The 2016 open issue of Fabrications presents five papers that traverse the globe from Europe to Asia and Australia, from the eighteenth century to today. The topics are diverse. They include architecture as an instrument of critique in the eighteenth century, motivations and identity in urban design at the beginning of the twentieth century, new approaches to institutional architectural histories, and the transparency of problematic architectural history in heritage listing.
The opening article is by Jennifer Ferng, titled “Monstrosity and Excess in Jean-Jacques Lequeu’s Visionary Architecture.” It revisits the work of Jean-Jacques Lequeu and analyses a selection of his visionary architectural propositions with reference to eighteenth-century neoclassical aesthetic and architectural thinking. Ferng considers Lequeu’s rejection of prevailing orthodoxies of neo-classical architecture based upon Vitruvian principles and as advocated at the time by the highly influential Jacques-François Blondel. She examines the ways in which Lequeu challenged formal and compositional rules associated with notions of covenenance and bienséance, or decorum, and transformed architectural forms and elements through the introduction of mythology, fantasy, and sensuality. Ferng interprets Lequeu’s graphical propositions in relation to earlier theories of anatomical monstrosity, or deviations from regular bodily structures of humans and animals that likewise challenged ideal forms. The analysis thus presents Lequeu’s drawings as a mode of architectural critique.
The second article, “Carlo Catani and Alexandra Avenue: The Making of a European Promenade in Colonial Melbourne,” by Anne Bourke, examines the design of Alexandra Avenue, Melbourne, designed by Florentine immigrant, Carlo Catani in the Victorian Public Works Department, and declared open in 1901. Today, the avenue is a feeder for Melbourne’s south-eastern freeway. However, at the time of its design and construction, it was significant as the first major thoroughfare in the city since the laying out of the colonial grid and arterial roads in the mid-nineteenth century. Catani envisaged it as a recreational carriage drive and promenade drawing upon contemporary ideas of urban planning and beautification from Europe and the “city beautiful” movement in North America. In turn, the realisation of the avenue influenced the subsequent beautification of other major roads in Melbourne and it was later used as an exemplar of an urban streetscape at the inaugural Australian Town Planning Conference in 1918. The design and realisation of the avenue thus sheds light on thinking about urban and landscape spaces in Australia at the turn of the twentieth century. In addition to his design for Alexandra Avenue, Catani was responsible for a wide range of landscape and engineering projects in Victoria and Bourke’s paper also reflects on the broader career of this influential but under-studied figure.
“Changi: A Penal Genealogy Across the Pacific War,” by Anoma Pieris, turns to southeast Asia. Pieris argues that in Singapore the colonial prison has provided an institutional model for colonial governance. The idea is discussed through a genealogy of the prison in Singapore and, specifically, the infamous Changi Prison, designed in the late colonial period. This genealogy is extended through an examination of the transformation of the institution, and the prison, through the Fall of Singapore in 1942. Pieris links Changi Prison to an expanded geography of Second World War prisoner-of-war camps and carceral adaptation of military estates that created a vast network extending across south-east Asia. The discussion also considers further transformations of the institution and the various sites of incarceration during Singapore’s post-war reconstruction and in relation to recent redevelopments of the Changi prison complex and prisoner-of-war camps from the 1990s to today. Pieris constructs a heterogeneous institutional and architectural history that crosses various boundaries – geo-political, spatial, and intellectual. The article thus extends the discussions of borders in architectural histories opened in Fabrications 25:3, “In-between: Spaces for Border-thinking.”
Russell Rodrigo’s article, titled “Banking on Modernism: Dr. H.C. (Nugget) Coombs and the Institutional Architecture of the Reserve Bank of Australia,” is also concerned with questions of institutional architecture. It documents the establishment of the Reserve Bank of Australia in 1959 and its representation through the design and construction of new offices in each of the Australian state and territory capitals. Rodrigo discusses the influence of the Bank’s inaugural governor, H.C. Coombs, and the adoption of a modernist architectural idiom aligned to wider international shifts in bank architecture that sought to emphasise ideals of openness and transparency in banking. At the same time, design input was sought from local academics in architecture, rather than professionals, and individual designs variously responded to local urban situations and climatic conditions in northern Australia and Papua New Guinea, incorporating local stones, timbers, and site-specific artworks. Yet Rodrigo’s analysis ultimately questions an apparent lack of architectural inventiveness across the group, which needed to negotiate both an institutional agenda and commercial architectural parameters.
Finally, Rebecca Dickson’s essay on “The Evansian Period of Knossos: Inconvenient History and the World Heritage List” discusses the complexities of archaeological and architectural conservation of Knossos, Crete, in relation to the goal of listing the site on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Understandings of the site are largely based upon early twentieth-century archaeological hypotheses and speculative architectural reconstructions by the site’s chief excavator at that time, Sir Arthur Evans. Evans’ scholarship is now widely disputed and, from the perspective of contemporary heritage practice, the associated reconstructions diminish the authenticity of this ancient building complex. Nonetheless, Dickson argues for their transparent incorporation into the proposal for the site’s World Heritage listing. At stake is the question of including the problematic period of Knossos’ architectural history and evolving scholarship as part the site’s outstanding universal value. Underlying this discussion is a tension between an architectural history and heritage.
The issue concludes with three book reviews: Alexandra Brown reviews Sam Ridgway’s Architectural Projects of Marco Frascari: The Pleasure of a Demonstration (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015); Lee Stickells reviews Architecture and the Welfare State, edited by Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete, and Dirk van den Heuvel (London and New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2015); and Andrew Steen reviews Gevork Hartoonian’s Architecture and Spectacle: A Critique (London: Ashgate, 2012).
The next issue of Fabrications, 26:2, will be a themed issue that presents scholarship on the networks and flows that have established and maintained relationships between geographically distant architectural cultures. The third issue of volume 26 will be guest edited by Julia Gatley and Andrew Leach on “The Architectural History of the Pacific Basin.” Our next open issue will be Fabrications 27:1, to be published in February 2017.
February 2016