Way Out Down Under

This issue of Fabrications was conceived in response to the Aquarius Redux symposium held at the University of Sydney in July 2016. That symposium focused on reimagining and expanding histories of countercultural architecture. The ambition of the symposium was to begin a wider conversation about the development of insightful, innovative histories that could broaden the geographies of countercultural spatial production and consider its consequences anew. It drew a strong response from both established and emerging scholars, and indicated a thriving interest in tracing architecture’s imbrication in upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s: the transnational counterculture that multiplied against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, struggles worldwide for liberation from colonial rule, the new social movements, a burgeoning global ecological consciousness and concomitant challenges to conventional professional education and practice.¹

Within the collection of papers presented at Aquarius Redux, there was a noticeable selection that converged on architecture-counterculture intersections in an Australasian context. The subjects examined ranged from the detailed excavation of surprisingly (or, perhaps not given the period) hazy episodes, such as the Yellow House experiment in Sydney (the 1969–1972 cooperative art-living space instigated by Oz illustrator Martin Sharp), through to the discursive analysis of the very active independent student publication scene in Australia and New Zealand during the 1960s and 1970s. The work presented at Aquarius Redux further mapped territory that had recently begun to be surveyed, especially via work presented in the conferences of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ), from about 2012 onwards.²

The articles in this issue of Fabrications represent a further extension to that historical mapping. They responded to a call for scholarship that illuminates countercultural ideals and practices explored particularly in Australia, New Zealand, the South Pacific and Southeast Asian regions; that is, outside their traditional geographic imaginary. While American, particularly West Coast, spatial practices were highly influential, they were never absorbed wholesale elsewhere, but rather as a mediation between the local and the global. The aim was to extend historical understanding of the diverse set of experimental and subversive architectural projects, conceptual work, pedagogical initiatives, exhibitions and publications that can be connected to the countercultural radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s. Particularly, this issue sought submissions that explore the translation of concepts, attitudes and practices – sustained experimentation in new temporal localities and local adaption.

The scholarship gathered here fulfils the objectives of the call for papers by illustrating a range of projects, from landscape design to student design-build experiments, as well as highlighting a range of conceptual mediations, networks of physical and intellectual circulation, and experimental sites and practices. Hannah Lewi and Andrew Saniga open the issue with a consideration of the importance of spatial production to an urban (or suburban, perhaps) politics of occupation and creative transformation. They focus on the building of new suburban university campuses in the post-war period, specifically Monash University in Clayton, Victoria and La Trobe University, Bundoora, Victoria. Like many modern university campuses of the 1960s and 1970s, these two Australian examples gained some notoriety as settings for student radicalism and social protest movements. In this context, Lewi and Saniga’s concern is less with the liberating opportunities produced via the countercultural reconfiguration of architectural conception and production; rather, they look to clarify the dynamics and consequences of resistance within the spaces of these newly built university campuses, and how spatial practices associated with that resistance shifted the way buildings and landscaped amenities were occupied, used, and also developed, often in subtle and temporary ways.

My own contribution to this issue attends to a much smaller example of spatial production: the student-built autonomous house at the University of Sydney (1974–1978). The Sydney house is a significant example of its type – actually built and occupied, produced with a conscious appreciation of its connections to an international network of similarly minded experiments, featuring a range of experimental student-designed components, and gaining widespread public attention over its four-year lifespan. In the article’s account of the house, insight is given into the circulation and materialisation of countercultural architectures – their reformulation and reconfiguration as ideas and bodies travelled across the world – and the mediation of global and local concerns within the project is foregrounded. The alternative architectural tourism practiced by students, transnational countercultural ferment, and the global circulation of radical educators and key architectural texts, all played a part in the production of the house. While it was small, and gone after four years, the Sydney autonomous house project opens up consideration of the historical relationship between countercultural experiments and architecture’s knowledge base, pedagogical structures, technologies, and its representational and practice forms.

Robin Skinner, in contrast to the issue’s other articles, looks back to the mid-nineteenth century and Robert Pemberton’s scheme for a model settlement in New Zealand, published as The Happy Colony (1854). Pemberton sought to perfect the human race through his planned community, the scheme for which ran counter to established social, legal and political convention. For example, all land and buildings were to be owned communally, there would be no markets, public houses or prisons (as traders, drunkards and criminals would not exist), there would be no hospitals (the sick would be treated at home) meals would be eaten communally, and money and financial borrowing would be eschewed. Unsurprisingly, The Happy Colony remained a paper project. Drawing on work of Thomas More, James Silk Buckingham, John Minter Morgan and others, Pemberton’s book can be understood as part of a long tradition of developing utopian-style schemes for the New World. This tradition was not inconsequential for the communitarian idealism and communal living that formed significant aspects of the 1960s and 1970s countercultural phenomenon. In the USA, Australia and elsewhere, the founders of those later back-to-the-land experiments often referred to themselves as “new settlers,” acknowledging the links with earlier pioneering communities and their ideals (not unproblematically, especially given the violent foundations of Australia and New Zealand, for example, as settler-colonial societies). In Australia, for instance, there is a history of utopian settlements that stretches back at least as far as a cluster of radical experiments in the late nineteenth century. The 1970s counterurbanisation in Australia included a similar flourishing of experiments in communal living. Skinner’s article draws attention to a significant example in New Zealand, one which continued to exert influence on planning thought over the twentieth century (the ideas and imagery covertly absorbed into Ebenezer Howard’s far better-known Garden City project).

In “The Visit,” the final article in this issue, Lynn Churchill returns us to the 1970s and some more familiar reference points in the history of experimental architectural practices. Churchill focuses on the move made in 1971 by English-born architect William (Bill) Busfield, from the “swinging” London scene, where he was working with Archigram and teaching at the Architectural Association (AA) school, to the far western edge of the Australian continent, where Busfield continued to pursue, in various forms, an experimental, technologically invested design practice. Churchill’s account takes in Busfield’s career trajectory from witnessing, as a child, the implanting of pre-fabricated housing in a northern-English mining town, to recent speculative exhibition installations in Hong Kong. The 1971 shift to Perth is positioned as a hinge moment in this account: a catalyst for the generative transference of countercultural thinking and practice. In considering Busfield’s mobility and dynamism – both physical and intellectually – the article points towards prospects for a much-expanded understanding of 1960s–1970s experimental architecture outside of metropolitan and university centres in Western Europe and North America. It also offers a contribution to (nascent) histories of Australian architectural education in the late twentieth century, and consideration of Australia’s “edge condition” as a fertile one.

This issue also includes a number of reports and reviews. Among the book reviews, of particular relevance to the issue’s theme, is Daniel Ryan’s appraisal of Daniel Barber’s A House in the Sun: Modern Architecture and Solar Energy in the Cold War. As Ryan points out, Barber’s book includes significant discussion of the solar house as a research project. Within this account, it can be seen that counterculture’s experimentation with alternative energy sources (especially in the pursuit of autonomous modes of living) was often enabled by mid-twentieth century funding structures and organisations, and the projects they carried out in settings (such as MIT) that often exemplified the post-war military-industrial-research complex they sought to escape. Lawrence Chua reviews Architects of Buddhist Leisure: Socially Disengaged Buddhism in Asia’s Museums, Monuments, and Amusement Parks, by Justin McDaniel, and Kelum Palipane reviews People’s Places: Coping, Familiarising, Creating, edited by Nihal Perera.

We have included two reports from mid-year conferences, the first for Quotation: The 34th Annual Conference of SAHANZ, held in Canberra and the second for Architecture as Method: the Adelaide Congress with its suite of events. The latter combined the twentieth anniversary celebration for the Centre for Asian and Middle Eastern Architecture (CAMEA) at the University of Adelaide with a conference partnered with the Society of Architectural and Urban Historians of Asia (SAUH-Asia). These events were extended to incorporate the SAHANZ PhD colloquium. Also included in the reports section is Ashley Paine’s review of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York, exhibition Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive.

Guest Editor
Lee Stickells
[email protected]

Notes

1. Aquarius Redux Symposium, University of Sydney, July 2016, http://sydney.edu.au/architecture/aquarius-redux/index.shtml

2. see e.g. Lee Stickells, “‘And Everywhere Those Strange Polygonal Igloos’: Framing a History of Australian Countercultural Architecture,” in Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand: 30, Open, eds. Alexandra Brown and Andrew Leach (Gold Coast, Qld: SAHANZ, 2013), vol. 2, 555–568; Janina Gosseye and John Macarthur, “Angry Young Architects: Counterculture and the Critique of Modernism in Brisbane, 1967–1972,” in Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand: 31, Translation, ed. Christoph Schnoor (Auckland, New Zealand: SAHANZ and Unitec ePress; Gold Coast, Queensland: SAHANZ, 2014), 263–275; Andrew Murray and Leonie Matthews, “Geodesic Domes and Experimental Architectural Education Practices of the 1960s,” in Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand: 32, Architecture, Institutions and Change, eds. Paul Hogben and Judith O’Callaghan (Sydney: SAHANZ, 2015), 435–445.