The community of scholars served by SAHANZ is quite naturally preoccupied with the Pacific as a region. So many islands are surrounded by its ocean, while its rim is the edge of so many continents. The Pacific presents historians of architecture – defined in the most generous terms – with an incalculable number of subjects of study in its own right, even as it serves as a setting that shapes the kind of scholarship and the kinds of problems towards which scholars who are one way or another defined by the Pacific are drawn. It determines, to varying degrees, the outlook of the architectural history that happens in and around it, be it the study of contemporary South Pacific architecture by Jennifer Taylor and James Connor (reviewed in volume 25 of this journal); or Mike Austin’s decades’ worth of scholarship on the “Pacific” worldview; or, further afield, Reyner Banham’s reflections (in Los Angeles) on the relationship between maritime settlement and westward expansion in shaping the Pacific’s import to the cities of the American West Coast.
Naturally, then, almost every issue of this journal contributes to a growing body of research on the Pacific as a setting, theme or problem: the architecture and planning of islands and continents; the soft architecture of the complex geopolitical and trade relationships that nations with a stake in the Pacific at once foster and challenge; and the question of the relationship of this semi-global territory to the world as a whole.
The papers that appear in this issue of Fabrications therefore amplify attention to a geography that is rarely overlooked in the pages of this journal, but which is here posed a little more forcibly. What, for architectural history, is the Pacific Basin, encompassing the Pacific Ocean, its borders across the Americas, Australasia and Eastern Asia, and the many dozens of its islands? What does it offer – as a subject, or a territory – to a disciplinary field that has become preoccupied with the global? A field that has absorbed the lessons of post-colonialism? And that has grasped as well as any field might grasp the importance of studying works of architecture alongside modes of intellectual and technical exchange? What is the Pacific as an idea? And how has the idea of the Pacific interacted with the various “realities” towards which it leads? How does the significance of the Pacific change for architecture’s various agents in Russia, Peru or Taiwan? In Norfolk Island, Kiribati or Canada? To what extent is the Pacific a complex field, unified by water, and to what extent a series of discrete cultural settings made complex at the edges?
In asking if we can speak of an architectural history of the Pacific Basin, this issue of Fabrications invokes three ways in which the Pacific already figures in architectural history. The first is as an idea, bound to the tradition (Romantic, imperial, colonial) of imagining the Pacific outside of experience. The second: as a setting, in which buildings are needed, architects put to work, technologies developed or applied, or events occur that result in historically noteworthy works of architecture and urbanism. The third of this is in its absence, as a condition to be overcome, an obstacle removed by thinking about the relationship between one part of the world and another in different ways. This latter Pacific embodies distance as a dimension of architectural work that allows for a kind of practical simultaneity that eliminates altogether the obstacle of the ocean, while at the same time invoking it as a precondition of the relationships prevented by the problems of time and navigation.
It was not always as easy to overcome the Pacific as it is now, and the papers that follow demonstrate the different ways in which the Pacific is brought into play. Anoma Pieris recalls a period when the Pacific was a battleground, prompting a new cartographic layer of prison “islands” demarcated along lines of aggression and allegiance and interacting with a global network of islands on one side or another of the Second World War. Christoph Schnoor takes a single island as his setting, testing the conditions of architectural production on Samoa across different phases of its modern colonisation and independence against the images of a Pacific architecture that occupy the minds of writers, artists and architects alike; and that assume importance, therefore, for their political potency. An article by Jeffrey Ochsner then tests the import of the Pacific for the architecture of Seattle in the American North-West, and in particular, the mechanisms by which knowledge of Japanese architecture was invoked in the modernism of this region. Ke Song and Jianfei Zhu present a series of instances whereby an image of American modernity was invoked in a Chinese architecture making overtures to the western world from within the depths of the Cold War. This timing coincides, too, with the trajectory of Philip Goad’s study on the evolving relationship between Australian and American architectural practices that shaped the nature of Australia’s import for Asia and the South Pacific in the second half of the twentieth century – but a relationship predicated on the mobility of culture and personnel across a distance that still demands more than 10 hours of air travel to traverse.
The theme of this issue was initially explored in a session supported by SAHANZ at the 68th annual conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, held in April 2015 in Chicago, asking the question of whether we could yet speak of “an architectural history of the Pacific Basin”, encouraging a particular focus on the post-Second World War period. That session included work by five speakers, among them Philip Goad, Jeffrey Ochsner and Christoph Schnoor, whose papers appear here in extended and revised form. It included, too, a contribution by James Weirick, who offered a pre-history to the session’s problem by studying the diffusion of the Chicago School across the Pacific in the early decades of the twentieth century that predicated relationships of a kind explored here by Song and Zhu and Goad. The session also included a paper by Arief Setiawan, on the Hawaiian houses of Vladimir Ossipoff.
The articles that follow – together with Bill McKay’s review of the recently published Cook Islands Art and Architecture – advance the project of positioning the Pacific in architectural history. They advance, too, the task of working through the complexity of the Pacific as a subject that resists synthesis. In this, we still have much to do.