history : ideas touching evidence : the architecture of norman day

This publication seeks to act as a self-critique of our   architecture. We present realised and unrealised architecture equally and have reconsidered the work as a body of experience - as ideas touching evidence.

I represent that position predominantly through discussion of the work, although I will refer also to my hobby of writing about architecture and pass a backwards glance, for the record - at a kind of professional or personal biography which may help explain how I came to develop   an attitude .

By way of providing evidence, I want first to briefly explain what made me interested in architecture, and how it came about   that   I am an architect. I hope I am not indulgent here, because   my desire is to explain as best I can how it is that I do what I do - and why it is that I operate with the concerns that I do.

I was born in Melbourne but   my family moved to Perth in 1950, when I was 3 years old. I remember little of Melbourne then, just a hole in the fence at Dorothea Street leading to the large plot of land next door which was the Duffy's house.    I remember the suburbs such as Canterbury where I lived, were alive with my cousins and friends, I remember my mother talking over the fence to her friend Elise Dunn.

The house fence was   a timber   paling fence, about 1800mm   high, just like all the other suburban fences. The house was a duplex, bricks were deeply burnt clinker type and the roof was   terra cotta   tiles.

Perth has other memories for me, of white buildings mainly,   and of water which was the huge Swan River   with a hill rising above it and the city which was King's Park.   From the park I watched a fireworks display one year, with enormous explosions of color and light and sound blasting over the Swan River with a crown and black swan lit up in crackers on the side of a brewery building - it must have been 1953 because it celebrated   Queen Elizabeth's coronation.

My parents had a Dutch friend, and I remember once going to the port   to welcome some new arrivals who were Dutch migrants who arrived on an enormous white ship - which seemed bigger than any building I had ever seen and had terrific white rails over it with what I remember as green streamers hanging   off as they arrived. The ship had a giant   deep blue chimney sloping at an angle to the horizon. It was a dramatic structure for me,   not the least that it could move, and it was something that stayed in my mind   a long time.

There was also a little strange Medieval arcade in the city of Perth which entranced me,   called   London Court , which was designed with mock Tudor shopfronts and a relatively shallow width to the street. I now know of course that these type of buildings were constructed during the 1930's when people were seeking   escape from the   Depression and chose to   abscond with an architecture of fantasy- such as a Tudor village or a Spanish villa.

I did not know about that.   But I did know   that London Court was a different, unique, special, and in my world it was a declared site of significance,   somewhere where   theatre and expression of an idea had taken root, it was magical, glamorous   (in   Perth) and   particular.

There was another time in Perth, when I was sent to hospital to have my   tonsils removed. The process then was to remove the patient (or object perhaps) from their environment and subject them to an isolated, technocratic medical experience. (I am not certain that things in the medical   world have progressed much since the early 1950 's).

  I remember that I was placed in a ward with a small   aborigine boy, and my parents were worried, I since discovered   - because they thought my deprivation    from my family and the introduction of a new person with a different colored skin in my bedroom -   might just make me unhappy and dispossessed. I was, but not for those reasons.

I remember lying on my back being fed colored jelly   and looking for what seems now to me to be hours, at a transparent curtain of probably cotton (not polyester)   and seeing that curtain waft and wave in the breeze, sometimes solid, sometimes a brown-green. It was a good lesson for me, seeing   things that change as you watch them , starting to know how light and color work in sunlight and what fabric does when it is in motion. The little black guy next to   me was no surprise.

What my parents did not fully realise was that I had a family of aborigines living not far away from my own home, in Dagleish, who were not nomadic, but lived in makeshift houses alongside a stretch of bush which I walked through to get to the Jolimont State School. Each morning, I would pick up one or two of the kids from that place and we walked, always barefoot,   to school together. They were great at dealing with the magpies swooping over us at nesting time, they taught me at least how to keep my head up, wave a leafy stick of gum tree over my head, and walk on.

Mine   was a childhood spent in the Australian suburbs and on the beaches.

I spent hours in my back yard   with my two brothers living out fantasies in my cubbies and around the sand pit - which had become a small world only I knew about.

Back in Melbourne in 1956, I had another huge backyard with a garage full of tools and nails, saws, hammers, timber bits and a big timber workbench. I loved making things there. We also built a large hut that went on from room to room through a series of passages. And later, I built a neat cubby on top of a pinus hedge. The top of the hedge seemed from   my child's memory to be about 10 metres of the ground (although I now know it was just half that height ) and it offered views across Camberwell and into what would have been a city skyline - if such a thing   existed in the 1950's -   the only building piercing the skyline that I remember was a church spire in Camberwell.

But I do remember the smell of the hedge as I climbed through its brown sticky trunks and the moisture on ground of the rotting twigs and leaves of that plant.   When I   smell that wet, green lush fragrance - it means for me the house on top of the hedge, the views, the peace, the sky.

These childhood memories   images resonate in an architect's mind when it comes to designing buildings. The suburban nature of my childhood is strong - gardens, trees, a barbecue under the summer skies, cubby houses, wet garden beds   and   sprinklers, a concrete slab to play shuttlecock on, the Hills hoist, backyard football and cricket matches played with my brothers using a rolled up sock for a ball, kicking the football in the street   (even though the local park was just a few minutes   away).

The houses of my early memories were lathe and plaster, timber and brick veneer, oil heaters located where a fireplace once was, vinyl flooring and yellowing pine cupboards, Axminster   carpets, deep dark brown skirtings and stained cedar doors, a long passage in the centre of the house from which the rooms radiated. My brothers walked through my bedroom to get to theirs, my older sister lived in her own "bungalow" which my father had built with my uncles, she was outside - private, aloof and with her own garden   window.

 

Childhood reminiscences are critical to the development of an architect's sensibilities. They do not hold me back from developing more and different attitudes , nor do they restrict my thinking, but they allow us to place in context the intellectual and artistic work made in   later life - against what I know from before. I have a feeling (rather than proof) that these contexts are worth knowing about if I wish to understand the work of a creative architect and of the architect has come to terms with the issues.

The other major influence,   and the first I can really acknowledge as architecture (although at the time I did not know it)   was my interest in Modern design during the late 1950's. I don't know why, but I was impatient to see buildings with flat roofs and big glass windows when I was about a 12 year old. I asked my father to drive near these buildings, which were generally located in the outer eastern suburbs, which were then Blackburn, Bennetswood, Doncaster, and the seaside areas near Sandringham.

It was an education learned from my houses in the suburbs - the   stuff of my youth and the reality of my   existence - these Modern buildings located and alien to most things around them, yet somehow bright, happy, adventurous, colorful.

I saw daring buildings with what appeared to   be flat roofs, and also the butterfly roofed houses of John Mockridge and the colorful creations of Peter McIntyre. More importantly, when I was studying art at school during the period 1961   to 1964, I found the magazines and books of Boyd (which influenced the   way I saw the world, as much as the paintings of Brett Whiteley   who was then painting his wife Queenie in London and led me to believe in the quality of the LINE as an issue.)

As a youngster, I spent many hours visiting the National Art Gallery in Melbourne, then placed in a Victorian building beside the Museum and Library.   There, I could see and almost touch the work of masters, quite alive compared to the glossy pictures in books, with oil paint textured, finger marks in the surface of the painting, brush strokes and three dimensions.

My favorite in the NGV collection was, and still is, Tiepolo's   'The Banquet of Cleopatra' (1743-45). It is a large picture, with the figures located each side of centre, dramatically awaiting Cleopatra's lethal pearl, and in the centre is colossal architecture, columns, entablatures, decorative capitals, arches and balustrades. The generating idea of the painting is ordered by the single point perspective, which appears to bring the viewer into the painting, so it becomes and shared experience - viewer and subject - audience and stage.

That painting made me understand that art and life was one experience, the one was part of the other, even without much imagination we could be taken into the other worlds. Its emphasis on architecture simply reinforced my desires.

At the   big scale of the Olympic Pool, I was excited about the inventiveness and color of this new Modern architecture, most only known to me by the houses I saw on weekends. The Pool fascinated me as a child because   it included art as part of the built product. The art was a simple Arthur Boyd totem pole, but its memory is etched still in my mind, the notion that art and architecture can be one. What interests me now, looking back, is the freshness of the architectural idea of that period and the diversity of the products that came from it.

The younger architects—including Boyd, McIntyre, Bell, Clerehan, the Murphys, Berg and Mockridge—experimented with cantilevered roofs and balconies, sprayed concrete shell structures, lightweight steel frames and houses generally built using the barest of materials (there was a limitation on the amounts and usage of materials that could be used following the War, as the country rehabilitated itself , to allow   the building industry   time to recover ).

The final chapter of this period came about as a result of the 1956 Olympic Games being staged in Melbourne, with a   shift of architectural practices from small one-person sized studios to corporate companies,   and the movement of those practices into larger-scale work, which reduced the immediacy of experimentation and   daring of designers.

In my third year of studies in architecture at Melbourne University, I obtained a job working with my hero - Robin Boyd. There, I worked in a small office in east Melbourne with Karl Fender, Paul Couch, Bill Williams, Leanly Vellicate, "Missy" Berenice Harris and some others.

It was also there that I built my   first freestanding building, called Neptune's   Fishbowl, which was designed by Robin Boyd,   and was my project in the office to document and supervise the building. That same year I completed my university thesis.

I was working most of the week with Boyd and fitting my studies in during nights and the weekends. When Boyd gave me this project to look after I was excited at the challenge, anxious to discover how it could be built absolutely convinced it would be done. Whilst I found people who could prove the structure within the academic world, no practicing structural engineer at the time in Melbourne would touch it. And I found some slightly mad German builders in the Dandenongs who could build it.

This exercise, and my years with Boyd, taught me that all is possible in architecture.

There is a series of themes recurrent in my architecture   (since 1971). Many of these themes hark back to knowledge   experienced   and others   developed   by my learning to intellectualise my creative work, at universities and working under Robin Boyd and Frederick Romberg. Others still result from my knowledge gained in discussion with my friends and peers,   and by looking and travelling and investigating through my own work.  

I have also had the great luck to be able to study carefully the work of other architects in detail, by analysis, making opinions and recording those reactions   - predominantly in the printed media. As a writer and commentator on architecture I   have written   about 1 million words, and most of those words have been written about architecture in Melbourne, built predominantly during the period 1975 to 2000.

On the one hand such a task is limiting, it can compromise creative work, I refer to   much by quotation, intended or not, of the work of others, and often without realising the attribution, it's just information stored that bursts forth when I am designing.

I have over the past six or seven years , created work that celebrates that attributable part of my designing, where I have intended deliberately to quote and reflect on the work of other architects, where it suits me, and interpret their work in my bundle of creative activities.

I have a concern with the human condition   - which is lived in my world predominantly in a world of   suburbs.   My architecture offers a   critique of those suburbs using an ordinary aesthetic, made wondrous so it redefines suburbia with assurance and delight.

Buildings adapt   iconoclastic traditions using   regional and   local materials which represent   what is   known   for reconsideration   , and endow   them with new meaning and life.

I wish to place my buildings in a defined time and   space with evident references to the past and    other architecture. To achieve that end, I propose uncovering history by interpretation, so the past becomes understandable through intervention.

History is investigated through experiments rather than known solutions, which allows for a challenge of   pre-conceived notions and historicism -   without making literal quotations from the past. The work is to be considered   both in isolation (as a finished piece),   and as part of a larger composition.

Forms are chosen to provide a language of recognition and challenge.

Platonic forms   - such as   the cylinder, box, cone and pyramids   -   are recognisable symbols which people understand from their earliest experiences. I like to represent them by inversion of the standard   (such as upside down pyramid roofs), or as elements    mediating , or as structure made into form and used as a clue to the function of a building. Internal elements   also are designed in terms of primary forms, with   stairs as rectangular boxes, cupboards as cubes, poles as cylinders and wall units as sculpture.

These symbols and icons which compose the buildings are enhanced through the use of colour and daylight and artificial lighting , where structure is adapted for light control and   daylight is drawn into the buildings - which   defines   three-dimensional   expression as a   form giver.

Known symbols are redefined and the experiences of sense (sight, touch, smell and taste, sound)   are   enhanced   as part of an unexpected   journey into architecture.

This is architecture which seeks to explain the senses and   to   express   them using    platonic forms, color and light   for enhancement. It is made using coded elements for form recognition and materials as a critique of the place, thereby   providing fresh    definitions of an   architecture which is appropriate   in time and space for this date in history.  

Norman Day Melbourne. 2000