Two projects by the one architect, both of which come with the statement: Text description provided by the architects, can be used as examples to raise questions about architectural texts, the explanations that accompany the published illustrations. These informative pieces now seem to border on hype, or is it just blurb?, mixed into an explanatory statement of facts.
While being informed about the project, the reader is also being told what the experience is; what to expect; how to see the work. The matter has to do with the expressions that embellish perceptions as they tell us about the project and place. Projects are now rarely left alone for the critic to analyse and comment upon. The self-confidence of architects seems to have developed from the selfie world that appears to encourage statements from influencers. Has the architect now assumed this role too, of being the influencer for a project’s publicity?
We no longer seem interested in reviews by others, leaving these aside as grumpy indulgences, preferring grandly florid statements can declare the certain wonderment and brilliance of the work. It is a worrying situation, because the strategy touches on a sense of inbreeding, and we know the problems with this. Could one consider it intellectual incest that seeks revelations and recognition by way of what appears to be an explanatory approach rather than accepting the exploratory approach of the critic?
This critique is not a judgement on these two particular projects that are only examples for this exercise in thinking; we are dealing here with what has become the norm for architectural writing. The question is: where are the critics today? How do we discuss projects so that we can learn?## We already know how voices are silenced by being ignored if opinions are challenging: see – https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2023/04/the-voice-architect.html. Is this strategy now engaged in matters architectural, with only exotic, positive gratifications being allowed to be presented? We are in grave danger of believing ourselves without ever looking over our shoulder and asking questions about our actions: c.f. Robert Graves The Reader Over Your Shoulder, 1943.
So what is said?
THE TEXTS
https://www.archdaily.com/1000077/bellbird-house-bower-architecture
Bellbird House / Bower Architecture
• BLACKBURN, AUSTRALIA
Architects: Bower Architecture
Area: 322 m²
Year: 2021
Photographs:Shannon McGrath
Manufacturers: Britton Timbers, Limestone Australia, Lysaght, Viridian
Text description provided by the architects. After a long search, our clients Cameron and Nicole found a property in the Bellbird Area of Blackburn, a classified National Trust area that has been protected against significant development since the 1960s. The Bellbird Area is a suburban bush setting, connected to the Blackburn Bush Corridor a critical habitat for birdlife and animals. The streetscapes retain a peaceful ambiance with no footpaths, dominated by native vegetation. The site featured 41 existing established native trees, all of which were preserved in the creation of this home nestled amongst, and suffused by the natural landscape.
Cameron and Nicole’s brief to us was for a single-story family home that blended warmth and comfort, which was responsive to and respectful of the natural beauty of its bush surroundings.
The wonderful tree canopies, textures, smells, sounds, and colors of the site became the key drivers for the design. Internal sightlines at eye level were dominated by trunks and neighboring properties, so we gave preference to abundant north-facing highlight windows which direct views up and out to the treetops above, flooding the interiors with daylight. Internally lined with Tasmanian Oak, these highlights developed into a synthesis of the external expression of the building, as angled roofs reach up to the tree canopies above. A light, natural material palette internally starts with a central spine of Australian limestone cladding, which wraps from the external entry into the heart of the house. External materials, such as black-oiled bandsawn Accoya, were selected to provide a contrasting backdrop to the grey-green of the eucalypts while mirroring bark-like vertical texture. Centered around an open-plan kitchen, dining, and living space that opens up to the landscape at the rear, the house is arranged to meet Cameron and Nicole’s brief for spaces to share with their two daughters, and spaces of solitude for all their individual pursuits – music, reading, study.
This project is the result of a wonderful collaborative relationship between the architect, builder, and client – each respectful of the other’s expertise. The building team treated each detail with craft and care, resulting in a meticulous outcome. Landscape designer Sam Cox created a whimsical and meandering garden featuring an abundance of native grasses. Cameron and Nicole have planted over 1400 indigenous plants and installed a pond to encourage wildlife back to the site.
This project is the
result of a wonderful collaborative relationship between the
architect, builder, and client – each respectful of the other’s
expertise. The building team treated each detail with craft and care,
resulting in a meticulous outcome. Landscape designer Sam Cox created
a whimsical and meandering garden featuring an abundance of native
grasses. Cameron and Nicole have planted over 1400 indigenous plants
and installed a pond to encourage wildlife back to the site.
Sustainability: Passive and active design principles are essential to the success of Bellbird House which achieves a 7.1-star NatHERS rating. Passively, north-facing highlight windows flood the interiors with natural light and exhaust. Considered sun-shading protection during summer while harnessing winter sun angles; vertical batten screens to the west and east provide protection. Carefully placed smaller south and west windows facilitate cross-flow ventilation. All double glazing is high-performance thermally-broken aluminum and a car charger is located in the garage.
The
home is packed with insulation batts and meticulously sealed.
Cladding is sustainably sourced oiled Accoya timber, with PEFC
locally-sourced, sustainably-managed Silver Top Ash highlights and
natural limestone cladding from WA. Internally, PEFC Tasmanian Oak
lines the ceilings and solid recycled timber features in main joinery
pieces, celebrating beauty in the reuse of a natural material.
Thermal mass principles act via the limestone cladding and insulated
concrete slab with hydronic heating to main living areas, while
Australian-made 100% wool carpet adds warmth.
We acknowledge the Wurrundjeri people, Traditional Custodians of the land upon which this project is sited.
and
https://www.archdaily.com/1000074/coastal-court-house-bower-architecture
Coastal Court House / Bower Architecture
• FLINDERS, AUSTRALIA
Architects: Bower Architecture
Area: 368 m²
Year: 2018
Photographs:Shannon McGrath
Manufacturers: Cavalier Bremworth, G-LUX, Rogerseller, Ventech, Viridian
Text description provided by the architects. After a long search, our clients Michelle and Peter found an ideal site to realize their vision for a house that would preserve a life of privacy and connection to nature (something they had enjoyed for forty years on the family farm), without the unsustainable workload. The brief for a timeless and tranquil home filled with natural light, warmth, and texture also prioritized accessibility and low maintenance to allow aging in place.
The 1920sqm vacant block sat between modest, predominately timber 70’s houses and a new vacant subdivision. Given this unknown future context, the design sought to create a perimeter along the exposed site edges surrounding a captivating internal focus and generous unstructured landscape buffer. A 5m cross fall to the corner site required a unique solution to harness the opportunities and drove the response of a single-story L-shaped descending plan, following the slope of the natural ground. Internal level changes are navigated entirely through ramped gallery spaces that flow down the site, maintaining level connections to the landscape. The focus is on a journey, not a destination.
Ramped circulation also allows zoning into 3 main parts, with entry/guest bedrooms to the north and main bedroom and study to the opposite end, joined by a central connection zone consisting of living, dining space, and terrace. The linear plan acts as a protective edge to the two exposed street frontages, informally defining a large private internally focused courtyard. This removes the need for fencing, allowing the restored gully, native landscape, and building to contribute to the streetscape and be enjoyed by the public.
Conceptually we found inspiration in the tension created by balancing the highly structured and restrained building form with a wabi-sabi approach to interiors, finishes, and landscape.
Rendered masonry, timber cladding, and polished concrete floors provide texture and warmth throughout the internal living spaces. The thermal mass of the reverse veneer rendered masonry and insulated concrete slab combine with passive ventilation to result in a low-energy house that is cost-effective to run.
Our close collaboration with Landscape Architects, Andrew Laidlaw and Andrea Proctor of Laidlaw & Laidlaw Design, and our client (an avid gardener) in creating seamlessly integrated landscape and architecture was a joy and integral to the project’s success. Carefully framed views capture light and landscape through all seasons and weather, especially important given our client’s deteriorating health and mobility. The landscape celebrates its wild coastal indigenous context within a zoned and loosely structured framework. Long framed vistas in a more formal style are paired with areas of layered textural native grasses, trees, and flowering selections, lovingly hand planted by Michelle and Andrew himself.
The home achieves a seven-star energy rating and the design performs well passively in terms of light, temperature control, and natural ventilation. Significant thermal mass elements (ideal for Victoria Australia) include reverse veneer rendered masonry and insulated concrete slab, and these combine with easy ventilation via effective window openings to result in a low-energy house. The home is also clearly zoned to create a much smaller footprint when the client’s kids or guests are not in residence. The unique ramping design and consideration of mobility and ergonomics for aging in place allow the house to be a long-term home, achieving sustainability in its longevity. Chickens, a large composting area, and generosity further reduce the environmental footprint.
Defined by its unique simplicity and outlook on the compelling landscape, Coastal Court combines innovative modest gestures to create a memorable solution that contributes to and shelters the inhabitants from the surrounding context. In creating a building utterly of its place which celebrates imperfection, impermanence, intimacy, and appreciation of the integrity of natural objects and processes, it makes a positive contribution to the life of its aging inhabitants in what they plan to be their last house.**
REVIEW
Statements are made about these houses as though things might just be as the words say they are. That another eye might raise questions, challenges, and other issues seems to be something that will never be contemplated or entertained. The words in the texts tell us what is meant to be there as though these things are as a matter of course:
this home nestled amongst, and suffused by the natural landscape; abundant north-facing highlight windows which direct views up and out to the treetops above, flooding the interiors with daylight. Internally lined with Tasmanian Oak, these highlights developed into a synthesis of the external expression of the building, as angled roofs reach up to the tree canopies above. A light, natural material palette internally starts with a central spine of Australian limestone cladding, which wraps from the external entry into the heart of the house; a contrasting backdrop to the grey-green of the eucalypts while mirroring bark-like vertical texture; treated each detail with craft and care, resulting in a meticulous outcome; a whimsical and meandering garden; we acknowledge the Wurrundjeri people, Traditional Custodians of the land upon which this project is sited.+
and
sat between modest, predominately timber 70’s houses;# a 5m cross fall to the corner site required a unique solution to harness the opportunities and drove the response of a single-story L-shaped descending plan, following the slope of the natural ground. Internal level changes are navigated entirely through ramped gallery spaces that flow down the site, maintaining level connections to the landscape; the focus is on a journey, not a destination;^ conceptually we found inspiration in the tension created by balancing the highly structured and restrained building form with a wabi-sabi* approach to interiors, finishes, and landscape; rendered masonry, timber cladding, and polished concrete floors provide texture and warmth throughout the internal living spaces; seamlessly integrated landscape and architecture; carefully framed views capture light and landscape through all seasons and weather; the landscape celebrates its wild coastal indigenous context within a zoned and loosely structured framework; chickens, a large composting area, and generosity further reduce the environmental footprint;*** defined by its unique simplicity and outlook on the compelling landscape, Coastal Court combines innovative modest gestures to create a memorable solution that contributes to and shelters the inhabitants from the surrounding context. In creating a building utterly of its place which celebrates imperfection, impermanence, intimacy, and appreciation of the integrity of natural objects and processes, it makes a positive contribution to the life of its aging inhabitants in what they plan to be their last house.
Both texts give a good, broad understanding of the circumstances involved in these projects, but they reach beyond this explanatory task and include what might have been intents as real outcomes that should be left for others to describe once they have been recognised – if they are. One wonders if this extension of the descriptive process might mean to ‘get in first,’ as it were, so as to guide the critical eye by establishing the way to see things, in much the same manner as the photographer does. Having the designer tells us what one experiences, inserts a directive force to perception that is concerning. It is as if the designer might be worried about how the work will be received by the nonchalant passerby, the critic, who needs guidance to see the ‘real’ qualities of the project.
Our era needs to give the critic a say rather than closing such comment down, or pre-empting it. We will learn much more with this more open process of assessment.## We will not get far by reinforcing our own ideas and expectations with our own words shaping superlative praise.
COMMENTS
##
Glyn Maxwell On Poetry Bloomsbury, London, 2021
p.75
Poetry workshops are fifty times less valuable to the poet whose work is being scrutinized than they are to those doing the scrutiny. The poet whose work is being discussed is a trembling tower of ego, taking the general personally or the personal generally, feebly inferring through a cloud of panic what he really thinks she really thinks and so on. But the poets discussing it are learning all the time. They have no dog in the fight. Folks do selfless things in the white spaces. They hunt there for the group.
**
There is no statement of recognition of 'First Nations' people and country in this text describing the 2018 project. Such statements have only recently become popular. Interestingly, the date of the project which contains this statement is 2021.
+
The recognition of the Traditional Custodians of Aboriginal land has become something of a woke++ fashion. One wonders whether this recognition has really had any impact on any decision or action involving those making the statement. Is it just political correctness? What might the recognition really mean if it is made with heartfelt sincerity? Sadly, it always seems to be a necessary political statement made with some sense of duress, as if necessity drove the statement rather than any love, feeling, or care: box ticked. In this case, what particular decisions were made in this regard in the building on Wurrundjeri land? Has the idea and intent something to do with land rights; or is it more apologetic? If everyone is keen to recognise the ‘First Nations’ people, then why are we going to such lengths to formalise The Voice?
++
Woke - What is woke slang for?
Woke is an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning "alert to racial prejudice and discrimination".
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Woke
#
Maybe these 1970’s houses had been given the astonishing brief which was once given to myself: ‘the building shall be of low architectural esteem.’
^
One has to be careful with how subtle, meaningful matters are used. The journey, not a destination concept was first attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay, Self-Reliance:
“Its the not the Destination, It's the journey.”
It is a theme repeated by Constantine P. Cavafy in his poem Ithaka:###
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51296/ithaka-56d22eef917ec
The architect uses the notion to describe the idea of movements through the house when poetically, the reference is far broader, holding more intimate depth and richness. Gropius once reprimanded an architect who used a Minoan symbolic form, the Horns of Consecration (as it was named by Sir Arthur Evans), as a skylight over a student cafe, noting that we must be far more sensitive to the inherent meanings of things rather than merely using them as ‘interesting’ attachments to decorate our buildings: could one add ‘our texts’ in this example? This usage looks like an appropriation of meaning to add significance to a project, to make it appear 'extraordinary.'
- you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
. . .
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
*
Much the same might be said about wabi-sabi as has been noted on the journey/destination adaptation; but this begs the questions – ‘How?’; ‘Where?’; and ‘Has it been achieved?’
In traditional Japanese aesthetics, wabi-sabi (侘寂) is a world view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of appreciating beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete" in nature. It is prevalent in many forms of Japanese art.
Wabi-sabi is a composite of two interrelated aesthetic concepts, wabi (侘) and sabi (寂). According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, wabi may be translated as "subdued, austere beauty," while sabi means "rustic patina." Wabi-sabi is derived from the Buddhist teaching of the three marks of existence (三法印, sanbōin), specifically impermanence (無常, mujō), suffering (苦,ku) and emptiness or absence of self-nature (空, kū), however, originally the concepts were seen as two distinct concepts.
Characteristics of wabi-sabi aesthetics and principles include asymmetry, roughness, simplicity, economy, austerity, modesty, intimacy, and the appreciation of both natural objects and the forces of nature. It is often discussed in tandem with a similar aesthetic concept, mono no aware.
According to Leonard Koren, wabi-sabi can be described as "the most conspicuous and characteristic feature of what we think of as traditional Japanese beauty. It occupies roughly the same position in the Japanese pantheon of aesthetic values as do the Greek ideals of beauty and perfection in the West." Another description of wabi-sabi by Andrew Juniper notes that, "If an object or expression can bring about, within us, a sense of serene melancholy and a spiritual longing, then that object could be said to be wabi-sabi." For Richard Powell, "Wabi-sabi nurtures all that is authentic by acknowledging three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi#References
***
The calculation of sustainability ratings include some strange items that allow for the easy compilation of extra points. Exotic ratings can be achieved just by drawing in a few undersized 'small car' parking spaces, some bicycle racks, and a couple of trees and shrubs. Here one is reminded of the difference between a three-star and a four-star accommodation rating: a bottle opener, and a mirror in the dressing room. Such trivia seems to degrade these assessments that sound so grand as numbers and stars, but are really mathematical games that allocate quantities to ticks in boxes. One would do better working with actual, accountable outcomes.
***
Ithaka
BY C.P. CAVAFY
TRANSLATED BY EDMUND KEELEY
As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
C. P. Cavafy, "The City" from C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Translation Copyright © 1975, 1992 by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Reproduced with permission of Princeton University Press.
Source: C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems (Princeton University Press, 1975)
NOTE:
No comment has been made on the selective photography that has been written about previously: see - https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2023/03/architectural-presentation-problems.html
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