Architectural Theory Review

ISSN: 1326-4826 (Print) 1755-0475 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ratr20

Inspiration from Below: Australian Vernacular in

Contemporary Architecture

Philip Drew

To cite this article: Philip Drew (2006) Inspiration from Below: Australian Vernacular
in Contemporary Architecture, Architectural Theory Review, 11:1, 26-40, DOI:
10.1080/13264820609478553

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13264820609478553

Published online: 22 Jul 2009.

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 Philip Drew

Inspiration from Below: Australian

Vernacular in Contemporary
Architecture
PHILIP DREW

What is meant by vernacular?

Vernacular is used to describe the language of the people as apposed to the language of the ruling
class. The two were not necessarily the same. In Russia in the 19lh century, the elite spoke French, as
did the Norman's after their conquest of Britain. In Italy and many countries in Europe there were a
host of dialects.

The term began to be used to describe writers such as Francesco Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio,
who wrote their stories and poems in the Italian vernacular instead of in Latin, and Martin Luther,
who translated the Bible into German so the people could read holy scripture. Vernacular means the
standard native language of a country or locality, as distinct from the language of the elite, hence, a
language that is universal and popular. Vernacular is the informal everyday speech of a country or
locality.

Architecture is not a language, however much post-modern theorists insist that it is, nor, for that matter,
is it a coherent and easily read system of signs or signifiers that everyone can understand. In most
countries, the buildings of the elite and wealthy are different from the houses and work places of the
ruled—the commoners—not only in terms of their elaborateness and cost, but also in their style. It is
as though society is saying, this type of house for the ruler, another type for the under class. Today,
we express class differences by the car we drive, even when we don't own the vehicle. Vernacular
architecture is roughly equivalent, the architectural equivalent, you might say, of vernacular speech—it
is the style of building shared by the under class.

Until recently, architects were employed by kings, princes, the nobility and the church. It required
wealth to hire an architect. There was little point, even if you could afford it, to hire one to design
a barn. Barns, though essential, were workaday structures and hence did not require the architect's
touch.

Awareness of vernacular building is relatively recent, though you dofindan appreciation of it in Thomas
Hardy, who trained as an architect. We owe our contemporary awareness of vernacular building to the
writers Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Kidder Smith, Bernard Rudofsky, Sherban Cantacuzino. and Paul Oliver, and

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to the likes ofVictor Hugo and Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-Le-Duc from the 19"' century. Rudofsky more
or less gave us the definition of vernacular architecture in the title of his inspired MOMA exhibition:
Architecture without Architects.

Vernaculararchitecture is fascinating for what it reveals about the lives of ordinary people, for its evidence
of cultural exchange and influences, standards of living, climatic adaptation, building techniques,
etc. Throughout Europe, in the 19"' century, dialects served as regional ethnic markers. These days,
architecture features strongly on the new Euro currency, to communicate co-European identity. In the
past, vernacular building styles were markers of a regional identity. The elite and rulers imported their
architecture from outside: at first, with the Italian Renaissance, style was taken from Italy, then, when
the French court under Louis XTV set the standards of courtly behaviour, it was French architecture
and French style that dominated the provincial courts of Europe.

Consequentlv it is the vernacular architecture which becomes the regional designator and not the
houses and palaces of the rulers. Something like this also occurred in the Church until the Reformation
caused a break with Rome. After this, there is more regional expression in religious architecture and
the Baroque is created.

Predominantly, people lower down the social scale imitate the upper classes. It could be called the
'trickle down effect.' Less talked about is the trickle-up effect, when an elite imitates the lower classes
as Marie Antoinette did at Versailles with her dairy project. Rural simplicity as a restorative to court
intrigue.

The question I wish to explore is the influence of vernacular on contemporary Australian architecture,
how genuine was the understanding behind it, and what purpose it served. In keeping with other elites,
Australian architects looked outside Australia for their stylistic sources and architectural influences.
This is ven' much what might be expected from a country emerging from colonialism and lacking
confidence. Architecture, in general, aspires to be indigenous. No Japanese or French architect would
proclaim that his aim was to produce architecture that is alien. But often we hear Australians protesting
against Australianness in architecture as though it was retrograde. The great strength of Aboriginal art
is its secure indigenous identity. The artist reveals and tells us about 'his land.' The art, in that sense,
is autobiographical. This essay investigates the use of indigenous vernacular sources. Who do we find
who look to our own vernacular for inspiration?

The Queenslander is widely admired as a response to climate. I wrote a book on the veranda as a trope
that gives architecture in this country its identity. Later, I argued that it was the main point of difference
that distinguished the form of Glenn Murcutt's houses from those by Mies van der Rohe that, in a large
sense, allowed him to deal with issues of climate, space, landscape and introduced and legitimised his
appropriation of the colonial material corrugated iron as his principal distinguishing material.

If I can digress, vernaculararchitecture has been seen bysome as revealing or encapsulating the spirit of

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 Philip Drew

a people and, in some sense, of capturinga true common cultural identity. The Nazis exploited German
vernacularimageryduring the 1930s. The cause of vernacular architecturewas highlighted by thedebate
over flat roofs and steel and concrete construction (symbolising Modern architecture) and traditional
style public dwellings with high tile roofs, shutters and even occasional medieval or baroque detailing. A
1926 newspaper article, called the sloped roof'the German roof.'The arguments for 'German' or 'Folk'
architecture were advanced by Theodor Fischer and Fritz Schumacher. Modernism was characterised
by its opponents, 'as importers of a dangerous, a death-dealing spirit, for it will murder our finest
possession, the German soul.' Later, this nationalist moment in architecture, with its admiration for
folk architecture traditions, would bring about the closure of the Bauhaus and the construction of Nazi
youth hostels that resembled alpine chalets and thatched or half-timbered cottages. The folk style was
also inflated for the use of larger buildings such as the hotels on the autobahn, the exhibition halls
of Kraft durch Freude in Berlin, and the federal Post Office administration buildings. Under the Nazis
the folk style became one of the most widespread of the officially encouraged styles.

This example is significant because it demonstrates one of the dangerous ways vernacular architecture
can be exploited politically. There are alternative ways of seeing vernacular building, but if there is
an underlying message, it is that the vernacular expresses the spirit of the people tied to a region, as
opposed to an international identity. The vernacular is about the particular, though many universal
lessons can be drawn from it.

Australia was long content to import its architectural styles from England. Later, the sources vary, but
they are all foreign and this continues unabated to the present. This makes the identification of what
is vernacular difficult. Many of our rural building practices were a continuation of practices brought
from the home country of the builders and were only modified because of material or technical
obstacles.

Awareness of the vernacular frequently implies nationalism; to create an architecture that expresses
its region by everyday building practices will over time give it the status of a regional symbol. This
is usually opposed by architects who derive their models from international sources. There was just
such a backlash against Glenn Murcutt in the mid-1980s. The struggle between international and
regional forces is unrelenting. Internationalists suggest they what they have to offer is more up-to-
date or fashionable, that its international imprimatur is a sign of superiority, when all it tells us is that
the architect is not original enough to find his own solutions. This competition can be seen as one
between architectural inspiration that comes from outside and above, or from below from the culture
itself. For designers seeking a distinctive, authentic architectural expression, which deals directly with
issues of landscape, climate, local materials and skills and a life-style that is embedded in its region,
vernacular examples have much to teach. Recently, there have been signs of a return to favour of
vernacular examples. Whether it is genuine or seeks to exploit the authenticity of these Australian
vernacular models for other motives, it does indicate a renewed interest in creating architecture that
is different and recognisably Australian. This seems to be a particularly healthy development, after the
denial of Australian sentiment for so long under politically correct multi-culturalism.

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The resurrection of suburbia

Peter Corrigan (b. 1941-) provides a convenient starting point. He differs from Philip Cox in the
1960s, whose interest in vernacular started from an admiration of rough bush carpentry and colonial
architecture, and was clearly very rural. With Ian Mackay, Cox designed buildings such as the St
Andrews Preparatory College at Leppington, 1964. and the C.B. Alexander Presbyterian Agricultural
College Stage 1,1966.

Corrigan's jumping off point are the vulgar excesses of suburbia. Corrigan was deliberately subversive.
He revelled in the shock effect of glorying in those very features of suburbia, which, a decade before,
Robin Boyd had condemned as bad taste in his polemic on The Australian Ugliness (I960). Robin Boyd's
attack on suburbia was backed by analysis of its aesthetic shortcomings—such things as Featurism,
the shallowness and veneer aspect, its dependence on American popular inspiration, for which Boyd
coined the term Austerican' to cover the Californian and Las Vegas elements of the austerity version of
the American dream that had overtaken the indigenous culture. There are echoes of Boyd in George
Johnston's 1964 novel My Brother Jack when David Meredith marries and sets up house in Beverly
Grove, then defiantly plants a snow gum in the middle of his front yard.

"And this is a grove we live in, darling. It's printed on the footpath at the corner, Beverly Grove.
Don't you know the definition of a grove? We've been letting them pull the wool over our eyes.
The Beverly-Park-Gardens-Estate." I spaced the wrords with careful sarcasm. "It isn't a park and
it isn't a garden and this isn't a grove. They've got us here on false pretences. They can't bloody
well do that to us! Besides, this is our chance to be original... what this place needs is a good
firm far-sighted policy of reafforestation!" (page 291. authors italics).

Corrigan has reversed this. He delights in taking the 'mickey' out of Boyd's stereotypes, and revels in
the shock his elevation of suburban banalities has on such upholders of good taste,

Corrigan's instinct is democratic; he deliberately turns his back on the defenders of good taste, who,
in the main represent the architectural elite, and instead, shifts the focus onto suburban styles. His
justification is that they are popular and represent the taste choices of the majority of Australians.
Corrigan stand is in tune with his teacher at Yale University, Robert Venturi, who advocated a mannerist
interpretation of Pop. This was the period of Pop art and Andy Warhol. Venturi's research into the Las
Vegas strip in 1968 set in train a re-examination ofsimilar popular environments. Hence, what Corrigan
started was roughly equivalent, but Corrigan did not undertake the son of visual analysis that Venturi
and his students at Yale undertook, but instead, in a casual sort of way, identified pans, features, which
he would use and incorporate in his own designs, around an edgy, deliberately abrasive geometry.

Venturi sets out to re-classify neon signage as an, and writes about the 'Ugly and Ordinary' and the
evolution of industrial iconography. In Corrigan's case, the argument is less clear. It is unclear what
we are expected to take from suburbia, or what makes it admirable beyond the fact of its popularity
and its unconscious vulgarity. Suburbia, he wants us to believe, is without conceit, the very quality

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 Philip Drew

that so infuriated George Johnston.

Corrigan seizes on brick and tiled suburbia, its bay windows, and trite concrete sculptures on the front
lawn (just a few selected features, as providing a highway leading to the Australian psyche). The 50s
is Corrigan's period. It is the time he is happiest returning to in his architecture

The artist. Howard Arkely (1951-1999), was notably more successful than Corrigan in applying an
aesthetic sheen to suburbia. He is successful because, as an artist, he can impose a consistent visual
tone that masks all its inconsistencies, which applies colour harmonies where there are none in what
becomes a rather soothing pictorial aesthetic, whereas Corrigan limited himself to quotations.

Both Arkely and Corrigan exhibit a similar commitment, saying, "it is the right thing, and if it isn't me
it will be someone else. It has to be done." What emerges from this, on Corrigan's part, is a theatrical
exaggeration of suburbia clad in polychrome brick, arbitrarily patterned, and choreographed in ways
more indebted to the Expressionism of Michel de Klerk, that elevate and frame his suburban vernacular
elements. The apotheosis of this approach can be found in Corrigan's great masterwork, the facade
and roof of RMIT Building 8,1993. on Swanston Street, which astonishingly, looks more like Antonio
Gaudi wielding a large paint brush than any street in Sunshine. The result is a montage of motifs
unconnected with the original suburbia. It becomes something separate and unrecognisable, even
to the point that we fail to recognise those very suburban elements it has incorporated, such is the
chaos Corrigan imposes with meticulous care.

To build his aesthetic, Corrigan hasfirsthad to destroy it. It becomes something altogether separate.
It all started quite differently with hisfirstfusillade, the Resurrection Church, Keysborough in 1975.
which opened the campaign to resurrect suburbia.

In Arkely, the subject is recognisable. Without such recognition, the representation of suburbia in
art would have no point. But architecture is different to a painting; it needs no such justification. But
Corrigan was really a pioneer two decades ahead of Arkely in his attempt to redeem suburbia

Corrugated iron in the Soul

Glenn Murcutt provides a great contrast to Corrigan. In 1985, after the publication of my monograph
on Glenn Murcutt, Leaves of Iron, it was said as criticism that in such a highly urbanised country
as Australia, where only a few percent of the population actually lived or made their living in rural
Australia, impressive as Murcutt's houses were, they were irrelevant. I recall the attacks that were not
made directly, because they seemed to come from fear. What these valiant defenders of international
plagiarism failed to see was that the world wasrightlynot impressed by its derivative pale imitations.
What excited the outside world more was architecture that expressed the flavour of the country and
its history and displayed an undeniable authenticity of spirit. It was so much easier to copy than to
be confidently original.

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Such defensiveness was understandable. These were architects who preferred to copy from overseas
instead of thinking. The critics were challenged by the mere suggestion 'that it is all here,' as Max
Dupain would later say, meaning that there is more than enough inspiration here in Australia.

What such criticism failed to acknowledge was that the bulk of Murcutt's houses were in suburban
Sydney, often near the city, but it was only on the fringes that he could escape the restrictions placed on
him by local Councils and was free to create houses that fully reflected his architectural intentions.

Murcutt's critics were correct when they stated that his sources were often rural and some went back
to before World War 2, when Australia was a rural land. None stopped to ask where the terrace house
came from and how it was climatically or socially relevant. The most distinctive and typical parts of
Australia were still essentially rural and colonial, because that was our history. The cities were great
emporiums of imported goods and thinking. Something that also was forgotten is just how heavily
industrialised rural industries were and how much in the way of manufactured goods and equipment
was used. In Australia, for example, the development of unionism among miners and shearers was
especially important.

What Murcutt succeeded in doing, which Corrigan's resurrection of suburbia failed to realise, was to
tap into the broader stream of our rejected and devalued past, namely, corrugated iron, timber louvres,
the veranda sleep-out, and transform such things and make them beautiful in a convincing way. This
has led to Murcutt becoming our most recognisable architect internationally. A French photographer,
on being shown an early Harry Seidler house, responded, "We have hundreds of these in Europe;
show me something Australian."

Glenn Murcutt did not discover the idea of a completely corrugated iron house. It was really an
obsession of Sydney Ancher, who kept talking about an all-corrugated iron house while Murcutt was
in his office around 1969. The thought stayed with Murcutt but it took him quite a long time to realise
because many clients were appalled by the prospect. By then, Ancher had died.

Ancher was an exceptional Modernist who never lost sight of his Australian roots. His most important
contribution, arguably, was to give Modernism an Australian inflexion. One is justified in calling his
work Australian Modern, whereas this is not true ofSeidler's early work. So many of Seidler's 1950s
houses are really a continuation of Marcel Breuer's New England domestic work, with occasional
forays into Le Corbusier. They never come to grips with an Australian identity because that is not
Seidler's aim. His goal was to plant Modern architecture in Australian soil, not to grow an Australian
modern architecture.

The concept of a corrugated iron house occurred to Ancher for the reason that he was emotionally
engaged in the Australian scene and Australian history. In this sense, the achievement of utility' over
aestheticism is the goal and the true meaning of modern Functionalist). In using identifiably Australian
methods and materials, the corrugated iron house was the logical result of Modern Functionalism,

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 Philip Drew

which has a further virtue that it can also be seen as indelibly Australian.

The European pavilion and the Australian veranda

It took Murcutt until 1983.14 years after Ancher had talked about the corrugated-iron house, to achieve
it in the Sydney Ball-Eastaway House at Glenorie on the north-west outskirts of Sydney. Corrugated
iron lined the outside walls and formed the roof, and ripple iron, the smaller version of Blue Orb. was
used on the ceiling. The iron was applied with the rolled pattern horizontal. There were two verandas,
one on the end and a contemplative veranda on the north outside the living room.

The house was surrounded by dry woodland at the head of a gully. Bush fires were a severe threat to
the survival of the house. The corrugated iron proofed it against bushfires,and a system of agricultural
sprinklers served by tank water was installed along the ridge as an added bush fire measure. This
illustrates the difference between copying English cottages in Australia and actually designing houses
to suit Australian circumstances.

Murcutt avoided any suggestion of kitsch by adapting Mies' famous steel and glass minimalist aesthetic
to recognisably Australian materials. His early houses, notably the Marie Short farm house between
Kempsey and Crescent Head, was based on Mies' Farnsworth house from 1950. There were the two
staggered floating platforms, which Murcutt re-deployed as two staggered overlapping long verandas. It
looked very different to the Miesian steel-and-glass pavilion and its companion piece, Philip Johnson's
house at New Canaan. Conn., 1949. The Murcutt veranda house underwent a significant paradigm
shift: timber sections replace the steel I-sections, louvres and insect screens replace plate glass walls
and a pitched corrugated iron roof has replaced the flat concrete roof. Where Mies used the new
industrial materials, Murcutt rehabilitated early colonial industrial products, along with the latest
new Australian products that could be seen as highly developed and'refined. The result looks quite
different because it is no longer a European pavilion but an Australian veranda. The form has been
changed in a quite fundamental way.

The detailing is the same in minimalist spirit, even though the particulars are entirely different. There
is the same austerity, the samefineness,yet the spirit has changed and is no longer that of Europe.
The house has been acclimatised and is much more in keeping with the austere hardness of the Maria
River landscape that surrounds it. The hard minimalism of the corrugated iron also makes a connection
that corresponds with the delicate oily metallic minimalism of the eucalypt foliage around it.

What Murcutt has remarkably achieved is to elevate corrugated iron and make it look elegant and
noble in a way that was inconceivable before then. Murcutt seized on other vernacular products,
cedar external louvres and glass louvres to encourage cross-ventilation, and cyclone roof ventilators
that were popular for butter factories and other industrial sheds, but were rarely applied in domestic
architecture.

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The most important single transformation Murcutt made was the reinvention of the veranda. The
veranda accompanied white settlement and history in Australia from almost the outset. It was an
abiding symbol of the British colonial expansion and dominion. It did not arise in Britain, but was
instead part of an international tropical architectural development which possibly originated with
.Arab traders. In Australia it made itsfirstappearance in 1793.

By separating the veranda from the house core, straightening it out, then turning the veranda into a
single straight platform open at the front but closed in at the back by an isolating protective wall, in one
stoke, Murcutt produced a house that solved the isolation of the British cottage from the Australian
landscape. It was easily cross-ventilated because it was narrow—not much more than 5-5m. The veranda
house suppled an ideal living platform for a temperate climatic region such as Sydney in the 1980s and
along the coast, which controlled sunlight, and caught the northeast summer breezes from the sea.
The rainwater system, which had been developed for the light misty rainfall experienced in the British
Isles, was resized by making the gutters and downpipes larger, to cope with torrential downpours. All
of the thinking was plain commonsense, but Murcutt injected poetry into the practical.

Synthesis of the vernacular

There are parallels outside architecture with Murcutt's transformation of the Australian building
vernacular in the poetry of Les Murray (1938-), whose language in The Vernacular Republic Poems
1963-83 (1985), as in his other verse, evokes the vernacular spoken tongue. Murray's poetry catches
the intonations, the rhythms, of ordinary speech. It is simple and ordinary, yet reflective in a much
deeper way. Murray's imagery and experience mined rural life.

Murray's poetry and the paintings of William Robinson complement Murcutt. It may be coincidental
that not only is Murray's poetry derived from the country, but in the paintings of William Robinson
(1936-) we detect a similar ethos and attitude to the vernacular landscape that goes on to manifest
itself in a magical transformation of ordinary reality. Murcutt and the other two were all born around
the same time, immediately prior to the outbreak of World War 2, between 1936 and 1938.

Atfirstglance, Robinson seems merely to be a conservative producer of landscapes, yet the impression
is deceptive. Underlying the pictorial imagery is great sophistication, much more than it gives away.
Robinson offers us a richly voluptuous catenation of multiple perspectives that is anything but simple
or straightforward and that equates much more directly with the way we experience landscape. His
way of seeing is vastly different to that of Eugene von Guerard. It is not taken from a single static
viewpoint. The Springbrook rainforest, behind Surfer's Paradise, envelops the viewer. The paintings
offer us multiple perspectives from above, skywards, much the way a bushwalker might remember
a day's walk. It is all compressed as in a dream. The imagery is Robinson's pictorial equivalent of J.S.
Bach's contrapuntal musical compositions, with their inversions and counter variations.

All three, Murcutt. Murray and Robinson, draw on farm life and rural themes. This would appear to

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place them at odds with contemporary values and with the Australian present. Robinson lived at
Beechmont farm and his early Brueghelesque scenes of farmyard life include chooks, cows, goats,
including magnificent images of distorted corrugated iron. Murcutt bought the Marie Short farmhouse
on the Maria River near Crescent Head and later added a guest hut. Les Murray spent his childhood and
adolescence on a dairy farm at Nabiac and has spent much of his later adult life at Coolongolook.

Each, in his own medium, sums up the common or core vernacular spirit, whether in words, images, or
the stricter constructions of architectural space. Murcutt reformed the Miesian minimalist pavilion as a
long, narrow veranda lifted off the ground. The pavilion's deck is narrowed and the large areas of glass
wall are replaced by the horizontal planes of glass louvres. Mies' flat roof is replaced by a lightweight
curved one of corrugated iron tilted against the sun. It is so entirely new it is almost unrecognisable,
The original pavilion was based on the Middle East tent, which the crusaders brought back with them
and planted in the garden. All that Murcutt did was to lighten the stone version and turn it into a linear
artefact and then restore it, once more, to the landscape.

Appropriating a Mediterranean Vernacular

To understand Alex Popov you need to know something about his biography as the son of Russian
refugees who settled in Shanghai before coming to Sydney. His work starts from a different point to
Cox, Corrigan and Murcutt. It comes neither from the suburbs nor from the bush, but is an imported
species from Mallorca planted around the fringes of Sydney Harbour.

It began with Jorn Utzon's 'Can Lis' house, constructed as an abbreviated village in sawn Santyarni stone,
made up of stone cells covered by Mallorcan vaults, interspersed with courtyards. As Utzon's son-in-law
at the time, Popov adopted a similar vocabulary of simple stone pavilions surrounded and protected
by attached courtyards in his own 'Can Lin' house, 1980, Eckert house, 1980, and Lerche houses at
Granada, Spain. On his return to Australia, Popov continued todesign unadorned Mallorcan vernacular
forms that have since become the hallmark of his mature style in the Marden house, 1980.

Though conceived in the eastern Mediterranean, it hardly seems to need altering for Sydney. The very
notion is a flattering one: Sydney regarded as a Mediterranean island. Leslie Wilkinson made a similar
connection in the 1920s. Popov even went so far as to incorporate Utzon's window framing devices.
The pink Shimann House is a condensed stepped version, with nearly all the Mallorcan vernacular
elements present, such as the open cubes and triangular section skylight. On this occasion, the
attached courtyards have been sacrificed to the slope.

Lest this seem altogether too simplistic, there is an alternative interpretation: Le Corbusier's 1921
Seaside Villa design had slightly vaulted ceilings of reinforced slabs that look not dissimilar to Popov's
much later Northbridge house; his 'Monol' house, though more industrial in appearance, suggests
Popov's Newport scheme. All of which may be just a coincidence, or perhaps both Popov and Utzon
and Le Corbusier all drew on similar Mediterranean vernacular models.

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Popov's Coffs Harbour house, 1983, occupied a headland north of the city. It united the Mallorcan
cubic pavilion arrangement with the Japanese stroll garden concept, with the house structured in a
similar way, with courtyards behind the bedrooms. It is Popov's most complex house, with acropolis
overtones that recalled an isolated Greek temple overlooking the Aegean Sea. but in this instance,
transported to the South Pacific.

In later houses for wealthy clients, Popov amended the earlier Mallorcan vernacular simplicity by
adding to it a natural Scandinavian minimalism. His housing at Mona Vale Beach, 2000, kept the
Mallocan vault, but instead of a true terracotta vault, it was framed in steel. The system of courtyards,
first applied on Mallorca, is repeated.

The Canopy Apartments at Northbridge retains the suggestive village shape of cubic volumes closely
attached to courtyard terraces as outdoor extensions of the living and bedroom areas. It is, as at Mona
Vale, all white.

The spacious Northbridge house, which has stepped terraced floors and vaults interspersed with
courtyards, represents a further luxurious variation. Its imported grey floor is used to unify a series of
cascading levels, sheltering under vaults that strongly recall Louis Kahn's Kimbell Art Museum at Fort
Worth. Texas, 1972. The vaults are punctured by openings that admit the sky and bounce sunlight
off water terraces so as to be reflected of the underside of the vaults. Popov persuades us that his
Mediterranean vernacular and Scandinavian modern synthesis is connected with Australia and the
fractured sandstone terrain of the Sydney Harbour foreshore.

Sydney does resemble Mallorca, especially on the south coast with its cliffs, and the climate does seem
similar. It could easily be argued that this is all very harmless, that all Popov has done is to bring a
little of the charm of Mallorca to Sydney. The sandstone, cliffs along the coast, sunlight and beaches
support this contention, but the truth is that all these similarities are skin deep, very superficial, and
the history of Mallorca belies all this. Charming and seductive as Mallorca is, it is not Sydney.

Our history is different, we lack the equivalent of the vernacular that inspired Utzon and Popov and
that serves to underline and validate the regional identity of their houses. We are today so used to
treating everything as a commodity, that we seem not to notice that not everything is transferable. One
of the characteristics of architecture is that it isfixed.We don't get our architecture out of shipping
containers. Some things, some objects, are unique, special, and have their own place in the world,
a place that makes them what they are and makes them special. Architecture, fortunately, is one of
those things that cannot easily be turned into a commodity.

Popov's vision is a very seductive one. One wishes it were true. If only Sydney were actually like
Mallorca. But they are different places, with different climates and different histories. They are
not really interchangeable and any pretended attempt to make such a transposition is ultimately
implausible. As it is, Popov's houses never quite shed their Mediterranean atmosphere and they never

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quite convince us that they belong in Sydney. They are slightly deja vu. like the day after a wonderful
Mediterranean holiday we wished would never end. They are as false, in their own way, as any English
house in Australia.

They possess a charm and an appeal that runs deep and is much more attractive than English houses,
not to mention being more liveable in our climate. They seem at home close by the sea, but ultimately,
they have 'imported' stamped all over them, in spite of all the clever adaptation.

A roof that says it all

Peter Stutchbury's architecture is the outcome of a varied and, in some respects, seemingly contradictory
background. He has united his exposure to the raw landscape of a family farming property at 'Manuka'
(camping ground), 100km south of Cobarin outback NSWand 700km northwest of Sydney, with the
visually challenging industrial vernacular of engineering. He straddles both the inland and lush coastal
scenery of the Palm Beach Peninsula.

Stutchbury's father, Ernest Stutchbury (b. 1924-), completed his diploma in mechanical engineering
and became the managing director of International Combustion Limited (ICAL) which provided steam
generators for power stations. His father's work had a powerful defining impact on his son; it aligned
him with a raw industrial aesthetic of exposed galvanised structural steel forms, with corrugated iron
and other industrial building products.

As a student, Stutchbury was set a history of architecture assignment to report on an architect that
interested him. By chance he chose Richard Le Plastrier, who later became his mentor and close
friend when Stutchbury set up in practice on the Palm Beach peninsula. Thus, in addition to his own
impulse towards a hard-edged mix of rural and industrial vernaculars. Stutchbury acquired from Le
Plastrier a poetic landscape sensibility, which in Le Plastrier's case was Japanese from his time in Kyoto.
The early houses reflect Le Plastrier's penchant for Japanese carpentiy and obsession with highly
crafted timber details demanding great attention. It was not until Stutchbury' won the competition
of the University of Newcastle School of Art that the industrial side came to the fore, with its brutally
direct steel frame and saw-toothed roofs that look like they have been taken from the nearby Stuart
& Lloyd's factory sheds at Mayfield.

The Aramax steel deep self-spanning structural profile of the Deepwater Woolshed roof, 2004, is
an uncompromising illustration of Stutchbury's dedication to industrial expressionism of bolted
steel products, including CVS 'freeflow' louvres in COLORBOND steel and Custom Orb walls. In a
similar vein, the Springwater House, 2004, on an unspoilt section of Sydney Harbour, makes use of
a lightweight, industrial galvanised operable system of steel louvres, applied originally to houses for
breeding chickens.

Stutchbury's poetry comes from his promotion of the 'big roof,' the architectural version of the farmer's

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hat to shade the face. It says it all about the sun and shade and the need for shelter in a dry parched
landscape. It can seem a little overdone and forced but that did not deter Stutchbury in his Birabahn
Indigenous Centre at Newcastle University (with Le Plastrier), 2003, and the Harbour House, Newcastle,
2004, with its naked north facing glass facade and exaggerated wing-like roof on tilted props,

Robin Boyd toyed with the large roof in his 1956 Pelican house at Davey's Bay, Victoria. The house
had plywood-covered trussed beams carrying a large 120 x 55 ft. flat roof over quite wide spans. In
his own house that year Boyd strung the roof on cables draped over the main living space, which was
separated from the rear night time children's areas by an open courtyard. The idea was much the
same as the Pelican house—one large shade over the house. The result, however, was a much less
dominant and aggressive statement. Once again, this inflation of the roof can be seen very often in
farm buildings whose role is to protect machinery or hay. Boyd's holiday houses at Portsea in 1968
returned to the same theme of the large roof projecting forward from the under space. Although
his trussed structure is different to Stutchbury's, the holiday houses are on the same wavelength as
Harbour house and Birabahn, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Stuchbury was on
the same wavelength.

The 2005 Shearing Shed Revival

There was a revival of the Australian shearing shed in 2005. Just quite why is a mystery. Something
stirred in the architectural unconscious, possibly a reawakened national sentiment, or awareness of
region, or possibly it was the shock of Glenn Murcutt being awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize
in 2002, suddenly making Australian imagery seem less gauche.

It was surprising. The wool industry was in the doldrums and the prices for wool meant it was hardly
worthwhile growing the stuff. There was a fabulous exhibition, Woolsheds & Shearer's Quarters, by
Allison Bennett, of interiors that gave them a wonderful baroque spatial dynamic. Some of the examples
she selected made an important point about the way these sheds established a novel porous space to
promote cross-circulation. Something similar can be detected in the spatial openness of Tom Roberts'
painting, Shearing the Rams, 1890.

Deepwater Woolshed outside Albury updated the traditional woolshed and improved the way it
functioned. Deepwater also forcefully demonstrated the big roof idea as a source of shade and coolness
for the inland. Later the same year, Richard Johnston ofjohnson Pilton Walker, won the competition for
the National Portrait Gallery with a design that Johnson stated was based on the Australian woolshed.
The wheel had turned full circle. No one decried the Australian metaphor as parochial or archaic.
Instead there was a fulsome chorus of approval. Nationalism was acceptable again, and we did not have
to shrink from our history or hide our pride in our past. It seemed okay for Australians to celebrate
Australianness in the face of multi-cultural denial.

The truly surprising thing about the Johnson design was that it looked nothing like a woolshed.

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The real comparison was with the Louisiana An Museum at Humlebaek. 1958. but Richard Johnson
never mentioned the delightfully simple trabeated pavilions and irregular gallery walk overlooking
the waters of Oresund. Anyone familiar with the industrial idiom of rural woolsheds would not have
been convinced for a moment by Johnsons' presumptive metaphor. It was simply not believable. Its
materials, form and space did not recall a typical woolshed. The dominant woolshed roof was missing,
and so was the industrial mixture of exposed structure, rough hardwood worn smooth and dented
corrugated iron.

Now that the glory days of wool are past, it is permissible to celebrate woolsheds. After all. Canberra
was founded in a sheep paddock. Under the circumstances, an art gallery masquerading as a woolshed
could be justified. The question that remained was why the deception in thefirstplace? Why pretend?
This was not thefirstoccasion Johnson had muddied a metaphor; the new Asian Gallery to the New
South Wales Art Gallery was based on a Chinese lantern. It sounded suitably cute, if a little trite and
cliche-driven, yet the attempt to adapt the transparent glass box into a successful gallery for displaying
art came at a price. To put it bluntly, there were no walls on which to hang art. and the excess sunlight
would have quickly destroyed the delicate artworks. Johnson resolved this functional contradiction
by blocking out his Chinese lantern with horizontal interior panels that destroyed its transparency
and creating a narrow gallery around the main central space. This pushed the gallery goer against
the art works so they could not stand back to view them properly. It was a classic example of taking
an architectural metaphor too literally and an illustration of where vernacular opportunism and the
temptation to exploit the vernacular for propaganda purposes can lead the unwary architect.

Less well recognised is the difficulty of applying vernacular motifs. Frequently the architect will be
confronted by a functional mismatch, some internal contradiction that might not be too strong as
a characterisation, between the vernacular motif and the new application such as occurred at the
Johnson Asian Gallery.

One non-Australian example, Renzo Piano's Jean-Marie Tjibaou Kanak indigenous museum on New
Caledonia, 1998, deserves mention in the context of a discussion about the contribution of vernacular.
The museum is comprised of a collection of Kanak like hut structures, greatly enlarged, along a curved
pathway crowning a ridge, resembling a village. Obviously Piano was not an indigene, yet he has
succeeded in producing an enormously powerful work based on the Kanak hut that is made of timber
yet has the sheen of steel. This illustrates what must appear a contradiction; one would expect that only
someone who was a Kanak could have done it. yet, one suspects that it was because he could view the
Kanak culture as an outsider that he has been so successful in capturing and embodying its essential
spirit. What mattered most, in terms of the result, is his sympathy and his skill as an architect.

A final perspective

There must be a lesson somewhere in all this. Because so much of what is politely described as 'Australian
architecture' is really not Australian but foreign and imported, there is a deep unsatisfied hunger for

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an authentic architecture which validates our local culture. It is the same in film, theatre, art, and many
other creative areas of our culture. We want the arts to reflect our lives, to comment in some way on
the issues and dilemmas we confront in choosing to live in this isolated part of the globe.

For architects seeking to escape the easy plagiarist trap of imitating overseas models and styles,
vernacular models offer a way through. No one has been more successful in taking this approach or
is as famous as Glenn Murcutt. Before seeing vernacular as the answer, or one among many answers,
the question must be asked, how authentic is our vernacular? Is it not, after all, just a lower borrowed
version of something else, whose pedigree has been mislaid? Does it only seem Australian because
we know so little about it?

To what extent is vernacular directly the result of the colonist's encounter with place, and a measure
of his ingenuity and creativity in meeting the challenge of a new environment? I have long admired
the hardwood, hessian and corrugated iron banana packing sheds that proudly jutted out from the
steep hillsides that surround Coffs Harbour. These sheds are rapidly disappearing, but in my youth
they had a special magic. They expressed something more than just hard, back-breaking work.
They had a freedom, a liberation from the convention, because they were improvised. The outlook
through an irregular filigree of torn green banana leafs of the distant Pacific made them seem really
part of everything. It was a feeling that was partly to do with their location and elevation. They were
crudely built, thrown together, but they were what they were, without pretence, without style, simple
well-ventilated platforms for making timber boxes, dipping bananas, packing and stencilling them
for market. In a way they were like the people who made them: they were without pretence, lonely
worksites stained by sticky banana juice.

These days I look back with a certain fondness to these places of labour and sweat, where an occasional
crude joke or prank softened the labour and monotony of the work. But the question is not so easily
dismissed: are they enough? They represent simple, unpretentious work values and are admirable as
such. There was no doubting their authenticity.

They did not ennoble the soul; they lacked that critical presence of aesthetic value that Nikolaus
Pevsner said was essential to architecture. Is this the missing ingredient the architect must add later
when he designs, for example, a National Portrait Gallery? Glenn Murcutt demonstrated that the
transformation of the vernacular into architecture requires an aesthetic act. In his case, it was the act
of taking the Farnsworth House, which had nothing to do with Australia or with Australian history
and values, and giving it an Australian form as a veranda for living, imposing on local materials the real
aesthetic discipline of Minimalism, that transformed and re-expressed the steel and glass European
pavilion at its source. It was necessary to transform the vernacular veranda and to treat the house as
a long narrow veranda.

The way in which Murcutt detailed his corrugated iron had little to do with vernacular. It was not messy,
unconsidered or improvised in the way that Peter Corrigan sought to make his designs with their

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irregular, jagged and seemingly arbitrary shapes. It was highly considered, sometimes too much so, but
it adopted a strictly functional stance to the solution of problems posed by climate and landscape. It
innovated aesthetically in a way that led him to produce an Australian aesthetic that to people outside
this country looked remarkably Australian. That, in a sense, is the nature of his achievement, to elevate
the vernacular and make it acceptable at the level of architectural form making.

Breaking free from the grip of outside influences has proved extremely difficult. Australian culture
has remained obdurately and proudly derivative for two centuries. Our artists and architects have
resisted what is so badly needed in the context of our special historical experience, that is, to think
for ourselves. This is the only way that we will create our own architecture. Not one can do it for us or
supply the answers that we need. The British Empire has faded, its contribution is being diluted and,
as Robin Boyd keenly noted, the American influence has replaced the English as the major decider
of what our culture is like. In practice this all started well before 1942, in the 1860s. Today we see a
grovelling, unthinking subservience to Washington. In the 1990s, you could say that the influences
on architecture in Australia were more catholic, more widely drawn, generally international, and less
confined to the two primary historically dominant countries. Yet, despite efforts to free ourselves
architecturally, and some valuable breakthroughs in the 1970s, we still remain derivative.

The vernacular offers an alternative, a way to make architecture Australian or, at the very least, to give
it an Australian inflection. The architect who draws on the vernacular runs risks, but that is in the
nature of creativity. It leads us down, and strikes a spark that can light something within our souls,
something genuinely and profoundly original in our own cultural makeup. Short of a complete jump,
the vernacular provides stepping-stones, which, while they do not guarantee a safe crossing, do assist
the architect who seeks to reach the far bank of the authentic. The reward is a sincere architecture
free of the taint of dissimulation or deceit.

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