Roofscape of bloodwood and copper shingles, looking across the roof over the entrance, with Uluru beyond; photo by Trevor Mein.
Aerial view from the south; photo by Craig Lamotte.
Tjukurpa space beyond entrance; photo by Trevor Mein.
Anangu Maruku Punu craft gallery; photo by Trevor Mein.
Anangu means (our) people, and refers to the traditional owners of the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park who use Pitjantjatjara and Yankunyatjatjara dialects. Mutitjulu is the community of Anangu who live adjacent to Uluru. All Anangu quotations are from Uluru National Park Cultural Centre: Project Brief and Concept Design, by Gregory Burgess Architects, 1990.
AA appreciates the support of the Northern Territory Tourist Commission in producing this feature.
More photos can be found
in the version! | Review Michael Tawa Greg Burgess engages the sacred landscape of Ayers Rock with a circuitous and undulating cultural/tourist centre for the Uluru-Kata Tjuta community. This is another of the Territory’s contemporary architectural marvels. Good Place for Wiltja
We want tourists to learn about our place, to listen to us Anangu, not just to look at the sunset and climb on the puli (Uluru)—Tony Tjamiwa. For Anangu, Uluru is marked by various stories of traditional law (Tjukurpa), and the acts of ancestors (Tjukuritja). Tjukurpa is a pattern of relations which registers and binds together people, country, plants and animals. Anangu country is known by being walked and spoken—by tales constantly retold in dance and song. The circuitous rhythms of walking dune country—between meandering contours and undulations of surprising scale—change continuously; quickening and slowing, building up and releasing. Without horizon or vantage, perspectives shift and tend to disorientation. Country is known through the memory of having been walked before—by reiteration of a whole not surveyed as singular but remembered as a resonance of parts. The centre was designed through a collaborative on-site process lasting a month, between the Mutitijulu community of Uluru and the Australian Nature Conservation Agency (ANCA) as joint clients, architect Gregory Burgess, display designer Sonja Peter and landscape architects Kevin Taylor and Kate Cullity. The site was walked, stories of Uluru were mapped and painted by Anangu, the brief was developed and the siting negotiated. Preliminary layouts were explored in sand drawings—a central issue being the way tourists (minga) would move about the centre, what they would pass and how displays would unfold. The configuration of two serpentine buildings developed early in the process, from more symmetrical flower-like forms. Anangu spoke of this arrangement as representing the snakes Liru and Kuniya watching each other warily across the open field of a battleground. The buildings arc about a dead desert oak in a natural clearing oriented to the southern face of Uluru, on which the Tjukurpa of Liru and Kuniya are inscribed. Uluru doesn’t so much contain or close the clearing as frame and open it up to significant readings of country. The site is a “good place for wiltja [shade]” because there are “lots of Tjukurpa here”—because, here, Anangu abide in the shade and abode of Tjukuritja, and can share his dwelling with minga.
Sequence
Maruku number one. Then t shirt shop, office, painting, food, drink. … Tourists can come along and look around, get information, reading and walking around. Then they see ranger and turn around to go to t shirt shop, then drink. … sign about Inma—Nelli Patterson. Nelli Patterson’s account of walking about the spaces of the centre place Maruku, where the Tjukurpa is explained and Mutitjulu handcraft sold, as the first experience of tourists. Minga walk from a carpark to the west, around the Inma danceground and skim the southern walls of the building before turning and entering Tjukurpa. The arrival space at the head of the serpent is cool, quiet and luminous. It effects a reorientation to the Tjukurpa space by slowing and quietening down the arrival sequence. The first space tells of Tjukurpa using paintings and ceramics on floor and walls, information panels and an audio-visual area showing Inma song and dance cycles. The serpentine entrance space then broadens to explain male and female aspects of Anangu culture and lifestyle. Beyond a covered walkway, the second major space is Nintiringkunpai: a place of learning. Here, the joint management of the park between Anangu and ANTA is explained. The pentagonal space consists of four areas focusing on different aspects of the park: background, activities, community-produced videos and language. In the fifth area is an office and enquiry counter which also books Anangu-guided tours of the park. Nintiringkunpai is poised about a massive column with branched struts and a skylit lattice. The Tjukurpa space winds around the third major area of the southern building, the Maruku Arts and Craft Gallery, which sells handcrafts from over 16 surrounding Anangu communities. Between Tjukurpa and Nintiringkunpai, on the southern side, is a yard where Anangu work on handcrafts below a wiltja. In the northern building are Minkiku (an exhibition, performance and meeting place), change rooms and a private courtyard associated with the Inma dancing ground, public toilets, the Ininti store selling the usual souvenirs but with Tjukurpa designs, and the Ininti kiosk serving the usual takeaway food. Plantrooms and associated service areas stretch to the north and surround a staff carpark and delivery area. Between the two buildings are the Inma danceground to the west, an open space hinged around the dead, desert oak and, further to the north-east, a larger area with the southern face of Uluru closing the vista beyond. These clearings are intended to be shaded with vines and brush shades–and in time can house more activities under wiltjas.
Framing: Between Inside and Out
The tourist comes here with camera taking pictures all over. What has he got? Another photo—take home, keep part of Uluru. He should get another lens—see straight inside. Wouldn’t see big rock then. He would see that Kuniya living right inside there as from the beginning. He might throw his camera way then—Elder, Mutitijulu community.
Inside or outside? This question is always deferred by a play of complements: solid/void, shaded/unshaded, enclosed/open, hidden/revealed—and by the spatial dynamics which result from their conjunction to keep space in motion and delay decision. In this fluctuation, space is repeatedly brought to closure—which means that it never closes but plays indefinitely at the limits of enclosure .Consequently, the landscape is not surveyed passively but is engaged through walking and tracing a circuit. Glimpsed in shifting perspective and partial angles of view through tilted or segmented edges, the prospect is never complete, panoptic or totalising. The experience is one of community—of others seen across—and seen as crossing space, seen as advancing and retreating into shadow, shade and strong sun, as slipping into furrowed walls and wandering against the rhythms of solid, void, and bright, framed landscape—always between, always infiltrating trajectories which are never fully known and whose pacing is reflexive and quiet. This framing iterates the cadences of moving among dunes and of hearing Tjukurpa. Sliding between landscape and narrative, one is always in-between—and so always renegotiating position and trajectory. Engaged in framing and being framed, one’s relation to country is always open: one is always outside, or rather, one is always about—weighing on the limits of a boundary experienced as wholly outside. Speed
Minga walk around touching trees, one by one, slowly, not just look at Rock. Walking, touching, then (as they see Uluru): Oh! —Barbara Tjikatu. The rhythms articulated by closure, and by the negotiation of position and trajectory, affect the pace and character of experience. They articulate threshold, pause and procession. The floor, walls and roof of the centre swell and undulate about fluid and tidal spaces characterised more by energy than shape. Direction and density of movement change according to the body’s relationship to a building that resists. Space pulses between dilation and concentration. It fields a network of spatial dynamics experienced in terms of speed rather than proportion—that is to say, in terms of time. The centre installs both a chorography and a choreography specific to place. Space and movement are orchestrated in a setting that frames for the body and the landscape a poetic of appearance and disappearance, a narrative of presence and absence, an aesthetic of view and review. Playing on the limits of complementarity, these rhythms pace for minga an Anangu reading of Uluru. Glowing: Shedding Skin
This building is for us all. Our beautiful shade house has the Kuniya python built within its shape. Its body is made of mud and its roof is the spine of the python–Topsy Tjulyata. The centre is configured in shadow–as skin, carapace, crust. An arbor stretched over frame and earth wall. Backbone through taut skin—seeing bones under skin like lapped scales, then draped and hanging. An architecture of peeling skin, of pelts. A space made room for in shade by tensing apart earth and sky—by lifting up the skin of dunes and pegging territory. Independent elements of the building‘s two and three-dimensional assembly—frame, surface, mass—slide or shear against each other. Columns hug or part away from walls to open up places of confluence and conveyance. The buildings breathe and open to breezes which are cooled and quickened by passage through shaded and open spaces, perforated curved walls and the undulating skirt of eaves. The centre resists uniformity and the systematics of prefabrication. It contests the metaphor of seamless and effortless craft. Its remarkable body shows the stages of an extremely labour-intensive construction. It registers effort and struggle in the roughness of its bush technology and site-specific assembly. Materiality is taken to excess of bulk, and to saturation of chromatic and textural value. Earth walls and timber soffits receive light from the dune floor and return it to deeply shaded spaces that glow red and purple—swelling and receding with the passage of time. As skin peels back and reveals bone and sinew—again turned inside-out—space is flayed and exposed. Shedding skin, the building reveals Uluru as elemental incandescence—and as the interminable refractions of Tjukurpa. Lots of Tjukurpa Here
All stories round up like horses and put in yard. … talking about making room … whole of the Mutitijulu community … talking to put it all together. Make sure all given, nothing left out. We are still happy … being happy … we are listening … you get it straight. You are inside … no words … draw now … put it on paper. Make drawings … I can’t wait to see it drawn on paper—Tony Tjamiwa. Numerous metaphors code the centre. The two serpentine buildings represent Liru and Kuniya, Anangu and ANCA working together, two dune forms and Uluru. The centre is entered through a serpent’s mouth. Snake motifs multiply in the plan and layout of buildings and low walls, in breezeways, blocks and curved cladding profiles, in roof ridges and the massing of ‘heads’ and ‘tails’, in ornamental schemes on floor and wall, and in slit-eye skylights. The profiles of Uluru and the dunal topography are registered in segmented undulations of roofs read against ground, sky and the rock itself. Displays and videos reinforce this multiple coding by producing shifting and overlaid narratives. They tell not one story but the confluence of numerous stories, of different parts of stories and of numerous versions. They resist a linear reading. They invite a resonant listening which attends to differences—to the specific and particular, rather than the generic. These are the stories and Tjukurpa of Anangu at Uluru—not a “central Australian Aboriginal dreaming”. Likewise, tectonics and spatial experience are constructed around numerous superimposed systems with multiple resonances. For example, in one spot on the entry sequence—where Uluru comes into full view before one turns and heads up into the entry space—there are at least eight elements, each following a different alignment: curved earth wall, inner and outer columns of the verandah, segmented outer ring beams, radiating rafters, battens, the edge of shingle eaves and the inclined, compacted earth floor. These differences are clearly sensed by reading inclined horizontals and verticals of columns and wall surfaces against each other, against people and against the landscape. In these allusions, systems slide over each other and no one system dominates. There is no build-up to a generalised monumental configuration, vista or moment of survey. Any visual sense of the whole is elusive and constantly deferred by the representations made and the resonances produced between buildings and their setting. Rather than disaggregating, this multiplicity tends to symphonic consistency the longer its landscape is walked and traversed. The Uluru-Kata Tjuta Community Centre initiates a physical and cultural experience of the Uluru landscape in which spatial sequence, temporal rhythm and materiality draw on and bring to presence an Anangu practice of understanding place and constructing dwelling. What minga take back in leaving behind is the Tjukurpa of Uluru —walked before. Michael Tawa is a senior lecturer in architecture at the University of New South Wales. ULURU-KATA TJUTA ABORIGINAL CULTURAL CENTRE Architects Gregory Burgess–design architect Gregory Burgess; project architects Peter Ryan, Steve Duddy; project team Ian Khoo,Phillip Bigg, Robert Lock, Anna Linstad, Alvyn Williams, Thomas Kinloch. Initial Project Consultation Gregory Burgess, Taylor Cullity, Sonja Peter. Structural/Civil Engineer W.O. Ross & Associates. Landscape Architect Taylor Cullity. Quantity Surveyor Anthony Prowse & Associates. Display Sonja Peter & Associates, Form Australia (Gerard Mussett), Christopher Knowles. Builder Sitzler Brothers. Site Foreman Roger Starr. |
