HUXTABLE

Huxtable never let her readers, or anyone else who would listen, forget that architecture is not like the other arts. Paintings or dance performances you choose to see or not see, but architecture envelops us all. Everyone sees and experiences it. Huxtable insisted both that architecture is an art and that it is an art that everybody deserves to enjoy precisely because it constitutes the life of our inhabited places.

-  SARAH WILLIAMS GOLDHAGEN at The Republic

PLANNING CITY CULTURE

An opinion piece in today's Dominon Post entitled 'Lack of Planning hurting Wellington' is an interesting read, providing some thoughtful, grounded consideration of where Wellington City is going. The author's focus on public events, activities and use of space seems to highlight the lack of discussion of people we usually hear in planning conversations.

However, the piece got me thinking, and I had a few queries. I noted down the following, intending to post in reponse to the piece. However, my thoughts got out of hand, and before long I had well exceeded the maximum character limit. So, I thought I'd post it here instead.

'I am somewhat concerned that your suggestions for change focus on new buildings primarily located on the waterfront. This response echoes two urban issues Wellington encountered in the 1970s and the 1990s. In the 70s, a large amount of the building stock was demolished to pave the way for the new with the dream that this would fix the urban issues of the time. The learnings from that were that new was not neccessarily better, and that in establishing the new, much of what was held dear as quintessentially Wellington was lost. In developing culture, we have to take care not to abolish culture.


Members of the public seem to understand that new doesn't solve everything: in the 1990s, there was much public outcry about council plans for doing exactly what you suggest: building large facilities (some public, some private) on the Waterfront. The result of years of public dissent was Waitangi Park - a lively, variable terrain which acts as a connective tissue between the cultural institution of Te Papa (which, sadly, turns its back to the Waterfront) and the leisure precinct of Oriental Bay.

If you look at Wellington more broadly, you'll notice that it's not so much places, but the linkages between them which we struggle with. While our compactness lends us the title of a 'pedestrian friendly city', wide vehicular streets, large block sizes, and few direct accessways from the city to the waterfront limit pedestrian exploration and engagement. (In this sense, to praise Jervois quay as a necessary 'strong boundary' seems ill-considered.) If I could walk the short distance from Courtney Place up Taranki St to the Film Archive without getting drenched, having my skirt blow above my knees, my ears blown out by four lanes of traffic and nothing to look at but a blank facade than perhaps I might be more inclined to spend more time - and money - there. Why confine your conceptions of 'performance' and 'culture' within four-walls, or outdoor amphitheatres? The city as a whole deserves to be considered as a site of our cultural endevours.

The suggestion is that 'our planning needs to bring them together'. Close, but not quite. Rather, I suggest, our planning needs to promote active, connected, and accessible cultural institutions which are not neccessarily 'together' geogaphically, but which, through consideration of wider urban planning issues such as Jervois Quay and Taranki St, are accessible as a group, and indicate their individuals roles within the broader cultural climate you wish to promote.The distribution of cultural institutions throughout Wellington allows a broader range of individuals to come into contact with them everyday; rather than relegating them to the role of weekend or tourist fare that is the waterfront.

The answers are not as simple as : but then, our creativity should make Wellington well placed to develop innovative, long-term propositions. Wellington 2040 - and the creative public marketing of this vision - was surely a good start. '

AMBIGUITY & CONTRADICTION

Sennett, again, as I potter away with design.

ESSAYING ETHICS

Lothar Baumgarten, Tetrahedron, 1968. 

Joshua Fausty at Afterall has written a piece Trinh T. Minh-ha and her critical/creative methodologies which reflect the path that, presently, my thesis is seeming to follow. I've reproduced the whole article here, with my own emphases and notes embedded. You can find a link to the original here. Since I was in a stumbling mode, I also stumbled across Cornelia Lauf's musings On Language and the Public Art of Lothar Baumgarten, a beautiful engaged article with equal pertinence to my questions of critical language and sociality. She includes a favourite quote from Baumgarten which I had near forgotten: 'You cannot reflect your own society, unless you know a society that is remote from it. To know that society, you don't want to walk into it, get a PhD and turn the page. You have to jump into the bushes, almost naked, as I did.'

 

Trinh T. Minh-ha, Reassemblage, 1982, 16mm film, 40min, stills. Courtesy Moongift Films 

Trinh T. Minh-ha Essaying Ethics

Writing's slippery, mysterious, protean quality gives it a freedom and efficacy always tempered by specific social and historical settings. Like speaking, acting and teaching, writing creates contexts - and there is no end to context-making. Trinh T. Minh-ha's essay-writing is a clear example of this: through the performance of feminist, postcolonial and post-structuralist theories of language, subjectivity and power, her work reveals that writing constructs its own contexts, and cannot be trusted to illuminate without confusing, to disclose the truth without concealing it. Trinh's intellectual history and artistic production emerge in and out of a multiplicity of national and disciplinary contexts. Born in 1952 in Vietnam and educated there and in the Philippines, Trinh emigrated to the United States in 1970 where she studied French literature, music and ethnomusicology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Trinh is currently Professor of Women's Studies and Rhetoric (Film) at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work with theory, poetry and experimental film centres around a reflection on language and identity - a reflection that emerges through literary performances, most explicitly developed in her pointedly essayistic essays on art and criticism.¹

PHENOMENA OF PARTIAL ILLUSION

 Phenomena of Partial Illusion

Nuveando & Nuveado

snow, fog, and salt

Lightjet Prints

134" x 7.5" & 160" x 7.5"

Katherine Bash

Speaking also of Illusions Partial or (im)-partial, Guy Horton's column The Indicator over at ArchDaily has recently featured two incredibly real articles on The Next Architecture (1 & 2). He is not afraid to delve into the difficult questions of - what value does the greater public place on architecture? How can architecture be sustained as a profession when the majority of those who practice in its field cannot afford to purchase in the field? What role can the architect play before the building enters the picture?

Pressing, pertinent, and powerful.

SECTION HOUSE

The Cloud Collective's Section House, located on a public green strip in Oisterwijk is just that: a physical, dense section through a typical house. It seems to exist halfway between building site and ruin, halfway between house and playground, halfway between real and unreal. It recalls Whiteread's Ghost - though what is given material presence is not negative space, but the cut of the section. We feel, in it, the resistance of lost matter meeting matter. The drawing is firmly in control of the material - the projected slice is given weight beyond itself. Catherine Ingraham , in an essay titled Losing It in Architecture has called the architectural drawing a lament. Here, indeed, we see the architect's marks stand in for his absent object, calling it into presence. At the same time, the structure breaks no rules, rather, the logic is misapplied, drawn out from itself. The delight is in what the conventional can allow when we engage with it critically. The Section House acts as an operator, what Stan Allen might call a 'transaction' between the abstract realm of geometry and the material stuff of building. 

Whiteread, Ghost