Books: Architecture Australia, September 1996

Pacific Island

By Herbert Ypma, from the World Design series published by Thames and Hudson, softback, $40.
Review by Davina Jackson

As Vika and Linda Bull, notable Tongan chanteuses, remarked before their new tour, Polynesian culture has been explored only slightly by Australians. Although the northern world looks to us for leadership in the South Pacific, many island governments (lately including Papua New Guinea) consider New Zealand a more supportive ally. We are obsessed with Asia’s wealth and while our tax haven may be Rarotonga, we getaway to Bali.

This seductive picture book on past and present Pacific architecture and artisanship should galvanise some of us to connect with what editor Herbert Ypma calls the “refined simplicity” of oceanic cultures.

Flicking through the splendid photographs by Patrick Reynolds (Auckland) and Willem Rethmeier (Sydney) brings on waves of hormonal sentiment for the whole Gauginesque, beach bure ideal. This has always been the agenda of Pacific chroniclers—posting home (as Edward Said revealed and Margaret Mead demonstrated) selected, misleading interpretations of exotic ways of life. In this fin-de-millennium daybook, the Pacific’s culture is moulded by white world people.

Davina Jackson is editor of Architecture Australia.

Pictured above: Vatulele bure at sunset, from Pacific Island, a new edition in Herbert Ypma’s World Design series.

If You Practise Architecture…

For Australian architects to raise themselves—and architecture’s standards—from their current lowly position in the evolution of the built environment, then many lessons offered in this timely book deserve serious consideration.

Many origins of the practising architect and the profession’s present malaise are unearthed in the Part 1 chapter ‘Old Footings’. Like a slice of Bannister Fletcher with a sprinkling of morality tales, the author serves up cameos across the centuries—from the Egyptian pyramids and lessons learned in basic building blocks, through Greco-Roman penalties for professional misconduct, the emergence of the enlightened patron during the Renaissance, whimsical fantasies in edible architecture by a French chef, to the Industrial Revolution and the source of the modern architectural dilemma—diminution of the architect’s role with the arrival of engineers, building designers and allsorts managers of projects.

Understanding and redressing this situation is the focus of Part 2, ‘Variations’, which explores conflicts faced across the spectrum of practice. Standen weaves through the complexities of common law, ethics, the pragmatic versus the theoretical, setting up in practice, market analysis, competitions and strategic methods of procurement which need to be negotiated just to initiate a project.

In the real world, basics are easily overlooked and penalties are out of proportion when misdeeds inevitably occur. The case studies which comprise the last part of the book are anecdotal hyperboles presented with a cast of quirky characters whose dilemmas demonstrate the tangled webs of malpractice and misunderstanding the author has encountered over 42 or so years.

Don’t throw away those Practice Notes just yet however! If You Practise Architecture is not the panacea for all the evils to be faced in our increasingly vulnerable realm, but it offers some very salutary insights for the survival of the profession into the next millennium. Jon Johannsen is a director of Sydney architects Armitage Johannsen.

Waste Not Waste

This book of essays about rubbish—the catalogue for a travelling exhibition arranged by Sydney’s EcoDesign Foundation—should be compulsory reading. It brings to the subject of waste—in fact the whole ecological movement—a level of scholarship that is long overdue. It forms links to Derrida, Heidegger and other notable philosophers: there is also much reverential quoting from Fry’s earlier text, Remakings: Ecology, Design, Philosophy.

After questioning what waste is (“a cultural category before all else,” Fry writes), the essayists move on to extend the concept of what waste might be. Fry begins with the claim that “waste begs to be thought … All that we are and can do, all of our achievements, stand on the effort we make to think outside the norm(al).” While I entirely agree with his defence of language as a vital tool for changing the way we think, it is contradictory to present such important issues via texts impenetrable to a broad readership.

Abby Mellick looks at how television both produces significant waste and presents waste in such a sanitised way that we can feel disassociated from its problems. Samantha Donnelly and Helen Pynor question why we have developed a mindset that regards human waste as something to be hidden, laughed at, got rid of. Cameron Tonkin’s examines the idea of art as waste; waste that becomes useful in its reuse before becoming waste again. He also questions the sacred concept of recycling … suggesting that it makes people feel good about ‘doing something’ for the environment without changing their destructive patterns of disposal. Anne-Marie Willis looks at “instrumentalised” and “moralised” waste that result from “the rise of industrial and consumer culture”. Many industries, processes and lives are spent—wasted—on producing, marketing, selling and buying rubbish. Tony Fry concludes with a paradoxical postscript stating that the Waste Not Waste exhibit is not to be assumed as art— “nowhere evidences the transformatory power of institutions to transfer value from nothing to something, from waste to expensive commodity, than the institutions of art”.

Waste Not Waste is an erudite, fecund text that may inspire more readable authors to take these ideas to a larger audience.

Caroline Pidcock is a Sydney architect concerned with ecology.