That Crevice Between Two Beams: Blackwell Street
If place is always retrospective, how do we begin?[1]
They built the house themselves.
Whatever the context, the weather at that moment, what suburb, what street, what unfamiliar turn you took to reach it. The memory is flicked like a switch. The house is all surfaces, flimsy façades. a breath flies in one window and out the other. In a space of permanent transience, we find a partial inventory: shreds of pigment, forgotten slogans, the dust of ages, dangling wiring now defunct.
Same story, the whole area was being developed, all their neighbours were dropping out. Two acres left where this house stands waiting. They hung in for three, four years for their million bucks.
A Queenslander is a style of vernacular architecture characterized by wide verandas and construction on ‘stilts’, raised foundationless off the ground to allow for airflow. This lack of foundation allows for easy transportation, and it is common in the night to see homes shorn in half and tied to the backs of trucks, speeding down the highway.
The doors’d been ripped off all the cupboards. One remained untouched: the cupboard where grandma kept the cordial. The carpet still felt the same to walk on, the scent was the same.
‘Here the Heideggerian question of the dwelling comes up again: where is that shelter, that house of being, located now? Freud said, and for him it was an important phenomenon, that to understand America one might observe the complete houses that were moved on trucks. Freud tried to explain the displacement of symptoms by this remarkable movement that seeks to show, via these prefab houses on trucks, an effect of contingency, the fact that ultimately there are no substantial roots.’[2]
These houses relocated on trucks – identical to the Queenslanders without foundation that can be found corralled in lots on the outskirts of town, awaiting a loving owner – leave the past behind. While traces of its inhabitants remain, the house itself is untethered from its geographic environment, occupied by ghosts that belong nowhere.
These buildings, now sought after in newly expensive areas of Brisbane, are known for their openness, for letting the air through on humid summer days.
They unfold into pavilions and verandahs, living space neither inside or outside. Blackwell Street exhibits none of these qualities: doesn’t unfold, doesn’t invite, but turns its head. A closed system. Van der Ryken’s house is Queensland’s much lauded ‘open-plan’ living taken to its furthest absurdity – the walls knocked through, the windows without glass. Untended, lush tropical weeds curl in the windowframes.
Freud’s American houses on trucks are a symbol of something disconnected from environment, constantly shifting. They turn their backs on the mistakes of the past, ‘moving on’.
The oft-repeated slogan of self help: moving on. How to move on? We move on and forget the past, forget that it can only repeat itself.
That crevice between two beams, it’s the place where my dad and his siblings used to keep their cigarettes hidden from their parents.
The disappeared object, the psychic doubling. House and not-house. Which is real? Both buildings now operate at a second remove, the first shorn of its effects and decorative flourishes, a bare shell; the second a false façade overlaid with meaning, expanding in density inside the gallery like a parasite.
Does putting the real inside the white box of ultrareality – the gallery – make it unreal? I wonder whether this history is a fiction. The house exists moving between real and fabricated – which elements contain ghosts, which are new?
‘The suburb is a received idea, a quoted stupidity, a commonplace cliché, a spatial imposter, a couple of curios, an idle machine, a proof of the great chain of simulation… But maybe utopia is memory, unbearably simple and symmetrical and practical. Our suburb flaunts the awkward authenticity of an origin.’[3]
When I went back the house was trashed, glass on the floor, walls kicked in, tags sprayed everywhere.
The structure evokes an uneasy subtropic-gothic, cicadas in the early evening as the light is dying.
I sometimes joke to the people I live with that locking the doors and switching out the lights at night is a moment of ‘dad-drag’: assuming the role of protector, defender of property, patrolling the perimeter. Blackwell Street shadows the learned performance of masculinity, of gender in general, that occurs at this age. The way that space – domestic space in particular – teaches gender and the rules of sex. The misspent youth of parents or older siblings, in memory forever wilder and less regimented than our own, that recklessness now sealed under plastic in yellowing albums.
The artist uses the same software to map his space of the past as is used by construction companies to mock-up the advertising hoardings that hide great dirt pits in the ground, illustrated by images of laughing nuclear families gathered in sitcom level airbrushed perfection.
This technology, which allows the viewer to float, omniscient, through the rendered fantasy of future space, offers is the potential for a multiplicity of perceiving in layers, a telescoping relation to the past. The required temporariness of this is what gives it importance; when structure fails, there exists a shack. It is inexhaustible because it barely exists. What remains is temporary and ephemeral, the scaffolding by which one can circle the building but not enter it.
Referring to Mallarmé, Deleuze describes ‘…the way the folds [replis] offer glimpses of the stone in the indentation of their inflections, “fold following fold,” revealing the city, but also its absence or withdrawal, a conglomerate of dust, hollow collectivities, hallucinatory armies and assemblies.’[4]
This space of the Fold is an attempt a methodology of ‘seeing-through’ architecture, where one can act as both a citizen and an impartial observer of spaces and the actions contained within them. In the end, like the hazy sepia youth to which it refers, the building remains inaccessible.
I’ve often tried and failed to express the permeability of buildings. In Blackwell Street, this means the outside-inness of an intermediary space – neither inside or outside, or rather, inside-inside. The claustrophobia of the exurban home doubled by the airlessness of the gallery space.
Who owns the carpet? It was there as long as I can remember. Who owns memory?
Van Der Ryken’s work elects silence as mode, refusal as strategy. A sense of groping in the dark. This acceptance of doubt, unknowing, discomfort, and sadness as unspeakable. The bleached dry freeway verges, graffiti dulled by light, glare bouncing off bitumen. Picking your way barefoot through the bindis to the Hills Hoist. In a small dry ritual of the day, repeated. Humidity accelerating decay, of bands of bored teens mucking up and making out before they too abandon the building.
4118 REPRESENT
Perhaps Blackwell Street can become new kind of public art: an alternative monument to what is endangered. A bleak cathedral to the vulnerability of the body in a rapid project of gentrification. In East London where I live, buildings disappear overnight leaving gaping holes in the streetscape. Even on a route walked daily, it is difficult to remember what was there before. Also common is the one hold-out, a lone house in sooty brown brick clinging to the side of a reflective glass monolith like a carbuncle.
The way we think about architecture is organized by the way we think about the relationship between inside and outside, private and public. With modernity there is a shift in these relationships, a displacement of the traditional sense of an inside, an enclosed space, established in clear opposition to an outside. All boundaries are now shifting.[5]
Van Der Ryken identifies site as reusable, shifting according to fancy and town planners. The displacement that occurs in suburbs around the world, a melancholy sliding further and further outwards from the city center. It is a site made up only of doorways, corridors, thresholds, an interior that shuns inhabitation. We give up in cities. Cities give up on us. We are made weary by the city, it takes what we have, leaves a husk. In this town there is a familiar heaviness in the air before a storm, a crepuscular light.
The word exists in the open, we can’t talk about it, we must, it hangs in the air. Everything of Van Der Ryken’s work is the unsayable. There can be no invocation. writing it you (I) come up against this shitty fibro time after time. Things bounce off it. or it sucks in the air around like a black hole. An architecture of the contemporary shuns permanency, occupies transient spaces that shift and change before they can be locked into memory, an endless non-place. Uprooted and arbitrarily relocated, traces and palimpsests, masked articulations, the incompleteness of space regretfully abandoned.
‘The ultraprivate haven was in fact overexposed territory’ [6]
No matter the flaws it is a place we live in. We hang our clock above the threshold to mark the hours. Rem Koolhaas: ‘if there is to be a ‘new urbanism’…it will be the staging of uncertainty; it will no longer be concerned with the arrangement of more or less permanent objects but with the irrigation of territories with potential…’[7]
First disobedient forays out of the family home into the suburbs: stormwater drains (irrigation with potential), underpasses, abandoned buildings on the edge of town. We want a clubhouse. We carve marks into the still-wet footpath. We spray a name. Boys dirty underwear and a neon smiley on the wall. AUSSIE PRIDE. Besser bricks, a white plastic stacking chair fallen on its side. In the gallery the scale of the home is warped – too big to grasp, too small to gape at. The house is provisional, a space of arrested time, stalled movement, tepid air, psychic dead ends.
She said what she remembered most was that antique pendulum clock, its constant hollow ticking.
But still: a place so contingent remains a shelter.
Madeleine Stack
-------
If place is always retrospective, how do we begin?[1]
They built the house themselves.
Whatever the context, the weather at that moment, what suburb, what street, what unfamiliar turn you took to reach it. The memory is flicked like a switch. The house is all surfaces, flimsy façades. a breath flies in one window and out the other. In a space of permanent transience, we find a partial inventory: shreds of pigment, forgotten slogans, the dust of ages, dangling wiring now defunct.
Same story, the whole area was being developed, all their neighbours were dropping out. Two acres left where this house stands waiting. They hung in for three, four years for their million bucks.
A Queenslander is a style of vernacular architecture characterized by wide verandas and construction on ‘stilts’, raised foundationless off the ground to allow for airflow. This lack of foundation allows for easy transportation, and it is common in the night to see homes shorn in half and tied to the backs of trucks, speeding down the highway.
The doors’d been ripped off all the cupboards. One remained untouched: the cupboard where grandma kept the cordial. The carpet still felt the same to walk on, the scent was the same.
‘Here the Heideggerian question of the dwelling comes up again: where is that shelter, that house of being, located now? Freud said, and for him it was an important phenomenon, that to understand America one might observe the complete houses that were moved on trucks. Freud tried to explain the displacement of symptoms by this remarkable movement that seeks to show, via these prefab houses on trucks, an effect of contingency, the fact that ultimately there are no substantial roots.’[2]
These houses relocated on trucks – identical to the Queenslanders without foundation that can be found corralled in lots on the outskirts of town, awaiting a loving owner – leave the past behind. While traces of its inhabitants remain, the house itself is untethered from its geographic environment, occupied by ghosts that belong nowhere.
These buildings, now sought after in newly expensive areas of Brisbane, are known for their openness, for letting the air through on humid summer days.
They unfold into pavilions and verandahs, living space neither inside or outside. Blackwell Street exhibits none of these qualities: doesn’t unfold, doesn’t invite, but turns its head. A closed system. Van der Ryken’s house is Queensland’s much lauded ‘open-plan’ living taken to its furthest absurdity – the walls knocked through, the windows without glass. Untended, lush tropical weeds curl in the windowframes.
Freud’s American houses on trucks are a symbol of something disconnected from environment, constantly shifting. They turn their backs on the mistakes of the past, ‘moving on’.
The oft-repeated slogan of self help: moving on. How to move on? We move on and forget the past, forget that it can only repeat itself.
That crevice between two beams, it’s the place where my dad and his siblings used to keep their cigarettes hidden from their parents.
The disappeared object, the psychic doubling. House and not-house. Which is real? Both buildings now operate at a second remove, the first shorn of its effects and decorative flourishes, a bare shell; the second a false façade overlaid with meaning, expanding in density inside the gallery like a parasite.
Does putting the real inside the white box of ultrareality – the gallery – make it unreal? I wonder whether this history is a fiction. The house exists moving between real and fabricated – which elements contain ghosts, which are new?
‘The suburb is a received idea, a quoted stupidity, a commonplace cliché, a spatial imposter, a couple of curios, an idle machine, a proof of the great chain of simulation… But maybe utopia is memory, unbearably simple and symmetrical and practical. Our suburb flaunts the awkward authenticity of an origin.’[3]
When I went back the house was trashed, glass on the floor, walls kicked in, tags sprayed everywhere.
The structure evokes an uneasy subtropic-gothic, cicadas in the early evening as the light is dying.
I sometimes joke to the people I live with that locking the doors and switching out the lights at night is a moment of ‘dad-drag’: assuming the role of protector, defender of property, patrolling the perimeter. Blackwell Street shadows the learned performance of masculinity, of gender in general, that occurs at this age. The way that space – domestic space in particular – teaches gender and the rules of sex. The misspent youth of parents or older siblings, in memory forever wilder and less regimented than our own, that recklessness now sealed under plastic in yellowing albums.
The artist uses the same software to map his space of the past as is used by construction companies to mock-up the advertising hoardings that hide great dirt pits in the ground, illustrated by images of laughing nuclear families gathered in sitcom level airbrushed perfection.
This technology, which allows the viewer to float, omniscient, through the rendered fantasy of future space, offers is the potential for a multiplicity of perceiving in layers, a telescoping relation to the past. The required temporariness of this is what gives it importance; when structure fails, there exists a shack. It is inexhaustible because it barely exists. What remains is temporary and ephemeral, the scaffolding by which one can circle the building but not enter it.
Referring to Mallarmé, Deleuze describes ‘…the way the folds [replis] offer glimpses of the stone in the indentation of their inflections, “fold following fold,” revealing the city, but also its absence or withdrawal, a conglomerate of dust, hollow collectivities, hallucinatory armies and assemblies.’[4]
This space of the Fold is an attempt a methodology of ‘seeing-through’ architecture, where one can act as both a citizen and an impartial observer of spaces and the actions contained within them. In the end, like the hazy sepia youth to which it refers, the building remains inaccessible.
I’ve often tried and failed to express the permeability of buildings. In Blackwell Street, this means the outside-inness of an intermediary space – neither inside or outside, or rather, inside-inside. The claustrophobia of the exurban home doubled by the airlessness of the gallery space.
Who owns the carpet? It was there as long as I can remember. Who owns memory?
Van Der Ryken’s work elects silence as mode, refusal as strategy. A sense of groping in the dark. This acceptance of doubt, unknowing, discomfort, and sadness as unspeakable. The bleached dry freeway verges, graffiti dulled by light, glare bouncing off bitumen. Picking your way barefoot through the bindis to the Hills Hoist. In a small dry ritual of the day, repeated. Humidity accelerating decay, of bands of bored teens mucking up and making out before they too abandon the building.
4118 REPRESENT
Perhaps Blackwell Street can become new kind of public art: an alternative monument to what is endangered. A bleak cathedral to the vulnerability of the body in a rapid project of gentrification. In East London where I live, buildings disappear overnight leaving gaping holes in the streetscape. Even on a route walked daily, it is difficult to remember what was there before. Also common is the one hold-out, a lone house in sooty brown brick clinging to the side of a reflective glass monolith like a carbuncle.
The way we think about architecture is organized by the way we think about the relationship between inside and outside, private and public. With modernity there is a shift in these relationships, a displacement of the traditional sense of an inside, an enclosed space, established in clear opposition to an outside. All boundaries are now shifting.[5]
Van Der Ryken identifies site as reusable, shifting according to fancy and town planners. The displacement that occurs in suburbs around the world, a melancholy sliding further and further outwards from the city center. It is a site made up only of doorways, corridors, thresholds, an interior that shuns inhabitation. We give up in cities. Cities give up on us. We are made weary by the city, it takes what we have, leaves a husk. In this town there is a familiar heaviness in the air before a storm, a crepuscular light.
The word exists in the open, we can’t talk about it, we must, it hangs in the air. Everything of Van Der Ryken’s work is the unsayable. There can be no invocation. writing it you (I) come up against this shitty fibro time after time. Things bounce off it. or it sucks in the air around like a black hole. An architecture of the contemporary shuns permanency, occupies transient spaces that shift and change before they can be locked into memory, an endless non-place. Uprooted and arbitrarily relocated, traces and palimpsests, masked articulations, the incompleteness of space regretfully abandoned.
‘The ultraprivate haven was in fact overexposed territory’ [6]
No matter the flaws it is a place we live in. We hang our clock above the threshold to mark the hours. Rem Koolhaas: ‘if there is to be a ‘new urbanism’…it will be the staging of uncertainty; it will no longer be concerned with the arrangement of more or less permanent objects but with the irrigation of territories with potential…’[7]
First disobedient forays out of the family home into the suburbs: stormwater drains (irrigation with potential), underpasses, abandoned buildings on the edge of town. We want a clubhouse. We carve marks into the still-wet footpath. We spray a name. Boys dirty underwear and a neon smiley on the wall. AUSSIE PRIDE. Besser bricks, a white plastic stacking chair fallen on its side. In the gallery the scale of the home is warped – too big to grasp, too small to gape at. The house is provisional, a space of arrested time, stalled movement, tepid air, psychic dead ends.
She said what she remembered most was that antique pendulum clock, its constant hollow ticking.
But still: a place so contingent remains a shelter.
Madeleine Stack
-------
- Robertson, L. 2003. Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. Toronto: Coach House.
- Ronell, A. 2010 Fighting Theory. University of Illinois Press. p. 63
- Robertson.
- Deleuze, G. 1991. The Fold. Yale French Studies. Accessed 27 February 2015. Available: http://www2.gwu.edu/~art/Temporary_SL/177/pdfs/Deleuze_the_Fold.pdf
- Colomina, B. 1996. Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media. MIT Press.
- Preciado, B. 2014. Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture and Biopolitics. New York: Zone Books.
- Koolhaas, R. in Robertson p. 38