Dovey, Kim. 2000. “Myth and Media: Constructing Aboriginal Architecture.” Journal of Architectural Education 54 (1): 2–6. https://doi.org/10.1162/104648800564671.
Media
Meaning market
inauthenticity
gentrification
photos vs reality
Marika/Alderton House designed by Glenn Murcutt, Yirrkala (1994)
Built for an aboriginal woman, Marmburra Marika, and her non-aboriginal husband, Mark Alderton.
enmeshed in a large range of aesthetic, social, and environmental discourses; it is also strongly geared to advertising for construction industries and to the quest for professional identity.
The demand for an authentically Australian architecture and the need for a solution to problems of Aboriginal housing meant that the audience for such a work was very large.
funded by advertising that juxtaposes products with matching buildings and have been augmented by soft critiques from academics and journalists.
meanings of buildings have become subject to an integrated cluster of interests wherein publishers and editors rely on architects to supply images.
not an independent critique
publishing of Murcutt's house
Phrases that link the work to both Aboriginality and ecological sustainability.
A photograph of a “stringybark hut on stilts” is juxtaposed with the section of an unbuilt design that is “meant to bridge Aboriginal and white Australia.”
vokes the primitive hut as the model for such an Aboriginal architecture.
ikens Murcutt’s houses to those of Aboriginal groups who built huts in the form of long sheets of bark drawn into curves across a bush pole frame, thus enabling shelter from the rain and sun while preserving cross-ventilation underneath. Although Murcutt’s early buildings do not have Aboriginal clients, they are photographed with see-through foundations and theorized as having roots in an authentic and spiritual relationship with the land.
Mucutt's awards: won the Gold Medal as Australia's premier architect and the international Alvar Aalto Meda
These awards were for a large body of work over about 20 years, mostly of detached houses in rural settings, not for aboriginal client but yet the celebration was opened with a quote from Chatwin’s book Songlines and identifies Murcutt’s work by two axes—the climatic and the Aboriginal
BHP Steel agreed to finance design on the grounds that they could use the project for publicitty
a 10-page spread appeared in the BHP promotional magazine Steel Profile in December 1993. using terms like: “blueprint for future Aboriginal housing”
Not so far north of this site, at Ok Tedi in Papua, New Guinea, BHP were at that time engaged in a long-running legal dispute with the indigenous population over massive environmental damage caused by mining operations, with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake. This dispute was being reported regularly in the Australian press, and the company’s failure to reach agreement on compensation was causing a serious public relations crisis. The BHP sponsorship of an “Aboriginal” house was a form of counter-publicity, an investment in some potent symbolic capital.
marika, an indigenous panter, had credited the house for bridging the tow different cultures of her and her spouse however also stated she does not Aboriginalize the building and denies its role as a prototype for Aboriginal housing.
Aboriginal people other than the clients are posed in many of the photographs. Joyful naked children sit on the steps and edges of the house, and others are gathered on the floor watching tele- vision. An Aboriginal painting and a large gourdlike container is moved about from photo to photo as signifiers of Aboriginality.
The range of publications in the international media drew not only from the single collection of photographs, but also from a narrow range of descriptive phrases—“touching the earth lightly”; “bridging between cultures”; “simple platform for Aboriginal fam- ily life.” This framing discourse became repeated in a serial manner from journal to journal with titles like “Murcutt Mediates,” “Aboriginal Shelter,” and “Murcutt’s Dreaming.”
The photographs operate to establish a congruence between the architectural ideal of the pristine house in a coastal landscape and the ideal of the Aborigine living in harmony, the representations of the building have excised it from its cultural context as part of this town.
On the beach, people sit under the much photographed “traditional Aboriginal shelter,” which is, in reality, just the local equivalent of the beach umbrella.
By contrast with the beach shelter and the photographs, the house is mostly kept closed.
The electricity poles, wires, and houses next door have been made to disappear through a combination of digital erasure, cropping, camera angles, and exposures.
Controlled representations of structure
Architects have never been able to control the reproduction of architectural imagery
By controlling the reproduction, Murcutt controls the critique of his work. The representations have been deployed to make the design fit the theory.
mechanism for display of aboriginality
A film of Murcutt’s work entitled Touch the Earth Lightly was made by BHP, shown on national television during 1994, and the cover image used in promotion shows Murcutt with Marika and her baby, his arm extended in a gesture of offer.
The “window… looks back to the billabong and waterhole and it’s very important isn’t it… the location of the room in relation to the man-groves, the fresh water mangroves, to the sea and to your billabong at this end of the house.” - Marika’s relationship with the landscape is spoken for by Murcutt. As a “bridge”: between cultures the house does not quite span the divide, but they are not the only parties who want this bridge to stand in film.