Looking inside Design: Crossing and Connecting the Disciplinary Boundaries of Architecture, Design, and Exhibition

By focusing on the interplay between the fields of design, architecture, exhibitions and curatorial practices, the authors in this special issue of Fabrications have uncovered new historical connections, shed new light on iconic buildings, and furthered new methodologies and theoretical approaches. As guest editors, our methodological provocation for this issue was the critical examination of the shared and overlapping influences, approaches and practitioners within design, architecture, exhibition and curatorial practices. Too frequently these fields are siloed from each other, reciprocal knowledge ignored and methodological exchange eschewed. Yet all share a lineage as Kulturwissenschaft — cultural histories of material objects — and in Australia they have been significantly shaped by the scholarship of Professor Emerita Harriet Edquist.

The aims of Looking inside Design are threefold. Firstly, to foreground the entwined histories and the traversing of professional boundaries between the fields of design, architecture, exhibition and curatorial practices. Secondly, by connecting these disciplines, richer and more complex cultural histories can be unearthed, thus broadening the conceptual framework for the discipline of architectural history. In seeking to explore the possibilities of enlarging the scope of architectural history we tap into a rich and well-established agenda in Fabrications’s special issues, and a broader turn in architectural history as epitomised by the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative, active since 2006 and dedicated to fostering innovative scholarship from multidisciplinary perspectives. Finally, this special issue commemorates Professor Edquist’s career as she retires from an academic position at RMIT University and as director of the RMIT Design Archives, though not from scholarship itself. Edquist’s work as historian, editor, commentator, curator, and archivist has animated architectural, design and exhibition studies for decades. She leaves a significant legacy of influence and scholarship which this issue attempts to mark. Dominating many of the papers, such that it constitutes a parallel theme of the issue, are women’s voices and those outside the discipline of architecture. This is entirely fitting in a festschrift for an art historian turned architectural and design historian, and exhibition curator.

Catherine Moriarty’s paper “Environments of Defence: Finland and the Winter War” transforms past understandings of Finnish modern architecture, in particular Alvar Aalto’s Viipuri library, and demonstrates the value of using military design and war-time technological invention as an innovative lens through which to rethink architectural history. Her paper describes an encounter between architecture and the Winter War, the Russian invasion of Finland, as observed by British writer John Langdon-Davies in Finland: the First Total War (1940). Moriarty, via Langdon-Davies and his first-hand observations of the Winter War, persuasively connects ideas about military strategy, landscape, climate, the built environment, social legislation and home defence. Aalto’s architecture is presented in an entirely new and militarised light, while the understanding of how enmeshed his work was in design and Finnish culture is deepened. Moriarty’s paper was completed before the unlawful Russian invasion of Ukraine in early March 2022. Its context is a haunting reminder of the ways in which less powerful communities under extraordinary pressure are forced to adapt and resist: often using specifically local design knowledges of their own climate, material and construction practices.

Stuart King similarly uses text from an observer outside architecture’s sphere to underpin his paper, “The Architectural Imagination and the Colonial Tasmanian Homestead.” Significantly, and in contradistinction to most colonial architectural history, King foregrounds colonial settler Jane Williams’s reminiscences, personal letters, and diary entries to fashion an alternative narrative of the design discourses and aspirations for her family’s early homestead, Ratho, in Tasmania. King eloquently demonstrates Edquist’s observation that “popular representations of Australian homesteads as isolated objects within an abstract landscape”¹ are belied by the British Empire’s networks of financial, cultural and social capital necessary to these homesteads’ construction. Stylistically, Ratho was associated with Scottish and colonial identity. Yet more importantly, King demonstrates that Ratho’s idiosyncratic Grecian colonnade, which comprise knotty tree trunks fashioned as Ionic columns, shows the interplay between colonial notions of propriety and romantic pastoral allusions drawn from then popular artistic, architectural and material cultures.

In “Re-evaluating post-war interior design practices through client histories: Loti Smorgon and her architect/decorator Noel Coulson,” Catriona Quinn utilises scholarship from the field of interior design, along with client histories, to reassess the omission of architect and interior designer Noel Coulson from existing histories of post-war architecture in Melbourne. Delving into a remarkable history of taste, consumption and migrancy that traverses aesthetic and professional boundaries, Quinn contests Pierre Bourdieu’s description of interior designers as mere intermediaries acting between consumer and cultural producer. Through a careful analysis of Coulson’s commissions for wealthy Polish Jewish immigrant Loti Smorgon and her family, Quinn proposes that interior design is better described as a hybrid practice, mediating cultural knowledge and producing original aesthetic artefacts. Fittingly, the primary materials for this article are held in the RMIT Design Archives founded and directed by Edquist since 2007.

Moving continents, yet maintaining the focus on 20^th century interiors, Manu P. Sobti and Peter Scriver direct their gaze to the surprisingly little explored post-partition modernist domestic Indian interior. On a topic which should soon sustain larger exegesis, “Personal Journey or Tectonic Practice: Thick Descriptions of ‘Curated’ Residential Interiors by Four Indian Architects,” Sobti and Scriver investigate the living rooms of the family homes of four titans of Indian modernism: Aditya Prakash, Balkrishna Doshi, Charles Correa and Hasmukh Patel. Through direct observation and experience, supplemented by newly available archival insights, Sobti and Scriver discuss these curated spaces of encounter and dialogue showing how they reflect the spatial order and tectonic languages of their larger architectures, yet also function as spaces for experimentation and reflection for their designers. Ultimately, Sobti and Scriver argue that these interiors can be considered personal horological devices, marking both origin and transition points for the experimental journeys of their curators.

“Lina Bo Bardi in dialogue with Frida Escobedo: a spontaneous entanglement” centres around the 2020 “Lina Bo Bardi: Habitat” exhibition designed by Mexican architect Frida Escobedo. Michaela Prunotto uses this exhibition, alongside interview and oral testimony, to reconceptualise the architecture and potent voices of Bo Bardi and Escobedo. Prunotto’s methodological juxtaposition highlights Bo Bardi’s projects of urban revitalisation and pioneering adaptive reuse, and Escobedo’s similar focus alongside her preoccupation with ruins. Prunotto directly addresses the neglect common to much modern heritage that Bo Bardi’s buildings face today, arguing for their contemporary importance. Underpinning this article, and the utilisation of the voices of Bo Bardi, Escobedo and Olivia De Oliveira (Bo Bardi’s interlocutor), is Prunotto’s desire to contribute to what she describes as the “collective transformation of the broader gendered communication terrain.”²

In “Making a Fuss in Architectural Discourse” Hélène Frichot tackles the gendered transformation of architectural discourse with a study of a series of discursive and performative events that centred on feminist theories and practices in the architectural humanities between 1988 and 2017. In part auto-ethnography and celebration of Edquist’s contribution to architectural history and design discourse, the article takes the formative editorial to Transition, no. 25, Winter 1988 by Edquist and Karen Burns on women and architecture as its touchpoint. Following their direction, Frichot attends to two strands of the conceptual conjunction of women and architecture: the documentation of women’s contribution to architecture; and the unsettling of onto-epistemological structures by women. Frichot employs feminist philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers and animal studies scholar Vinciane Despret’s conceptual and collective figure of “women who make a fuss” to describe the divergent performances of research in architecture and design. Frichot argues for the transformative power of women challenging the status quo and advocating for diverse forms of situated knowledge in architecture, an apt conclusion to this collection of articles commemorating the influence of Edquist’s scholarship.

This issue also contains a report on the workshop held for those preparing articles for this special issue which was co-hosted by the Australian Centre for Architectural History, Urban and Cultural Heritage (ACAHUCH) at the University of Melbourne and the RMIT Design Archives. “Ode to Edquist in a Zoom zeitgeist” is Michaela Prunotto’s incisive view of that day’s proceedings. Attentive readers will notice the large number of presentations that were given in the workshop: Women, Writing, Design Volume 12 Number 1 2022 of the RMIT Design Archives Journal captures more of these presentations in extended form and functions as a parallel outcome to this festschrift celebrating Edquist’s career and influence. A report by Natarsha Tezcan on the “Navigating Encounters and Exchanges: Intercolonial Trade, Industry and Labour Mobility in Asia Pacific, 1800s – 1950s, Fifth Annual International Symposium of Australian Centre for Architectural History, Urban and Cultural Heritage, University of Melbourne” follows Prunotto’s report. Tezcan details the many papers given that addressed the undervalued industrial heritage of the Asia Pacific and notes the considerable attention paid to infrastructure, both physical and process-based throughout the symposium. Rounding up the issue are a pair of book reviews. Firstly, Macarena de la Vega de León reads Activism at Home. Architects Dwelling between Politics, Aesthetics and Resistance edited by Isabelle Doucet and Janina Gosseye and then David Nichols reads Gold Coast: City and Architecture by Andrew Leach.

The production of Looking Inside Design has been a collaborative effort and from its inception we have been overwhelmed by the warmth and good feeling expressed by all of Harriet’s colleagues and peers who contributed to both the workshop as presenters and respondents, and as generous reviewers for the articles.

Looking Inside Design is the third festschrift issue of Fabrications and the first dedicated to a woman scholar. Volume 8, 1997 Issue 1 was devoted to Robert Irving, and Volume 10, 1999 Issue 1 to George Tibbits. Edquist is deserving of equal attention and celebration.

Professor Edquist is internationally recognised as one of Australia’s leading architecture and design historians. She has made an outstanding contribution to scholarship in Australian architectural history and design through her important books and papers on Arts and Crafts architecture, émigré European modernist architects and industrial designers, automotive design and designed landscapes. As co-editor of the critical journal Transition, as an exhibition curator, and, most significantly, as the Founding Director of the RMIT Design Archives, she has expanded and fostered discourse within her discipline and within the broader community through major exhibitions at RMIT Gallery, the State Library of Victoria and National Gallery of Victoria. For those who have not had the privilege of being taught by Harriet Edquist, working alongside her, or simply puzzling together in excited conversation over an idea that might lead to another project or another research venture, this special issue of Fabrications stands in for that absence. We hope it is as rich and as fulfilling.

Catherine Townsend and Philip Goad, guest editors.

Notes

1. Harriet Edquist and Stuart King, “Trans-colonial family enterprises at the frontier: the forgotten origins of Australian colonial architecture,” Colonialism and its Narratives: rethinking the colonial archive in Australia conference, University of Melbourne, 10-11 December 2018.

2. Michaela Prunotto, “Lina Bo Bardi in dialogue with Frida Escobedo: a spontaneous entanglement,” Fabrications, 32:1, 111. DOI: 10.1080/10331867.2022.2075526.