ART FORM
Architecture and the Work of Charles Wright
INTRODUCTION
ARCHITECTURE HAS A PROBLEM
Architecture has always had an unreasonable job description. Vitruvius knew this two thousand years ago when he described a discipline requiring familiarity with drawing, geometry, history, philosophy, music, medicine, law and astronomy. Vitruvius was not asking the architect to become expert in every field; buildings were already understood as places where different kinds of knowledge collided, and architecture could not retreat into beauty because buildings had to stand up, or into engineering because somebody had to live in them, or into usefulness because human beings have an inconvenient habit of wanting their lives to mean something.1
The modern world has not made the task easier. A substantial building now carries structure, fire engineering, acoustics, hydraulics, mechanical and electrical systems, accessibility, energy, planning law, environmental regulation, cost planning, construction logistics, landscape, cultural questions and a small army of specialists whose expertise the architect would be foolish to pretend to possess. Clients, governments, builders, neighbours, insurers and eventual occupants enter the process as well, while weather, gravity, money and time remain stubbornly indifferent to the elegance of the concept sketch. After all of those forces have had their say, the result is still expected to become architecture.
ART FORM began as an attempt to understand the work of the Australian architect Charles Wright and gradually became an enquiry into that larger difficulty. Wright is useful because his career keeps making the problem hard to ignore: experimental houses in the wet tropics, mirrored civic architecture, schools, hospitals and health facilities, remote community projects, masterplans, metropolitan work, resorts and buildings that operate somewhere between object and landscape. A Fine Art degree precedes the architectural one; painting and sculpture remain part of the biography; music matters, and Wright is himself a saxophonist. There are buildings concerned with cyclone, flood, heat, water and vegetation, buildings of conspicuous concrete mass and another that attempts to disappear into a botanic garden. A house called the Glass House seems suspicious of glass, while Stamp House eventually found a second life inside a Godzilla film. The material is interesting before anyone begins attaching grand descriptions to it.23
Architecture is especially vulnerable to those descriptions. Brutalism, Critical Regionalism, Tropical Modernism, organic architecture, high-tech and parametricism can all clarify something before they begin concealing something else. Wright’s work has attracted terms of its own, including Artist–Engineer, polymath, Total Architect and Resilient Tropical Modernism. Some will prove useful later, but none should be allowed to become the plot. A critical study becomes strangely dull when it announces its conclusion and then spends three hundred pages proving that it was right.
The better place to begin is architecture itself. There is a respectable argument that architecture is the most comprehensive of the arts, although the claim becomes pompous very quickly if it is mistaken for a hierarchy of cultural worth. Painting can achieve things architecture cannot, music can move through time with freedoms unavailable to buildings, sculpture can pursue form without providing emergency egress, and literature can enter consciousness directly. Architecture’s peculiar difficulty comes from its inability to remain pure. Its closest relatives may be opera and cinema, synthetic arts that gather many other arts into a single event, except that architecture makes the scenery weigh thousands of tonnes and asks people to inhabit it for generations.
That physical persistence changes the stakes. When an opera fails, the curtain eventually comes down, and a dreadful film releases its audience after a couple of hours. A bad building may remain on the corner for seventy years, accumulating consequences in the lives of people who work, sleep, recover, learn or grow old inside it. They pay to heat and cool it, clean it, repair it and find their way through it; they discover whether the western glazing was really a good idea in February and whether the roof junction that looked elegant in section keeps out rain. Architectural decisions become physical facts in other people’s lives, which gives beauty an ethical burden rather than making beauty less important.
Architecture can absorb the concerns of other arts without becoming subordinate to them. Painting may sharpen an attention to colour, surface and light; sculpture may intensify an understanding of mass, void, gravity and balance; installation can disturb the assumed edge of the object; Land Art can make landscape inseparable from the work; Pop can turn image, reflection and spectacle into serious subjects. Architecture accepts all of those possibilities and then subjects them to weather, structure, access, cost, construction, occupation and time. An architect can make a painterly judgement and discover that the red thing weighs six tonnes.
Cairns Botanic Gardens Visitor Centre makes the distinction vivid. A public building is placed beside an extravagant tropical garden and, instead of competing with it as an object, substantial mirrored surfaces allow the garden to steal the architecture. Trees, sky, people and weather migrate onto the facade so that the object remains physically present while its visual identity becomes unstable. The camouflage effect is close enough to Predator to be funny, but the joke opens a serious architectural question: where does the work end when the environment becomes part of its visible surface? Installation and Pop offer useful ways of thinking about the effect, yet the building is not an installation or a Pop artwork. It has doors, public obligations, weathering, structure and maintenance; the artistic question becomes architectural precisely because it cannot remain only an image.
The (-) Glass House performs another conceptual trick. The twentieth-century glass-house tradition made transparency almost doctrinal, whereas Wright’s project asks how much conventional enclosure a tropical house needs in the first place. The title promises a type and the building subtracts from it. What might remain a conceptual gesture in a gallery becomes a negotiation with rain, insects, privacy, security, heat, air movement and the ordinary indignities of occupation when somebody has to sleep there. Fine Art matters here when it sharpens our ability to see such questions, not because architecture is a branch of Fine Art.
The work becomes more complicated as its scale and obligations change. Kyneton Hospital Redevelopment and the Wimmera Base Hospital masterplanning work bring architecture into contact with institutions that cannot be reduced to formal theatre. Primary health-care work in the Torres Strait introduces remoteness, island logistics, climate, community and maintenance. Toorak Pavilion shifts the field to substantial metropolitan residential architecture and the Yarra landscape, while Wonga Beach Resort brings tourism, coast, ecology, cultural experience and Country into a project of a different order again. These works matter not as a roll-call proving versatility but because each changes the conditions under which architecture has to become coherent.
Modern practice answers complexity through specialisation, correctly. No contemporary architect can possess the depth of knowledge required across every discipline of a major building, and pretending otherwise insults the people who do. Specialisation nevertheless creates an architectural question that cannot be delegated quite so neatly: who remains attentive to the relationships between the specialists and to what those relationships are becoming together? Vitruvius would recognise the problem even if the consultant matrix astonished him.
As the enquiry developed, another pattern became harder to ignore. The boundaries kept misbehaving. Building became landscape, landscape appeared on mirrored wall, concrete became structure and image, water became environmental system and spatial experience, and weather ceased to behave like scenery outside the building. Music entered the discussion because improvisation offered a way of thinking about coherence without repetition, while collaboration complicated the old fantasy of singular authorship. None of this requires a mystical theory in which distinctions are unreal. Architecture depends on distinctions, from property boundaries to waterproofing details, but lived experience continually crosses them.
Sunlight crosses the section, sound and heat cross the envelope, views cross the property line and water crosses almost anything if the detailing gives it sufficient encouragement. People enter with habits, histories and meanings that were not in the brief; materials age, landscapes grow and buildings are altered by lives their authors could not predict. The phrase ART FORM became the title because it describes something more interesting than a career. Architecture separates the world into manageable parts in order to make a building, then discovers in the completed building that the parts have started talking to one another again.
Charles Wright is the subject because his work offers an unusually varied place from which to watch that happen. This will not be an argument that he is the greatest Australian architect, the most versatile, the most awarded or the final specimen of a heroic professional species. Architecture has suffered enough from league tables. It is instead an investigation through houses, gardens, hospitals, schools, coastlines, concrete, mirrors, music, storms, institutions, popular culture and the occasional monster movie. Other architects and artists will enter when they illuminate the buildings and leave when they do not. Wright remains at the centre, but the larger subject is architecture and the unreasonable responsibility it assumes when the world enters it.
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