One or two things I know about … JWA1
Leon van Schaik recognizes John Wardle’s ability to bring mindfulness, and a devotion to detail, to projects at all scales in his quest to counter entropy and affirm that we understand the intricacies of our universe.
Thirty-two years ago, when I was getting to know Melbourne and its architecture, there were persistent whisperings about a beach house at Balnarring, said to be remarkable. Eventually I met John Wardle, the author of this much-discussed house, and went on a site visit with him – the first, as it turned out, of many visits to his buildings in subsequent years. And yes, indeed, the house was remarkable; a hybrid of an autonomous object – almost cabinetry-like, giving the impression that a drawer could be pulled out in an act of extension – and site specificity, the way it rested among the tea-trees seeming effortlessly right in weight and density. It was, and still is, utterly wonderful, and it signalled the hybridity that has characterized all the work of
John Wardle Architects.
Later, I was able to engineer some of John’s earliest public commissions: the extraordinarily cost-effective and delightful International Centre of Graphic Technology at RMIT University’s Brunswick campus (2000, in association with Demaine Partnership), and the Biosciences Building on the Bundoora campus (2002, in association with DesignInc). In 2001, as part of the design practice research program that I had initiated at RMIT in 1987, John undertook an investigation into his own way of designing, titling his findings “Cut threads and frayed ends: The character of enclosure.”2 Unforgettably, he summarized his findings in the articulations of a joinery unit, the Masters Unit that resides in his house. Each opening drawer or extension described a design strategy more eloquently than words ever could. At one end, taking a section and extruding it to lengths extended a set of drawers that telescoped out, one from another, until, in the last, a pencil was revealed. As architectural theorist Diane Lewis said at that time, “What is this? A pencil. You cannot take this away from an architect.”
Somehow
Somehow, in John, there is a supreme quest to counter entropy, and in this quest, he allies himself with all others who create sense out of dumb matter. Recent collaborators include artist Natasha Johns-Messenger, with whom JWA collaborated on Somewhere Other (2018), and ceramicist Simon Lloyd, with whom John designed the Systems Vases (2018). He opens embassies with many who have glimpsed a higher order of a more than quantum mechanical probability, seeking arrangements that are both here and there, and that are scaleless. A handle incised in the width of a cabinet door scales to a cleft in a cliff face; a table leg is at once a leg and a confluence of geometries; and a coffee table scales to a civic presence in an urban landscape. Fascinated by what we recall and by the commonalities between things – he discusses a pair of Japanese shoes with breeze holes and a 1720 vase perforated to hold flowers – John choreographs scenographies in his designs, his unfolding plans orchestrating rich passages towards framed views.
Emblematics
In this quest, John sets out the emblematic and that which disturbs it – openings to the concatenations of present being – and he finds in that conflict a quantum resolution, a fractal spread from moments of solitary intimacy to “joyous” (his adjective) social engagement. He observes potters in workshops, arranged as they have been for millennia, melding clay into factures with ancient antecedents, and he is fascinated that every successful firing (while so many others fail) reveals a fresh presence.
Cabinets, baskets
Cabinet-makers take timber and make it wood, make it – under John’s urgings – into the essence of what wood can do. Basket weavers take their craft and, at his request, launch their efforts from the carried to the carrying. In his mind’s eye, the processes of lived life find form. The functional sequences of a winery (Vineyard Residence, 2004) flow into an expression of the age-old craft, while the pleasures of city living – vestibule, reception, arcade and coffee bar – are wrapped into form in The Urban Workshop (2006, a joint venture between JWA, Hassell and NH Architecture).
In every design, John conducts the skills of the office and of his web of artisans in a concerted drive to describe our being in the world, our “lovely world.”
Houses
Houses continue to be crucibles of invention for JWA. A house on Lake Wendouree in Ballarat (2012) draws its skirts up around itself to create a view of the lake as if the road that interrupts that view is a mere ha-ha. Fairhaven Beach House (2012, recipient of the Robin Boyd Award for Residential Architecture 2013) fissures at right angles to the cliffs, drawing into its heart the sea and its waves. On inland dunes, Wonthaggi House (2020) floats above grassy slopes, presenting a childlike archetype of the house form so devoid of detail that it appears at first to be long abandoned, weathered into purity; yet, when approached from a gully below, a magic undercroft threshold opens, from which the internal form is entirely evident.
The dimple
In Phoenix Gallery (2020), a square facade of slightly undulating brickwork is elevated from a sheet that has been dimpled, and that dimple becomes a window, an eye to the long leg of a T-junction street. In John’s designing, there is a quiet determination to make sense of “what is out of what is.” In “Cut threads and frayed ends,” John explains that he never turns a corner but rather finds the section and extrudes to length, and caps that cut. We see that approach in the International Centre of Graphic Technology design, in the Biosciences Building and in his own house in Kew (2000). For John, there are no false problems; the universe has no interest in classical formalism.
The awareness connector
This architect is a connector. John links and builds bridges between where he comes from and where his collaborators have come from. From his early student days at RMIT, he recalls Peter Corrigan, fresh from studying in the USA, lecturing on famous architects and revealing their histories, their lands, their personhood, their places, their families and their people. Still inspired by those lectures, John surveys his in the studio, discovering the diversity of lands and schools from which they have emerged. John draws on the differences that his collaborators offer; he choreographs and composes their inputs into continuums that span from a groove in a cupboard to a suite of vases for celebrating the brief life of flowers, to bricks that fold around our own brief lives, capturing – however brief – traces of consciousness, of what humanity has evolved to gift to the universe: awareness. John celebrates such traces, re-creating in his study at home and in his own way a window of Louis Kahn’s that caught his attention in one of Corrigan’s lectures years ago. “Only connect,” wrote novelist E. M. Forster, as if foreseeing John’s philosophy.
Meaning? At every scale
This, says John, is what fighting entropy grants to us: a declaration that we do matter, that all is not contingent, that in our doings we can show that we understand the intricacies of the universe at every scale and – as John describes in “Cut threads and frayed ends” – “scalelessly.” John is mindful always of the butterfly effect of every act, of every designing moment; mindful of the vitality of the moments – their variety and their specificity; mindful of the fleeting presence of our mentality. He is mindful of space– time and all of its illusions; aware that consciousness evolves without beginning or end, is forever present and is that upon which future generations build. John is mindful at all scales: even as the practice has expanded greatly since its early days, it has remained devoted to details on projects of all types and sizes.
International cultural resonance Architects in the pre-information eras were riding on the cultural dominations of empires, and this spun their significance well beyond their intrinsic value. John’s practice rides no such tide. JWA and its manner of working exemplify what is best about the Australian way of doing and being, the “fair go, mate” ethos.
JWA is a maker of material, not in a wealth-syphoning “world city” but in the multicultural cosmopolises of Australia. As part of this “bringing together,” architect John can draw out, draw on and creatively combine the mental spaces of people from many worlds, past, present and future.
— Leon van Schaik is innovation professor of architecture at RMIT University, where he holds an Innovation Chair in Design Practice Research.
Footnotes
1. The title of this essay refers to a 1967 film by Jean-Luc Godard, Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (Two or three things I know about her), because I have, in the past, compared the way in which John Wardle orchestrates his practice to the way in which film directors work.
2. John Wardle, “Cut threads and frayed ends: The character of enclosure,” The practice of practice: Research in the medium of design (RMIT University Press, 2003), 204–222.