Kaylene is a PhD student at the Melbourne School of Design, focusing on food heritage interpretation. With a background in heritage engagement, Kaylene has worked as a writer and producer for film, audio, theatre and site-specific performances for cultural organisations and historical sites in Singapore and Malaysia.
Morgan Hickinbotham
Morgan graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2012 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, majoring in photography. His photography work spans the fashion, design, architecture and commercial spheres. Seeing and thinking in sound and vision, he also makes music and video art.
Sean Anderson
Sean Anderson is the Associate Curator for the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Prior to his work at MoMA, Anderson served as the undergraduate program director and senior lecturer of design and history at the University of Sydney from 2012. His research focused on Italian modernism and its effect upon colonial and post-colonial architecture across multiple geographical contexts.
Tanja Beer
Dr. Tanja Beer is an award-winning ecoscenographer and an Academic Fellow in Performance Design and Sustainability at the Melbourne School of Design. She has more than 15 years professional experience, including creating ephemeral designs for projects in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, New York, London, Cardiff, Glasgow, Vienna and Tokyo.
Toby Dean
Toby Dean graduated from the University of Melbourne in 2017 with a Master of Architecture and now teaches in the Bachelor of Environments. He is interested in the intersection of contemporary culture with tradition and in seeking alternative methods of architectural practice and exhibition for the future. He believes in design as a form of empowerment and hopes to continue the discourse on the implications of architecture upon complex environmental and social systems.
Tod Williams and Billie Tsien
Tod Williams and Billie Tsien began working together in 1977 and co-founded their eponymous architectural practice in 1986. Located in Midtown Manhattan, their studio focuses on work for institutions including schools, museums and not-for-profits—organisations and people that value issues of aspiration and meaning, timelessness and beauty.
CONTENTS
Barnaby Bennett Breaking and Making Temporality
Christof Mayer Cui Bono? The City as a Product of Societal Negotiation
Aki Ishida Metabolic Impermanence: The Nakagin Capsule Tower
Kaylene Tan Unfinished: Brutalist Heritage in the Making
Amelyn Ng Illusions of Freedom
Christine Bjerke Dual-Living: The Digitalisation of Domestic Space
Elizabeth Diller On Obsolescence
Tod Williams and Billie Tsien On Slowness
Eleni Bastéa The Memory of Loss
Tanja Beer * The Aesthetics of Impermanence
Toby Dean The Reassembled Town Hall
Jessica Wood MPavilion: Catalyst or Cat’s Paw?
Sean Anderson On Imagined Placelessness
*denotes articles that have been formally peer-reviewed
EDITORIAL
Dominic On, Jessica Wood, Nina Tory-Henderson and Stephen Yuen
Permanence has long been prescribed as an essential virtue of architecture, associated with the Vitruvian definition of firmitas. mass and solidity crafted to endure. Yet, to think about architectural permanence in the Vitruvian sense today produces a schism: absolutism in a culture of relativism. Speculative development, volatile real estate markets, international warfare, mass migration, a changing climate and throw-away attitudes prioritising quick and temporary fixes for ongoing problems have repositioned the value placed on the material durability of architecture. How do we focus our thoughts and efforts in a culture of obsolescence, when the very essence of architecture—to build—has endurance at the centre of its logic?
This logic frames the architectural project as complete the moment it is built, but a building is an ongoing series of processes; it changes over time through occupation, inhabitation and developing technologies. From the enduringly incomplete Tower of Babel to the temporary urbanism of today, practitioners and theorists have been negotiating and reinterpreting the definition and value of architectural permanence, and it is in this milieu that this edition of Inflection is positioned.
In opposition to the commonplace acceptance of architectural timelessness, this journal presents alternative practices that interrogate the relationships of architecture and design with solidity and time. Through examining a series of temporary architectural interventions in post-quake Christchurch, Barnaby Bennett proposes an ecological understanding of architectural timescales. He argues that buildings should not be understood as inert edifices, but as ‘living’ things that respond to flows, shifts, events and activities as they move through time. In rebuttal to the scrap-and-build culture in Japan, Casey Mack’s study of ‘artificial land’ projects by structural engineer Toshihiko Kimura underscores the importance of cultivating new attitudes toward existing built stock in order to project them into the future, finding a middle ground between permanence and change. Christof Mayer of raumlaborberlin takes post-Wall Berlin as a case study to illustrate how temporary projects can democratise spaces, diversify a city and contribute to long-term urban developments. A thesis project by Toby Dean from the Melbourne School of Design explores the reclamation of public space through more permanent means. Dean proposes the Reassembled Town Hall as a tool with which to resist a culture where the worth of architecture is reduced to economic capital alone. Conversely, in the fields of scenography and performance design, the transience of the event typically takes precedence over the fixity and sustainability of the set and costumes. Tanja Beer’s research considers the social and environmental ripples that resound long after the curtain falls and the set is demolished.
Our contemporary world is one in-flux; new technologies allow business models, governments and social structures to morph with unprecedented speed. How then, does the relatively slow and fixed practice of building position itself in this global condition of temporal, social and technological instability? Amelyn Ng responds to this question through a critique of the rise in freelance and precarious work, made possible by contemporary