Landscape detail near the Brambuk Living Culture Centre, western Victoria, by Greg Burgess. Image: Trevor Mein.
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Aboriginal cultural institutions are constructed or commissioned in various locations, and the new Museum of Victoria will have an Aboriginal wing. My aim here is to open up some of the issues surrounding these new representations of Aboriginality.
I will begin with a generalisation. It is that Aboriginal cultures traditionally invested little meaning in built form and rarely constructed fixed buildings. This was read from the beginning of white occupation as evidence of both ‘rootlessness’ and ‘primitiveness’ In colonial eyes, Aboriginal claims to the land were not ‘legitimate’ or ‘proper’ because they had not ‘appropriated’ it architecturally. The lack of a permanent ‘architecture’ was a significant reason why the continent was declared terra nuliius, the legal legitimation of the white invasion.
As we have since learned, the Aboriginal investment was in landscape rather than architecture, in the identification with one’s country and sites of significance within it. Aboriginal obligations to the land, represented aesthetically in Aboriginal art, contrast with the colonial imperative to appropriate and exploit. Yet to summarise Aboriginality in this manner is inadequate and dangerous. It is problematic because it immediately invokes a traditional model of Aboriginality as if it were untransformed by 200 years of white domination; because the task of a white intellectual in rendering such a relationship transparent through language is fraught with doubt, and because the popular mythology of Aboriginal harmony with the land has become complicit with a postcolonial discourse, complicit with new forms of domination. These issues are apparent to Aboriginal people, who both affirm the spiritual connection with their ‘country’ yet also resist being typecast in such a relationship.
Problems of Aboriginality in architecture are evident primarily in housing, where the living conditions of some Aboriginal communities remain a national disgrace. My interest here, however, is with the emergence of buildings which have become representative of Aboriginality. They may include housing but also emerging types of Aboriginal institutions-cultural centres, museums, health centres, schools and so on. To my knowledge, there are no Aboriginal architects: how are white architects to design for Aboriginals? I want to explore this question through recent buildings by some of our best architects.
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Marika/Alderton House
Glenn Murcutt and his key theorist, Philip Drew, make much of the fact that some Aboriginal groups built huts in the form of long sheets of bark drawn into curves across a bush pole frame, thus enabling shelter from the rain and sun while preserving cross-ventilation underneath. VVhile Murcutt’s early buildings do not have Aboriginal clients, they are photographed with see-through foundations and theorised as having roots in an authentic and spiritual relationship with the land. To use the language of the myth, it is as if these “leaves of iron” had fallen from the eucalypt trees to “touch the earth lightly”. The latter is a key phrase which links the work to both Aboriginality and ecological sustainability, although the “light touch” may be more effective in the metaphor than on the environment.
The Marika/Alderton house, completed in 1994, was designed by Murcutt for an Aboriginal woman and her white husband at Yirkkala on Cape Arnhem, Northern Territory. The result of years of collaboration, this project became a labour of love for Murcutt, who donated more time and money than most architects could afford. The house is a gabled steel structure on a raised rectilinear platform. The planning is modernist but closely geared to the site, its views and climatic conditions. Designed for cyclones and floods, with sophisticated modulation of temperature and airflow, the house is innovative and commendable. Vogue Living describes it as “bridging the cultures” and (ironically for a “light touch”) as “ground-breaking architecture”. Murcutt suggests it as a prototype for prefabricated Aboriginal housing. There are many things to learn from this house, but one of them may be that design skill and the best intentions are not always enough.
BHP Steel helped to fund the building and produced a promotional film about Murcutt’s work which was broadcast on national television. The advertising shows the white architect with arm held in a gesture of serving the Aboriginal woman and her baby, with the bay in the background. The film picks up this narrative with Murcutt speaking with Marika who is trying to hold both her child and a conversation:
Murcutt-Of course in this corner here is going to be where your window is, which looks back to your billabong and your waterhole and it’s very important isn’t it? (Marika-Mmm ) that sort of thing to you isn’t it, the location of the room in relation to the mangroves, the freshwater mangroves, to the sea and to your billabong at this end of the house?
Marika-It’ll probably feel more at home having to be exposed to that (Murcutt-Yes) environmental, um (Murcutt-Connection) connection.
Murcutt-And of course all the floor will be slats and open (Marika-Mmm), so the air will come up from that as well (Marika-Mmm), and there’s the whole spirit of being within the building and yet outside the building (Marika-Yes) and the building could be modified so that you could feel it was just a platform outside.
Marika-Yes, I mean this is just a house for one family (Murcutt-Mmm), one need (Murcutt-Mmm) and I’m sure that everyone’s different (Murcutt-Yes) and there has to be some cases where there’s more than one family.
Murcutt-Of course you could have two smaller buildings separated from one another where two families are here but they shared certain things (Marika-Yes) and that’s also possible, all those sorts of things (Marika-Yes) within the system are available and that’s the sort of thing we can talk about in the future for other developments in Yirrkala.
Marika-You’re more or less saying that a house can be developed and expand and [soundtrack fades to didjeridoo].
This narrative cuts at a crucial moment. Marika’s relationship with the landscape is spoken for by Murcutt. The social relations of the larger community are introduced by Marika, who appears to be suggesting both some possibilities of difference and more than one “family” in the same house. Murcutt hears this as two “separated” houses. Marika summarises this “more or less” as a house that “can be developed and expand”. Murcutt nods in agreement, but the house, as a ‘bridge’ between cultures, does not quite span the divide. It is a poignant moment, since both parties want this ‘bridge’ of reconciliation to stand. But it is grounded on one side in the professional traditions of the pristine coastal house finely tuned to its landscape and, on the other, in a complex Aboriginal community where ‘family’ has a different currency.
Murcutt and Marika are not the only parties who want this bridge to stand. The house has become enmeshed in a complex network of imagery, well beyond the architect’s control. In Vogue Living, unnamed Aboriginal people are posed within it in a manner which contrasts with the way the same magazine portrays Murcutt’s ‘white’ houses. As a gesture of reconciliation, and a model for a steel solution to problems of Aboriginal housing, the house has become a form of ‘symbolic capital’ which circulates through the BHP film, the pages of the BHP promotional journal Steel Profile and coffee table magazines. This single and very expensive house could not have been built without BHP funding and therefore its advertising value to the steel industry. Its influence extends by implication to the broader negotiations by BHP over mining resources under indigenous control.
It is not my intention here to denigrate the work of one of our finest architects, nor to question his integrity. Murcutt has invested more in this project than most architects can afford. What I do question is the Miesian ideal of the autonomy of architecture from society, the state and the market. And I make a plea for a more critical understanding of the various social, political and economic contexts within which the architect inevitably works.
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Marmburra Banduk Marika, Mark Alderton and their child in front of their then-to be completed (later award-winning) house by Glenn Murcutt.
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Brambuk Living Cultural Centre by Greg Burgess. Image: Trevor Mein.
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Brambuk
Some of these issues emerge again in relation to the Brambuk Living Cultural Centre, designed by Greg Burgess with others. The centre was completed in 1991 to house and represent Aboriginal culture of the Gariewerd region in western Victoria (the Grampians). The written brief called for the use of “curvilinear forms and natural materials” and a participatory design process. Burgess’ work has long been characterised by non-orthogonal geometries, curvilinear forms and the use of timber. The theoretical base is an archetypal quest for an architecture that connects with the human spirit. His recent work, including this project, has had a strong community design component and is often undertaken in collaboration with landscape architects and community artists.
The design has sources in both the traditional Aboriginal shelter (stone circles of the western district) and in Aboriginal art. The plan is formed out of five rough circles which represent the five Koori community groups which constitute the client, but the internal divisions are functional and not social. The work is strongly archetypal, with the plan centred on a large hearth in the foyer, a kind of axis mundi. A helical pathway leads to a workshop and restaurant, with eye-shaped windows framing glimpses of the mountains as one rises. The materials are earth, timber and rough stone with liberal use of bush poles. Hung off a serpentine ridge beam, the large undulating roof opens into eye-shaped slits of window. The building is metaphorically both zoomorphic and geomorphic- suggestive of bird and mountain. The constructions of Aboriginality are both spatial and formal. The plan is strongly oriented to two outdoor spaces which it embraces; an entry courtyard and a meeting area with fire pit. The centre operates as an interface between Aboriginal culture and its ‘other’-everyone from white Australians to Japanese, European and American tourists. The building constructs an ‘Aboriginal’ space and imagery which meets the expectations of both sides of this divide. It is a site of both cultural production and cultural consumption.
The museum displays a shocking history of white domination and violence against Aboriginal people in the region. Aboriginal arts are taught and practised in the workshops and sold in the shop. In the restaurant, ‘bush tucker’ is consumed while gazing at the mountains though the Aboriginal ‘eye’. Response to the building has been generally very positive. For the Aboriginal people involved, it is their building; conceived, fought for, designed, constructed, inhabited and managed. They see the architect’s work as but one element of its success. The visitors’ book is filled with an uncommon passion for the building-and this extends to most of the architecture profession, which honoured the Brambuk centre with its national Sir Zelman Cowen Award.
The exception to this acclaim is a current of informal criticism from a sector of the profession. While it is difficult to represent unpublished views, there is an argument here that needs to be brought into the light. [Here I want to acknowledge the excellent work by Mathilde Lochert in her 1994 RMIT thesis, Architecture and the Construction of Aboriginality, on which the following paragraph is largely based.]
In its simplest form, this criticism is that the building is problematic because its use of natural materials and curvilinear forms meets white preconceptions of a ‘primitive’ culture. To white eyes, a set of conceptual oppositions are set up around the building; white/black, sophisticated/primitive, culture/nature, straight/irregular. The building is said to reinforce a construction of Aboriginal people as primitive, natural and irregular. This critique has sources in postcolonial theory which suggest that in such a power structure, the native ‘other’ finds a voice only within the framework of a dominant discourse. And the State has an interest in seeing Aboriginal identity ‘fixed’ in built form; its dangerous, amorphous, power ‘arrested’. From this view, Brambuk becomes a gesture of reconciliation which is at odds with the unresolved conflicts it represses.
What are the options for an architect who approaches an Aboriginal project from this point of view? If the contradictions of unresolved racial conflict were encoded into the building as deconstructive text, this may satisfy the critics. Yet if this were done over the heads of the clients, then the architect presumes a superior position to the clients in relation to their own oppression. Was the programmatic call for “natural materials and rounded forms” wrong; perhaps a form of false consciousness? Where is the privileged position from which to make this judgement? Does this critique of ‘primitivism’ carry an implication that the architect should have manipulated the Aboriginal community into a more regular building for their own good? Is this not a return to architectural assimilation? Is there any kind of architecture that does not, for better or worse, ‘fix’ and ‘stabilise’ socially constructed identities?
My own view is that the value of this building hinges on questions of Aboriginal agency more than on its reception by architectural critics. The question of whether it meets the formal expectations for an architecture of liberation has to be preceded by that of whether the building embodies forms of liberating practice. And I would maintain that it does. Yet such an approach remains problematic. Like the Marika/Alderton house, the Brambuk centre has become part of a discourse which is not of the architect’s making-enmeshed in the romance of the bark hut, promoted by the timber industry and used as a signature building for cultural tourism. And the approaches of both Burgess and Murcutt are subject to political imperatives in the quest to represent Aboriginality and place it on public display within a framework of reconciliation.
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Museum of Victoria
All of which leads me to the new Museum of Victoria, being built adjacent to the Exhibition Buildings in Melbourne, and with an Aboriginal centre as an annex. The design is the result of a 1994 architectural competition for which the brief noted that the museum’s Aboriginal collections are world-class and require a designated Aboriginal centre. But this centre is not for exhibitions, which will remain in the larger museum, but is instead for cultural events under Aboriginal control. The brief made it clear that the Aboriginal centre must occupy an external location in the plan, with a separate entry “for direct access by Aborigines and other visitors”.
The Aboriginal centre and exhibition programs result from contentious ownership of the excellent Aboriginal collection. The museum will retain the collection and exhibit it in an ambiguous space which is part of both the museum and the Aboriginal centre. According to the brief, the centre was to be “integral to the architecture of the complex while being an easily distinguishable element with a unique spirit and character … visually and symbolically represented … The symbolism influencing the design will be developed in close consultation with these communities.”
Here is a contradiction-the “unique spirit and character” was to be invented for the competition and then “developed in close consultation” later.
The competition winners were Denton Corker Marshall, well-known for a ubiquity of orthogonal gridded forms, specialists in delivering high-style packaging of large volumes of corporate and institutional space, as well as skilled urban designs. Their museum proposal is mostly typical DCM, yet the Aboriginal centre, which emerged from the north-east corner, was different. Its form was an irregular oval-shaped brown mound, framed by the orthogonal superstructure of the larger museum. There were no clear plans or elevations but it was connected into the museum foyer via a serpentine-shaped wall or path. Nothing resembling it had ever emerged from DCM, so how do we explain it?
Architectural competitions are the best way to procure innovative public buildings but they have serious problems. They do not permit consultation and the appointment of judges is highly political; encouraging an incestuous frenzy of second-guessing their judgements. There were no Aboriginal judges. The panel was chaired by architect Peter McIntyre, who was also a judge when the Brambuk centre won its national award and was known to have applauded the design in glowing terms. While DCM’s design does not mimic Brambuk, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that it was a textualised and packaged version of Brambuk.
So how does the critique outlined earlier in relation to Brambuk run in relation to this project? Quite differently, I think. The Brambuk building emerged as a conjunction of site, architect and client communities over an extended period of collaboration. The museum design responded to none of these. The Aboriginal mound was not really designed at all but indicated as ‘other’ to the main museum. The site is highly urban and participation by Aboriginal people was not possible. John Denton suggested in the press that the gridded core of the museum was to be identified with Melbourne’s 1835 street grid. This was an unfortunate choice of metaphor since the grid was one of the techniques of the white invasion, constructing an orthogonal colonial space as it packaged the land for speculative capital. But once again a disclaimer: one can scarcely blame the architects, who are meeting the expectations of the State and its agents, following the oldest imperative of getting the job.
The design has since been developed “in consultation” with Koori representatives and the Aboriginal centre has been transformed in some ways. The oval-shaped plan and the serpentine entry path from the museum remain. But the separate entry has disappeared and the curvilinear shapes inside the Aboriginal centre have spread almost to the core of the museum. There is a belated attempt to gear it back to meet its primary market. Thus the liminal space referred to earlier will constitute a quarter of the exhibition area, framed orthogonally but with a curvilinear lining. If one were to accept the black/white and curved/straight constructions of this cultural divide, then the building could be said to have been whitened on the outside and blackened inside.
The Aboriginal centre has also been significantly transformed in its street imagery. As the museum magazine puts it: “the eastern end of the centre facing Nicholson Street will be stylised in powerful and contemporary ways, reflecting Aboriginal symbolism”. The mound has been replaced as a model of Aboriginality and is transformed into three curvilinear leaning walls; a kind of zinc-clad lean-to. From the exterior, it has become much better integrated with the larger design and formally (to my white eyes) much improved. But a post-hoc consultation remains a contradiction in terms. The structure of the design brief, the competition and its judging panel had the dilemma written into it. The architects were required to fix Aboriginal imagery in architecture under conditions where Aboriginal agency was impossible.
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Brambuk Living Cultural Centre by Greg Burgess. Image: Trevor Mein.
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Who
authorises
Aboriginal
architecture?
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Conundrum
What are the lessons in this for architects or critics? I have more questions than answers; this is a genuine conundrum. Should architects avoid identifying any kind of Aboriginality in architecture?
I think this is too easy. It seems to me inevitable that Aboriginal architecture be constructed. It is in the nature of architecture that it ‘fixes’ social constructions of identity and it must do so within a complex web of competing interests. But it is for Aboriginal people to decide how they are to be represented. And if the issue lies, as I suggest, in the agency of Aboriginal people, then what if they choose to exploit the market for cultural tourism by meeting its preconceptions? What if primitivist constructions of Aboriginality are used as a mask for economic interest?
Finally, what if Aboriginal people choose not to participate in any collaborative process under white domination? Consultants on the Aboriginal centre at the museum agreed that the initial mound in the competition design was a poor representation of Aboriginality, but disagreed on how to deal with it. One school of thought was to engage in the process and try to get it right; the other was not to bother but to ‘let them build it and then pick it apart later’. The former process prevailed, resulting in the lean-to, but the ‘pick it apart’ attitude is intriguing. It implies both a refusal to be co-opted and an assumption that forms do not matter, aside from how they are used.
This brings me back to where I started, with the dangerous generalisation that Aboriginal cultures traditionally invested relatively little meaning in built form. While the lack of traditional architecture weakened their position under colonial ideology, it may now have some advantages. The lack of clear and authentic formal sources enables a variety of appropriations and movements. It is a brave white critic who would judge any formal construction of Aboriginal architecture to be ‘wrong’. My final point here is to try and open up important questions: how is architecture being used in the ongoing discourse of Aboriginal reconciliation; by whom and in whose interest?
Who authorises Aboriginal architecture?
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