Transcript
UQ Architecture Lecture Series
Quentin Stevens
Event Date – Tuesday, 14 May 2013
Venue – Auditorium 1, Level 2, State Library of Queensland
Speaker – Quentin Stevens
Convenor – Luis Feduchi, Professor of Architectural Design, UQ Architecture
Discuss Online – facebook.com/slqAPDL & twitter.com/slqAPDL (hashtag #APDLlecture)
Website – apdl.slq.qld.gov.au
Speaker 1–Susan Kukucka, State Library of Queensland
Hi everyone. Good evening, I'm Susan Kukucka, Executive Manager here at the State Library of Queensland and I'd like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land, the Turrbal people and the Jagera people, and pay respects to their ancestors who came before them. And I'd like to welcome you all here tonight to the UQ Architecture Lecture which we deliver in partnership with the University of Queensland.
We'll have question time at the end as well and if you do want to ask a question if you could just wait for a microphone because again we'll be recording you and it's how we capture your question. So I'd like to hand over now to Professor John Macarthur. Please welcome him. He's the Dean and Head of School at UQ and over to you John.
Speaker 2–Professor John Macarthur, University of Queensland
Thank you. Great thanks for coming and it's a great pleasure to welcome an old friend Quentin Stevens. Quentin's Associate Professor at the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT University and he's also a Reader at the Bartlett School of Planning University College London. We know him well because in 2002 and '03 he was a Lecturer in urban design at UQ where he worked in the planning program of the school that we once were and was a great colleague to interact with.
He's got a Bachelor of Architecture and a PhD from the University of Melbourne and a Masters in Urban Planning and Policy from the University of Illinois Chicago. His research interests focus on environment behaviour relations with a particular interest in unplanned uses of public space, public art and urban waterfronts. He's held major grants from the Alexander Von Humboldt Foundation in Germany and the Australian Research Council and he's recently been a Visiting Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre at the ANU.
He's the author of a number of books which you might have seen outside. "The Ludic City", he’s co-editor of a collection "Loose Space" and "Transforming Urban Waterfronts". His next book, which we’ll hear something about, tonight I think, co-authored with Karen Franck, is "Memorials as Spaces of Engagement, Design Use and Meaning". Look forward to hearing Quentin's talk, let's welcome him to the podium.
Speaker 3–Quentin Stevens, RMIT
Thank you very much for that John and also to Matthew Aitchison and Luis Feduchi for getting me here and to the State Library for hosting us. Now I have to drive and speak.
Okay well I started looking at public memorials about eight years ago and I thought I'd start by saying something about why it is I find contemporary memorials interesting and why perhaps architects and other designers should also find them interesting as something to learn from.
The first thing that's important I think to note is that memorials are very expensive. As an example the recent Martin Luther King Junior memorial in Washington DC cost well over $100million. Memorials are very physically prominent in the cityscape. Unlike many other buildings they may in fact last forever. They're the elements of our built environment whose designs engender the most intense public scrutiny and debate, both through public competitions and through the general media. And there are of course very large emotional and political expenditures involved in defining, producing and making use of memorials.
But strangely I think then the decision about the design of important memorials is very much in the hands of a small group of people, a competition jury, which is primarily made up of expert designers not experts in the subject being commemorated, although they do have representation.
Another thing that's particularly interesting about memorials as a building type is that they don't have a function. The project brief is primarily symbolic. Even though they don't have a function public memorials do get used by people and I'll show a lot of illustrations of that. So I think they're interesting case studies of how designed objects are experienced and used by the public because they don't come with these strong preconceptions about what the function might be or should be.
And by trying to study commemoration as I am from a lot of different viewpoints I'm also trying to help us think about the functions of design landscapes more generally and the role that design professionals might have in shaping people's experience of the landscape and that's why I've titled my talk a how to guide.
I'm going to look at the objects, the physical objects of memorials, their uses, how they're regulated and how decisions are made about them.
Now how I became interested in this as John had mentioned the earlier books that I was working on, I was doing a wider study of playful unexpected uses of public spaces with Karen Franck. And then at that time in 2005 I happened to visit these two very large scale, abstract public memorials and I observed a lot of visitors using them. And so I did a lot of research since then exploring different ways the visitors engage with these objects.
Now at traditional memorials visitors feelings are affected primarily through their relatively passive perception of visual images and those images tend to offer a reasonably clear reassuring view about the past. You know they're quite didactic in telling us about the past. At most memorials visitors behaviour is also respectfully limited to slow walking, standing, kneeling and laying tributes, but many visitors to these two memorials, as we can see, don't have their thoughts or their bodies focussed on grieving, remembering or being edified. Many people's actions at these two sites respond to feelings such as curiosity, fear, delight, comfort and excitement. And these feelings are stimulated by a wide range of physiological sensations that are afforded by these settings.
And so what I find interesting about the abstract forms of the Lady Diana Memorial and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is that they shift the focus of attention for us as researchers and designers from the representational to the multi-sensory content of the landscape and from the artwork itself to the visitor who's engaging with it. So I'm going to talk quite a bit now about these kinds of engagement that people have with these settings.
People do not stop and stare at these memorials. Their sensations, their encounters with them are often quite incidental. Because these two particular memorials are very open public landscapes which many people can come across them incidentally when they're going somewhere else as part of their everyday journeys through the city. And both of the designs are intended to mix sacredness with everyday life. They're both very open to their surroundings. Many of the people passing through these sites are walking to work, they're joggers, cyclists, tourists who are on their way somewhere else, children, and these accidental visitors are primarily affected by the physiological sensations prompted by the landscapes. And a lot of that happens at a very subconscious level, people aren't necessarily thinking about how they're encountering the landscape.
A second point in addition to this incidental nature of our experience is that the stimulus is very rich and varied, or stimuli. It's only in a visual sense that we could say these two memorials are minimal. As people move very close to these memorials and as they move inside them or over the top of them and they sit on them it actually becomes quite difficult to view the memorial and a rich variety of other intense sensations become apparent.
The Diana Memorial's concrete channel has a great variety of geometry in a section of it and that sculpts the water into many different shapes, different textures, different sounds, different speeds of movement and people, as we can see here, immerse their bodies to feel the coolness of the water, to feel the water moving against their bodies.
At the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe the undulating ground surface also has this kind of characteristic of engaging the bodies of visitors. Rather than the ground being something neutral that you don't really notice, as in when we walk around inside most buildings, the ground at this memorial makes visitors aware of their own motion, the risk and the speed and the effort that's required to change direction, to move into different parts of the site.
Now in addition to this wider theme of sensory engagement I also want to focus on the performative aspects of these landscapes, that is what people are doing. Because these are very theatrical settings. The sensory perceptions that people have when they go to these sites are not something that's just passively received from the objects. The visitors themselves are important producers of sensations, they call out, they hit against the surface, they move the water, so through their actions both conscious and unconscious their own perceptions and also those of other visitors are being shaped through the, and that's modulated through the materiality of the objects themselves, the water, the concrete and the audio and physical affects that they have upon our bodies.
A similar sensory richness and performative engagement is also something you can see with many kinds of informal what's often called spontaneous memorials like these ones which we're also studying. In the bottom we see two images of the September '11 temporary commemorations directly after the event and above are two images of collections of flowers and cards after the July seventh bombings in London.
The next theme I want to talk about is the relation that this sensory experience of the sites might have to meanings. And in both of these, both of the previous cases, the designers are conscious of an attempt to form what I would call a sensory analogy between our experience and the historical people and events that are being commemorated.
In the case of the Diana fountain the idea of that landscape is to make children happy by supporting their play and that's supposed to in a way reflect Diana's own affection for children and the charitable works that she did with children. So the memorial is intended to have in a way the same affect that Diana herself had on children rather than being a symbol of those feelings and ideas. And so in a way the bodily and auditory delights of that memorial are its meaning.
With the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe Peter Eisenman notes of his minimalist design that he was not trying to represent the Holocaust. He believes that this is in fact impossible and that representations only trivialise the scale of the events. Instead Eisenman wanted to introduce in memorial visitors physiological feelings which would somehow be similar to that of, to those of Holocaust victims, what Holocaust victims themselves might have experienced. He placed then the rows of dark tall stelae as they're called at this memorial close together so that people walking between them would feel very confined. The aisles are intentionally too narrow for people to walk next to each other so that you're separated from your companions. Some of the stelae lean out over the top of the visitor to make them feel weak and insignificant and in addition to that the overall concrete mass tends to shield out views and the noise of the surrounding city so you're sort of cut off. People then are supposed to feel this memorial's purpose and act it out rather than reading it. And the physical discomfort of, which subconsciously is supposed to come to your awareness, is supposed to provoke some sort of metaphysical discomfort, thinking why do I feel like this in this site.
A particular illustration of that in the images here is that as the ground plane sinks away when you move towards the centre of the site and the stelae progressively rise up visitors have an incremental sense of moving inside this memorial. Many visitors, as we can see here, linger at the point where the stelae have risen to their eye level and many of them pose for photographs here and I've got I think about 20 different instances of groups of people coming into the site and hesitating and some of them aren't willing to move any deeper inside the field. There seems then to be some kind of existential fear of getting out of your depth and being somehow swallowed up inside the memorial.
Now that's all well and good but I think in the larger picture Eisenman's efforts to make people reflect on the historical tragedies through these perceptual analogies is rather at odds with most people's observed playful responses to the sensory stimuli that this site calls for.
I've just got a couple of slides here that collect together a lot of illustrations of the variety of ways that people position their bodies in relation to these two built environments. So we can see a whole lot of different bodily performances which explore possibilities of location, posture and movement as people feel their way around these sites. And this is why I think there's a link to design in a much broader sense, to look at the ways that an object which isn't designed for function actually serves a lot of different bodily functions in terms of how we move and position ourselves.
At the Diana Memorial for example people walk circuits around the ring of the fountain and the sloping topography provides an enjoyable awareness of the sense of the body's own motion and we see that when people bring inline skates and scooters and move down the path or walk down in the water. They also put their hands or feet into the water to interact with it, sensing and testing its strength, splashing their friends. Similarly at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe people explore the diversity and the challenge of different spatial relationships to the sculpture. The stelae's different heights relate to the human body's capacity for movement, bending, stepping, reaching and grasping. And you can see that children and adults of different sizes find different parts of this field to sort of suit their capacities, either to do things easily or to do them in difficult ways. So people lean against, sit on and lie on the stelae in many different ways but it's not so that they can see the memorial better, it's partly to optimise their own bodily comfort or alternatively to enhance the thrill of engaging with the setting.