ALBERT’S FOLLY, Interpretation Machines, And the Seeking of Treasure on St Andrew’s Eve.
ALBERT REX
RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nations on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business. I thank Sophia Pearce, Barry Pearce, Betty Pearce, the Culpra Milli Aboriginal Corporation, and th broader Barkindgi people for inviting and warmly welcoming myself and my class onto their land.
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PATCHES OF THE FOLLOWING HAVE BEEN DRAWN TOGETHER/ MISINTERPRETED IN THE MELTING OF THIS PROJECT: 1. ROBERT FROST: A Boy’s Will, North of Boston, Mountain Interval, The Figure A Poem Makes. On ambiguity, understanding how ideas can unfold and grow, and the organisation of relationships and tensions. Found in: Frost, R., (2013). Vintage Frost. The Collected Poems. Vintage, Great Britain, pp1-156. 2. ANNA TSING: The Mushroom at the End of the World On overlooked socio-economic constructions, the latent commons and the great resource this represents. Tsing, A., (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton University Press, USA. 3. JAMES CORNER: The Agency of Mapping. On the power that maps hold as creative, regulatory tools and how this is often overlooked by designers and built environment professionals. Corner, J. (1999). Mappings: The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention. 1st ed. London: Reaktion Books, pp. 231-252. 4. MILES FRANKLIN: My Brilliant Career On what it was to be a European settler/ invader in early colonial Australia. Franklin, M., (1901) My Brilliant Career, Angus and Robertson Publishers, 1978, Australia. 5. ROBERT CHAMBERS: Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA): Analysis of Experience On working with Subaltern communities and being aware of/ offsetting associated power imbalances. Chambers, R., (1994). Participatory rural appraisal (PRA): Analysis of Experience*, in World Development, Great Britain: Pergamon, Vol. 22, no. 9. Pp1253-1268. 6. MICHEL FOUCAULT: The Order of Things On the influence the organisational systems we use to break the world up have on what we do and don’t see. Foucault, M., (1989) The Order of Things. Great Britain: Routledge. Foreword, Preface, Chapter 1: pp i-18. 7. HENRI LEFEBVRE: The Production of Space On how we work with Social, Mental and Physical spaces, and how these play out against/ into each other. Lefebvre, H., (1991). The production of space. Australia, UK, USA: Blackwell Publishing. 8. FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY: Crime and Punishment On compassion and empathy. Dostoyevsky, F., Pevear, R. and Volokhonsky, l. (1991). Crime and punishment. London: Penguin Books, p.628. 9. JOHN STEINBECK: The Grapes of Wrath & Tortilla Flat On empathy and the beauty in heterogeneity Steinbeck, J., (1939). The Grapes of Wrath. Great Britain: Penguin Books, p.137. Steinbeck, J., (1935). Tortilla Flat. Great Britain: Penguin Books. 10. HENRY LAWSON: The Drovers Wife & The Roaring Days On what it was to be a European settler/ invader in early colonial Australia. Lawson, H., (1976). The Portable Henry Lawson. University of Queensland Press, Australia. 11. VICTOR FLEMING: Gone with the Wind On how histories layer up and fracture against eachother Fleming, V., (1940) Gone with the Wind, USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer 12. STANLEY KUBRICK: 2001: A space Odyssey On orbits, rich spatial relationships and choreography. Kubrick, S., 2001: A Space Odyssey, USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer 13. HOWARD HAWKS: Only Angels Have Wings On points of light in the dark and the narrow paths toward them. Hawks, H., (1939), Only Angels Have Wings, USA: Columbia Pictures 3
A special note must be made of the essential role played by Jock Gilbert, Sophia Pearce, Christine Philips, Steve Mintern, Simon Robertson and all other affiliates of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Reconciliation Engagement Steering Group, without whom this work would have been impossible to undertake.
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The work of Robert Frost has played an important role in framing this project in terms of motion. His work is scattered throughout this document in recognition of that reality and I hope his work’s contribution becomes more apparent through these patches. Here we see a fantastic explanation of how an idea can/ should best unfold into the world through time. 7
HOW TO READ THIS_ Anna Tsing’s fantastic recent book “The Mushroom at the End of the World”2 has been an exceptionally influential source in the unfolding of this project. In the below quote from her introduction to the book, Tsing writes about how she hopes readers will engage with her work. I hope that this document will be able to operate structurally in a similar way: -
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CONTENTS_
10. INTRODUCTION 12. Bias Offsetting 38. Transects 48. Using Transects 52. ALBERT’S FOLLY 54. Culpra Station: Impressions 68. Culpra Station: Proposal 92. Interlude: Travel 110. THE SEEKING OF TREASURE ON ST. ANDREW’S EVE 112. Transects 2 122. Transects 3 150. A Rhythm or a Path 174. Interlude: The Seeking of Treasure on St. Andrew’s Eve 178. Towards a New What? 191. Anti-Endings
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INTRODUCTION
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INTRODUCTION
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BIAS OFFSETTING
We took a walk around the city and thought about what we did and didn’t see.6 We were learning to look for things that were not imediately evident or were not evident to us. To work through this we produced two maps of our walk. One of what we did see and one of what we didn’t see.
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WHAT I DID SEE_
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WHAT I DID NOT SEE_
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WHAT I DID NOT SEE: ENCOURAGING THE UNEXPECTED_
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WHAT I DID NOT SEE: EXCITEMENT_
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TRANSECTS
The transect has been an essential tool in the unfolding of this project. We have used transects to draw together desperate chains of information and connotation in an easily readable way. As landscape architects we take a section line through real space as a base. This experimentation with transects along Birrarung Marr served as preperation, allowing us to work confidently in the limited time we had at Culpra Station later on.
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USING TRANSECTS
A well drawn transect can serve as an incredibly helpful aid in developing design interventions. It is as simple as observing the relationships at play and using space to manipulate them toward some kind of end. We see this unfolding at Birrarung Marr in the following section and later again at Culpra Station.
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ALBERT’S FOLLY
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ALBERT’S FOLLY
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CULPRA STATION: IMPRESSIONS
I call it a folly because instead of engaging with the people who invited me onto their land, I spent a large chunk of my time exploring and trying to understand what the early colonial experience in this area would have been like. In addition, the work I produced was all about this colonial experience. I would refine this later in the process, re-arranging my folly in attempt to have it servers a larger and more important project.
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This map shows the area imediatley around Culpra Station overlayed with the standard grid used by Designers, Builder and myriad other arms of the global North’s development apartus. We see the grid faltering and fading away as it crosses over space where its influence is less observable. (National Parks and Culpra Station).
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CULPRA STATION: PROPOSAL
Using a transect, my experience with the space, conversations with its owners and conversations with Jesika Ellul, Lise Haarseth, Scarlett McClure & Emma Croker I developed a design proposal that repurposed delapidated agricultural infrastructure for water collection. This establish a an optomistic conversation among the temporal patches on site, a position that would carry on in spirit throug the rest of the project.
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INTERLUDE: TRAVEL
We travelled to do this work, and more importantly we travelled close to the ground. We drove in a messy loud bus, slept in tents and didn’t have easy access to many of the conveinces we are accustomed. This process served as a powerful technique not only for locating us on a regional scale but also reafirming one of the core principles that this work is shot through by: That the support systems we use to operate on a daily basis have a profound effect on what and how we see. This is a particularly empowering point to make in a Landscape Architectural context because it makes apparent that these support systems are not only mental but also physical, suggesting the interventions in a physical space can refract back through how we percieve it. 92
Map outling our the spacial relationships of our trip. From Melbourne, To Robinvale, To Lake Mungo, To Culpra, To the Grampians, and back to Melbourne.
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THE SEEKING OF TREASURE ON ST. ANDREW’S EVE
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THE SEEKING OF TREASURE ON ST. ANDREW’S EVE
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TRANSECTS 2
The work at Culpra was messy, and impossible to sift into discrete categories. When we got home however, to a farmiliar enviornment, everything became a lot easier to cut up. This section shows how work fromt he trip was recorded, broken over space and consolidated into patches to provide a stable building material for construction.
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TRANSECTS 3
If the last section can be looked at soemthing of an extension of the transect, that is, a recording of what we see, then this section is where the leap is made into reorgainsing that information and building it up into something new, hopefully something that responds to some of the tensions highlighted in earler work.
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A WINDOW TO THE PAST_
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REWRITING BACK INTO THE PRESENT_
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THE LIGHT IN THE VALLEY_
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DON’T FOLLOW THE LIGHT!_
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BUNYIP HOUSE/ HOUSE OF GHOSTS_
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SELF-SUPPORTING STRUCTURE_
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NESTINGS, OFFSETS AND ECHOES THAT BUILD UP_
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GHOST FOLLIES_
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INTERSECTIONS INTO CULPRA - ROUGH_
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GHOST HOUSE FRAMED_
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HARMONIES7: 6 SECTIONS THROUGH TIME_
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A RHYTHM OR A PATH
The various strands of the project where fraying and diverging. I needed a frame to tie them to and so constrained myself by centring the project aroudn 12 intersections in the road from the Highway to the Culpra campsite. My follies, when strategically aranged against these intersections, would generate a simple but secret directional map for informed individuals hoping to navigate to the camp site.
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GETTING TO CULPRA CAMPSITE_
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NOT THIS WAY!_
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MAP WILL GET YOU TO CAMPSITE_
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NEW RELATIONSHIP ESTABLISHED_
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AN INTERPRETATION MACHINE
The question now becomes what else do these follies do? I chose one of these locations (the location of our transect) to explore this. The site, however, is was indeciphrably loud, and I was left with no choice but to produce a kind of loose interpretation machine as an aid to help extract workable chunks of information while still keeping an eye on offseting bias.5
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Here we see the machine. A model of site that when finished will only be able to be seen through these 5 view holes. No one can see the whole model and design work will have to work out from these views. 165
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5. LATE SPRING Robust and contaminated space.
6. I don’t know!
ALBERT’S FOLLY, Interpretation Machines,
#The black line follows a growth in the generation of new spaces.
And the Seeking of Treasure on St. Andrew’s Eve.
4. SPRING Builders and others begin to write back into (the) folly/ homestead.
#The red dotted line follows the pathof the landscape architect.
A lantern light from deep in the barn Shone on a man and woman in the door And threw their lurching shadows on a house Nearby, all dark in every glossy window. Frost, R. North of Boston
LATE SPRING
5. Towards a takeoff.
3. EARLY SPRING Homestead is reframed through (the) folly.
SPRING
4. Campers use structure.
2. LATE WINTER Building, in both senses of the word.
EARLY SPRING
1:500 @ A1 N
1. WINTER Old Homestead, trees, large space. LATE WINTER
3. Old framed by new.
WINTER
1.Homestead
2. Working on a building.
ALBERT REX
Sections 1:300 @ A1
A clear representation illustrating the operation of the relationships of this loose interpretation machine. The model is doing multiple things at once and is doing them at the same place in the same time. There is an economy to this representation that aims to invite speculation. 172
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INTERLUDE: THE SEEKING OF TREASURE ON ST. ANDREW’S EVE
Now and then Pilon and Big Joe passed other searchers...Who could say whether all of them were really living men? ... The wind arose as the walked and drove the fog across the pale moon... The moving fog gave shifting form to the forest... Pilon know it was not good to listen to the talking of the trees. No good ever came from knowing the future... The fog siren began its screaming on the Point, far below them; and it wailed its sorrow fro all the good ships that had drwoned on the iron reef, and for all those others that would sometime die there...
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TOWARDS A NEW WHAT?
The machine worked! It cut things up in a way that let me write into them coherently. It gave me space for a narrative. Of course, the narrative that the machine revealed is again one of economy, and it would not be in the spirit of this piece of work to offer any kind of central aim. Instead, below, I offer you the story itself. Please feel free to cut transcets through it, put it through interpretation machines or indeed really do whatever you need to continue this productive process of recombination!
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1. The homestead as we know it today. It is important to note that while the homestead, intervention and distances between them appear different shapes and sizes between these sections, it must be kept in mind that they are cut radially, along a circle rather than a straight line. This does very interesting things to perspective and turns correct scale on its head, by using it as aid to ambiguity and heterogeneity.
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1. Some people are working on the building. These, if CMAC see fit, could be local young Aboriginal people coming to learn standard building and carpentry skills. This could also feed into Office’s proposal to work with River Red Gum timber on site to produce furniture and other wood products. Already, a simple change is jump-starting a whole series of exciting possibilities.
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3. The folly is complete and the relationship between folly and homestead is highlighted. This is underlined by the radial nature of sections and the slight perspective warp in this model that makes patches closer to the POV of the observer (from the machine) ((pp 181)) larger. This is a choreographing of physical, social and mental space that is in a way booby trapped toward re-interpretation. 184
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4. People. Perhaps these people are the people who built the folly coming back to admire, restore, show off or make use of their work. Perhaps they are people from Melbourne who heard about the new facilities on Office’s website. Both these patches of relatiionships present fasciniting potential, not to mention the enthralling possibility of these two potential groups coliding. Who knows what that could produce!
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5. And through movement, the transition begins. Our radial sections are pivoting away from the folly and back toward the homestead. We, the designers, are also pivoting away from site. A rich series of relationships have been set up, they have grown, and this area is now ripe for something new and exciting, something that would have been possible without the process that led up to it, but also importantly can’t be defined by said process. 188
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Some readings of this piece of work talk about it as being a celebration of an independent spirit. However another reading could render it more about the central importance of writing back into our stories.
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ANTI-ENDINGS
This is not the end, however,
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I AM DONE WITH APPLE PICKING (FOR) NOW.
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