I met Andrea Mina, Associate Professor at RMIT, two weeks ago. What he brought to Shanghai, presently made from pillars of hard-edged pragmatism wrapped with a fuzzy smog of transient shifting values, was a fresh reminder of the need for contemplation and questioning, a deeper boring into the core substrate that architecture had been built upon. What is missing, he alluded to with his own work, is a personal poetic vision, a careful intimacy, a slow sustained engagement with the immediate living breathing stuff around us again.
In particular, his investigation called ‘Intimate Immensity’ consists of a series of architectures so small that the making of which entail care, closeness, slowness, calm, skill, and monumental sustained effort. Like how buildings should be conceived and built. The resultant miniature architectures do not represent some other thing but are what they are. They are not ‘paper architecture’. They ask of you to experience them with both mind and body. Like how buildings allow us to engage their physicality.
These architectures are made from “balsa wood, jarrah, pine, red gum, mountain ash, meranti, palm, plum, bamboo, kelp stalk, kelp pods, sea-anemone shell/spines, cuttlefish bone,/shell … and cat and dog hair.”
Such materials are carved or glued together to form spaces. Operations of carving and adding; that minus or add stuff.
Looking at his work, I suggested to Andrea that we visit Yu Yuan, a classical Chinese garden in Shanghai. The typical classical Chinese garden is a poetic vision that comes about by a giddy adding of things: pavilions, rocks, trees, shrubs, flowers, grass, ponds, pebbled paths, paintings, and textual inscriptions. These things fuse together to allow bodily enjoyment, reflection, movement, actions, in a hyper-real environment.
The Chinese garden is like a Kandinsky or a Pollock, if you like, if architecture were two dimensional painting.
Or curry or congee, if architecture were food.
In the classical French garden, there seems to be lots of carving. Parterres and topiary look like they were carved out of plant material.
Even in the Romantic English garden, sinewy curvy landforms are shaped to form emotive scenes. Like a Turner, it alludes to the imagined ‘characters’ of Nature. By extension too, Paris the proto-European city, can be imagined to be a thick stone pie carved with boulevards, alleys and plazas.
What distinguishes carving from adding is that carving requires pre-planning, a pre-figure, a diagram – a pre-determined order. Adding is an accumulation of parts in adjustment to a changing whole – an emerging order.
In the classical Chinese garden you meander through a hundred paths to weave your own particular experience. At Louis XIV’s Versailles, you don’t have to walk down the Sun King’s axis to know what he had in mind.
The classical French garden is a representation of man’s rational world. The Romantic English garden can be said to be a representation of Nature (with a capital N). In contrast, the classical Chinese garden is not a miniature representation of Nature; it contains the DNA of nature or natural occurences.
In Andrea Mina’s 1:1 small works of architecture, which he insists is not a representation of architecture but themselves constitute an architecture, we can sense a tension between carving and adding, between enclosing in and breaking free. This architecture is made from a careful planning of and a delirious drifting into things.