Enlightenment in Melbourne
As promised, here is the obituary I wrote about one of my favorite architects, Peter Corrigan. I have edited it to bring greater focus on Maggie Edmond, his partner, and updated it with photographs and drawings. Corrigan self-described himself as a “Brechtian architect.” The theatre director Jerzy Grotowski’s idea of poor theatre also fits the work.1 In the coming weeks, I will post a short piece about Ettore Sottsass, another Brechtian, humanist architect, and designer who placed collaboration, joy, and pleasure above good taste.
“Architecture,” Melbourne architect Peter Corrigan said, “is the full Opera.” What was meant by this, I’d venture, is not that architecture should be operatic but that architecture might be like opera, an art form that takes in all of life and, per Julian Barnes, “…cuts to the chase… [and] seeks, more obviously than any other form, to break your heart.”2
When I was a student in Australia in the late eighties and early nineties, Edmond and Corrigan did work that was an “…authentic expression of the art - at odds with that which is chic, tasteful, and conceited.”3 Their work was operatic, and one might say heartbreaking. Not surprisingly, when they were not making buildings or teaching, they designed sets and costumes for the theater and the opera. They were also the doyens of Melbourne’s architect-cum-public-intellectual scene. Their work was either loved or hated.
Edmond, who I never personally met, was described by architect and writer Neil Clerehan as "…probably the nation's foremost female architect." In 2001 Edmond was honored with Life Fellowship in Royal Australian Institute of Architects (now simply the Australian Institute of Architects). In 2012 she was elected to the National Council of the Australian Institute of Architects for her “substantial contributions to the architectural fabric of the city.” In 2015, she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Architecture by the University of Melbourne, her alma mater.
Corrigan was the blustery Victorian capital’s lead architectural provocateur, an enfant terrible, the best architectural educator for quite a few decades at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology’s Faculty of the Built Environment, where I studied. After I graduated in 1994, I started my academic career as a first-year model-making teacher in Edmond and Corrigan’s RMIT Building 8 on Swanston Street, the city’s main north-south thoroughfare and its busiest tramway.4
They built it right on top of John Andrew's unfinished late modern student union building, upsetting Andrews so much he allegedly complained that he would never have done such a thing to his worst enemy. The structure is a stack of medieval towns, an unruly riot of references and in-jokes meant to provoke laughter, consternation, and rebuke. It was literally noxious. I remember its halls were still perfumed by the caustic off-gassing of new carpet and MDF weeks after the first day of classes. Before I moved back to the US, I spent the better part of the mid-nineties preparing for classes late into the night in their “City in a Building.” At the time, I found their polychrome masterwork to be awkward and challenged. But in retrospect, I am sure I was too callow to understand the work and even more than a little scared of it as a symbol of formidable and restless intellects.
The VCA School of Drama, a later work that I have only seen in photos, is located about a mile and a half south of RMIT. It sits across the Yarra River on the south bank, an Antipodean riposte to Gaudi’s best work, full of rich flourishes, strange figures, and lyrical motifs. Located behind the Melbourne Theater Company building by ARM and near the Australian Center for Contemporary Art by Wood Marsh, it is the most raucous of the three cultural buildings, all examples of Melbourne’s flourishing architecture scene.
Edmond and Corrigan’s work's impact remains with me over half a globe away and almost three decades on. Although I didn’t quite get it then, their work seems intoxicatingly refreshing now and, at the same time, quite tragic: beautiful in its raw, arte povera expressionism but yet misunderstood for its heady didacticism. Their work reminds me of the best of Frank O. Gehry’s mid-80s flirtations with off-beat forms and unruly colors and Eric Owen Moss’s impish early houses and additions in West Los Angeles. That branch of West Coast architecture might yet bear more fruit.
Obituary: Peter Corrigan, rebellious voice in Australian architecture, passes away.
“To conclude: architecture should enhance that sense of a defining difference. Which is central to what makes a culture rich and its citizens proud.
Architecture is the thing with feathers.”5
Dr. Peter Corrigan, AM, the dean of a vigorous and difficult Australian architecture brand, passed away on December 1, 2016. His passing marks the end of an era—one in which, initially by his own doing, the Melbourne wing of Australian architecture refused the polite modernist postures of a Harry Seidler or the pastoral narratives of a Glenn Murcutt and became a full-throated and, one might say, an angry critique of post-colonial culture. Corrigan was only 77 but had fought illness for a decade.
In a half-century, Peter Corrigan had achieved a career that would be enviable on any continent, especially in Australia. There are few parallels to Edmond and Corrigan’s work anywhere in North America or Europe left to mention these days. Despite their vast output, they remain, perhaps by design, internationally undervalued pioneers of Postmodern architecture. Charles Jencks and Kenneth Frampton never much sang their praise, and they never sought it. If Edmond and Corrigan’s early work too often took up the challenges posed by Louis Kahn’s late work, Paul Rudolph’s mid-career efforts, or Venturi’s early architecture6, then their mature work extended a unique voice and timbre—as if by kaleidoscopic projection—into an idiomatic and local Australian expressionism. Wildly regional and local in its references and double meanings, their oeuvre remains oddly imbued with the cosmopolitan and intellectual generosity that characterized Corrigan as a scholar and Edmond as an advocate for the public realm.
Indeed, Maggie and Peter were no ordinary architects. Their “Cities of Hope,” buildings as varied and often incongruous as suburban churches and fire stations, oddly iconic small home additions, schools, university buildings, galleries, and many designs for single-family homes (designed and built or sketched and unexecuted) seem, in retrospect, too provocative for our age. In the place of the endless parade of nonsensical baubles that get passed around Instagram, they offer us the sort of poor aesthetic charms that a Brecht or a Grotowski could easily understand: created with simple means yet rich in meaning. Edmond and Corrigan’s work was unstylish, unrefined, and lowly (for a love of the Untermenschen and not the Superman). It was sometimes shoddily made but never boring, never inoffensive, never generic. The work was ridiculous in the best possible ways. Working with Barrie Kosky on Falstaff in Graz and with the Melbourne theater director Peter King they made otherworldly stage sets.
Corrigan himself was difficult in an age that demands smoothness of both architecture and architects. He was sometimes horrible, even terrifying. He remained a challenging character well into a time when upsetting the dinner party or polite after lecture chatter by speaking honestly and forcefully was increasingly frowned upon. His exhortations to his students were searing, and his demands as a teacher were unrelenting because he knew the world is always so much crueler than the classroom. “Symmetry is asinine!” he roared one late afternoon to my first-year class. “Architecture is not for Philistines! Next time you come to class, bring your brain!”
Corrigan was not politically correct, but neither was he a bigot. He was unusually irate as a public figure, and yet, as a teacher, he supported and nurtured the weakest voices and endured, with great patience, the slowest students. As long as his students showed up with work, had hope, or could dream, he was their champion as he guided them with a genuine kindness so that they find might their own voices, their own resolve.
It would be odd to conclude this dedication without explaining my personal connection to Peter and my memories of him, formed over the decade I spent in Melbourne, studying at RMIT, previously a night school (the Working Men’s College of Melbourne where my father studied architecture and design as a European refugee in the 1950s.) Like other independent schools of architecture that formed new voices in the 1970s and 80s, RMIT was a laboratory, a temple, and a circus, shepherded by Corrigan and others. His ideas were lightning rods for a generation of architects who have since reshaped Melbourne. Regrettably, I was never his student; I never had the inclination (or perhaps the will) to endure one of his now famously grueling design studios. I did, however, have a few run-ins with Peter.
As a second-year student, I was asked to use some crude, slow early version of AutoCAD to draw up a small project of my choosing. I decided, wrongheadedly, to draw up one of Edmond and Corrigan’s most complicated projects, the Athan House in Monbulk, Victoria. I called their office to acquire the plans, and I was invited to meet Peter. Unshockingly, I was made to wait in his library for an hour until he arrived after a late lunch. He vigorously quizzed me about my intentions and then instructed me to return for the copies of the plans after vaguely explaining the project to me. I picked them up a few days later, but we didn’t speak at length again for easily half a decade.
The house itself is mysteriously a sharp chevron in the plan, an arrow that decided to sprout a series of neo-expressionist spikes, bizarre decks, outriggers, a small masonry bridge various other unnecessary but crucial appurtenances. Naturally, it turned out to be nearly impossible to document it in pre-historic AutoCad. While I eventually managed to draft the plans faithfully and returned copies on a floppy disk, I don’t think Peter ever bothered to review them. Their office has already painstakingly produced meticulously hand-drawn, zip-a-tone shaded, ink on vellum perspectives that were infinitely more refined than anything I could conjure on the computer.
Epiphany
Australia is a country as challenging as any to establish an architectural practice, let alone one with such a passionate and, some might say, rebellious voice. Peter Corrigan left behind a grand legacy: of many buildings and countless awards received; of numerous protégés and perhaps some enemies; of feral ideas shared selflessly with many students in Melbourne and elsewhere; of an architectural voice in the wilderness built of dreams and hopes set against the small-mindedness of the usual local political leadership and the numbing logic of the construction market.
This week I looked again with new eyes at Maggie Edmond and Peter Corrigan’s work.
I was reminded of two architects who accepted and valorized the local and the ordinary, who had the best uses for the most imperfect, least likely, and most mundane materials, who accepted the ersatz and kitsch as good things, and who made a genuinely local architecture with a true sense of a “defining difference.”
When I drive around Southern California’s less glamorous suburbs, I often wonder why so many architects here elect to see our cities as dumb, blank canvases for various futurisms instead of places imbued with an unpretentious beauty and even an unexpected melancholy.
On other days, I daydream about what an idiosyncratic but more generous and inclusive American architecture might look like in place of the glossy saccharine renders that depict our cities’ next big things, in the name of “advancing” architecture, the same here as everywhere else: anodyne and evocative images made of exactly no ideas.
Maggie Edmond and Peter Corrigan fiercely worked towards making an architecture of extraordinary ideas accessible by ordinary means.
I think such architecture is needed again, now more than ever.
Notes
“The buildings produced by our practice are what I would like to regard as 'poor' architecture (as in 'poor' theatre). Modest means, pedestrian imagery, and bush details are employed in an attempt to make public statements within tight budgets. The temporary and the cosmetic are given serious consideration.” Peter Corrigan, Architecture Australia, 6, 1, February/March 1977, p. 52.
Julian Barnes, Levels of Life, Knopf, 2013. “Sunshine on the Valiant’ A.S. Hook Address, Peter Corrigan, November 1, 2003
Norman Day, “Doing it his Way.”
Melbourne has 1763 tram stops making it the largest tram system in the world.
Corrigan studied with Robert Venturi at Yale and worked for Paul Rudolph, César Pelli, and Kevin Roche.