Review, John Gollings: The History of the Built World, Museum of Sydney
Regardless of age, some architectural masterpieces continue to fascinate.
In a remarkable passage at the beginning of his history of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides observes that if one day both Athens and Sparta should fall into ruins, the remains of Athens would lead the people of the future to imagine that it had been a more powerful state than it really was, while those of Sparta would lead one to underestimate the city’s greatness. The difference was that one city had invested its wealth in magnificent public buildings, while the other had not: the modest structures of Sparta would disappear, and even the ruins of Athens would continue to impress later centuries. There is always something remarkable about such a demonstration of historical imagination, and particularly the imagination to realise that things have not always been and will not always be as they are today. The prehistorical mind assumes that the tribe has always lived in the same place and in the same way; today the contemporary mind is just as blinkered, for we assume that we will be able to continue indefinitely in a way of life that is growing less and less sustainable with the increase of populations and the burgeoning of individual consumption.
There is another memorable passage in the Aeneid, where Virgil relates, in Book VIII, Aeneas’s arrival at the site of what is destined to become the city of Rome. In the poet’s own time, Rome was a vast, dense and sprawling city that occupied the seven hills and valleys between them. It was also a city in the process of being rebuilt by Augustus, who said he found Rome built of brick and left it marble: marmoream relinquo quam latericiam accepi. It was crowded, noisy and relentlessly busy.
Virgil strips all this away in his imagination and takes the reader back to a time when there were no buildings, conjuring up a scene of bucolic tranquillity, emphasised by the recollection of the violent episode, long before, when Hercules pursued the giant Cacus to his cave on the Palatine. It is particularly moving that he evokes cattle grazing where one day the Forum would be — and even more for the modern reader, who knows that after the fall of Rome, cattle would again graze among the ruins, and that the Forum was long known as the Campo Vaccino for the weekly cattle market held there for centuries. Even in ruins, Rome continued to fascinate visitors who would meditate on the vestiges of grandeur, still overwhelming in their scale, long dwarfing the constructions of the modern world. Rome became the greatest and most evocative ruined city in the world, a theatre of the vicissitudes of history, the awful mystery of the fall of empires and the melancholy spectacle of universal mortality.
But elsewhere, too, it is in buildings that civilisations express themselves and leave durable memories of their spirit. Whether as part of the fabric of still living and bustling cities, quiet and picturesque backwaters or even in ruins, it is buildings that we most often visit when we travel, and in which we try to read the character of the society that built them. And this is also the interest of John Gollings’s History of the Built World. Gollings, who was discussed here last year in connection with the proto-architectural Aboriginal site of Nawarla Gabarnmang, is a fine photographer of architecture who takes great care to capture the character of each building not only as a structural design but also, and crucially, as an object placed in an environment, whether natural or urban: a structure designed to take its place in dense streetscape will be conceived very differently from one intended to dominate an open vista or to be viewed across a body of water.
Buildings interact with the natural features that surround them, such as hills and rocks, and with the conditions of space, light and the colour that pertain to these settings. Ancient dwellings from Turfan on the Silk Road seem to grow organically out of the mountainside; granaries in Libya have been built up like the cells of a honeycomb. These and other buildings exist in a desiccated environment of stone, earth and dry sunlight. The temples of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, on the other hand, arise in tropical jungles, surrounded by lush green vegetation whose roots climb over and entangle the ruins as they slowly reclaim the work of man into the order of nature.
One quality of all good architecture is that it is governed by purpose and motivation: whether a caravanserai on a trade route, a granary in the desert or a temple in a jungle, and whether architecturally primitive or sophisticated, all of these structures are made for a reason. In the most important buildings, multiple threads of motivation may intertwine: religious function, the demonstration of piety and of prosperity, the adoption and variation of architectural languages that are inseparable from cultural associations — as we see for example in two of the most important buildings in our vicinity, the Hindu temple of Prambanan and the Buddhist Borobudur, both in Java but relatively little known to Australians.
One of the most memorable photographs is of the Taj Mahal, a picture admirable for the sense of space and the river view that differentiate it so strongly from the standard tourist views of the building. Here we are farther away, but we can in fact better understand the structure of the whole ensemble, where the central tomb is flanked by a mosque and a guest pavilion. The Yamuna River divides what we can see from the remaining part of the complex, the Moonlight Garden. The name of this garden, Mehtab Bagh, is Persian, as is the name of the builder of the monument, Shah Jahan, and the Taj Mahal is a Mughal building that arises from ancient Persian sources. The enormous arched porches that dominate the four facades of the tomb are called iwans, and this structure actually seems to originate in the pre-Islamic Sassanian period, almost 2000 years ago; later it was revived and became the basis of the classic Persian mosque design, with a vast courtyard surrounded by four facades with iwans, subsequently imitated all over the Islamic world. From this perspective, the Taj Mahal is rather like the mosque pattern turned inside out, unconsciously returning the iwan to its Sassanian role as an outward-facing entrance.
It may seem curious at first sight that Gollings should include, alongside buildings of this grandeur, a suite of domestic houses and motels from the Gold Coast in Queensland — surely a dizzying drop in architectural altitude. But kitsch and mediocre though these buildings may be — built in the style and taste excoriated by Robin Boyd in The Australian Ugliness (1960) — they have a kind of motivation of their own: they are built within a vernacular suburban subculture and they belong to a sort of tradition in the use of forms and motifs.
Like shantytowns, they have a sense of life that can all too often be lacking in modern architecture, especially when designed for the accommodation of the masses. Still they remind one of the depressing fact European settlers in Australia came to a land with no buildings and proceeded, all too often, to cover its surface with structures of the utmost banality, especially in our suburbs, coastal sprawl and regional shopping centres.
Of the modern buildings that Gollings exhibits, many are very striking, and once again he has excelled in bringing out the distinctive character of his subjects, whether intended as a residence, an office or as some public monument. He can be said to have shown off each structure to its best advantage, yet in doing so he also lays bare its inherent qualities and even its shortcomings: thus it is clear that many private houses are remarkable designs, yet they inevitably speak both of the vast sums of money that the very rich will pay for homes and of their often radical disconnection from any social or urban fabric.
Large industrial and public buildings too speak of extravagant design and of the intention, above all, of making a mark and establishing the prestige of their brands, but are they humane environments to work in? Are they the expressions of sustainable economic structures or of functioning social systems, or of dysfunction and gratuitous displays of expenditure?
In an economy of relentless consumption, art has achieved a special place based less on meaning than on the simple promise of freedom. That is why the promotional language surrounding contemporary art is all about breaking boundaries and overstepping conventions, because people are desperate for some space in which they can escape from the realities of their work lives.
Art museums — but only contemporary art museums — have also become the post-religious equivalents of cathedrals, and cities rush to spend money to demonstrate, as once they did with ecclesiastical buildings, the piety and the prosperity of their communities. In a city full of commercial tower blocks, the contemporary art museum has to be wildly fanciful, ludic and extravagant. Hence the popularity of star architects such as Frank Gehry, who can be counted on to produce, as at Bilbao, a destination building. Whether these buildings are suitable for the display of works of art is almost unimportant; most often they overshadow anything displayed in them, but that doesn’t matter because it is the building, not the relatively vacuous art, that people come to see; the building is the dream of freedom that visitors can luxuriate in for a time, like a more sophisticated cultural Disneyland. One of the most remarkable recent examples, included in the exhibition, is Gehry’s building for the Louis Vuitton museum in Paris. This is the contrary of modernist functionalism: it is a conspicuous display of redundant and non-functional form, serving to support the prestige of the LVMH family of brands as well as attracting visitors with its promise of miraculous freedom from the constraints of any kind.
What will future generations, a couple of millennia from now, conclude about our civilisation from its architectural remains? It is interesting to imagine them digging up the remains of the Louis Vuitton museum, but the sobering fact is that modern concrete architecture is not designed to last for more than a few generations. Everything modern in this exhibition will have long disappeared in 2000 years, but quite a few of the older buildings may still be standing.
John Gollings: The History of the Built World. Museum of Sydney, until April 26.
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