This article was originally published in Domus 961 / September 2012
Exquisite Corpse is a game in which participants write or draw
on a folded page, concealing each turn from the next until
a cumulative text or picture is formed. Sam Jacob recently
proposed the game be used as an alternative architectural
approach. Based on "multi-authorship", wrote Jacob, the game
results in "accident and un-logic", and might therefore "help us
out of the self-replicating horror of contemporary architecture
and urban design."
Jacob may not be aware that a city-scale staging of Exquisite
Corpse has been taking place in Sydney for over 20 years. In this
case, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) has been used in
lieu of a folded page. Since 1991 the MCA has occupied an Art
Deco-era office building opposite the Sydney Opera House. In 1996
and 2001, international competitions were held for proposals to
renovate and extend the museum. Winning schemes by Kazuyo
Sejima and Sauerbruch Hutton were never realised for variously
cited reasons, including lack of funds, political conservatism,
architects' naivety and even — in a city barely 200 years old — the
onsite discovery of historical remains. Yet behind those reasons
was a powerful subtext: the authorities' fear that any architect's
vision would "compete" with the iconic Opera House, our
Scandinavian Sphinx. In 2002, following the second competition's
failure, the MCA's director Elizabeth Ann Macgregor and her
board arrived at a radical conclusion: there would be no vision.
No further competitions would be held, and only a handful of
local, malleable architects would be considered. Neatly folding the
previous architects' endeavours and beginning afresh, Macgregor
appointed Architect Marshall, a Sydney office otherwise known
for residential projects. A decade later, the opening of the MCA's
new Mordant Wing signals that the game has come to an end.
So, was Jacob's intuition correct? Does the Mordant Wing offer
an alternative to the "self-replicating horror of contemporary
architecture"?
Autopsy / autopoiesis
To answer this question, we must
examine the Corpse. Architect Marshall's MCA addition began as
a modest master plan, nurtured over a decade into a contextual
proposal, deferential to the old building and the surrounding
street pattern. However, within this well-meaning project
lurked a deadly disease: autopoiesis. Self-generating and selfmultiplying,
autopoiesis is a cancerous condition manifesting
itself architecturally in outbreaks of mindless, space-filling, self-referential
geometries.
Dissecting the Mordant Wing, we find a ravaged host. Witness
the cube-like forms that aggregate like tumours on the outside
and infiltrate within. These do not stack, nor intersect, nor align
to a grid, but seem to have grown in purposelessly overlapping
clusters. As only a parent could, lead architect Sam Marshall finds
the "cubic" façade "random and inviting", claiming the building's
exterior makes its contents legible. But the cubes frustrate legibility
through their very randomness. Containing mostly breakout and
teaching spaces and not light-sensitive galleries, the building's
envelope is irrationally opaque.
Inside, disease runs rampant. Plasterboard cubes hang from above,
cling to walls and swell up from below. From a precarious entry
stair, via unfurnished lobbies, beneath uncomfortably low ceilings
and under harsh fluorescent lights, the visitor encounters a series
of acoustically and experientially hostile spaces. The frenzied
growth of autopoiesis starves other areas of life: the MCA's forecourt
is an uninviting moonscape, inhabited only by the panel seams
and plugholes of the precast concrete floor. Somehow, the disease
seems even to have crippled the architect's attempt at "deferential"
planning. The portion of Art Deco façade adjoining the new
stairwell suffers a cruel fate, its windows blinded with black
paint. The new extension displaces the entrance from the middle
of the old galleries to the end — discouraging access and impeding
circulation. At the uppermost public level of the building, even
the postcard Opera House view is impeded: inside by a blade wall,
outside by an autopoietic black cube.
Post-Mortem / Mordant
The Mordant Wing case seemed
like an isolated outbreak. Then plans were announced for a new
Australian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Australian architects
have long called for an open competition to replace the "temporary"
existing pavilion, installed in 1989 and compromised as an
exhibition space. Last year, the government-run Australia Council
for the Arts announced there would be an official competition,
but that it would be restricted to a limited number of Australian
architects invited to participate based on an "open" process to
establish eligibility. When the winning proposal was revealed, it
was clear that something had gone very wrong. Architects Denton
Corker Marshall's sterile black cube was unmistakably an offshoot
of the MCA's autopoiesis. Improbably, the virus had managed to leap
more than 16,000 kilometres, contaminating a new host.
One name appeared in both Sydney and Venice: Simon Mordant.
A wealthy businessman and prominent philanthropist, Mordant
is both chairman of the MCA and, alongside his wife, the major
benefactor for its expansion. In 2011, they donated one million
dollars towards a new Australian Pavilion, and Mordant joined a
government-run panel to appoint the architect. In the case of both
the MCA and Australian Pavilion, Mordant played a key role in
funding and thereby initiating significant architectural projects.
Could it be that he had unwittingly spread the disease?
Conclusions
Autopoiesis is Jacob's "self-replicating horror",
a disease that thrives in the vacuum of ideas. But in the game
of Exquisite Corpse we find not the solution, but the cause. Both
the MCA and Australian Pavilion represent abandonments of the
open competition model, devising instead a bureaucratic, multiauthored,
vision-less mode of procurement. The common element
was a philanthropist who is extremely generous, yet ambivalent
about architecture. In both instances, he not only provided the
critical funding, but also occupied a position of leadership during
the implementation of the project, without understanding the
role that a patron can and should play in fostering visionary
architecture. When asked to comment on the decision not to hold
an open ideas competition for the Australian Pavilion, Mordant
said, "This is an art space, it's not an architectural competition."
I asked Mordant, "How do we best foster and support a vibrant
architectural culture through private patronage?" He replied, "I'm
not an architect and not best placed to answer that."
In 2010, an open letter by Charles Holland called on architects
to "stop entering competitions" in order to protect their ideas,
livelihoods and sanity. I hope that the examples above will help
demonstrate that there are compelling reasons why architects
cannot and should not stop entering, and calling for, open
competitions. The open competition model, through its democratic
blindness, affords the architect freedom of independent thought
and action. The entrant can operate outside the brief and beyond
bureaucratic controls. In selecting a winning scheme, the
institution transfers visionary power to the architect. In principle,
it is the architect's vision that will organise and direct the other
actors, enlivening spaces and avoiding thoughtless replication.
It may not be the only cure for autopoiesis, but in the absence of
visionary patrons, it's the best one we've got. David Neustein (@dneus)
Exquisite Corpse
The open competition model, through its democratic blindness, affords the architect freedom of independent thought and action. In principle, it is the architect's vision that will organise and direct the other actors, enlivening spaces and avoiding thoughtless replication.
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- David Neustein
- 20 September 2012
- Sydney