Beyond real estate

The role of architecture in cultural policy

by Cameron Logan

Architects and architectural culture do not slot easily into cultural policy. Those in other creative fields might well say the same, but the ambiguity around the professional and artistic identity of the architect amplifies the problem. Are architects artists? Or ‘creatives’, like those in advertising and marketing? Or white-collar professionals and managers in the property and construction industry?

The answer depends, of course, on where you look. Existing government policy in Australia tends to endorse the authorised view of the professional bodies, the state-based institutes of architecture, which tend to emphasise professional competencies. The Victorian government lists ‘managing’, ‘co-ordinating’, and ‘selecting sites’, alongside ‘designing’ as things architects might do. The same document identifies ‘understanding regulatory frameworks’ and ‘project co-ordination’ as the bodies of knowledge and expertise architects might provide to prospective clients.

Popular culture furnishes a different set of answers. Peppa Pig’s father Daddy Pig hints at least once in the popular children’s cartoon that he might be an architect, and his Corb spectacles leave us in no doubt. Far from being a competent professional, however, he comes across mostly as a pompous and bumbling windbag. Elyse Keaton, Meredith Baxter’s clear-eyed mother in the long-running 1980s sitcom Family Ties, is perhaps closer to the sanctioned idea. She is smart, capable, and organised, just the kind of person you might want to manage your construction project. What’s more, she wants to ‘do good’, make the world a better place.

Perhaps the most salient literary image of an architect is the unwaveringly principled visionary Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. This is a man who turns to terrorism when his design for a public housing project is altered by bureaucrats. For Australians of a certain age, this high modern idea of the architect as a form-giving creative genius (and a man) resonates with events from earlier decades that involved the figure of the architect. The best-known public controversies were Jørn Utzon’s removal from the Sydney Opera House project in 1966 over resources and creative autonomy, and Harry Seidler’s decades-long battle with what he regarded as petty bureaucrats over local planning controls.

Clearly, there are multiple notions of the architect, none of which can be positioned easily in a government cultural policy. The focus on professional competency in official documents reflects the profession’s own anxieties about the possible perception of architecture as useless or merely aesthetic. But the concern to underline the efficacy of design, its value to clients – think engineer or project manager rather than visual artist – also risks devaluing the extent to which architecture might have something to say. And here is the nub of the issue for cultural policy. Should government policy support the work of architects as professionals, or merely to the extent that they have something to say about Australian people or places?

Revive, the Commonwealth Government’s recently announced cultural policy, leans heavily on the idea of the artist as storyteller. It is the kind of anodyne idea that one might expect in a document like this. We all know that today everyone has their own story, and we have the inspirational wall art to prove it. Revive affirms that wisdom by asserting the policy objective of supporting ‘A Place for Every Story’.

Making sure that creativity is encouraged and supported everywhere is doubtless a worthy objective. But it is not clear whether the places for these stories are actual or just metaphorical. The document is silent on the question of whether we need to design and build more places where Australian stories can be told. The document adopts the five pillars established under Labor’s previous national cultural policy, Creative Australia, and ‘Pillar 4’ talks about infrastructure. But the amount of money historically involved in arts funding suggests that recurrent support of companies and funding of new initiatives is not going to include enough money for capital budgets. The ‘building’ in the document is mostly about capacity and partnerships, as well as about ‘building on’ previous ALP policy achievements.

It is not surprising that Revive mentions architects only once and the practice of architecture on just one other occasion. Most of what might count as a discussion of architecture appears on a single page under Pillar 2 of the policy, A Place for Every Story.

Revive does seem to like the idea of place. But the authors of the document – including its Introduction, which is provided by historian Claire Wright and novelist Christos Tsiolkas – are clearly more comfortable with an idea of place framed as place protection or cultural heritage. The design of buildings and public places and the shaping of our cities and other settlements goes unremarked. Place is important, the document tells us, for tourism and national identity, but it is vague about the role of architecture and design.

The problem perhaps is the uncertainty around whether ar- chitecture is itself a mode of storytelling or just one of the steps needed to create the vital infrastructure for storytelling. Revive makes reference to Kerstin Thompson’s award-winning Bundanon Art Museum and Bridge for Creative Learning, noting that it will support creative endeavour and that it is award-winning. It does not recognise that the design of the place itself is an act of creativity that frames our relationship to the landscape and suggests a way of experiencing that place. The same uncertainty beset the competition brief for Australian Parliament House (APH) in the late 1970s. A series of reports were in no doubt that the winning entry should be a place that contains important expressions of national meaning in the arts and crafts. But, as Luke Tipene’s recent work on the APH competition has demonstrated, the building itself was not expected to say anything in particular about Australian democracy.

The Commonwealth’s hesitancy and uncertainty about the scope of what architects do is understandable. Seinfeld ’s George Costanza habitually lied about being an architect through the several seasons of the show. He sensed that there was something interesting and worthy about architecture, but it was also clear that he didn’t really know what architects do. In this respect, the Commonwealth is a bit like George.

This uncertainty is no doubt exacerbated by the current set of crises remaking architectural practice globally. The profession is in the midst of a major transformation, or what Jess Myers, writing in the Architectural Review, called ‘an act of speculative professionalism’. Newly vocal groups of architects around the world have made the novel demand that they be treated as an organised labour force. In the past couple of years, architects in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Portugal, and the United States have all engaged in efforts to unionise.

Add worker, therefore, to manager, professional, and creative artist on the list of ways to think about the architect. The set of economic and professional ambiguities embedded within the meaning of architecture makes its position in cultural policy challenging – but not impossible.

There is one domain in architectural culture that has obvious potential to be included in an inclusive cultural policy like Revive. Broadly known as research architecture, this work takes the form of exhibitions and publications and is mostly dedicated to creative speculations and curated visual reflection on the challenges facing architecture now. It is distinct from the more methodologically bound research pursued in architectural academia. In the United Kingdom, where this form of architectural creativity thrives, it is largely supported by philanthropy. But there are obvious downsides to that model. If government was to become a more active partner in supporting research architecture here, the subject of the work – how we respond architecturally to the changing climate and landscape, spatial relations between humans and the non-human, the limits of the public domain, to name a few – could acquire a new relevance and vitality as a set of reflections on who we are and how we live, work, and interact.

The success of research architecture will depend not so much on government money as it will on a clear signal that it is part of a wider field in the visual arts and design. Such a signal has the capacity to link the arts more directly to city-making. While the impact of including research architecture in cultural policy is sure to be modest, any effort that helps us move beyond the dominance of real estate and the municipal as the limits of our spatial imagination is worth a try. At its most compelling, the resulting work might even revive and enliven debates about how we live and what we value in our buildings and public places. g