In Frank Moorhouse’s Cold Light (2011), the last in his trilogy of novels focusing on the life of internationalist, bureaucrat-diplomat protagonist Edith Campbell Berry, Edith finds herself in a new position in Canberra in the early 1950s. Occupying a Department of Works office in a modest weatherboard building in Acton, Edith decides to elevate her circumstances by purchasing her own furniture and redecorating her workspace. She removes the standard departmental furniture and, we learn, on the advice of Brian Lewis contacts Fred Ward in Melbourne to obtain a quote on the design and making of new office furnishings. In her note to Ward, she mentions a Douglas Snelling chair that she has seen in magazines in Sydney and on Ward’s recommendation orders a Frances Burke desk lamp. Her follow up conversation with Ward on the telephone includes mention of Sam Atyeo and Cynthia Reed and Edith briefly contemplates painting the walls of the office in a bold colour, a possible reference to the work and sensibility of Marion Hall Best. Moorhouse intends, of course, that this roll call of interwar and mid-century Australian designers should underline Edith’s self-conscious cultural sophistication. But it is also striking the degree to which this list overlaps with a canonical group of Australian designers circa 2011, when the book was published.
In writing the call for papers for this editors’ themed issue of Fabrications I hoped that an issue of the journal focused on interiors might help expand and complicate that list of designers; and that the next time a novelist, filmmaker, or television producer as attentive and dedicated to research as Moorhouse dipped their toe into design history they might find a wider, more complex world of practice and production on which to draw. The authors included in this issue have indeed achieved this. But they have also done much more. Most notably they have used the spaces, design sensibilities and traditions of the interior to ask probing questions about how we create knowledge about the built environment. They have pointed, collectively, to the mechanisms through which gender organises built environment knowledge in ways that go far beyond the necessary and well-intentioned efforts to balance the historical record with the inclusion of a greater number of women practitioners. Moreover, the group of papers gathered here make a striking case for the idea that focusing on interiors leads us inescapably to fundamental questions about methods of research in architectural history. More than methodological reflection, however, the papers also enact a wide range of different methods and demonstrate a commitment to broadening the sources of information available for architectural research.
There are a dizzying array of sources used by the authors in this issue: advertising in Chinese newspapers; company archives in Sweden; New South Wales Housing Commission annual reports; performance art documentation buried in the archives of a well-known Melbourne building company; colonial trade statistics in Aotearoa/New Zealand; interpretive materials at historic house museum displays; ethnographic evidence from Lebanese women about their kitchens and how these relate to their wider domestic arrangements; and fieldwork observations from an architect’s living room that expand into a process of life writing. Readers will struggle to find a conventional project profile from a piece of architectural media.
This editors’ themed issue is slightly different to those the journal has previously published, in that it begins with an article that reviews the state of the field. The intent of this is to provide coherent, field-specific guidance for new scholars – PhD students and others making a foray into a field – who will need to map out the scholarly apparatus available to them. While Fabrications has done this in an ad hoc way in the past, I hope that this will become something scholars will look to Fabrications for in the future, and that the journal can gradually build up a collection of historiographically-focused papers with a regionally specific bias.
The curator and historian of interiors, Catriona Quinn, has provided this survey of the field, carefully weighing the historiography of the post-war interior in Australia. As Quinn notes, there has been no review quite like this before. Howard Tanner’s 1983 conference paper identified a glaring deficiency in historical research on interiors over 40 years ago, and since then only and Peter McNeil’s 1993 survey of literature on Australian, interwar interior design history has made any serious effort to systematically map the field. Quinn has provided us with an expansive and engaging model for how to cover a field like this. Her paper serves as a fascinating history as well as a very forthright critique of the critical norms and narrative assumptions underpinning Australian architectural historiography in the twenty-first century. She is particularly unsparing on the deep persistence of modernist canons of value. It is a salutary reminder for this journal in particular, whose origins in a postmodernist moment of discourse in the early 1990s have not prevented a habitual reversion to a standard, progressive and broadly modernist narrative. Feminist, postcolonial or settler-colonial critiques do not automatically dislodge such a narrative. They are effective only if reiterated, rethought and revisited frequently and with serious intent.
Such was the depth and quality of the submissions received in response to this call for papers that we have something of a bumper issue, nine refereed articles in all including Catriona Quinn’s lead article. All nine interrogate gender ideologies as they relate to architectural practice and discourse, and in different ways the papers address changing living arrangements, domestic power, and shifting norms of work and family. They do so across three distinct domains: culture, commerce, and memory.
Commerce
One of Quinn’s key points is that the tacit values of architectural historiography have tended to suppress and erase the historical sites of production of the interior. For example, we know much less than we might in this part of the world about historical patterns of taste in interior decoration and design and how they relate to marketing, trade and promotion. Three of the papers here address these domains. Mark Ian Jones’ paper on the Sweden at David Jones Exposition of 1954 demonstrates how soft power initiatives and related narratives of social progress were mobilised in the post-war consumer landscape as Australian shoppers flocked to see the latest in Swedish design at Sydney’s most prominent department store. Efforts to point Australians towards all things Swedish negotiated an uncertain, but emergent sense of Australian taste and culture. Chunyao Liu, Lian Liu, and Erin Cunningham show that tensions around local taste and international influence were also prevalent in Shanghai’s furniture trade in the early twentieth century. Their analysis of newspaper advertisements reveals a vacillation between an embrace of Western influence (c.1900–1925) and a preference for local products (c.1920–1935) before the emergence of a new hybrid form in Shanghai, the Modeng, that incorporated elements of both (c.1930–1950). The final of the three papers that use commerce as a lens for understanding interiors is Eva Forster-Garbutt, Nigel Isaacs and Joanna Merwood-Salisbury’s examination of the wallpaper trade in Otago during and after the gold rush of the 1860s. Using trade statistics alongside advertisements and other newspaper sources the paper draws attention to the inter-colonial trade network – especially the links between Otago and Victoria – as well as the continued reliance on British designers and manufacturers. By understanding the wallpaper merchants and their centrality to the material culture of the British colonial world we glimpse – or can at least imagine – interiors that have long since disappeared. But the paper also highlights the ways in which the wallpaper trade can be used as a proxy for urban growth in this period, linking domestic interiors to the form and character of the city.
Culture
The commercial trade in furniture, wallpapers and other products that constitute the interior provides a window into patterns of dwelling and domestic life and how these speak to wider framings of cultural belonging. A second group of papers in this issue tackles these questions directly by asking what cultural assumptions underpin the spatial organisation of domestic life. Hannes Frykholm attempts to understand the interior at the scale of the settlement or city by documenting and analysing the visits to Australia by American anthropologist Margaret Mead. Mead was a household name by the 1970s thanks to the vast popularity of her 1928 publication Coming of Age in Samoa and visited Sydney as a guest of the New South Wales Housing Commission. The Commission mobilised Mead’s idea that urban residential towers could be understood as “villages stood on end.” This was especially useful to the Commission as at that time they were developing towers in Waterloo in inner Sydney that broke dramatically with the existing form of the city. Significantly, the towers were also planned in such a way that attempted to overcome the apparent social failings of broadacre suburban development by including a large quotient of shared social space, a case of what Frykholm describes as interior urbanism. Karen Burns and Alan Pert also consider questions of housing and culture in the 1970s, but from a dramatically different standpoint. Their paper focuses on the work of American feminist artist Lynne Hershman and her three-part performance, “The Dream Weekend,” staged at a Merchant Builders’ display home in suburban Melbourne in 1977. Hershman’s performance, Burns and Pert explain, enacted the liberal feminist project of personal liberation by staging a kind of three-part escape from suburban confinement. This performance resonated in a complicated way, however, given that the Merchant Builders’ “product,” including sophisticated interiors by Nexus, already presupposed aspects of the feminist and wider progressive critique of suburban consumerism and isolation.
The third paper that uses a cultural lens to consider the status and meaning of the interior is Maram Shaweesh’s study of the kitchens of Lebanese Australian women. Here is the story of migration and cultural difference told from the inside out, with the kitchen helping to construct not just the space of the house but its domestic power relations – built around the idea of sit el bayt, the “grandmother of the house” or “power of the house” – and therefore the wider set of norms that structure daily interactions and sociability. The interwoven ideas of gender and culture that emerge from Shaweesh’s ethnography and spatial analysis are in stark contrast to those mobilised in Lynne Hershman’s performance. In contrast to an imaginary liberation, the Lebanese women in Shaweesh’s study speak to a very real, constraining and ramifying idea of cultural and domestic authority.
Memory
The final set of papers in Fabrications 33:2 is concerned with how culture is mediated in history and memory by domestic interiors. Like Shaweesh Hannah Lewi focuses on kitchens, but rather than looking at them as a living site for adapting cultural practices around food and hospitality, she is concerned with the explicit historical interpretations that are staged at historic house museums. For Lewi, the kitchens at the four properties she discusses are missed opportunities to genuinely grapple with and present newer interpretations of class and gendered labour. The stories of people like Mary, a kitchen maid who worked at the Sargood family mansion, Ripponlea, in Melbourne and who we meet at the beginning of the paper, could be evoked, Lewi argues, in much more spatially and socially engaging ways. The final paper in the issue is Harriet Edquist’s account of the architect Maggie Edmond’s living room, the Vienna Room, in her home in Carlton, Melbourne. This private evocation of family memory via a series of paintings and objects connects Edmond’s current circumstances and daily life to that of her parents and extended family in central Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century and to her long personal and professional partnership with Peter Corrigan. While the museum settings that Lewi discusses in her paper point to a series of constraints that Edmond does not face in her house, the naturalness and inclusiveness of Edmond’s approach to the making of her interior, could indeed act as something of an example for those involved curatorially with in situ domestic displays in museums.
I am delighted to be able to include such a rich collection of reviews and reports in this issue, several of which are directly concerned with interiors. The breadth and depth of these sections in the issue are testimony to the widespread interest in the history of interiors and to the energy of our former reviews editor (and now editor) Isabel Rousset, and her successor Renee Miller-Yeaman. We have never had such a generous selection of material discussed in the journal.
The issue also includes a tribute to the late historian of architecture, Jean-Louis Cohen. Like many others I was saddened to hear of his sudden death in August last year. I am grateful to our colleagues Andrew Leach and Christoph Schnoor for sharing their recollections and highlighting Jean-Louis’ enormous energy and contribution to our field.
Finally, I would also like to note the death in 2023 of architect Peter Myers. Peter has been well remembered across a range of tributes in the professional architecture media, not least by his former colleague and lifelong friend Richard Leplastrier.Footnote1 Myers is fondly recalled for his work in the office of Jørn Utzon in the 1960s and as the designer of the Ngaripuluwamigi Nguiu “Keeping Place” for the Tiwi people on Bathurst Island. And tributes have also noted Myers’ memorable teaching and relentless curiosity. While never an architectural historian in the disciplinary sense implied by the term, he was a remarkable thinker, collector, critic and writer. His nearest and dearest described him in his death notice as “architect and antiquarian.”
For me, two occasions in particular point to Peter Myers’ capacity to generate insights that are important for historians of architecture. The first was his keynote lecture for the 2010 SAHANZ Conference held in Newcastle, where he evoked the material world of the Gadigal people and the exploitation and reuse of shell middens as lime by the invading settlers in early Sydney. This history is now so familiar that it is easy to forget that just a decade or so ago such stories and processes were not widely recognised or understood. Myers’ second contribution to the field that made a marked impact on me (and I am grateful to Karen Burns for originally alerting me to this piece) was his much earlier excoriating essay on endemic poverty and racism in Wilcannia.Footnote2 Prompted initially by an investigation into housing conditions, the essay is ultimately a closely observed description of the indignities heaped upon Aboriginal people living on their own land but in an environment completely remade by others, or as Myers notes a people “(t)otally dispossessed in their own land.” And it concludes with some of the more far reaching cross-cultural observations about privacy and domestic interiority that I have read anywhere. Neither his SAHANZ keynote, nor “On ‘Housing’ Aboriginies” were conventional pieces of historical research. But both reflected a remarkable grasp of the historical forces that have shaped the environment of the settler colonial society and especially the meanings of its architecture. If just some small part of Peter’s spirit, erudition and critical attitude have been bequeathed to the members of SAHANZ then our scholarly community will have been much the better for his having been, even if only glancingly, part of it.
As always, I am grateful for the patient, diligent and insightful work of our peer reviewers, without which the journal would not be possible. As this is my final issue as co-editor I would also like to extend that note of thanks to everyone who has assisted me in the four years or so that I have been in this role. This includes, of course, all the authors and during that time, the SAHANZ editorial board for entrusting me with the role, and lastly and most importantly my co-editors, Kelly Greenop and Mirjana Lozanovska.
Notes
1. Richard Leplastrier, “A Tribute to Peter Myers,” ArchitetcureAu, May 25, 2023. accessed February 26, 2024 https://architectureau.com/articles/a-tribute-to-peter-myers/
2. Peter Myers, “On ‘Housing’ Aborigines: The Case of Wilcannia, 1974,” in Island in the Stream: Myths of Place in Australian Culture, ed. Paul Foss (Pluto Press: Leichhardt, NSW, 1988): 139–159.