The Edifice Complex by Deyan Sudjic

Author:Deyan Sudjic
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing
Published: 2005-06-16T16:00:00+00:00

Australia marked a century of nationhood when its prime minister, John Howard, opened the new National Museum in Canberra. It’s a project that demonstrates just how sophisticated a critique of national identity architecture can offer, even in what was intended to be a celebration of Australianness. While you can find Donald Bradman’s cricket bat inside, along with the van that ferried Australia’s first mobile television film unit around the outback, the museum is anything but a mindless celebration of the lucky country. It does not shrink from addressing the brutal history of its treatment of the Aboriginals, both in its content and in its very fabric. You can see the pistols and metal clubs that colonists used to murder women and children when Tasmania’s first Australians were exterminated. All of this in the name of a celebration of Australia that was paid for by a conservative government.

But nothing on display is more controversial than the architecture itself. The architects, Ashton Raggatt McDougall from Melbourne, put those sections of the museum devoted to the Aborigines into a replica of Daniel Libeskind’s museum of Jewish history in Berlin. The scale is slightly reduced and the materials are different. Walls are made from black concrete, puckered to look like rubber, rather than the zinc sheeting that Libeskind used. But the plan is an exact copy of the lightning-flash zigzag that Libeskind created by breaking a five-pointed star of David, except that Howard Raggatt prefers to call it a quotation rather than a copy. Libeskind claimed to be angry, calling it ‘shocking, banal and plagiarism’. For Raggatt, however, it is a legitimate strategy, put to work to make a comparison between the plight of the Aborigines whose world was all but destroyed by the settlers’ weapons, diseases and alcohol, and the horror of the Holocaust. The message about white Australia’s treatment of the Aborigines could not be clearer. It is a comparison that made Ashton Raggatt McDougall far more unpopular with some of the more conservative members of the Australian government than they are with Libeskind. After all, John Howard is the prime minister who has refused to apologize on behalf of white Australia to the Aborigines for their maltreatment.

At another level, the design could be seen as a reflection of a particularly subtle way of white Australia asserting its moral superiority by appearing to be so sophisticatedly downbeat about its history. The museum certainly manages to press a lot of buttons in a way that suggests a rare ability to make architecture matter. For once it’s not how the building looks that counts, but what it is saying. With a remarkable site in the heart of Canberra, overlooking Lake Burley Griffin, and aligned directly on the giant flagpole that crowns Parliament House, the museum forms a long ribbon, strung out along the waterfront and turning back on itself in a wide arc to create at its heart a sheltered garden of what the architects call Australian dreams. It’s filled with a fragmented map of Australia pockmarked with the names of massacre sites and battlegrounds.

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