d seen many of central Morocco’s premier monuments, we’d discerned scant artistic development. Always, Zelig (ceramic tile mosaics) stretching from the floor to shoulder-level; intricate, lacy plasterwork above; then wood, painted and carved, on top (the wood needs to be on top because it spans ceilings, windows, doors).

In no place we visited did that differ.

To explain to Gideon the difference between the architectural tradition as we’ve encountered it in Morocco and the western one, I used painting, with which he is more familiar. Think about what a Giotto looks like, I said. Then compare it to Leonardo’s Madonna and Child in the Louvre, and then compare that to Michaelangelo’s Madonna and Child. The subject is the same; the paintings don’t look at all alike. Each artist, in some way, was trying to express something new, even if he was also building on established traditions. Here, the mosaic work in Telout’s Kasbah (early 20th century) resembles the mosaic work in Marrakesh’s Ben Youssef Medrasa (16th century).

So, art or craft? Reluctantly, I concede: Danny’s correct.

That’s it for Morocco.

–Sarah

Coordinating Goldhagens

here, there, and (sort of) everywhere

Tradition

Australia express: musings on urbanism, I

Australia express: art

Australia express: architecture

All’s new in Christchurch

Morocco’s Architecture and Tradition

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