A series of stories – a rough version of it all
John Wardle is a collector – of people, of objects, of experiences – and this is apparent in his work, which is multi-layered, complex and finely detailed, amplifying human endeavour. In his
A. S. Hook Address, he reflects on the way that detail can draw out the strategy of an entire project, which in turn has the power to shape community values and effect social change.
I may be the first architect to write the A. S. Hook Address from the confines of a study, within a family home, during a global pandemic. Reflecting in isolation is remarkable and unsettling – since the foundation of the practice, all I have done has been with others.
We are a practice of many across two studios, Melbourne and Sydney, led by five partners –Stefan Mee, Meaghan Dwyer, James Loder, Mathew van Kooy and myself – and four principals – Minnie Cade, Jasmin Williamson, Bill Krotiris and Richard Sucksmith. There are many others in the studio, along with a family whose life has, under my wife Susan’s constant direction, been interwoven with that of the practice.
Our conceptual sketches suggest layers of authorship by many participants, evoking multiple conversations. Often uncertain and exploratory, these drawings are almost always incomplete. The buildings themselves are the result of extraordinary collective endeavour. I thank all those who have shared the journey – the critical audiences who recognize the value our works create and the clients of whom we demand so much. I am deeply appreciative of those who have engaged with us.
I would like to draw you into the stories of practice, which expose some of its rationale. In doing this, I avoid any semblance of manifesto. I will speak of collecting; of people, objects and experiences; and of the underlying curiosity that compels me to appreciate most the work of others that is unlike our own.
It has been 34 years of running hard – always forward, but frequently deviating to navigate new territory.
As we are a “first-generation” practice, new experiences are a constant. Often,
I’ve been too concerned with the running to give much thought to the direction. In writing this address, I’m aware that looking backward can provide a sense of navigation. The patterns become apparent, despite the fact that until recently there has never been a script.
At the time of writing…
Having spent most of 2020 in lockdown in Melbourne, I found that my view was shaped by a curious merging of intimacy and detachment. From my domestic setting, the realities of isolation were felt profoundly, but it was also a year of unusual connection. People were simultaneously data (numbers, percentages, averages) and highly individual – faces on screens set against living rooms, bookcases and other evidence of personal lives.
We’ve been forced to reappraise what’s on our doorstep, the specific things that define communities and our place within them. The five-kilometre rule in Victoria’s stage-four lockdown provided powerful evidence of social inequity – accessibility to green space, cultural institutions and other necessities of life are unequally distributed. The disparities are acutely apparent. Recent shifts in density in parts of our cities have exhausted the capacity of the public domain created by earlier generations. Yet those responsible make little contribution toward necessary new social infrastructure.
The work of architects has always registered moments of change, often in response to traumatic occurrences. These can be times of great invention, of radical shifts in creative practice, of new technologies and, importantly, new codes of cultural practice as society embraces the necessity of change.
There is a tension in our current situation. The push to get the economy up and running again (with stimulus packages driving projects forward) is countered by the pull of the desire to pause and reflect on how we design cities, homes and workspaces – and how we can do it more intelligently, more sustainably. Losing this reflective time to the urgency of kickstarting the economy would demean the deeper lessons of COVID-19. The capacity to adapt and survive, to prosper and benefit from change, will be a measure for success.
One of the foundations of our architectural practice is the constantly shifting tempo of our liaison with others. We see this as a time to undertake substantial change and are exploring new ways to operate through a series of workshops under the themes of: Culture, Technology, Service.
Measures for success are now far more complex and the circumstances informing them shift constantly. For example, we appreciate the advantages of new methods of timber construction and prefabrication as we sequester carbon harvested from trees, but we remain uncertain about the processes of their removal from forests. In the midst of designing buildings to rely less on artificial air-management systems, we experienced a summer of choking bushfire smoke, when operable ventilation remained closed. We must increase the density of our existing suburbs, but are aware of the substantial loss of suburban landscapes. We appreciate that technology is causal in so much of what we now contend with, but is likely to be redemptive in the solutions we seek.
As we engage with issues of far greater complexity than ever before, two key factors – early novation and the self-imposed injustice of constantly lowering fees – work against the resourcing of project-specific research and the critically important design development phase of architectural service. We are rarely empowered to directly change political will or to shift the metrics of large development corporations, but we can manoeuvre into place powerful examples of built work, which can shape community values to effect change.
Much of what we do responds to the immediacy of the present, while being attuned to the need for built work to be purposeful, responsible and constructed well, as if for eternity. I admit to driving more than a skerrick of anxiety into our processes in our endeavour to accord with this. And here lies a conundrum.
Our fleet of four buildings for the University of Tasmania – particularly the latest two, designed during the lockdown – have, under the urgings of an engaged vicechancellor, deeply considered the matter of finite resources and sought to understand and optimize the environmental costs of structure and fabric. We have worked closely with industry more than ever to appraise origins, utilization, assembly and inevitable dismantling to evaluate total carbon utilization through a circular economy. We have developed an architecture of expressive assembly and, in doing so, contemplated its complete disassembly.
An archaeology of sorts
As a 12-year-old growing up in Geelong, I bred bantams. From our home on the edge of the Barwon River, I would follow its winding course to an old farm, where I would swap my pocket money for one or two chicks, tuck them inside my shirt and start the hour-long journey home along the bank, over weirs and up rocky inclines. One day I arrived to find the farm empty of livestock and the house being demolished. The roof and wall lining had been removed to reveal the skeleton of framing. In the centre of it all, perfectly intact, was the original single-room slab hut with a split-shingle roof. I ran between the two large excavators and their cursing operators to collect a series of remnants. This was the first of a number of not-entirely-legal archaeological digs and the start of a life of collecting. More important than the artefacts was the powerful realization of that single moment when all is lost to the irreversibility of demolition.
Mine is a vast and undisciplined collection, the result of “digs” in many places: the builder’s yards at Hadrian’s
Villa and Villa d’Este in Tivoli, roadworks at the Pyramids of Giza, ploughed fields at Agrigento in Sicily, walks through empty villages in rural Japan and the Thames in London at low tide. Also, the junk and antique markets in just about every place Susan and I have visited. The objects assembled are interesting, not for any particular aesthetic value, but for their associations with people, moments within time, various technologies and cultural practices.
Our practice’s design process is often driven by a curiosity about places and about the way disparate objects can be linked by coincidence. We are interested in the commonality between seemingly unrelated things. We appreciate the influence of local craft on the society that has grown around its traditions and we’re fascinated by different societies and their history of making. We often look for ways to incorporate different “making” processes into our own.
Such associations of memory and physical space extend across the city. In 2007, the National Trust of Australia (Victoria) asked me to speak at their annual conference. I presented a bell curve that registered a sad truth. The period of 30 years or so between the fertile years of an architect’s career and the remainder of a life coincides with the degrading of building fabric and shifts in requirements. This means that architects often live to see their best work demolished or substantially altered by the next generation. In presenting the diagram, I argued for earlier recognition of the value of what architects do best and the generational influence between practitioners over time.
My gathering of objects and people has set in train a practice that celebrates the variance of collective endeavour. In 2017, we began the search for the DNA of the practice. This was a year of flux and disruption – Trump had just come to the White House, Syrians were crossing Europe looking for safe haven and our own borders remained closed while our leaders debated immigration policy. Preparing to launch our book This Building Likes Me, I sent out a questionnaire to our staff – Where were they born? What university did they attend? Where were their parents born? Then, as part of a very involved Christmas present, we paid for staff to have DNA tests. This prompted many to delve into their ancestry, which was shared over lunches and Friday-night talks. The theme of hybridity became a focus of our year.
This interest in collective memory also registers in the landscape itself.
The complex and sophisticated systems of land management used by Indigenous peoples have been revealed in new research and recent books, which gather together threads of memory and early reporting.
The assembled knowledge is instructive as we reframe contemporary land practice to combat the results of global warming and land degeneration.
Engaging with First Nations communities is a complex, rich and absolutely necessary endeavour that infuses almost all of our public commissions with new layers of collaboration as we learn from languages and cultures that better describe the Australian landscape and custodianship of place. We must make up for time lost. Encouraged by our engagement during 2020 with Dja Dja Wurrung Elders when designing the Bendigo Law Courts, and the palawa community when designing our University of Tasmania Cradle Coast and Inveresk Campus buildings, we are aiming to create a better framework for these conversations. We have started our Reconciliation Action Plan and I joined several of our team to complete the foundation course in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cultural Competence.
In perfect counterpoint to the intense demands of practice and the urban settings we work within, Waterview on Bruny Island is our important “other place.” Through the Bruny Making workshops, our staff learn from skilled craftspeople about cultural values embodied in processes of making.
Bruny is overtly beautiful, with evidence of its past always ready to surface
in at-times-difficult conversations. I look forward to interlacing specific cultural knowledge developed through research that is being undertaken this year into the precolonial history of this place.
A handrail can laugh
The pandemic has adjusted our collective focus on the details of light, air, outlook and the way assembled elements register our sense of belonging. Buildings that are devoid of fine detail or carelessly assembled rarely engage or sustain my interest.
This characteristic of architectural composition amplifies human endeavour. The invention of a small detail that may cause materials to merge, or separate, or be formed in a particular way, is an acutely creative act that encourages the participation of highly skilled others, within and beyond the practice, to develop and then fabricate. These processes also encourage technological invention.
As a practice, we’ve always been preoccupied by the making of things. This curiosity takes us out of the studio and into workshops and factories, forming relationships that endure. It draws us back into the history of making and forward to new applications of craft and the implementation of new technologies.
We are interested in how manufacturing processes have influenced patterns of settlement, creating regional variance and reinforcing generational identities. We add to this the knowledge of materials usage and the critical evaluation of resourcing and assembly to accord with new metrics for sustainability. This is an exciting era as new forms of craft evolve, linking more strongly to community values.
The “invented detail” can evoke the strategy of an entire project. I marvelled when visiting Donovan Hill’s C House – a vastly ambitious proposition for subtropical living that infuses every detail, from the turn of a table edge to the fabrication of a latch on a bedroom door. Detail can also be invested with whimsy and humour. Durbach Block Jaggers can compose a stair, a light fitting, a window reveal or a handrail that appears to be laughing – though I’ve never been sure if it is laughing with us or at us.
The concern with fit and assembly translates to the scale of the city itself, as we frequently seek to find accordance with, and at times disrupt, patterns beyond the boundaries of our commission. We position our work as an active agent in the evolution of such places. Sometimes the patterns may be lost or barely register in the jostle of a city, but they can be reclaimed by architecture’s ability to recall.
Working with raw matter
I commenced architectural studies at RMIT as a new era began, as dean Graeme Gunn devised a new syllabus and shaped a new course. We learnt of Robin Boyd and Kevin Borland, the architectural history of other parts of the world, the tail end of European modernism and the arrival of American postmodern theory, while two blokes called Rex and Ron taught us to draft with Rotring pens, leaving us largely alone between their visits to the
Oxford Scholar Hotel.
Peter Corrigan’s first day was also mine. His first lecture, delivered in full denim, was a revelation. His earliest lectures were anecdotal – stories of practice and his experiences as a graduate architect in the US. He brought to life
Paul Rudolph, Philip Johnson and Louis Kahn. For me, the stories of Kahn were profound – an immigrant outsider who jostled for position among the established practices of the East Coast. (Recently, I reassembled components from the living room corner in Kahn’s Fisher House into the design of my study in Melbourne.)
Corrigan demanded that we get out and engage with the city. He encouraged us to look beyond conventional architectural source material and guided us toward literature and theatre. This was a particularly fertile time in Australian theatre and Peter was deeply involved in the Australian Performing Group and set design.
He was brutal in his criticism, equally terrifying and humorous, but warm, deeply appreciative and encouraging of those willing to expose their processes in the formulation of ideas.
After graduating in 1981,
I joined Cocks and Carmichael Architects. Peter Carmichael could design a house appropriately zoned for an entire family with next to no passageways. The Growth House for Civic Constructions, and others for Merchant Builders, were remarkable examples of project houses. Uncluttered yet extraordinarily inventive, they were far more spatially sophisticated and appropriately scaled than the dull tract housing currently devouring our outer suburban landscapes.
Cocks and Carmichael was a practice of great generosity, much humour, long lunches and fine stories of the antics of the two partners. It was a fertile seedbed that, by my calculation, spawned 10 Melbourne architectural practices.
In 2001, I completed my Master of Architecture by project at RMIT with
Leon van Schaik and Sand Helsel. Entitled
“Cut Threads and Frayed Ends: The character of enclosure,” the thesis included writing, diagrams and a constructed object – A Music Stand for a Middle
Child, which, due to its late arrival and complexity, was assembled by eight joiners during the course of my dissertation presentation. The theatre of its assembly greatly benefited my presentation.
The dangerous pursuit of collecting ceramics
In Shanghai for a conference some years ago, I visited an antique market in the old town. As I looked through the many stalls, a young guy asked if I’d like to buy a genuine Ming bowl. I expressed interest and we walked for several blocks. The streets became smaller and turned to laneways, then to passages between light courts behind buildings. We turned many times, until we reached an ancient timber staircase within a seemingly empty building of many rickety levels.
Another guy fell in behind us and I started to feel apprehensive. Up two or three levels, two more joined the procession. At this point, I began to feel concerned for my safety. Then the leader unlocked the door to an empty room and closed it behind us. Panic set in as I considered the likelihood of a violent encounter.
Just as he opened an old cupboard and removed a small, wrapped object, I decided to run. As I fled for the door, he unwrapped it and held to the light from a single window the most beautiful bowl I have ever seen.
But by now it was too late. While fleetingly admiring the bowl, I’d already pushed one guy aside, leapt for the door and hurled myself down the stairs. I shall never know the bowl’s value or authenticity. I’m fairly certain the four weren’t archaeologists, nor potters, but they’d had plenty of opportunity to do me harm and hadn’t done so. My moment of panic remains one of my great regrets.
Small objects such as this can be considered maquettes that can be scaled up through discussion and infused with aesthetic value. They acutely express the process of their making and, like architecture, contain stories that encompass utility and cultural practice.
A visit to the historic bottle kilns of Stoke-on-Trent in England later found expression in the towering forms and associated gathering spaces of the Learning and Teaching Building at Monash University. These spaces also invite parallels between the process of firing malleable clay and the intense process of tertiary education on the raw matter of young minds.
Our 2011 proposal for the new Australian Pavilion in Venice deployed a complex system of terracotta segments, developed with industrial designer Simon Lloyd. Fired from a mix of Australian ochres and Italian soils, ridges and seams created a vigorous texture that, we imagined, would be made by the small terracotta factories of the Veneto. The gallery’s outer profile followed the outline of Andrea Palladio’s Loggia del Capitanio (1565), forming an open side suggestive of an informal Australian marquee. The sheer complexity of the idea appeared to terrify the jury. It remains one of our most glorious failures.
Learning perspective from an old Italian
In 1982, as a young graduate, I visited the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza. Designed by Palladio in 1580, the theatre houses Vincenzo Scamozzi’s trompe l’oeil street scenes, which exaggerate the perspective from each of Palladio’s seven portals.
As we entered the vacant theatre, an elderly Italian man, speaking English with an American accent, began reciting the theatre’s history. Unseen at first, then fleetingly visible as he walked back and forth, along and between Scamozzi’s streets, he described the intentions of the building’s creators. He began by explaining the compositional techniques, highlighting how the combination of variant perspectives creates a performative quality, distorting perceptions of scale and distance. He continued by describing the aural shape, projecting his voice to show how acoustic character is formed within the confines of a space. On closing, he walked to the front of the stage to engage with
us, his audience of two. Looking straight ahead, he missed us completely. He was blind, his perception acutely aural.
This story has had many lives over many projects.
The registering of our place in space, and our perception of the world beyond, is central to human experience.
The appreciation of spatial perception as a means of navigation has informed many projects. We frequently arrange spaces sequentially to unfold frames of experience. Thresholds and portals – those moments of intimacy and engagement, of arrival or outlook – are the most intensive elements of our work.
Responding to an invitation to participate in the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, we created a series of sets that reversed Scamozzi’s inverted perspectives, forming picture planes drawn toward the audience. The installation drew on earlier projects exploring Venice and exchanges between Italy and Australia – our ill-fated Australian Pavilion competition entry and our successful 2015 design for the inaugural Tapestry Design Prize for Architects for the Australian Tapestry Workshop. Somewhere Other became more instrument-like, much like a camera, with body removed to express its working functions. Exhibition-goers were invited to look within a vast, cantilevering, quilted timber portal, toward a cinematic representation of places within buildings (created through mirrors devised by artist Natasha Johns-Messenger and films by Coco and Maximilian).
Conceived in Melbourne, Somewhere Other was meticulously constructed in Geelong and clad in spotted gum, with a funnel-shaped form blown in Venetian glass by an Italian glass artist and supported on a framework of steel fabricated in rural Victoria. In Venice, we soaked the inner walls with eucalyptus to honour the lessons of that old Italian.
Do buildings speak?
If so, in what language?
In the essay “John Wardle is curious,”
Rory Hyde writes, “Architecture is a fairly low-resolution, inarticulate medium.
If you want to stage a grand epic, write an opera; if you want to explore emotions, write a poem.”1
I agree that architecture is a blunt instrument when the author’s narrative remains the primary reading of a building. Buildings stand for so long that it is implausible for stories of their authors’ creative objectives to remain the central narrative. The intentions of architectauthors are separate from the sensory experiences of places and such knowledge is not necessary to navigate them.
Our buildings frequently contain a series of narratives, told in a manner that requires engagement and discovery. We embed the suggestion of a story, leaving space for interpretation, thereby inviting individual experience to become part of the collective experience.
At times, we appropriate other people’s stories and add them to our own, fuelling narratives that may or may not be evident in completed work.
C. J. Dennis’s ode to the Sydney Harbour Bridge, “I dips me lid,” motivated our design for the summer pavilion at the National Gallery of Victoria. In our case, we dipped to a different Sydney – the Sidney Myer Music Bowl – paying homage to the exuberant and innovative structure of one of Melbourne’s great civic spaces. D. H. Lawrence’s note “Upside Down at the Bottom of the World,” written forlornly at the end of each of his letters home from Australia in the 1920s, became an appreciation of our position in the world – upside down, held by gravity to the base of this vast sphere. This has infused many design discussions, over many projects.
Much of what we do in this country adapts, modifies and, in the process, irrevocably changes cultural practices from elsewhere to fit the circumstances, environment and climate of our location. This provides a frame of reference that celebrates the rigour of hybridity that suffuses many of our projects.
The work of artists helps us to make sense of our lives and the world around us, and at times provides moments of release and joy. The ability of art to provoke helps us to contend with uncertainties and conflicts that are beyond our control. Our projects have drawn the work of many artists into the public realm. Located in public places, these works become shared artefacts and form part of a community’s collection.
In 2003, we commissioned
Peter Kennedy to create a 36-metre-long neon artwork running the length of the window of our Russell Street studio.
And So … Illumination 1 created a powerful connection to the city. Later reconfigured by Peter, it now turns a corner at our
Rokeby Street studio, while a neon test element is installed in our Sydney studio.
On Top of the World is a program that Stewart Russell and I devised in 2012. People from across the visual arts are invited to speak at a series of roof terrace events. Each guest designs a flag, which is raised – with much fanfare – at the start of the session. Clients, collaborators and friends of the practice come together to learn from each other and to appreciate different perspectives in art through the medium of a single flag.
Just as art doesn’t require a script to be appreciated, do we need a script to understand a building? Can our appreciation be both universal and specific to place and culture? We do know that we are imprinted genetically from generations past. The imprinting of pain and joy and habit comes from hundreds of years of pain and joy and habit, which suggests that specific cultural awareness may determine many of our memories of appreciation. I imagine that aesthetic appreciation is instinctive and relies on memory and the brain’s recall of experience from all our senses.
This may suggest that buildings can only speak to an audience in a single language. However, as we counter intellect with emotion, we are so often drawn to collective, ineffable appreciation of aesthetic experience and an instinctive acuity that encompasses the geography of the planet, its many cultures and the span of time.
Footnote
1. Rory Hyde, “John Wardle is curious,” Architecture Australia, vol 109 no 3, May/Jun 2020, 110–111.