Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts

Urban Historical

Julia Gatley — 2023-08-16

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Eucalypts of Hodogaya: Organic cultural diplomacy at Yokohama War Cemetery

Athanasios Tsakonas — 2023-08-16

Located within a former Hodogaya recreation park about 5 kilometres west of the city centre, the 27-acre Yokohama War Cemetery is the primary commemoration and remembrance site for Commonwealth Allies of the Second World War within mainland Japan. Alongside Hiroshima Peace Park and Tokyo’s Yasakuni Shrine, it serves to remind both foreign nationals and locals of war’s consequences. Yet beyond official narratives, its establishment in the peripheral city of Yokohama, rather than Tokyo, Japan’s imperial, cultural, and political heart remains relatively unknown. This paper aims to understand better Australia’s significant role in this war cemetery’s creation. Under the auspices of the Australian War Graves Service, Australian and Japanese designers and the contractors of both nations collaborated to create a significant setting for deceased servicemen and women. Whilst ostensibly another of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s many such sites worldwide, Australian involvement offers an alternative interpretation of its conception. By examining the factors leading to the considered allocation of the site and its subsequent layout design, this study intends to enhance our knowledge of this important Australian contribution to our region—by asking why this war cemetery differs considerably from the orthodox nature of the conventional war cemeteries; by unveiling the many unknown architects, landscapers, contractors, and officials that put aside differences to collaborate on this war cemetery and its memorials; and by recording and analysing the careful detailing and construction of the memorials using local and imported materials. The lens from architectural history offers unique insights into these processes.

Participation and/or/ against tacit knowledge: ILAUD, 1976–1981

Hamish Lonergan — 2023-08-16

For several productive years from 1976 to 1981, the International Laboratory of Architecture and Urban Design (ILAUD) engaged with the issue of participation in architecture and planning in the city of Urbino. Each year, these summer workshops—founded by Giancarlo De Carlo in 1976—brought together students, educators, and prominent practitioners from across the fields of architecture, urban planning, architectural history, and art to discuss and experiment on the issue of how designers should engage with users of the built environment. In this sense, the workshop’s participants were explicitly united against what De Carlo derided as formalism, and later as eclecticism and postmodernism. At the same time, despite this broad consensus, ILAUD’s public outputs—the student work and lecture transcripts collated in the annual reports—seem to betray a set of disagreements between participants from various European and North American schools and between planners and architects. On one side, were a group of schools who argued that participation involved an analysis of the built fabric and cultural heritage of a city and its architecture; on the other, those who believed that participation required the direct involvement of future users. Yet, rather than accepting these as fundamental differences in attitude, this paper uses such apparent contradictions to argue that these various approaches were united in articulating a new, broader, and more equitable relationship between users, clients, and designers, on the cusp of postmodernity.

Diagrams in the field: Three conceptual approaches in the entries for the 1979 Australian Parliament House design competition

Luke Tipene — 2023-08-16

Compositional relationships are well established between Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin’s 1912 urban plan for Canberra and the winning design by Mitchell, Giurgola and Thorp for Australia’s New Parliament House. As recognised by Andrew Hutson in 2011 and 2013, the civic-scale geometric planning features of the parliamentary triangle and land axis—from the Griffin Plan—influenced the competition brief, submitted entries, and assessors’ deliberations for the 1979 Australian Parliament House design competition. Yet, on reviewing the remaining submissions for 324 of the competition entries in the National Archives of Australia, many schemes appear to reject an apparent alignment with the geometric symbolism of the Griffin Plan.

This article surveys the lesser-known majority of competition submissions to consider other approaches to the relationship between Canberra’s urban plan and proposed parliamentary architecture, beyond the historical significance of the Griffin Plan. By comparing James Weirick’s 1989 criticism of Parliament’s remote location to Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter’s 1978 criticism of urban voids, it identifies three conceptual approaches to the problems of the site’s isolation—apparent in common characteristics across many entrants’ unique schemes. These three approaches include rejecting references to Canberra’s urban exterior with autonomous parliamentary architectural forms; internalising Canberra’s urban plan within parliamentary designs replete with symbolic gestures; or reclassifying parliamentary architecture as urban interiors for gathering places of public representation. Each approach reflects interpretations of Australia’s parliamentary democracy in different ways, and reveals risks and potential benefits for democratic practices when architecture and urban planning is employed to speak for the rights of others.

Watershed or whimper? The Australian Year of the Built Environment, 2004

Susan Holden — 2023-08-16

The 2004 Year of the Built Environment (YBE) was an initiative of the Australian Government that aimed to raise awareness and propel positive change in built environment design for the benefit of the whole community. Adopted after successful lobbying by the Royal Australian Institute of Architects, it provided an opportunity for architectural leadership and engagement with built environment governance at a time when the sustainability agenda was gaining popular momentum. An array of national- and state-level initiatives championed a range of themes from construction innovation to architectural heritage and the future of housing, with a focus on highlighting exemplars and supporting built demonstration projects. Patron-in-chief Governor-General Major General Michael Jeffery described it as a “watershed year” that had the potential to influence the quality of the built environment for years to come. In contrast, the Urban Design Forum described the initiative as “a whimper” disguising a lack of ongoing budget commitment and disinterest from national leadership on built environment issues across the political spectrum. In the ongoing absence of a national built environment policy agenda in Australia, and as a coordinated approach to climate adaptation in built environment design has become more than urgent, what was the legacy of this somewhat forgotten Year of the Built Environment? This article explores this question, analysing how the year exposed the need for new forms of engagement with government that aligned with changing modes of public administration. It reflects on how the year was a catalyst for the establishment of new State Government Architect positions and influenced how the architecture profession’s involvement in built environment governance has developed since.

The “soft edge”: Heritage, special character, and new planning directives in Aotearoa cities

Carolyn Hill — 2023-08-16

Divergent visions for urban form are currently contesting the future of cities in Aotearoa. Severe pressures of population growth, inadequate housing supply, and unsustainable transport systems are raising a spectrum of voices on the appropriate planning response. The heritage field is enfolded in these debates, as intensification pressures have amplified questions about the value of historic urban fabric and the planning mechanisms that sustain it. To what extent should cities’ existing areas be retained or developed, and who gets to decide?

Focusing on the “soft edge” of heritage—early suburbs valorised as “special character”—the paper traces the history of heritage-making in urban Aotearoa and its role in maintaining the ontological security of the settler state. It first explores the processes of identifying and managing historic urban forms that have gradually evolved through Aotearoa’s planning legislation, from the early town planning acts to the Resource Management Act 1991. It then analyses the tension between contemporary urban planning directions and historic places conservation, exploring the concept of “amenity,” which is implicated in both. It concludes with some avenues for deeper collaboration between planning policy and heritage-making for more spatially and culturally equitable cities.

Spectral urbanism

Tom Collins — 2023-08-16

Responding to the clearing in the 1970s of an estimated 15,000 houses to make way for the Central Motorway Junction in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, this research project presents a speculative architectural proposal for a wallpaper archive and a pedestrian bridge to a traffic island of regenerating trees at the centre of Grafton Gully. The wallpaper archive—intended to house a modest historic wallpaper collection by local heritage architects Salmond Reed Architects—and the bridge are cover for a larger recovery of historical significance eclipsed by the transport infrastructure. The architecture proposed intends both memorial and future-building functions and arises out of an investigation of practice-led processes centred on casting, modelling, printing, and photography. In doing so, this creative design research demonstrates a form of architectural renovation as storytelling, in which the past is recalled not through material restoration, but re-narrativisation—a process I have come to call spectral urbanism.

Drawing Ground

Ella Jones — 2023-08-16

Aotearoa now recognises non-human natural entities as having personhood: Te Urewera, Whanganui Awa, Taranaki Maunga. Given the significance of this recognition, the motivation for this work is to understand the evolving relationships of humans to the living, breathing ground. To do this I engaged drawing as a thinking tool, and myself as drawer/researcher, acknowledging my lens as a Pākehā (or non-Māori). This research project reflects on this work, exploring relations to Ground in Aotearoa.

“Drawing Ground” is a design-research project conducted through abstract drawing investigations, exploring connections between Ground, as a person, and my body. The work culminates in the re-sketching of the historic Dominion Museum. The building’s solidity is dissolved and reimagined through intense, turbulent sketches, engaging with Ground beneath the building. Architectural sketch drawing was used as a tool for thinking, allowing ideas to emerge yet remain open-ended and contingent, in concert with the subject matter of the research. Sketching allowed me to explore my relationship to Ground through an active and open dialogue.

Throughout this process there was an imagined co-production, between me and Ground, through multiple drawing experiments. These highlight ways in which drawing-based design research can shift settler colonial perspectives on how we interact with Ground, how architecture might achieve reciprocity with Ground as co-drawer and delineator of space.

The Routledge Handbook of Architecture, Urban Space and Politics, Volume 1: Violence, Spectacle and Data,ed. Nikolina Bobic and Farzaneh Haghighi

Samer Wanan — 2023-08-16

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Securing Urbanism: Contagion, Power and Risk, Mark Laurence Jackson and Mark Hanlen

Andrew Douglas — 2023-08-16

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Oceanic Architectural Routes: The Photographic Archive of Mike Austin, cur. Albert Refiti

Sēmisi Fetokai Potauaine — 2023-08-16

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Interview with Ian Athfield and Sir Miles Warren

Julia Gatley — 2023-08-16

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Biographies

Issue Editor — 2023-08-16

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Colophon

Issue Editor — 2023-08-16

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