June 01, 2002
As an introduction to the Australian work featured on the following pages, this idea of the antipodes can begin to show what is at stake in seeing this work from Europe, from such distance.
The notion that Europe had an inverse other preceded, and indeed fuelled, the discovery of territory that would materialize this idea. But the idea of the antipodes is not about Australia as such, but about the European imaginary, the way in which an idea about the existence of the ‘exact opposite’ would provide a balance for the idea of European culture. Yet the discovery of territories that could be framed in this way as antipodean provided Europe, or more specifically Britain, with the opportunity to extend itself within an imperialist project, one involving a dual register of extension and banishment. So the antipodes became both the imagining of complete difference and divergence (via Francis Bacon: ‘to tread opposite to the present world’) and the possibility of territorial extension of the same. This tension between sameness and difference bound up in the idea of the antipodes creates an unusual effect, an effect of the uncanny. In a current sense, to travel all this way only to find more of the same presents the banal side of a globally connected culture. Yet this effort of travel is punctuated by moments of strangeness, a strangeness felt most palpably within the hallucinatory condition of jet lag: a landscape which might be framed within the condition of the picturesque, yet with never-before-seen flora and fauna making up its picture; cities understandable along the lines of North American urbanism, yet, as Leon van Schaik remarks, with an inverse doughnut-effect of urban demographics. The interweaving of such sameness and difference puts in peril many theoretical frameworks for understanding the world in its global condition.
But we should not make the mistake of simply saying Australia is unknowable, or is only knowable as a condition of the same. If the antipodes is indeed a frame through which sense has been made of Australia historically for particular eyes, then it could now suggest a reflexive mode of deployment, a way of opening up a European perspective to questioning. In this sense, the idea of the antipodes, and Australia as its geographical figure, offer the opportunity of thinking about relations between things – between locations, between ideas, between subjects – in terms of reciprocity. To think in this way would be to think in terms of reciprocal effects felt in distinct locations, both ‘here’ and ‘there’. And in being brought into a reciprocal relation, the locations of these effects would not exist independently of each other. For example, van Schaik shows the pitfalls of romanticizing the ‘vastness’ of Australia within a purely European perspective; in addition, the geographical location of Australia should suggest the desire for a differently framed relation to its Asian neighbours. Yet this particular situation can be seen as more nuanced than a simple critique or rejection of what art historian Bernard Smith called ‘European vision’. In design theorist Tony Fry’s words, from Australia there is the possibility of an ‘appeal to other means’, means operating on the peripheries of dominant relations between things, means which would allow new, strategic forms of connection to be made. The antipodes might start to critique a European vision at the same time as this persisting European vision would continually be opened up to new perspectives. The antipodes, then, might be offered as a kind of switch or relay between same and other, rather than as their separation or elision.
What bearing, then, does this thinking have on Australian architecture, and the way it is to be understood ‘in Europe’? The work presented on the following pages can be seen to sit problematically within this network of reciprocal relations, without, so far, any real benefit of theorization. This condition is perhaps best articulated through the recent prominence of Australia’s ‘best known’ architect, Glenn Murcutt. In the jury statement accompanying Murcutt’s 2002 Pritzker Prize, Jorge Silvetti enacts the dual moment of difference and sameness, of the unknowable and the knowable, that is bound together in the antipodean relation: ‘His architecture is crisp, marked and impregnated by the unique landscape and by the light that defines the fabulous far away and gigantic mass of land that is his home, Australia. Yet his work does not fall into the easy sentimentalism of the chauvinistic revisitation of the vernacular. Rather, a considered, serious look would trace his buildings’ lineage to modernism, to modern architecture, and particularly to its Scandinavian roots planted by Asplund and Lewerentz, and nurtured by Alvar Aalto.’
This statement is most interesting for the way it shifts problematically between the uniqueness and unknowability of the Australian landscape as context, and the ‘serious’ Eurocentric consideration of the travelling of Scandinavian modernism. It is certainly not the case that the Australian works presented on the following pages should be understood in terms of Murcutt, or even in terms of Silvetti’s framing of Murcutt. Rather, Silvetti’s statement is illustrative of an interpretive difficulty, as his judgement is framed by the antipodean relation. In this instance, it is the relationship between Europe and its antipodes that should be scrutinized, as it frames and problematizes judgement.
Recognition and scrutiny of this framing might then offer a reflection upon it. As a switch or relay in the problematic relations between Europe and its antipodes, this architecture might be a means by which to open up the very idea of judgement in such a circumstance for serious inspection. Even as this architecture seems to be about taking flight (into the wilderness, into the domestic and into the domestication of wilderness), its double moment of strangeness and sameness should also cause one to do a ‘double take’, in other words, to reflect on one’s mode of seeing. The question might then arise as to whether it would be worth applying such reflection to other situations in which one thinks that one sees with authority.
Charles Rice is Lecturer in Architecture at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.