Editorial by Simon Sellars:
From Greek antiquity on, the physical and psychological properties of the body have both influenced and reacted against architecture. As Joseph Rykwert wrote in The Dancing Column, architecture in classical antiquity and the Renaissance became a metaphor for the body: ‘extended … In that it involves three terms: a body is like a building, and the build-ing is in turn like the world. The metaphor returns in a more global similitude: the whole world is itself understood as a kind of body’.
Today, the new wave of medical and health architecture revives the metaphor, healing the body by learning from nature, like the new Royal Children’s Hospital (p100), or else mimicking the body, like the Melbourne Brain Centre (p108), thereby signifying the knowledge required to cure It. The expansion of the Walter and Eliza Hall institute for Medical Research (p116), which produces biotechnological innovation with a global impact, echoes Rykwert’s third component: the world as a body, treatable as such.
Elsewhere, artist and researcher Oron Catts (p64) literalises the metaphor: what would tho consequences be if buildings worn actually made from the human body? Giovanna Borasi and Mirka Zardini (p48) look at how the urban condition will continue to make the body ill unless architecture changes strategy, while Natalie Jeremijenko (p54) tunes cities with practical art installations that allow spectacle and play to revive our physical selves.
McKenzie Wark (p68) returns to the Situationists and Constant’s New Babylon project, designed to counter control of the body by capitalist and consumer space, a strategy anticipating the wayfinding research used in the latest hospital designs. And Sir Peter Cook (p80) explains the interzones between architecture and the body in his work. Mark Dery (p156), relating to his ‘incarceration’ in hospitals, adds something that architecture often lacks in its most utopian guise: the painful reminders of ordinary people caught In the cracks between shiny new buildings.
Finally, welcome to the new-look AR and an expanded focus as we move from Architectural Review Australia to Architectural Review Asia Pacific. In issues to come, we will include not only our usual sustained analysis of Australian architecture, but also of the changes taking place in architecture and urbanism in the wider geographic region, which are set to have a global impact.
In this issue:
- On the cover: Dapto Anglican Church Auditorium, by Silvester Fuller
- Royal Children’s Hospital, by Billard Leece Partnership and Bates Smart Architects
- Lyons’ Melbourne Brain Centre
- Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Denton Corker Marshall with SKM-S2F
- Elenberg Fraser’s Lilli Apartments
- Life Cycle: Iwan Iwanoff’s Marsala House in Perth
- Imperfect Health: The medicalisation of architecture – extract from Giovanna Borasi and Mirko Zardini’s book
- Interviews with Sir Peter Cook, Natalie Jeremijenko and Oron Catts
- Alternate Reality: Godsell and Corrigan’s Refugee Family Units
Contributors: