The Return of the Object

The Return of the Object

Architect Victoria 2018 winter .

$14.90 Official Journal of the Australian Institute of Architects Victorian Chapter Print Post approved PP 381667-00206 • ISSN 1329-1254 .

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EnginEEring to shapE thE way wE livE Expertise in structural, civil, building services, environmentally sustainable design, facade, traffic transport & parking and waste engineering solutions.

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1. Banksia, NewQuay McBride Charles Ryan (Image Dianna Snape)

2. Melbourne Grammar School Geoff Handbury Science and Technology Hub Denton Corker Marshall (Image Gollings Photography)

3. Monash University, Caulfield Library Refurbishment John Wardle Architects (Image Dianna Snape)

4. Trinity Grammar School, Centre for Business and Social Enterprise

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McIntyre Partnership Architects (Image Bart Borgeshi)

Melbourne

Darwin

Bendigo

L3 289 Wellington Parade South East Melbourne VIC 3002 t +613 9622 9700 mlb@irwinconsult.com.au

82 Smith Street Darwin NT 0800 t +618 8980 5900 drw@irwinconsult.com.au

133 McCrae Street Bendigo VIC 3550 t +613 5442 6333 bgo@irwinconsult.com.au

www.irwinconsult.com.au

Contents —

Architect Victoria winter 2018 02 03 07 10 12 16 20 23 26 28 30 33 34 36 38 40 46 48

President’s message Chapter news Editorial David Gianotten On MPavilion Article by Howard Raggatt Interview with Farshad Mehdizadeh Interview with Fooi-Ling Khoo and Rose Nolan Interview with John Wardle Article by Igor Kebel and Eriko Watanabe Slice New projects Profile Ritz&Ghougassian In memory of Max Chester Interview with Carey Lyon Article by James Staughton Leanne Zilka On floppy objects Article by Rob McBride and Debbie Ryan Paul Morgan On the architectural object From the Office of the Victorian Government Architect

Australian Institute of Architects Victorian Chapter Level 1, 41 Exhibition St Melbourne, VIC 3000

Magazine Editor Ruth White

Cover MPavilion model by OMA

Editorial and Publishing Coordinator Emma Adams

Contact D — 1800 770 617 E — vic@ architecture.com.au W — architecture.com.au

Architect Victoria acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the land on which our office is located, and pays respect to the Elders past, present and future.

Guest Editors Toby Reed Anna Nervegna

This publication is copyright No part of it may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, mechanical, microcopying, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the permission of the Australian Institiute of Architects Victorian Chapter.

ABN 72 000 023 012 Subscriptions Five print issues per year, including Awards edition (AUD) $80 Australia/NZ $120 Overseas

Editorial Committee James Staughton (Chair) Elizabeth Campbell Laura Held Yvonne Meng John Mercuri Justin Noxon Sarah Rees Keith Westbrook

Design Direction Annie Luo Printing Whirlwind Print

Disclaimer Readers are advised that opinions expressed in articles and in editorial content are those of their authors, not of the Australian Institute of Architects represented by its Victorian Chapter. Similarly, the Australian Institute of Architects makes no representation about the accuracy of statements or about the suitability or quality of goods and services advertised.

President’s message —

The important role architects play

Victorian Chapter President Amy Muir

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There is a lot happening on many fronts that we are collectively tackling, all of which typically lead towards advocating for the important role architects play.

In having a voice, and projecting this voice, we are able to contribute to conversation and debate.

Cladding has raised significant concerns for our industry and the manner in which projects are procured. It is a timely reminder that the industry needs to be vigilant and to understand the shortcomings of current procurement methods and contractual arrangements. Victorian Chapter representatives met with the Cladding Taskforce CEO, Rob Spence, to push for improved responsibilities of architects, the registration of project managers, and professional indemnity to be bound by a Code of Conduct that preclude financial gain from material substitutions.

The Institute has been involved in a number of discussions and forums with the City of Melbourne, reviewing proposed amendments to the C308 Melbourne Planning Scheme.

These amendments are intended to lift the quality of design for the city. This is a positive and welcomed step forward for Melbourne and the evolution of our built environment. With every change there are knock-on effects, the Institute is currently in the process of putting together a submission that raises concerns and proposes solutions.

Our Large Practice Forum has been active in their discussions around novation and Amendment C308. It is encouraging to see so many practice leaders and key influencers contributing to these sessions, which can only assist in adding weight to our efforts to lobby for effective change.

Chapter representatives have also been working with the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning, along with other industry bodies to assist in the review of Better Apartment Design Standards.

We continue to advocate for the involvement of a registered architect in all apartment buildings over three storeys, better building supervision, putting an end to the practice of product substitution for short-term profit and accountability of the design beyond planning approval.

Recently, the Institute held a joint industry event with the Planning Institute of Australia and the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects.

The intention of the event was for the various institutes to highlight their preelection platform agendas and to open up the discussion to various industry members. The Victorian Chapter’s platform focuses on four points that we are asking the State Government of Victoria and political parties for their commitment to a strong Office of the Victorian Government Architect, improved procurement practices, better design standards, and more affordable housing. A series of meetings have been arranged to discuss these agenda items with the various political parties.

This year we were very keen to ramp up our awards media coverage.

Media has become a fickle beast, and for us it was important to broaden the conversation to the public realm and to discuss the importance of building sustainable communities through considered quality design responses and outcomes. We were also keen to represent varying voices in an attempt to avoid looking inwards – clients advocating for the role of architects.

The awards were published in over 70 media forums leading up to, on the day, and post awards. We are now in the process of assessing how we can maintain this advocacy momentum.

We know what good architectural outcomes look like and that we are able to achieve them under traditional and non-traditional contracts and procurement methods.

The awards are proof of this. But we also know that this is becoming a more problematic arena, one where our role is limited, our expertise is compromised and the value we can bring to a project is being overlooked. We have a city built on a strong and varied architectural culture which is recognised nationally and internationally. This has been nurtured by many practices over a significant amount of time. We need to be reliant upon each other in order to advocate for our role and to make change happen. This can only occur if we are collectively invested. Thank you to all of our members who are determined to back change and assist in advocating for a stronger and more resilient industry.

Chapter news —

From the executive director Ruth White Firstly, welcome to our new-look Architect Victoria magazine.

As of the autumn edition, the Vic Chapter team has taken over the reins from Boston Publishing to selfpublish our official Chapter magazine.

We will continue to issue four seasonal publications with the aim to address a theme that is of current relevance to the industry. In the immediate future, Boston Publishing will continue to publish the larger awards edition.

The process of selfpublishing continues to be a learning experience and we couldn’t do it without our wonderful Editorial Committee who have been incredibly supportive in ensuring our issues continue to be en pointe. From the Institute team, Emma Adams has come on board as our Editorial and Publishing Coordinator and has been instrumental in making the changes you are now seeing.

In order to ensure the future of this great magazine however, we do require your help! We urgently require assistance to uncover some new advertisers that will ensure the magazine continues to be a financially viable proposition. We love the magazine and want to ensure it remains the key membership offering it currently is, and for many issues to come.

While still a work in progress, we hope you enjoy the changes we have made to date.

For suggestions regarding potential advertisers, please email: Sanja.Novakovic@architecture.com.au

Heritage committee report Louise Honman The Heritage Committee addresses heritage issues within Victoria, advocates on behalf of buildings at risk, and provides recommendations for updating the Institute’s register of significant 20th century places.

The heritage committee is currently addressing its core business

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through the following activities: consolidating, updating and confirming the list of significant 20th century places within Victoria.

Once this is complete, it is intended that this list will be added to the Institute’s website; completing citations for several more places to put forward for the Nationally Significant 20th Century Architecture list. These citations will add to the forty-plus places with completed citations on the Institute’s website; and, providing updated guidance on the archiving of architectural documents and the collections policies of public institutions such as Melbourne and RMIT universities and the State Library.

The Heritage Committee exists to provide expert advice to the Institute on heritage matters. From much loved city landmarks to private houses, issues of heritage in a time of rapid change can arouse passionate debate.

Our shared cultural heritage should frame part of that debate about the places that mean so much to us.

To further this aim, the Institute sponsored CPD seminars entitled Understanding Heritage in a Contemporary City in early 2018 with speakers Paul Coffey from the Victorian Heritage Council, Anita Brady from Lovell Chen, Julia Street from Heritage Victoria, Jeffery Robinson and Johanna Trickett from Aurecon. Over two sessions the material covered included the new Victorian Heritage Act 2017, city and suburban adaptations of heritage places and embedding ESD into heritage.

The Heritage Committee looks forward to continuing to provide a voice for the Institute in heritage matters and to work on projects of value in the recognition and protection of 20th century built heritage.

Chapter news —

Sustainable architecture report Nadine Samaha The Sustainable Architecture Forum (SAF) members met recently to reestablish their interest, expectations and role of the forum.

The members expressed their passion as architects in advocating for a better sustainable environment leading to more sustainable social and economic growth in the following main ways: sharing knowledge through a variety of sustainable topics; engaging in activities that advocate the role of architect in sustainability; and, joining forces with other sustainable bodies and organisations.

This was followed with a discussion about SAF involvement in the Sustainable Living Festival (SLF) in February 2019. The members decided on providing tips (or what to look for) for Good Sustainable Design in apartments, new houses and renovations through seminars, speeddating events (for SLF attendees seeking advice from an architect in sustainability) and handouts.

We welcome new members who share the same passion. Our next meeting is on the 21 August 2018.

Student organised network for architecture – SONA Amarinda Bazeley Throughout our architectural careers, we all experience periods of success and achievement, but likewise can find our confidence dissipating in moments of chaos and confusion. This semester, SONA aims to provide students with the resources and skills they need to rebuild their self-assurance at any speed-bump in their career.

Just this month we launched a state-first trial of the Victorian SONA Mentoring Program that connects students with experienced practitioners in small-group mentoring sessions. Having a knowledgeable and approachable mentor is an

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invaluable resource for students and we envision that our mentors will be able to assist students with queries about architectural practice, career progression, and study challenges. We have had an amazing outpouring of support by practitioners and students, and we are very excited to expand this program to a national level in 2019.

Following this, we would like to announce a SONA x Archimarathon collaboration in early August with Kevin Hui. Kevin will lead students on a walking tour around Melbourne CBD to share vibrant insights on our city’s architectural fabric.

We’re also very excited for our next event: Ask an Architect! On 16 August, students can connect with highly experienced architects of their choosing to ask questions about the nitty-gritty of architecture and begin to expand their professional network. We hope that students will find guidance and support through the sharing of knowledge and advice across architectural generations.

Regional practice report Kim Irons While at ‘headquarters', we continue to seek a suitable sponsor to assist with the costs associated with meetings.

Regional practice forums continue to be active. Ballarat met a few months ago, discussing office productivity supported by technology and nontechnology systems. Geelong and Surf Coast Regional Forum was well attended in June for a tour of the Geelong Library. Geelong Library CEO Patti Manolis and project lead Peter Bicknell of ARM Architecture took the group on a special tour through the facilities and back of house, outlining the project requirements and design approach; a wonderful demonstration of a good client supporting good design.

Macedon Ranges Regional Practice Forum has also been started under the curatorial guidance of Denis Carter and Brad Hooper. Discussions opened with ideas for influencing outcomes within their local area,

The Return of the Object

even with some ideas of initiating opportunities for redundant sites.

It is also exciting to see Bendigo will have its inaugural meeting 16 August, continuing the ambition for our members to collaborate, share knowledge and connect with Chapter Council.

We appreciate we are still yet to see further regional practice forums toward the north and east of the state, and are therefore keen for you to contact myself or Sanja Novakovic at the Chapter office should you wish to implement a forum in your area.

Emerging architects graduate network – EmAGN Camilla Tierney At the Victorian Architecture Awards, held at the end of June, it was the first time the Victorian Emerging Architect Prize was announced at the state awards. A big congratulations to Monique Woodward, Director of WOWOWA who took out the award for 2018. Proving that her tireless work and contribution to both the Australian Institute of Architects and the architecture profession is highly valued and that she is a force to be reckoned with.

EmAGN continued the collaboration with Open House Melbourne on the weekend of 28 and 29 July and opened up Emerging Architects projects currently under construction – under the banner 'EmAGN This'. With all tours sold out, it is the start of what we hope to be another successful event.

In August and September we are looking forward to hosting our next EmAGN Forum with contributions from Nic Granleese from Bower Bird and Dave Sharp from Vanity Projects to help graduate architects define their own personal brand. In addition to this, we are hosting a BIM CPD and Forum.

Using the skill sets of experienced BIM managers to share both their success and failure to help streamline revit-use within the office for those starting out.

Above Tiger Prawn by WOWOWA Architecture Photo by Shannon McGrath

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Chapter news —

Small practice forum

Education report

Aimee Goodwin

Dominik Holzer

The last few months have seen a restructuring of the small, medium and large practice forums, with a small practice now constituting 1–5 employees. The refinement has been necessary to decrease the extremely high attendee list and give greater access to members. This is a testament to the success of the forums and the value they offer members.

Moving forward, it would be great to see an ongoing discourse between the forums, as the insight and knowledge shared by more established practices is of great benefit to smaller firms.

The last few forums have addressed issues including documentation, specifications and tendering. The next forum will be focusing on contracts, which is particularly pertinent in light of the recent survey issued by the Institute and National President, Clare Cousins, in conjunction with ArchiTeam and the ACA. The survey obtained details from members regarding banks unwillingness to approve construction loans for domestic building work when using ABIC or Australian Standard Contracts.

The issues surrounding bank approval of ABIC contracts and the potential long-term erosion of the role of the architect in the administration of contracts for small–medium domestic work is keenly felt amongst Small Practice Forum members, as residential work is the staple of their income. The Institute’s active engagement with the banking industry, state government and the submission to the Banking Royal Commission was well received by the forum, and we hopefully look forward to a positive result.

The Education Committee constitutes a mix of academics from Victoria’s four accredited higher-degree architecture programs, as well as Victorian architecture practitioners and student representatives (SONA) who all lend their voice to allow the Institute to establish a firm link between academia and the profession.

Going into winter, we welcomed representatives from Swinburne University’s architecture program as observers on our committee, Kristen Day and John Sadar. Their aspirations for the newly established program at Swinburne by introducing the cornerstones of both their Bachelor and Master degrees.

The Education Committee formed a dedicated working-party to address topics related to the Graduate Prize and another party to investigate practice-based research and links to academia (along the lines of the previous Archivision effort).

In addition, the committee decided to assist the Victorian Chapter in the thematic development of their CPD program, working closely with Institute representatives who are tasked with this effort. The goal is to fine-tune the training offered with a value-proposition based on direct industry feedback.

The Return of the Object

Editorial —

The return of the object Words by Toby Reed and Anna Nervegna

For the last few decades, architectural works have been generated, rationalised and validated by their external relations to context. This interest in generating both hidden structural links with the surrounding urban (or natural) field and also more literal contextual links sits nicely with town planner’s objectives of neighbourhood character, but does it ultimately make everything too connected, too much the same? There seems to be a need for occasional points of disjuncture where the architectural object can create a new experience. This is just as true of the well-planned designed city as it is of urban sprawl or the countryside.

Marcel Duchamp’s readymade and conceptual art show the importance of the object/context relationship in creating meaning and experience. We can see from Duchamp, and our experience of the city that both continuity and discontinuity are important factors in our everyday experience of objects and space. Of course we all want connection, but how buildings and objects connect needs to be constantly re-conceptualised.

We occasionally need a

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sense of disjuncture and possibly shock in our relation to objects in order to help us understand everyday reality, which without this disturbance could go unnoticed. It would seem to be time to reconsider the importance and complexity of issues surrounding the object, and object/context relations in light of the complexity of the contemporary city and the everexpanding urban sprawl.

Objects work on various scales. In many ways Paris is an object and so are its elements, including the buildings in it. Melbourne too is like this, although less cohesive and more a fragmented, messy combination of city blocks, vertical objects, sprawl, random buildings, suburbs and freeways.

All buildings are space objects, if only because traditionally they are objects enclosing space.

But should we start thinking of space itself as an object, and the space between buildings as negative objects? To explore the space idea further, we can ask ourselves if space junk could be an apt description of both the building/object and the millions of seemingly random buildings populating the urban sprawl,

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in varying intensities, like showers of asteroids.

In Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s novel Roadside Picnic, which became the basis of their screenplay for Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), they depict a scenario where aliens have briefly dropped by earth while space tripping around the galaxy. In a version of the roadside picnic where we leave fast-food packets and cigarette butts by the freeway, the aliens have left behind a multitude of space junk in a now closed-off area called the zone. The stalkers break into the zone and steal the space junk and sell it on the black market, hoping to find the magic object that will solve all their problems. The space junk is recognisable but mysterious and has unknowable effects on the environment. Scientists study the space junk trying to crack the unknown formulas. There is a detectable logic to the fragments and objects but it is still alien and not totally knowable.

Rem Koolhaas’ analysis of junkspace, which feeds off and inverts a space-junk metaphor, discusses the endless connectivity of the modern air-conditioned environment.1 However, like debris from an outerspace collision, the modern sprawl still retains an experience of spatial/ object disconnection, along with the other characteristics outlined in Junkspace. Sometimes this is like an exquisite corps urban strip, and sometimes like a strip of random objects. This disconnection of architectural objects in the contemporary city is unlike the →

Editorial —

Right Qom by Farshad Mehdizadeh Design/FMZD is one of the most significantly central religious Islamic cities of Iran Interview with Farshad Mehdizadeh on pages 16—19 Previous page Precinct energy project, Dandenong (Cogenration Building) Nervegna Reed Architect + PH Architects

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cohesion of the pre-modern city and needs methodologies to work with it.

If Junkspace describes the ever-expanding built refuse of modernisation, which connects endlessly, then space junk can help us work with the dislocation which is experienced in the expanding city. The space-junk object dropped into the field with seemingly no regard for context could actually give the environment exactly what it needs. The space-junk metaphor allows buildings to be driven by an external, alien logic, which becomes a way of inserting new content into a context that is not simply driven by functional or contextual concerns.

Given the manner of the recent growth of the city, space junk could actually be a very helpful diagram for designing the architectural object in our contemporary world, not just a description of it.

If everything in the object is too literal and clear, the interaction will stall, although for some buildings this can be a good thing. Architectural objects have an unstable relation to language and always work on a sliding scale between image and abstraction.

Some objects emphasise architectural language and some objects push towards abstraction. Most work through a shifting combination of the two.

When Rem Koolhaas and David Gianotten opened the MPavilion in Melbourne in October 2017, Koolhaas described the building as a tool. The MPavilion worked brilliantly as a tool for social interaction and engagement in the city for a number of months before being moved to the suburbs where it will continue to do so in another context.

The tool idea has been applied to objects in another way by Martin Heidegger as early as 1919, as an analogy of how we experience and perceive reality. If most objects are like tools, and generally go unnoticed in our daily lives, then it is only when they break or are altered that we notice them. As Graham Harman points out, when there is an earthquake we notice the earth.2 This

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obviously applies to the objects we call buildings, such as when Gordon Matta-Clark cut a house in half (Splitting, 1974). In the case of the architect, normal buildings, whether boring, ugly, or beautiful, often become subconscious background while the self-conscious architectural object which causes a disruption of this surface of reality often draw attention to our environment and place within it.

Marcel Duchamp produced his first readymades just before Heidegger proposed the tool concept.

The readymade through its object/ context disjuncture (as well as other mutations) causes awareness through the object. This is a lesson which has permeated the history of architecture.

Man Ray’s photos of mathematical objects, which looked strange and surreal, were actually photos of diagrams of mathematical logic and showed a rational reality that reveals as strangeness. Many architectural objects, which may seem different in a myriad of ways, some subtle, some overt, often end up being objects which provoke a consciousness of reality and our environment. In Melbourne, Callum Morton’s Hotel, a fake modern hotel on the Eastlink freeway, serves as a reality trigger to the inhabitants of the whole city.

The philosophy of OOO (object oriented ontology) of Graham Harman and others has refocused philosophical attention on the object.

In practice, architects have never stopped focusing on the object. It is what we do on a daily basis. Even when architects have experimented with the blurring of the object and the field, it has still been a way of mutating the object as a form in order to produce a new spatial awareness or thought process.

Harman’s essay ‘The Third Table’ explains the depth and complexity of the object which is familiar to the architect.3 Taking a cue from Eddington’s 1927 lecture on the two tables, Harman then breaks down the object into three categories: the reality of the physical experience of the object (the table); the scientific

reality of the object; and the third reality of the object which hovers between the two, and has immense depth and complexity.

Kengo Kuma reduces objects to their scientific particles, Harman’s second category, in his book the Anti-Object and his designs push this scientific aspect of reality into the experiential (the first category).4 For Kuma, this becomes a way of killing the object; however, the object never dies. As with much architecture, ideas are used which attack, mutate or distort the object, but the end work is still an object and still has the complexity of an idea to a greater or lesser degree. It is this manipulation of the object which alters our spatial consciousness. Harman’s third position is in many ways the realm of the considered architectural object.

Objects come and go, repeating as fragments, elements or large object. Appearing almost the

same, like a sequel to a spaghetti western, but actually different each time, like Nietzsche’s Eternal Return.

Whether ephemeral, solid or virtual, they keep returning. Objects, including buildings, have always been central to our understanding of reality.

The following articles and interviews attempt to allow a range of writings on the architectural object.

As well as a wide selection of objects discussed, they mostly focus on works in Melbourne: ARM Architecture’s conceptual strategies which at times negotiate image and object (Barak Building); John Wardle Architects' verb actions imposed on architectural objects; OOF and Rose Nolan’s semiotic object; McBride Charles Ryan’s topological and pop objects, sometimes echoing the extrusions of Superstudio; Lyons’ optic, pluralist objects; Leanne Zilka’s floppy objects; Paul Morgan’s phototropism; and, XO’s vertical buildings as products of

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market capitalism. David Gianotten writes about the active and passive object and the MPavilion, which he designed with Rem Koolhaas, as a dynamic incubator. James Staughton discusses Workshop Architecture’s interest in aesthetic theory and the architectural object. Farshad Mehdizadeh, who taught in Melbourne and now practices in Tehran, describes possibilities for a post-parametric object in relation to Iranian culture.

Toby Reed and Anna Nervegna are directors of the award-winning practice Nervegna Reed Architecture based in Melbourne.

Notes 1 Rem Koolhaas (2001) Junkspace Taschen pp 408–421 2 Graham Harman (2011) The Quadruple Object Zero Books pp 36-37 3 Graham Harman, The Third Table: 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts. Documenta Series 085

Kengo Kuma 'Making a Connection: The Hyuga Residence by Bruno Taut' in Anti-Object: The Dissolution and Disintegration of Architecture Translated by Hiroshi Watanabe, AA Words 2, Series editor Brett Steele 4

On the cover —

MPavilion as dynamic incubator Words by David Gianotten

The purpose of OMA’s 2017 MPavilion was to create a structure that both facilitates performance and can perform itself. While the term ‘architectural object’ implies passivity and lack of agency, the MPavilion is both an object and an actor. This is quite literally expressed in its design.

The pavilion consists of a static and a dynamic element: the static element is the large tribune excavated from the surrounding landscape, giving a sense of the local setting. The dynamic element is a smaller tribune that can rotate, allowing it to shift functions from seating to stage and blur the distinction between actor and audience. Overhead there is a 2-metre deep gridded machine-like canopy with advanced lighting technology embedded it in. The pavilion is designed to enable possibilities; therefore, the grid and the moving tribune were implemented so that people felt that they could interact with it, change it, and really have an effect on it.

The core of MPavilion’s design is to play with the possibility of giving an architectural object agency.

We made an object that is flexible and allows for many configurations. It can

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generate unexpected programming, echoing the ideals of the typology of the amphitheater. It draws people in and allows them to participate in the events that are taking place. Through its flexibility, it aims to also stimulate the feeling of agency of its users.

This performative function of the pavilion was decisive in establishing its relationship to its surroundings. We wanted the pavilion to stand out, because it had to be a focus point and generate curiosity.

People needed to be drawn towards it. At the same time, it needed to be low-threshold and blend in well in its context.

To achieve this, the pavilion needed to be visible from far and spark an interest in exploring the object. Then upon approach, it had to be easy to enter, without being confronted with any boundaries. Once you are inside, you should be able to participate in the debate that is going on. Ultimately you shape the space yourself by being not just an audience member, but an actor who engages with both the form and the content of what is happening in the pavilion at that moment. Therefore, the pavilion is more flexible and dynamic than

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‘architectural object’ suggests.

We thus aimed to design an object that blends in its surroundings, and simultaneously stands out. Both the program and intended use of the space guided the design; the pavilion was to be a space for debate about the future of Melbourne.

How should the urban realm develop, what is the future of mobility, how will people be able to use the city? Discussing these issues on the future development of the city require an approach that was simultaneously immersed in the local context and conscious of the more global setting.

To achieve this, we created a place of concentration and reflection, but at the same time a place that is strongly connected to its urban as well as natural surroundings. This contrast and proximity of urbanity and nature is a feature of Melbourne that we wanted to reflect in the project.

Program and surrounding were intricately linked and expressed in the design of the MPavilion.

An object cannot but relate to its surroundings, whether it rejects, reflects or ignores its context. In my opinion, the design of an architectural object should take into account its surroundings and connect to it. An architectural object can be strikingly beautiful, but if it doesn’t connect to its surroundings, if it disregards its spatial setting, I don’t see its value or contribution apart from perhaps creating a short-term impact.

MPavilion, both in intent and in usage, actively engages with its setting. Reflected in its materiality, the design of the tribune is closely linked to the surrounding natural landscape; it is embedded in 12 different species of Australian flora. Made of aluminum, the canopy reflects the urban surroundings, the buzz of the city in the distance.

After having hosted a four-month program of events in Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Gardens, the MPavilion was relocated in March 2018 to Monash University in Clayton.

It is quite telling that the new setting also reflects the object and connects to it in a similar way as its first

location did; it is a landscape in which it can be embedded, and in proximity to a more urban setting which it can reflect on. The idea of the object, immersed in its immediate location but engaging with wider issues, remains in its permanent location.

David Gianotten is the managing Partner Architect of OMA, responsible for the management, business strategy and growth of the company worldwide.

He oversees design and construction of various projects, including the Taipei Performing Arts Centre and the conceptual study for Feyenoord City. In his previous role as Director of OMA Asia, David was responsible for the recently completed Shenzhen Stock Exchange headquarters. David studied architecture and construction technology at the University of Technology Eindhoven, where he is also a professor in the Architecture Design and Engineering department.

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Below David Gianotten with Rem Koolhaas Photo by Timothy Burges (Imageplay) 2017

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Article —

Subject object thing Words by Howard Raggatt

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I suspect that by return of the object Toby was referring to some kind of restoration, some kind of reinstatement, or even homecoming. This idea we have always loved, this sense perhaps of the uncanny or a certain type of nostalgia, of longing, of expectation.

For us the idea of a return has been as if a kind of promise, as if something perpetual, something forceful, and something surprising and yet perhaps also something prodigal as well, as if akin somehow to that prodigal son in the parable: profligate, wanton, and reckless, or even like the father too, also prodigal in his profusion, his bounty, his generosity, his acceptance.

Pejorative Object?

But I suspect that this return that Toby

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is calling out for is as much in hope as it is declaratory, as much prophetic as it would be documentary, or as much to what must remain inevitably secret, as can be pontificate, or to what they say will save the day. Is it any wonder that a return of the object is not necessarily a welcome homecoming at all for this thing that we call architecture, that we have to lie for, talk up, exaggerate, compensate, exonerate even? Now that what we say seems to matter more than what we do.

Mere object we sometimes call it, as if without further definition it appears self-explanatory, as if it stands as much for what it is not – an object in an abject form, as if only objectified, degraded, dehumanised, traded commodity, commercialised, rationalised, fetishised, alienated.

Questioning Object But what now? If we moan, if we’re complaining, if we’re always questioning or opposing, if we take exception, take a stand, become political, if we don’t know what to do? Is it really possible to pose such questions – to puzzle, to insinuate, to canvass our doubts, to object?

At the National Museum of Australia we explored the object of questioning in the analogous prospect of the puzzle piece – the incomplete or fragmentary – in what must overlap and where even the connections that we worked so hard to perfect remain in doubt, only our version or interpretation, inevitably inconclusive.

Veil / Object High up in the city of Naples there is the tiny chapel of Sansevero where a statue of The Veiled Truth by Antonio Corradini presents the exquisite conundrum of its title in the form of a veiled figure. Here the truth is veiled, and it is impossible to lift the veil and see the Truth directly without destroying both veil and figure, both the thing and the object as they say.

This same enigma of the object we have tried to explore in architecture.

For instance, when we look at the Barak Building at the top of Swanston Street, is it material or face?

Is it the object itself or is it a veil, is the object an illusion in our minds or is it necessarily resistant to our gaze, would it help if we got closer, would it help if we could touch his cheek, his forehead or his beard, or would our touch be cold, only thing, only fibreglass, instead of what we hoped for?

What is this gap, we wonder, between the thing we have made and that object of knowing? What is this gap between the individual curvaceous balustrade and this face springing forth to meet us? Is this a sure thing, this aesthetic charm that we’ve contrived, or this apparition in the city, this presence, almost spectre watching as we look.

Or then again what about the MTC Southbank Theatre on Southbank Boulevard, is this another

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kind of veil, as if to hide the object from its architecture, as if to drape and somehow protect that object, or else to dress in expectation of denouement at last, or is it the veil protecting us from what is otherwise perhaps only black and formless? Or is this only a special case, to do with black, and not the same for blue or red or yellow?

Or is it this object of the shadow only, this sense of what is immaterial or unembodied?

Visible and invisible object And what of the immaterial then, is this too an objective of architecture, both visible and invisible object? Is the object of architecture the evidence of its struggle to transcend materiality, as if evidence of what we wish was possible, or a sign of our longings and hopes rather than accomplishments, and the invisible a kind of witness or even premonition. Is the object of architecture able too endure that mark of the invisible and its subtractive force? Perhaps we have tried to build this expectation and remembrance into many projects big and small.

In the Great Hall of the National Museum of Australia, the space became the cast of a huge knot, not then the object of itself but its reflection, a copy, or trace as some would say. Or again at the Shrine of Remembrance, the objects of our architecture mark the invisible Boolean path of a double helix, one strand arching high over the roof and the other diving deeply below to form the four new courtyards that now make entry and define the secondary diagonal axes of the original Hudson and Wardrop design.

That double helix as if a life force, rising and plunging, sky-high but also underground and buried. And the courtyards marking this moment at the surface, both rising and falling, as if →

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Left The zigzag-walled Shrine of Rememberance by ARM Architecture was determined by an imaginary star-shaped double helix spiraling through the site Right The Barak Building by ARM Architecture features the face of historic Wurundjeri elder William Barak Photo by Peter Bennetts Previous page The Veiled Truth by Antonio Corradini Getty Images

both exultant and tormented, rejoicing and sorrowful. And for each courtyard a new view of the original monumental building, once too an impossible view, a buried view, but now made new, dynamic against the sky.

I’ll be back So what of this return of the object that Toby wants us to think about?

Is it that the object has been lost and we must somehow find it again? Has it been banished and we must try to restore its presence? Or is it that we have forgotten about it, because it has been too quiet, too reticent, too demure, meek or timid?

Or is it quite the opposite, the object has been too loud or too demanding, or even too unladylike for them!

Can this really be a homecoming then, can this be to somehow reinstate him or her, whether prodigal or not, and is it always possible to make this return somehow perpetually surprising, these visible and invisible things of our longings?

Or even this veil that we know remains always impossible to separate from, impossible to unveil, to which perhaps the object inevitably returns.

Howard Raggatt is a founding director of ARM Architecture. He is known around Australia for his innovative design practice, theory and teaching.

He is behind the overarching concepts of many ARM projects including the National Museum of Australia and the Barak Building. His work has been widely published and exhibited.

A principal contributor to ARM’s 2015 monograph Mongrel Rapture: The Architecture of Ashton Raggatt McDougall, and winner of the 2016 Australian Institute of Architects Gold Medal, which he shares with fellow ARM founders Ian McDougall and the late Stephen Ashton.

The Return of the Object

Above Termeh office commercial building

by Farshad Mehdizadeh Architects + Ahmad Bathaei

The Return of the Object

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Interview with Farshad Mehdizadeh

Toby Reed (TR) What is your attitude towards the architectural object?

Farshad Mehdizadeh (FM) In my design process, the object is not a goal, but the object is a tool that I use to connect and redefine the border and the fine line between private and public space, via a tool. This tool for me is architecture. This is the deal all the time for me, and especially here in Iran because we have different climates, different cultures. The culture between the inside of Iran is completely different to the cultures around the borders of Iran. And the definition of the border and the fine line between inside and outside, public and private is completely different here. For example, in the middle of Iran, near the desert, all of the buildings have a courtyard internally. Privacy is super important for people because of their religion, and other aspects of our culture.

However, in the north, the buildings have external courtyards, in the form of balconies. So we have different types of objects and architecture which defines two different borders.

My idea is to redefine the border between inside and outside. This is how I use the object of architecture...

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the architectural elements.

TR You use architectural elements as objects, and you take certain elements from traditional architecture to create new pixelated objects by repeating them in different ways.

FM I think I have two projects that are relevant to this discussion. One is the Termeh office building where we redefined a stairway. For me this is an object which we used and redefined in order to define public space. We donated some space from the private sector to the city and this was very important for us. Through redefining the architectural object (or an architectural element as the stair), we redefined it to become a small plaza and here it has a different dynamic. Another building which we designed is called Dreamland. What was important for us was developing our idea and design strategy, which was, we want to make a plaza and we want to combine it into an existing building. We looked at how we could combine or fade the border between the context and the proposal. How do we want to fade that border? So we studied the body of the building which was the object, which has a DNA and has a structural module. So we started

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to repeat and transform that module in order to create plazas, terraces, including some archway openings, which fade this border between inside and outside. In a shopping mall you have no idea what is happening inside the building, and when you are inside, you have no idea what is happening outside the building. So that way we connected the inside and the outside.

TR Are they real connections in Dreamland? Can one see through those arches from the interior?

FM Yes, these arches are going through the building and make the space, giving character inside the building. Actually, the arches face in different directions which gives the ability to feel like you’re in a field, when you’re in the plaza.

TR The building looks like its spilling out into the environment much like an object emerging out of the field. What is your attitude to context?

FM Three or four years ago, I thought ok, the context is how we can harness the inside and outside and how you can move on top of the building, how we can climb the building and how we can donate some space from the private sector to the public and the city. What I am teaching right now is the context of the city and of events. You can work with the event in different scales. In the city you can design the building as an object which is a pod of events. It could be a house, it could be a shopping mall, or even a factory.

TR When you were teaching in Melbourne you ran a studio on the dome as an object/element, which has become an important technique in your designs. Are you still teaching in a similar way?

FM Yes, yes. When I was teaching at Melbourne University I was working on the performance of material and structure, not as an engineering structure, but a structure which is full of rules. Right now I am working on the events, and when you want to work on the event you need to work on the dynamic structure, the city's dynamic structure. →

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You need to learn about the performance, it could be a physical performance, it could be virtual performance. At Melbourne University I started research on the performance and the dynamic of the structure. Now when you shift to the city you see that the city is full of dynamism. When you want to analyse the context of the city you shouldn’t see the buildings as objects but as cells which have a relation together, and you have a block, which has a performance, and then a superblock, and a city.

TR This is what we see in Qom? FM Yes, exactly. Qom is a commercial centre. They asked us to design a super-huge function in the middle of the context, the urban fabric. But we analysed it and realised that if we design and build this building it would disconnect the city like a dam inside the city. We realised that it is full of events, religious events. The scale of the religious event is the same as the scale of the streets and the neighbourhoods. So we thought it would be great if we started working with the scale of the urban fabric, the cells. Actually Qom is a superhuge public space made out of the functions around it. And we told the

client, this is a place for praying, and the boundary of this is your building.

TR Your description earlier of the two types of Iranian objects as almost positive/negative versions of each other, seems to relate closely to your designs.

FM Yes, do you have any pictures of my commercial centre NamakAbroud?

That is the two types, because Qom is in the middle and NamakAbroud is in the north. In the middle of Iran you need shadows, and you need to protect yourself from the sun, and in the north because of the humidity the building needs to breath and so you need more space around the building.

That is why we designed the plazas around the building.

TR You used to teach with Patrik Schumacher, so how does your work differ from parametrics?

FM We invited Patrik two or three times to our workshop, but I guess my project is more handmade. It is not parametric, in a computer. When you want to work with an event, or a material, you need to touch it. The computer doesn’t work. The computer cannot give you the quality of the event, and you cannot simulate an event with a good quality. You need

Below NamakAbroud commercial centre by Farshad Mehdizadeh Design (FMZD)

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The Return of the Object

to see the context and feel it, smell it.

When you want to design, you need to touch it. I do not agree with the computer in this way. In all of the structures that we make we don’t use the computer. We just work by hand.

It’s a touch intelligence.

TR So how do you design? What is the design process?

FM Each project is different.

Sometimes we start with a model, sometimes we start with a computer, sometimes take some photos and start sketching on the photos. In Dreamland we didn’t do any sketches.

We just went to the site and started studying the structure, physically, the big structure.

TR Your work seems to have an acknowledgement of parametrics, but there is a return to the traditional element as repeatable object, reasserting the object in a different way.

FM Sometimes when you see my buildings you think, ok, this has come out of the computer, with grasshopper and some parametric rules, but I can say that it is parametric but the parameters are not in the computer.

TR Do you see your architecture, and its role within society, as provoking a consciousness about society, politics, life?

FM We are trying, we are doing our best... (for instance) the Termeh office building was like an object connecting the city and the building in a good way through the stairs.

TR Do you consider space an object?

FM Sure, because all the time, as I told you, I am working on the space, the border between the public space and private space. So in a building the challenge is more the open space, like the last thing you see is the plaza, and how you can design the roof as an open space, how you can connect it through your object, through your building.

TR Is your Farmanieh residential tower going ahead?

FM No it was a concept design, but I have another one now. This is interesting for me as we started designing the building from the outside, not from the inside. But you can organise the inside through the open space on the outside, and we have different blocks and different neighbourhoods, on each level with different qualities.

Farshad Mehdizadeh started his professional career at Fluid Motion Architects, a practice based in Tehran. Later, he furthered his design experience at Lab Architecture Studio in Melbourne, followed by a postgraduate degree at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, in Barcelona. In 2012, Farshad returned to Iran to establish his own firm FMZD in Tehran.

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Hello House: a conversation about conversation Interview with Fooi-Ling Khoo and Rose Nolan

As big fans of a good chat, and the Two of Us format in the Weekend magazine, Rose Nolan and I thought we would try it here to enjoy some hindsight into the making of the Hello House. Although completed in 2014, we started talking about the house a long, long time before that; at least six years before when Rose and her partner Ian bought the Victorian corner shop.

Fooi-Ling Khoo (FLK) It's appropriate that we start with a conversation about conversation. The idea much beloved by councils is that a building should address, or have a conversation with the street.

This can be naff when timid or token but is pretty exciting when borderline excessive. We both love the fantastically literal versions of this idea such as the front fence of Corbett Lyon's House Museum and the facade of Leo's Spaghetti Bar in St Kilda.

Rose Nolan (RN) It seemed a natural way to respond to the context and as part of my art practice I am interested in developing objects that utilise text as material object – found text that is derived from the everyday – and methods of construction that have the potential to disrupt expectation and to engender complex readings. Words like ‘hello’ are chosen for their formal qualities as well as their linguistic content. In this way, seemingly insignificant words or phrases are separated from the stream of continuous talk and given a fresh

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existence transforming the space and site they inhabit.

FLK People certainly find the hello wall memorable because it seems so unexpected, so out of context. Yet I think it is highly contextual – just not in the sense of superficially looking like its neighbours. You could say it’s only different on the surface.

The house grows out of that specific piece of the city. It’s a new piece of architectural fabric that feeds off its physical material context, its civic role as a backdrop for the hub of the neighbourhood – the local cafe opposite and its cultural origins as a shop house and now home and studio.

RN Victorian architecture is not my favourite but the old shop provided studio space for me and the house already had a beautiful feel, and of course we loved having the cafe across the road. We feel very lucky to live where we live; in a beautiful house that addresses the local street in such a positive yet subtle manner.

FLK Photography of the hello wall is quite deceptive as the camera sees it as anything but subtle. Human eyes are not the same. I’ve met people who were surprised to learn there was a word written into the wall. Hiding in plain sight.

RN I love that element of surprise – the slow reveal of the hello – sometimes it’s clear and the word can be deciphered and at other times it disappears, and the wall is appreciated for the patterning and sculptural nature of the brickwork.

The Return of the Object

FLK We are often asked where the hello wall came from and I have always found this hard to answer.

For me, the hello wall is a part of a building as well as the space behind the wall and part of a larger question rather than an object in itself. I can tell you what we talked about on the way there, but not exactly how we got there.

RN Without intending to create a large text work/object, it ended up as an outcome of all our other decisions and conversations. I even recall thinking that we would have to let it go because of our restricted budget...

FLK I know. I died a little on the inside then!

RN and the difficulty of finding a bricklayer that still wanted to do that type of work.

FLK Thankfully, Anthony (our builder) found Rob Fuchshofer – bricklayer extraordinaire. White polytexture face brickwork is technically demanding and the wall is as much about his physical craft as it is about the graphic power of the word – a bit like how you like to hand-make artwork.

It forces a primal engagement with construction and materiality – every single brick was drawn and accounted for. I’m almost offended when people refer to it as a painted wall! →

Hello House by Fooi-Ling Khoo, OOF! architecture and collaborating artist, Rose Nolan Photography by Nic Granleese

RN One of my favourite views of the new addition is from the corner of the street where I can see the side profile of the chunky wafer that is the doublebrick hello wall delicately attached to floor-to-ceiling windows through which anyone can glimpse the black, lace-like trusses that literally hold up the roof.

FLK With that toothy brick-edge detail, I’m thinking more biscuit than wafer – maybe Arnott’s Nice. Actually, it was originally conceived of as a defensive billboard a la Venturi, ScottBrown, Izenour's Learning from Las Vegas. But then it became obsessed with the brick-and-blockwork story told by its surrounding neighbours, like Robinson Chen’s Wheeler House (diagonally opposite) and fell in love with the serrated brick-face of Bo & Wohlert’s Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen.

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RN There’s a strange sense of responsibility living here – I shift my mood when I emerge from a house that says 'hello' – you must. You can’t be grumpy coming out of a house that says 'hello'.

FLK I guess everyone must think you’re talking to them! When you arrived at the word 'hello', it was the natural and perfect, singular answer to our ongoing conversation with its many questions – banal and sophisticated – about site, construction, heritage, urban context, art, architecture, football, the role of a/ the house in the street, in your life… it answered everything at the same time.

The Return of the Object

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Interview with John Wardle

John Wardle Architects are well known for designing amazingly refined objects so it seemed obvious that we should talk to John Wardle. Looking at the models in your office there are so many iterations and variations of objects.

John Wardle (JW) Yes, we are in a state in our practice where we are constantly questioning process and discussing the use of models. It has been a great tradition of our practice.

The need for small three-dimensional maquettes of larger objects is something that we are fascinated by.

Toby Reed (TR) You can tell by your love of the model that there is also a love of the object.

JW Yeah I think so, and it can often refer to other source materials rather than a direct lineage with architectural history. We might look at models and their association with, say, art practice and industrial design.

TR That would seem particularly relevant if we compare your recent project in Venice which is a scaleddown object. It is larger than a model, and smaller than a building.

JW Yes, it’s neither and everything.

The idea to go to Venice was to not

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produce something that was directly representational, like a scale model or a partial section, but to look at the object as an instrument. This was to be an instrument that provided evidence of many of our processes, particularly some strong fascinations with how we create portals that determine our reading of space.

Anna Nervegna (AN) So do you think it’s actually an apparatus to understand architecture through the object?

JW That was our endeavour. It’s certainly universal, how we appreciate, understand, navigate through, and inhabit so much of the constructed world. And so we hope that this object with its instrument like characteristics does appeal to universal instinctive approaches to perception.

AN Does the object here become the diagram or is it related to the diagram of this illusion or play of perception of space?

JW Yes, that’s interesting because we have often felt our architecture is not one of diagrams. But that object was born from diagrams. We tend to frustrate a single purpose by allowing ourselves to deviate into other areas of inquiry during the design process. It’s

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through curiosity, really and frequent distraction, that our work finds a less linear approach.

TR Less didactic?

JW Yes, I think our processes are more intuitive and don’t accord to set formula. It would be very rarely that a formula from one project would apply to the next. I’ve never believed that our projects are a series. That would reduce the status of each project.

TR They do all seem to be one group, whether it’s a house or a university building. They all seem to use similar techniques.

JW It’s often said by others about our work, but we don’t see it ourselves.

Maybe we are too close to it. Say from the Conservatory of Music to the LTB building at Monash University that don’t have a lot in common. (However) there probably is something about the object, and certainly the relationship of objects to landscape, that is of interest to both projects. LTB was part of a large field of objects in the landscape, and we objectified (the) landscape and drew the university’s landscape right through into the heart of the building. So the building becomes much more part of the field rather than an object within the field. Our Conservatorium project is very much an object in a tight urban setting.

TR And you have objects within the building exploding out… objects within objects.

JW Yes, the activities off a conservatorium create a need to completely internalise, and be acoustically protected from all that surrounds. it. The walls in our project each appear to open up to bring particular strategic viewpoints into those parts of the program where we could allow lively activity to occur. A circular screen panel will roll back into place at the commencement of each performance, which closes off the studio from the park. You can imagine the orchestra tuning up and this massive view into the circular window, into the pocket park, with its massive 6-metre-diameter shutter rolling into place to provide the correct acoustic requirements for performance. →

Above Venice Biennale Photo by Peter Bennetts Right John Wardle Architects Verb List compiled in response to this interview Below Melbourne Conservatorium of Music

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TR Like a camera lens JW Yes, so that’s purely the object determining its requirements, and calibrating those to the world beyond.

TR You have an object within an object here, then you have the MSD building with the hanging object, and another hanging object out at LTB. JW We are fascinated by the scale of things and how a small object can somehow summarise the larger built form.

TR Do you consider space an object?

You seem to carve space as much as you carve objects. The spaces between your buildings are quite refined and create really interesting negative objects to your buildings.

JW We often talk about crafting space.

We appreciate the possibilities of the performance of space beyond simply the programmatic requirements and our visual appreciation of things. The range of human response to setting and the understanding of the many aspects that are universal and social as well as those specific to intimate

The Return of the Object

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experience are important.

TR We have been looking at your work in terms of Richard Serra’s 1967 Verb List Compilation, which listed all the possible actions that he could do to one piece of material. [TR Hands the list to JW, who reads it] JW Wow, they’re great. I can imagine their use in his description of his remarkable work.

TR We thought there was an interesting parallel with your work where you might take either a typology and then mutate it, bend it, cut it, or roll it …. or you might take a pure form and do the same.

AN The building at the university of south Australia, which is an institutional building, which then is manipulated and negotiated with the ground plane. When you conduct the design, are you thinking of certain strategies that might line up with intentions that you have for the building, for instance ‘suspending’ seems to be a theme, or folding, or even the reoccurring splitting of the plan?

JW I represent a large creative group in the studio, it’s never singular. In reading this (Serra list), I am absolutely fascinated by it. We’ve developed a lot of our own language over the years. When I did my masters at RMIT University, part of it was actually a series of discussions in the way we might describe a line, and sometimes the ways you can turn a corner through inflection, or rotation, or distortion. And those sorts of things become the language, particularly in a practice like this, where a lot is done through broad conversations in the studio. The language we employ become critically important and we can actually reference the terminology of the many different ways of applying a sense of geometry to something. So the idea of a verb list (is) something I wish I had thought to record over the life of our practice. You see ‘Hook’ is one of those words...

AN I can see that one up there in the light design…[AN points at the JWAdesigned light above] JW Yes, that’s right, yeah... and to

‘inflect’, to ‘camber’ and to ‘hook’ are all ways to just turn a corner. So we do share this in our language with each other, and as younger staff get involve it’s often the terminology of things, and the verbs, which become part of our creative conversations within the studio.

TR That could be how you can collaborate so well with so many people, because you have a shared list of verbs and actions that you do on projects?

JW I think it’s one of those things, as we matured as a firm, we have really honed our abilities to do all the things we must do in order to collaborate. It’s almost a set of manners you create to collaborate with others.

TR So in the studio, what would be some of the verbs you might use if you are describing a project?

JW What I might do to answer that question, I might ask a few people, I might send that (list) around the studio. At our Christmas party last year during the annual roast of me a series of words that I must use repetitively were handed around to all.

These are words that I constantly use, without realising I was as repetitive as I must be.

TR That would be a good idea. Then you can send us back a list and we will publish it. If we could do your verb list that would be fantastic.

JW Yeah, yeah. It’s not as beautiful as this (Serra) list.

TR There seems to be a preference for the abstract object over the image?

JW Yeah I’d like to think broadly that we encourage the abstract form and often the linage of those forms is derived from a curiosity of other parallel practices particularly art practice, sculpture and other aspects of the visual arts.

TR Occasionally image appears in your buildings as a kind of object, like in the Urban Workshop, where the section become the image of the building.

JW That’s taking something far from abstract, and abstracting it. The Urban Table, which was our name for the large social space with frontage

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to Lonsdale Street was generated when we observed the cross-section profile of the developed lift core late in the design process. The vigorous character of the interior profile was fascinating. By slicing and rebating this end profile of the core, it becomes a front elevation of the building relatively mute on the outside and alive within.

TR So it become, in a way, an architectural readymade?

JW Yes, but it was a rather playful sign of both the structure and the means of thoroughfare through the a vertically formatted high-rise building.

John Wardle established his architectural practice in Melbourne and has led the growth of the practice from working on small domestic dwellings to university buildings, museums and large commercial offices.

To fray To crank To weave To flick To pinch To fold To layer To corner To camber To morph To stretch To accrete To camber To trial To extrude To diffuse To refer To manoeuvre To expand To link To interpret To nudge To stake

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An autonomous product Words by Igor Kebel and Eriko Watanabe

Above Store Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash

Today we all know the ultimate smartphone will be a full-size screen.

More than a decade ago, Apple introduced the first iPhone and discarded the physical keyboard from smartphones and kicked-off a mini design revolution.

Two years ago, Philippe Starck designed a smartphone with an edge-to-edge screen for Xiaomi.

The Mi Mix was unique in design by its ceramic body and the nearedgeless display that covers most of the phone's front surface area.

Samsung in 2017 established a new design milestone. With Galaxy S8 they managed to squeeze in a size-inch infinity display without stretching the average hand all out of shape. The S8 was taking up 83 per cent of the front panel and leaving tiny bezel above and below it. The product sides are curved, finishing off the infinity-pool effect and making it feel like you’re holding just a display.

They disconnected the product from the competitors with the curving of the screen edges.

It's not the idea of the novelty per se that makes the difference, the product alone feels more comfortable than anything else available on the

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market. While Xiaomi introduced the dematerialisation of the design, Samsung made it comfortable to use and marketed worldwide.

The way history distributes the architecture of multi-storey objects in the city is occasionally similar to those clusters of consumer products in a convenience store.

These vertical commodities facilitate specific needs and response to particular demands. I’m not naively suggesting architectural objects are identical to consumer goods; however, there is much to borrow from the product designers and the other way around. Their primary skill is to create a new product to be sold by a business to end buyers. The architectural industry in a market economy is similar – we are asked by a specific company to design the object, which will be offered afterward to the buyers.

In the world of product design, the processing of rigorous ideas about lifestyle, society and daily use, leads to the generation of a new product. Measurable and non-measurable parameters shape the final consumer goods, and it's the market that decides their

The Return of the Object

survival. The same happens in our discipline. The market success of the particular architectural solution leads to its repetition and eventually to multiplicity.

Ironically, cities have a collection of intentionally differentiated, intentionally individualised, intentionally unique, autonomous objects with a similar objective and purpose. Those merge over a period of time into urban blocks. Here the singularity of the city scale supersedes multiplicity.

It’s not the multiplicity, (an antonym of individuality), that should concern our discipline; it’s the generalisation of ideas that leads to inferior architecture. Even in cities like Melbourne, where planning controls can change quicker than fashionindustry cycles, the multiplicity of individual buildings is not an issue.

It’s the lack of understanding what individual buildings have to contribute to the city that we should be concerned about.

At our office, we seldom fall into the trap of delivering blisteringly swift responses to client briefs without a proper design process, and we start making products individually

pretty and unique when we could be solving customer’s needs and generating real value. These are the rare moments when we spin our wheels instead of investigating the end-user, the market and other evident and inherent forces that shape our buildings. The process of successful object design is not always stringent. We walk the route of the shared purpose, about why we are building this product People don't buy how we design, they buy why we design.

The resemblance between the disciplines continues; the business, the parameters, and the technology define a product, so we are giving each a voice in all product-development stages.

Business demands dictate the strategic direction of the object formation and user experience, and space appropriation drives most of the formal decisions. Fluid-dynamics software allows us to adjust and objectify geometries in no time and we collaborate with other consultants effortlessly because we all use data-rich-objects software. The same way plane or car designers do.

We individualise the object until it performs as it must. These multiple steps negotiate the final impact of each individual object. Singularity does not necessarily mean there’s only one possible resolution for the object manifestation. It merely means one has been deliberately singled out from the rest to perform best according to various criteria. What remains afterward is the design sprint and the distribution into the larger whole, sometimes called the city, and other times market.

The concurrent unification of design objects, including buildings, is unavoidable. The fact that we can simulate, automate, analyse uncertainty using spatial probability distribution, convolution, and statistical learning to maximise the performance, is making the process of semi-homogenisation nearly irreversible. Everything redundant sooner or later gets disrupted, especially in the industry of real-

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market economy, which is the realm of vertical-architectural production.

The genuine threat to the tradition of an autonomous architectural object is indeed not the market, governed by aggressive global financial flows; it’s the threat of generalisation that makes products trivial and irrelevant. The alternative direction is the ability to produce variations in high volume, with the capacity to communicate and evoke sensorial comfort and experience for all the stakeholders involved. We believe only then will the end user be included in the complete circle. These bespoke systems yield personified mass-produced objects and embedded services, integrated with deep data and end-user convenience.

An architectural product, which won’t be differentiated only with the minor marketing variations. There is nothing wrong with making a product more attractive by contrasting its unique qualities with other competing products. There is also no explicit need to differentiate the sameness unless the specific circumstance requires so.

Sameness is not to be mixed up with uniformity. What the Crystal Palace initiated, and Mies van de Rohe and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and the like cemented, is the modernist Tower. These glazed bastions, driven by the 20th-Century Fordist production of uniformly repetitive, segregated series, are generalised in Saskia Sassen’s book Global City: introducing a concept.

The new economic order relies on profitable assets in form or realestate products. The stock of vertical apartments, along with fine art, is now replacing gold as the primary store of wealth. The tragedy of the new global capital is that it is still looking into the old physical manifestations of buildings while dealing with entirely new economic classes and financial models in the 21st century.

The taller the autonomous building, the more important is the contact with the ground, where the internalised vertical flow finally exchanges with the collective

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horizontal city flux. The generic podium-tower hierarchy, as currently established in many planning territories, is producing uniformity with strange consequences. Such planning law rigour is per definition decontextualising the existing surroundings and preventing new solutions, new products to emerge.

The prescriptive objectification of vertical objects is the opposite to pluralistic global cities.

Instead of preconceived ideas about the image of what a city should look like, we should try to focus on value systems or collective concerns, and again learn from other disciplines how to manage them.

In order to understand what drives our continually evolving cities, we focus on multiplicity, a very useful model where various groups of end users raise important questions and work together with diverse groups of designers, producers, agents and machines to answer them.

Igor Kebel is the co-founder and director of XO Projects. He has a degree from the University of Ljubljana and the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam. Eriko Watanabe is the co-founder and director of urban design at XO Projects. She earned her master’s degree at Tokyo Metropolitan University and afterward at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam.

Slice —

New projects Words by Laura Held

Project 1 BaldassoCorteseArchitects

Project 2 Nest Architects

Tarrawarra Abbey fire shelter and multipurpose building

Noriter Bilingual Early Learning Centre

The design for Tarrawarra Abbey incorporates a multipurpose space, archive room, gymnasium, tailor shop and amenities, and was developed in response to grass fires, which passed dangerously close to the site in 2009.

Utilising the inherent protective qualities and thermal mass of insitu concrete walls, the design compliments the existing timber buildings and provides a robust sanctuary.

The contemporary fire shelter cuts into the gentle slope of the site and is topped with a planted green roof, which adds to both the fire resistance and thermal performance. Other ESD initiatives include natural ventilation and rainwater tanks for irrigation and landscape purposes. Double-glazed windows are protected by distinctive copper shrouds and protective screens to comply with BAL requirements. At selected locations within the boarded concrete finish to the external walls, rebated cross patterns reflect the Tarrawarra Abbey motif. The interiors respond to the uniquely rural setting, using natural materials including polished-concrete floors and spotted-gum timber linings.

Located in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne, the Noriter Bilingual Early Learning Centre offers a playful interior with a scale focused on its primary users – children. The brief was to create a residential-style design, and not anything resembling an institutional facility. With this in mind, the spaces all have a homely feel to them, including a kitchen that would not be out of place in any residential project.

The entire project was envisaged as a big house for 42 children, so it was essential for the spaces to always feel warm and intimate. To achieve this, Nest Architects created a 1.2-metre datum line across the entire project. Everything below that had to provide texture, whether it be timber panelling, coloured joinery or tiles.

The project explores the notion of play in a very subtle manner. Coloured acrylic tunnels link the two main rooms and provide an element of fun within the space.

This theme is continued in the Babies Room, where lowheight porthole-windows provide a sense of playfulness, and also a chance to glimpse parents leaving and arriving.

Photo: Peter Clarke

Photo: Peter Bennetts

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The Return of the Object

Project 3 Lovell Chen

Project 4 JustinMalliaArchitecture

Bendigo Soldiers Memorial Institute Military Museum

Scarborough, Clifton Hill

This project combines the conservation, underpinning and refurbishment of a 1921 building, designed by local architect George Dawson Garvin. The new gallery extension is nestled behind the Memorial Institute and is designed to house items borrowed from national collections. It takes the form of a highly insulated air-tight inner building (cella) inside a ventilated circulation space, which in turn is enclosed by a perforated weathered-steel screen and steel-clad mansard roof. The two-storey cella houses the gallery at ground level and storage/preparation areas above.

Lovell Chen’s approach to sustainability for both new and heritage buildings is to use passive house principles to help maintain environmental controls. The museum’s design includes an energy recovery ventilation system and structural steel is kept to a minimum to eliminate thermal bridges.

Jointly funded by the federal and state governments, City of Greater Bendigo, Bendigo District RSL and the local community, completion is due in 2018.

Scarborough is a small, multi-residential project designed for an extended family, who along with visiting guests and students, have lived at the property for around 35 years.

The site was formerly a wide block with an Edwardian-style house and large sunny garden. A rear extension to a neighbouring house significantly overshadowed the garden and became a catalyst for the family to build a second residence.

Instead of building a conventional townhouse, Justin Mallia Architecture used sun modelling to selectively nestle new building elements into the site.

Significant trees from the old garden are worked around, and all new internal spaces are orientated north, allowing for exposure to sunlight.

The design reinterprets the functional brief, enabling occupancy that can flexibly be adjusted to accommodate various configurations of family, or can be rented out. Envisaged as one integrated project, new components mesh with the old in an arrangement of spaces, ramps, and gardens raised back up into the sun.

Photo: Lovell Chen Collection

Photo: Justin Mallia

Architect Victoria

Profile —

Ritz&Ghougassian Words by Elizabeth Campbell

The work of Ritz&Ghougassian is crisp and with clear rhetoric. This is likely due to the fact that the founders and directors of the practice, have a close friendship. Ritz&Ghougassian was founded in 2015 after the duo worked separately for several years.

They initially met through mutual friends while studying at university and immediately found that they were like-minded. Gilad Ritz was pursuing a degree in architecture at the University of Melbourne and Jean-Paul Ghougassian was focused on interior architecture at Monash University.

Gilad started his career in architecture at Woods Bagot, then moved to Room 11, while JeanPaul had his start with an interiors internship at Hassell. He worked here for a couple of years before pursuing some of his own projects for friends in the hospitality industry. Jean-Paul says ‘Hassell helped me develop a really good skill set, designing and presenting the conceptual stages of projects. However, I’ve always had aspirations to create architecturally driven projects rather than essentially just doing an interior designer’s job, which is to fit out spaces that already exist.’ Through this aspiration, he

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approached Gilad and they started to work together.

As a studio,Ritz&Ghougassian have tried to set some very strict guidelines for the process of approaching a new project. Gilad will often consider a project from an architectural point of view, while Jean-Paul will start from the interior and work his way outwards. Through this design approach, Gilad and Jean-Paul will often come to the same resolution though approaching them from different origins. They meet at a common intersection and many of their overall ideas have commonalities that overlap. This in turn creates a solid concept or driver for a project translated through beautifully restrained material selections. Each decision is rigorously interrogated before execution. Details are often what cause the liveliest debate between the pair, they ‘have big arguments over little things’. They laugh and elaborate ‘we initially start each project from a very pragmatic approach, both of us are very focused on function first. Bentwood for example, we started by mapping out the site, or the interior functionality of the space: where the kitchen was

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located in relation to services; how the point of sale would work; the relationship of the interior function with the street.’ Additionally, a material palette is often chosen during the very early stages of the project and all details are informed by this selection.

Jean-Paul reflects here on Penta, ‘that project was very much about one detail’.

For Highbury Grove, an alteration and addition to an existing residential house, the idea of habitation was the most important aspect to explore with the interior informing the outer appearance of this project. They explain, ‘of course it is important to consider the external context, the relationship with neighbours, but for this project, the driver was how the internal workings of the project allowed for a connection with other interior spaces’. This approach, the exploration of creating interior volumes for habitation is specific to Highbury Grove, the site is restrained on all four sides: two party walls, an alleyway and the front facade, which is a heritage-listed terrace.

Different sites, and clients, create different envelope and interior conditions. Edsall Street, another residential project, had a wider site, which provided opportunity for the architectural forms to inform some of the landscape. A portion of the architecture runs into the garden and acts as a backdrop for the native garden to cast shadows at different times of day. Gilad notes, ‘this is not about creating an object in a field, the architecture is a shell being pulled apart and allowing integration with the landscape’. Both Gilad and JeanPaul are excited with the direction of the practice and by the opportunity to collaborate with more clients on large and small projects, even down to designing the cutlery.

Left Bentwood iby Ritz&Ghougassian Photo by Tom Blachford

Highbury Grove by Ritz&Ghougassian Photography by Tom Blachford

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The Return of the Object

In memory —

Max Chester 1933–2018 Words by Max Chester for the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne, reprinted with kind permission

As a young man, I lived quite close to the University of Melbourne. However, I never thought that the opportunity would come my way, to enter its illustrious grounds as a student. My school days were far from spectacular – I was not a great scholar but enjoyed immensely mathematics, art, graphics and history ...

An early close friend at the time was Neville Quarry, who later distinguished himself as a Professor of Architecture. The profession of architecture did not in those days have the status it has today. Most of my friends who entered the University, at the time, pursued the traditional disciplines: medicine, law, dentistry, science and of course, the arts, and indicated little interest in a career in architecture. Perhaps the army huts did represent the correct background, of the course in Architecture, as we knew it then.

'Life was not meant to be easy, but take courage my child for it can be delightful.' This extract from the famous play "Back to Methuselah"

by George Bernard Shaw is probably a fair summation of our lives; certainly in my case.

A Commonwealth Government Scholarship allowed my entrance to Melbourne University, which up to that time had been restricted to the “privileged”. All this changed with the introduction of Commonwealth Government Scholarships in 1952. I recall vividly the telegram I received, during National Service in Puckapunyal, in the Army, standing on a dusty parade ground being advised, that I had

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received a scholarship. My insulated, isolated life was about to change.

At the School of Architecture at the University of Melbourne, in those run down army huts, we were most fortunate to have a number of luminaries as tutors, particularly I note Roy Grounds and Ray Berg. However, the person who had the most impact on my life was the architect, Leslie Perrott Jnr. AO, a very fine and talented man, who advised me, when I was a young man as follows: “Serve the Community, and the Community will Serve you”. This has been the practical statement of my life’s work.

A short note from the 25th Anniversary reunion booklet of students who commenced their course in Architecture at Melbourne University in 1952: "In our earlier student times, we eagerly and warmly discovered and shared an idealism of our chosen profession. We have since spread these earlier endeavours, in a variety of far-reaching ways; some outside the profession or architecture itself, yet we have maintained an ongoing contact and awareness of each other." Some of my fellow students at the time were: Kevin Cole, Arda Dzirnekels, Gordon Steele, Pam Humphry, Ken Styles, Gerry Kraus, Lisle Rudolph, Tham Chan-Wah, John Baulch, George Fox, Bob Durran, Bill Kerr, John Wisken, Les Trelour, John Berreen, Dudley Wilson, Geoff Woodfall, Noel Dunn, John Vernon, Hugh Flockhart, Strauan Gilfillan, Noel Dunn. Some of these fellow students unfortunately have passed on.

The University brought about a dramatic change in my life and

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outlook, an opportunity, rich in colour and lifetime involvement. Four years after graduation, when the firm I was working for folded, I started my own practice, which has held intact over all these years. My practice has been mostly focused on schools, homes for the elderly and churches, and in recent years I have done work for the Islamic community. I am now working on my fourth mosque, and have been the architect for nine churches.

From the earliest days, I have always been involved in community affairs and I have met and worked with people of all walks of life during this community involvement. A university degree equips one with skills, which provide an opportunity to serve the extended community. This involvement has been an enriching experience. In my case, I have served a wide variety of community and semi-government organisations in an executive capacity. The rewards have been wonderful.

I was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in 2000, for services to the Community, Local Government and Architecture. I served as Secretary of the Order of Australia Association (Victoria Branch) for some 4 years. I have also maintained a lifelong interest in the works of Walter Burley Griffen. Next year we will celebrate the centenary of the winning entry of Walter Burley Griffen for the International Competition for the Design of Canberra ...

I am extremely thankful for a career which has been rich in reward, excitement, and for the opportunity to serve.

Special feature —

Interview with Carey Lyon

Carey Lyon (CL) So the object, I think of your beautiful little chevron in the backyard – The Arrow Studio TR Yes, that’s what got us on to thinking about this topic.

CL I thought that was the case.

TR So what is your attitude towards the architectural object?

CL We are interested in objects because that's what architecture is creating. In the first instance what I was interested in is the sort subject / object (relation). So I’m interested in including people into the topic via the subject. So I think bound up in the object is the subject also.

It’s a social notion. Our architecture is bound up with people and it is a social art. You know you are making objects that are intended to be occupied and intended to be reflected upon and read in some way within the space of the city. However, the thing about architecture is that it is an object / object relationship which is what makes the city. I can look at the work we have done at the Swanston Academic Building (SAB) and compare that to Sean’s (Godsell) DesignHub as the classic two objects almost like sparring with each other across the space of the city. So you

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are conscious of that when you are working on a project but not maybe the initial motivation.

TR Do you think that the fact that the SAB building is close to the Design Hub makes your building read more acutely, and vice versa?

CL I think once you start talking about objects in the city, what makes the city, is the aggregation of objects and the difference between them.

So in some respects what intrigues me about the Swanston Academic Building with the Design Hub is they are so different it’s almost like putting contrast into the city into overdrive… credit to RMIT for effectively curating that.

TR Do we need disconnection sometimes?

CL Yeah like the old BHP House, Barry Patton’s building would be a classic example. The virtue of some architectural strategies is that they are disruptive and by being disruptive they do point out the fact that the intellectual construction of the city is just that – a construction. It’s not like it’s natural, it is invented. The city is the greatest human invention and rules change, and occasionally you have this disruption and this can be

The Return of the Object

extraordinary.

TR I was going to bring up the idea of maybe the democratic object. Is that something you think about?

CL Yes because we are a practice that substantially is designing public buildings, we are constantly bound up in the rhetoric of how the object presents itself into the public realm.

On the one hand they're a pretty standard trope of breaking down the object and making it more friendly; giving it a human scale; making it more transparent, opening it up and so on but… I think there’s a democratic (or I would even call it pluralist) idea in the design of those projects.

TR This would be where the subject / object relation comes in?

CL Yes, or even the object / object type of relationship. I was trained in an era where everything was seen to be a critical object. Each new project would be a critique of the conventions of the city which is completely different to just saying the city is a system and you are binding yourself into that system.

TR Do you still work with this methodology?

CL The practice is interested in what we might call the discursive object. (The object) is intended to have conversations with the city or conversations with the people who are using it, or conversations with the typologies. So these days we are much more interested in trying to design buildings which hold within them multiple narratives and multiple ideas and hopefully that makes objects which have a slightly more pluralist ideas within them which is perhaps the opposite to trying to design an object which is purely the ideological object. It’s intended to be dialectic or binary.

TR Not a fixed interpretation or experience?

CL Yes, I think designing buildings which are open to interpretation is a critical part of our practice.

TR In the SAB and La Trobe (La Trobe University Institute for Molecular Science) there seems to be a real tension between object and surface?

Particularly La Trobe, where the surface pushes out, or the extrusions in the SAB. CL In the Swanston Academic Building all of those perforations are intended to be almost like the infestation of the public space into what is essentially a private space of the university.

TR The democratisation of the object.

CL Yeah, totally, 100 per cent, public equals democracy.

TR What conceptual frameworks do you use when you start working on an object? Are there particular techniques that go with ideas?

CL Yes, we have always had the rhetoric that architecture is building ideas. So we would always start with an idea that would underpin the object, then reference the object in terms of its fidelity to that idea.

TR Do you think the idea could be seen as a subliminal level of communication?

CL Great question. We as a practice have never minded the idea of the literal… In any architecture you have your process and that gives rise to the object but once its built the so called autonomy of the object starts to take over and you assume it’s going to have a life of its own, but you’d like think you have embedded

enough into it and that there might be some way people might interpret it, experience it, or enjoy it. You know people experience buildings with their brains as much as they do with their five senses.

TR What are the ideas and the form making techniques behind 41X? When I see those shapes of the fins is there some kind of reference that I might have missed?

CL No, no the fins were actually derived from when you split a block of stone out of the ground where you insert rods, and the idea is that it would have an almost rough end of a raw block of stone that you could then carve out. So the idea in that instance was quite a literal idea to try make a masonry building and at the time we were trying to position the building somewhat differently to the ubiquitous curtain wall, and actually make a building as a solid physical mass in the space of the city.

TR So it is a play-off between the curtain wall and the solid object in some way?

CL Yes, I think we were trying to give it a slightly permanent, rather than commercial and ephemeral quality.

TR Let’s talk about the object and the field relation. So with the Queenscliff project (Marine and Freshwater

Right The Arrow Studio by Nervegna Reed Architecture + PH Architects Photo by Sam Reed

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Architect Victoria

Research Institute) were you trying to make the building/object disappear?

Or did you want it to appear as a tension between the landscape and the building as a kind of landscape?

CL Specifically the latter, so this idea of trying to design objects that are not one or the other. That they do fall into an ambiguous in-between realm is really important to the practice. So that project was trying to be on the one hand invisible, and on the other hand, visible.

TR Do you consider space an object?

CL Do I think of space as an object?

That’s a great question. I’m of a generation where the post-modern education in which space as god was subject to critical review, so I’ve never regarded space in a sense a primary means of making architecture. It is contained by the strategies you adopt and of course it is part of the medium of architecture, but in my mind, I would never foreground space as a first material or an object in its own right.

Carey Lyon is a founding Director of Lyons, an architectural and urban design practice based in Melbourne, and a former National President of the Australian Institute of Architects.

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Aesthetics and the object Words by James Staughton

A recent car trip gave rise to the question of the most impressive things (objects) we had each ever seen/experienced, and after some thought I narrowed it to three: Uluru, the Taj Mahal and the Great Pyramid of Cheops. Obvious in a sense but in retrospect also interesting. All are defined by their singularity (hence object) and to greater or lesser extent size, but quite different in how they came to be. One naturally occurring, one imagined, built and maintained by human intellect, one in an entropic state of decay between these two conditions (and defined by its stoic resistance).

So aside from singularity casting something as a definable object and size being impressive in making us feel small, but somehow connected to bigger things, what defines this relationship between us and the object and what of the object outside of our consciousness altogether?

It would seem that aesthetics (being the primary medium of interaction between us and the object) might be a good place to start and might be defined as follows: a complex sensory language used

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to communicate on many levels (emotional, intellectual, spiritual) much like any language but in many ways more so. Human aesthetic experience after all predates the existence of verbal or written language and everyone is born with a primary grasp of it.

Let’s first think about what you might call sensory aesthetics.

This relates to the hardwired sensory responses of the human mind and body as evolved over many thousands of years in response to our environment, survival imperatives and any number of other factors. This in turn extends to spatial understanding (a mixture of senses acting together) relating to the position of the human body in space (perceptions of what are in front, to the side or behind us are quite different) and are fundamentally shaped by the nature, size and configuration of our body: orientation of eyes, ears nose, mouth and surface of our skin and of course the way our mind processes the information.

These hardwired sensory responses are refined over a lifetime in response to our environment, relationships, intellectual pursuits and any number of other factors

The Return of the Object

which becomes particularly evident at the extremes of human focus and endeavour: the artist, musician, or perfumer with refined visual, audio and olfactory senses respectively, or the Inuit people of the arctic who can identify and describe 100 types of snow (so hypersensitised to the aesthetic experience of an icy white landscape).

A further aspect of this hardwired sensory aesthetic experience is the perception of natural phenomena as beautiful. This is probably no accident given that the evolution of the human species within the natural environment. We are a part of its system and order and it would seem we are hardwired to understand it as being right, natural, correct.

If sensory aesthetics represents the experience of phenomena as it exists in a raw state, unaltered by memory, logic and association, then the effect these (good and bad) on the aesthetic experience (and consequently the engagement/manipulation of collective memory, logic and association for aesthetic effect) might be referred to as associational aesthetics.

In reality, as this second example begins to show, sensory and associational aesthetics can’t be fully separated as they operate simultaneously and in tandem.

All of this explains something about the object as a perceived entity within the human mind but what about the object in its own autonomous right, outside of the perception of anyone or anything?

Philosopher Graham Harman in defining his thinking on object oriented ontology (OOO) sees objects existing both as ‘real’ objects outside of perception and as ‘sensual’ objects within the perception of the mind. He seeks to allow both simultaneously, casting OOO as a bridge between the two. This relates to a bridge between philosophical positions of realism (the real object as it exists) and idealism (the sensual object as it’s perceived).

Put simply, OOO proposes that objects, which are defined as ‘any unified entity’, exist as real objects outside of our consciousness (so must surely contain qualities which are unknown or unknowable to us), but also as sensual objects within our consciousness (with qualities connected to the real object yet substantially edited, altered and augmented). It is possible of course for sensual objects to exist in our consciousness alone (such as a god, a unicorn, or the unrealised idea for a building) and for real objects to exist outside of our consciousness altogether (by managing to escape the perception of living beings).

In promoting the value of the autonomous object, Harman bemoans the ubiquitous dual practice (especially in architecture) of what he terms ‘undermining’ and ‘overmining’ of the object (building), ‘undermining’ being where the object is rendered inconsequential by framing it as an insignificant sum of its parts and overmining being where the object is rendered inconsequential by framing it as an insignificant part of a greater whole. The symptoms of this practice (undermining and overmining) can be seen through the following shifts.

The shift in focus from object to field

(general), from objects themselves to their component parts and the systems they exist within; and, from inspiration to assimilation (universal).

The shift in focus from objects seeking inspiration from natural or constructed ecological systems (while standing apart), to objects seeking assimilation within these systems (so dissolving into insignificance).

In acknowledgement of the natural world (which we are very much part of) as a highly complex parametric model, operating according to the forces (parameters) and elements (material) of the universe, what does this mean with regard to the evolving practice of parametric design? While parametric design may seek to create objects by learning from the parametric systems of the natural world as a springboard for creative possibility (inspiration) it may also seek to create objects by responding to all the parameters (forces) within their sphere of influence as some kind of new (but potentially banal) form of functionalism (assimilation).

The shift from assertion to compliance (personal), now considering the person themselves as the object in question.

The shift in focus from the architect holding a position of genuine authority within the (increasingly complex) building procurement process, to the architect being the obedient agent of any number of different forces (economic, political, social) operating within this process.

The shift in focus from the politician demonstrating genuine leadership, to the politician operating as a market research (opinion poll) driven weathervane to (unguided) public opinion.

OOO seeks to shift focus from the field (of influence and connections) to the object itself, without the expectation that everything can or should be known about it, with the suggestion that much is indeed unknowable and at best can only be alluded to. Edwin Abbott’s often cited satirical story, Flatland, is a worthy metaphor in suggesting that we are unable to know

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about any number of qualities an object may have if they lie outside our ability to perceive them.

So maybe there really is something beyond sensory and associational aesthetics, impressions alluded to, unfathomable yet vital which can’t or shouldn’t be fully grasped or understood, acknowledgement that our understanding and experience of objects is fleeting, elusive, and incomplete. A parallel maybe to our search for wonder, adventure, even spirituality in a post enlightenment world, a restoration of faith in the possibilities of the seductive world of the unknown and the unknowable.

As the creators of objects, there is maybe a call for the manipulation of aesthetic language to pose questions with unknown answers, open doors to unknown worlds, to obfuscaate as much as explain, allowing room for mythology, wonder, the contradictory and the inexplicable. There’s no doubt such impressions have resonance in the experience of my three heavyweight champions of the object world.

James Staughton is the Victorian Chapter's Editorial Committee Chair and a founding Director of Workshop Architecture.

Above left Parallel Intersect by Workshop Architecture (Using the arrow for its vector quality and ubiquitous crosscultural presence within visual language, the pavilion is formed from the impossible meeting of floor and ceiling planes and the dual shadow volumes cast from an absent but suggested four-dimensional arrow form.

Photo by Shannon McGrath

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Floppy objects Words by Leanne Zilka

Right Immersive sensory aesthetic experience Olafur Eliasson's Smoke Room.

The floppy logic of material can be used to explore relations between the architectural object and surface. The Pleatpod, a small project completed in 2017 with RMIT University, applied the technique of pleating to develop architecture as object over other elements such as function, program or material expression.

This prototype experimented with the pleat (a technique to turn a flat piece of material around a form) as a way to develop a space where there is no differentiation between structure, skin and material.

The enclosure is developed by simultaneously considering support, material limitations, and enclosure, just as you would if you were fashioning a skirt around a body.

Pleating a building The Pleatpod uses the compression and expansion of the pleat to give the required structure and enclosure that also acts to express lightness and flexibility. By exploring the scale of architecture and the techniques used in fashion when designing and constructing the Pleatpod, many parallels between the disciplines of fashion and architecture came to the surface, including the unexpected

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engagement with the image and object.

Historically architects have expressed the elements of skin, structure and form clearly, but this has been ignored in the Pleatpod in favour of communicating an image of enclosure that seeks to hide any hierarchy in favour of the enclosure. Just as a corset in fashion manipulates a body into the idealised version desired by the designer, so too the Pleatpod works to hide the elements that make up the enclosure, combining them into the one surface.

Fashioning a building Fashion has been reliant on the object for as long as architecture has. Many of the techniques used in fashion can be used to experiment with architectural surface because both architecture and fashion use the object to direct culture, ideas and form. As practitioners we take cues from these images when thinking about the design of our projects.

In Fashion, techniques have been developed over a long period of time to manipulate the common starting point of a flat piece of fabric.

These techniques hide the limitations of the material where there is a

The Return of the Object

Above Pleatpod, a small project completed in 2017 with RMIT University Photo by John Gollings

process of developing mock-ups to manipulate materials into the desired image.

Once resolved, the 3D mockup goes through a pattern-making process that turns it into 2D that can then be mass produced, repeated and tweaked as needed. For example, smocking, a technique used to create decoration on a garment that also has the ability to hide the limited lengths of material, creating volume when the smocking is stopped, and the fabric is allowed to drape. The dart, is another technique used to create volume from a 2D surface simply by cutting away fabric that is then re-joined. Or the bias cut, where material is cut on an angle to allow the fabric to follow the silhouette of the body. The techniques

employed by fashion are useful for architecture as they have struggled through the limitations of their material palette in favour of the object – a reality of contemporary practice.

Dr Leanne Zilka is an academic at RMIT University and a practicing architect and director of ZILKA Studio.

Her research and practice focuses on the nexus between architecture, fashion and textile design to explore techniques that can be applied to the design and fabrication of architecture.

Through a range of built and unbuilt work, she has been able to develop ideas around fabric, form, and structure simultaneously.

Architect Victoria

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The architectural object

be expanded. This is the underlying ethos that pervades our endeavour.

Even if you put all meaning to one side it still remains, that the sheer act of discovery has some intrinsic value. The approach of conceiving architecture as a complex object is a difficult one. This does not however make it less potent or less relevant.

Clearly the richness of a discovery does go hand-in-hand with the degree of difficulty in achieving that discovery.

The alternative view is one where the outcome largely prefigures the design process. In that approach, the opportunity for discovery, for invention, for newness very significantly narrows.

Words by Rob McBride and Debbie Ryan

Right Immersive sensory aesthetic experience Olafur Eliasson's Smoke Room.

Art and architecture Like all dutiful Melburnians interested in the arts we recently visited the MOMA exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria. We were transfixed by the complexity of Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. Viewing this sculpture is simply like peering into another universe. This is equally true of a van Gogh’s Postman where one could endlessly speculate on the detail, composition and intention of the portrait. Given the enormous investment in architecture, it seemed a reasonable question to ask why architecture rarely reaches the level of complexity achieved by the object of art.

In part it is understandable; architecture has an overwhelming functional purpose. Moreover the construction systems that are available to architects, and our contemporary methods of designing and documenting buildings in programs such as Revit, resist conceiving architecture as a complex object. It is more common than not for architects to privilege techniques of assembly over the architectural object as a way of conceiving of architecture

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and of realising its ultimate expression.

Since the beginning of our practice we have maintained our interest in conceiving of architecture primarily not as systems of assembly but as complex objects. We were asked by Architect Victoria to discuss the role of the object in architecture by making specific reference to the work of our firm McBride Charles Ryan (MCR).

This short essay focusses on three things: the why – why we work this way; the how – some of the strategies and techniques that MCR uses; and the purpose – why we think this way of working is valuable and important.

The Why The intrinsic value of discovery – the why – is in part answered by our interest and fascination with objects and geometry, in rules and manifestations and how it is formed and how it can be manipulated, in the stuff that makes up our physical world, and the stuff that you can bring into the world. We are simply interested in how we perceive our physical universe and how it can

Architect Victoria

The How More than a catalogue, in describing our projects and processes it can sometimes come across as a catalogue of objects and techniques.

This does suggest passivity in the design process that does not really exist. Early in our careers we would talk of the interrogation of the object. We have mellowed somewhat but it remains that design for us is a vigorous iterative process where multiple types of object and transformations of that object are explored in parallel.

It would be rare that a single simple object would meet the complex briefs and planning process that are thrown at architects. In part to meet these briefs we typically subject objects to multiple processes and transformations. This is not just a planning exercise; this is the essential act of discovery, this is where new forms are revealed and where the local contextual relevance of the proposition is attained. This is where the architectural object is enriched.

For us, architecture is first a problem-creating exercise before it is a problem-solving exercise. Design is invention and fabrication; it is about creating a new universe, of concocting a new truth. The design process for us is, in part, to find that complex object that on the one hand causes a disjuncture with in its environment →

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and on the other that newly created object is inextricably linked to the meaning of that place and the people within it.

Projects and Strategies Perhaps the simplest of the strategies that we have investigated is the Pop Art object. The Cloud House in Fitzroy is an example. The main form of this house extension is drawn primarily from the extrusion of the cloud icon.

The project is a happy alliance of a sentimental idea for a family home, of sensible site orientation, of regulated planning setbacks and of the plastic possibilities of prosaic local building materials.

Both the Penleigh and Essendon Grammar School (PEGS) and the Templestowe Park Primary School share the characteristics of the Pop Art object, that is, they both co-opt an unlikely scaled playful and populous image. In one, PEGS, the pop image is the generator, in the other, Templestowe, it is the thing that is revealed or discovered. PEGS is an extruded black silhouette of an over-scaled federation home that is transformed into the images of a brutalist public school and a federation sporting pavilion, all of which enclose an unexpected cloud-

Above Dome House concept, conceived as a single platonic object with multiple parts removed Right Dome House, Hawthorn Previous page Klien Bottle House, Rye Photography by John Gollings

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like Utzon interior. At Templestowe, a large paraboloid shed is sliced to reveal to the suburb, a giant billboard with an over-scaled Olympic Stripe textbook emblazoned upon it – an Australian icon that evokes shared memories of school life across all generations.

Projects such as the Dome House in Hawthorn and the Ivanhoe Grammar Science Centre at Plenty share an overarching formal strategy.

Both of these projects are conceived of as single platonic objects with multiple parts removed. In both projects we devised a system of what exists inside the pure object, and it is this system that becomes the unlikely expression that is revealed in the final form. In the Dome House it is a 3D pixel, in Ivanhoe, a 3D mosaic. In both cases these introduced ordering systems create a Gesamtkunstwerklike interior. The strategy allows the unlikely objects of the sphere and cylinder to be manipulated so as to accommodate the complexities of the building program. In both, enough of the original figure is retained to allow two architectural languages to simultaneously exist. The Dome House language employs the picturesque strategies of the local vernacular while Ivanhoe reinforces the importance of scientific discovery within the teaching facility.

Projects such as PEGS, the Klein Bottle House and the Flinders Folly all take a topological approach to the architectural object. Our work here differs from the projects mentioned above in that if we are to maintain the particular topological properties of the object (which we prefer to do), they cannot be deducted. Adherence to these topological types maintains the key individual spatial characteristics of the architectural object; however, in this strategy, the thing is wrought into a shape with the greatest contextual meaning or relevance for each project.

Some of our architectural projects are subject to multiple contradictory strategies. The Letterbox House on the Mornington Peninsula is a good example. The street elevation →

The Return of the Object

Above Penleigh and Essendon Grammar School (PEGS) extrusion diagram Right The extruded black silhouette of PEGS Infinity Centre Photography by John Gollings

of this building is formed by extruding and enlarging the diminutive ‘No.7’ letterbox. This strategy however is completely contradicted by its opposite elevation where the exceptional extruded form appears as if it has been carved out of an ordinary colorbond-clad residential box.

Where applicable we do purposely orchestrate these contradictory strategies in the single project. At Monaco House in Melbourne, multiple strategies can be read in the single sole view of the building from Ridgway Place.

This building could be read as a metaphorical rock that has been cut and its exposed face highly polished.

Alternatively, it could be viewed as

a Christo-like object that has been draped in white fabric.

Spectacle and meaning So why do we understand that this way of making architecture is valuable and important? There are those that would argue for an architecture of good manners that is largely subservient to the order of the city. They argue that architecture should largely be a kind of urban backdrop. They do cite some historical examples but on the whole the evidence for the cogency of this proposition is feeble. One only needs to visit Rome to see the importance that the role that the architectural object plays in first disrupting and then re-creating an urban environment with purpose and meaning. There

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are more than enough background buildings to go around; good architects should concern themselves with the foreground, of re-imagining and redefining our cities, of making them rich and intense physical and intellectual experiences.

We think the work we are trying is to simultaneously cause a disjuncture with the context while re-emphasising the meaning of a place and the people that experience and occupy it. architecture should be both rupture and suture. The proposition is to make that urban place more vibrant, meaningful and legible and a key purpose of architecture is to provide meaningful spectacle in our cities.

A new alphabet Modernism largely stripped our profession of our shared architectural language and the role of the architect as inventive essayist. Try putting a window in a wall to see how what was the most fundamental of architectural acts is now immensely difficult.

Postmodernism sought to regain that lost language but it seems that exercise did little more than highlight the impossibility of returning to architectural strategies that existed prior to Modernism. Architects are now, in a sense, charged with the role of remaking the language of architecture and the architectural object is the alphabet of that new language.

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Robert McBride, Director of Melbourne-based architectural firm McBride Charles Ryan (MCR), works in conjunction with Debbie Ryan, founding owner, to lead the design direction on the firm’s projects. MCR is a national and international awardwinning practice with vast experience in the design of commercial, institutional and domestic projects.

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Associations: figure and field in a growing city Words by Paul Morgan

Paul Morgan Architects was founded in 1997 gaining traction through Urban Design Frameworks in Gippsland: Heyfield, Maffra and Morwell. But these projects were disaggregated and liminal by nature, the only commission one could hope for being perhaps a barbeque shelter or a footbridge.

These early urban design projects occupied a blurred zone between the making and the experience of space.

This urban and architectural theory of liminality was popular in the nineties but was rejected by the practice, not on philosophical grounds, but because it was an impediment to the will to build.

The drive to establish and build a practice became the drive to design objects, as objects meant freestanding architecture, where a design concept could be fully played out.

Early TAFE projects in the practice were big, cheap, expressive sheds. Necessarily, these buildings needed a branded presence for the TAFE institution – more Venturi and Scott-Brown’s duck than decorated shed – and this requirement drove our office’s projects towards a distinction between object and field. Object making – largely separated from

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context - occurred through necessity rather than design. The landscape budget was paltry and Rush Wright, SAALA and TCL produced skilled and inventive connections – from figure to ground – through limited means.

Later, life support units – or houses as they are more commonly known – provided an opportunity for subtle object conceptualisation.

At Cape Schanck phototropism – the orientation of an organism in response to light – formed a natural tunnel at the west of the site and the aerodynamic external skin referenced the coastal scrub which was formed by the wind. The house therefore represented the kinetics of the environment and harvested the environment’s rainfall. It is both an object and of the ecology.

Subsequently the Trunk House sought to achieve an almost transparent relationship with the surrounding forest, achieved through an eco-morphological transformation of remnant timber – bifurcations – into structure. Stringybark trees were removed from the site to make way for the new cabin. A mobile milling machine was delivered to site and the internal lining boards were milled,

The Return of the Object

Above Cape Schanck House by Paul Morgan Architects Photo by Peter Bennetts

cured on site and then fixed: site context harvested for object making.

This conflation of object (cabin) and field (forest) also engaged with the typology of the small Australian house as well as the primitive hut.

Where do we stand in Melbourne in 2018 – in relation to the object? This short opinion piece on the return of the object keeps our powder dry on definitive pronouncements regarding a complex subject in a period of massive urban change. However, some general observations can be made.

Object-making, exemplified by 50–60-storey apartment towers in the CBD, would seem to negate the benefits of complex urbanism and connection. Typology and scale drive practices towards certain positions on the object-field relationship.

Elenberg Fraser’s oeuvre is more likely to be object focused, Sibling Nation’s more context related. The algorithms underpinning the rising phenomenon of parametric design would tend to privilege the urban fabric, but this tendency is counter balanced by cut through, branded object singularities – Eureka, Prima, Mayfair.

Lessons can be learned from Melbourne practice NMBW Architecture Studio with designs that conflate both the European influences of the city with the Las Vegas strip. They apply a design sensibility to our Victorian-influenced city that works towards a complex and subtle urbanism. And finally, the contemporary rise of alliancing, mentoring, co-working and social enterprising is more likely to lead us

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away from, rather than returning us back to the object.

Paul Morgan is Principal of Paul Morgan Architects (PMA), a Melbourne-based practice. For over twenty years the practice has completed residential, university, TAFE and council projects. PMA was awarded the national Robin Boyd Award in 2007 and has also won awards from the European Centre for Architecture Art and Urban Design and Chicago Athenaeum.

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Building design culture Words by Sophie Patitsas

Right Immersive sensory aesthetic experience Olafur Eliasson's Smoke Room.

Advocating for the value of good design in a context where a common understanding of good design or even the term ‘design’ itself does not exist is a challenge. For the Office of the Victorian Government Architect (OVGA), an awareness of our place within government and clarity of our role, message and target audience is critical. Essentially this is an exercise in understanding context. This understanding is critical in remaining relevant and effectively performing our advocacy and advisory role in encouraging high-quality buildings and places for people.

Mutual understanding and respect enables a meaningful and authentic dialogue with decision makers about the role of design in creating value that enriches communities. A recent publication on The Value of Design in Infrastructure produced for the United Kingdom’s National Infrastructure Commission first explains what it means by design, essentially a problem-solving and iterative process, before launching into a discussion of value. It uses selected case studies to show what ‘we mean by design and how design and design thinking led to a wide

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range of benefits not only for those who commissioned them but also for end users and local communities.’ 1

Starting out as ‘occasional mail outs on aspects of the subject’ the OVGA’s Good Design publication series plays an important role in our design advocacy toolkit – defining, promoting and reinforcing the value of good design and the means of achieving it.2 Good Design and its companion pieces, including Good Design and Education, Good Design and Transport, and the new Good Design and Heritage, articulate good design principles, discuss process and governance arrangements that prioritise design and include examples of projects to communicate what we mean by good design.

Our recent refresh of the inaugural Good Design, identifies seven design principles that are key to achieving high quality design, defining good design as: inspiring, contextual, functional, valuable, sustainable, enjoyable and enduring.

Key recommendations for government include embedding these good design principles in projects, applying the most appropriate procurement method for every project, and building

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an innovative design culture.

Investing in competitive and quality-based selection processes in the procurement of design services is a good indicator of a commitment to building design culture. The OVGA’s recently published Architecture Design Competitions – A guide for government responds to a recent demand, from both local and state government, for OVGA to provide advice, and to assist in establishing design competitions. It seemed timely that we provide information that builds on advice provided in OVGA’s publication Government as Smart Client (2013) – elevating the role of competitions as a worthwhile procurement method and helping government realise the benefits of the process.

Our first-hand experience with design competition processes for Flinders Street Station, Frankston Station and Shepparton Art Museum, all featured as case studies in the publication, means we are wellplaced to share our learnings. These learnings include, the benefits and appropriateness of different types →

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of competitions, how competitions engage stakeholders, developing a brief, protecting intellectual property and jury selection.

Similarly, the process of undertaking design review through our Victorian Design Review Panel (VDRP) prioritises design-led interrogations of projects and builds design culture.

Now standing at just over 300 design reviews since the VDRP’s establishment in 2011, again we are in a position to offer lessons learned common to particular typologies we have reviewed. Perhaps the most important lesson in design review and one that consistently informs our definition of good design is that despite the ‘cliché of context’, good design is absolutely informed by its context and responds to site-specific environmental, social and cultural conditions.3 An awareness of place and a synthesis of vision and function embeds lasting value into a built environment and enriches our community.

One of the most powerful tools in design advocacy, providing

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valuable insight into what it takes to create design excellence, is the identification of exemplar projects through design awards program and similar quality-based judging processes. The OVGA has been involved in the judging of design awards both within government, such as the Victorian School Design Awards, and for peak bodies including the Australian Institute of Architects (the Institute) and the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects.

It is however our sponsorship of the Institute’s penultimate award the Victorian Architecture Medal that has recently offered our greatest opportunity to demonstrate what the profession means by good design and the public value this offers.

The criteria for selection of the Victorian Architecture Medal includes consideration of a building’s relationship and contribution to the public realm. This can manifest in a myriad of ways and even suggests ‘…that a measure of urban design, creating a threshold between building and environment, is…necessary to

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maintain a certain level of spatial and social quality.’4 Peer recognition of RMIT’s New Academic Street, a study in public-minded and collaborative architecture, and the winner of this year’s Victorian Architecture Medal in 2018, shows a maturity in the profession and an acknowledgement of the public role that architecture can play in the city.

The public focus of the Victorian Architecture Medal, points decision makers and stakeholders in the direction of an award that recognises projects that are civic in character and offer their architectural qualities to the greater public realm of the city. The OVGA taps into tools and resources to provide an understanding of design and build an innovative design culture within government.

In building this culture we mark out the territory and space required for architecture to take its place in creating value and building a positive legacy for future generations.

RMIT’s New Academic Street, Winner of the Victorian Architecture Medal 2018 Lyons with NMBW Architecture Studio, Harrison and White, MvS Architects and Maddison Architects Photography by Peter Bennetts

Sophie Patitsas is Principal adviser, Urban design + Architecture Office of the Victorian Government Architect

Notes 1 The Value of Design in Infrastructure – A Report for the National Infrastructure Commission (July 2018) United Kingdom, p. 8 John Denton, 'OVGA Message', Architect Victoria (winter 2008), Australian Institute of Architects, p. 28

2

3 Bernard Colenbrander and Christian Rapp, David Chipperfield: The embedded nomad (2016) ArtEZ Press, p. 18 4

Ibid p. 29

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Above Monash LTB by John Wardle Architects Photo by Peter Bennetts Left Dreamland by FMZD Below Swanston Academic Building by Lyons Photo by John Gollings

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