The Vienna Room: A Melbourne Interior by Maggie Edmond, 2018

ABSTRACT

The subject of this paper is a living-room designed by Melbourne architect Maggie Edmond for her own use. Labelled on the plan Vienna Room, it forms part of a 2018 renovation of Edmond’s inner-city house in the Melbourne suburb of Carlton. Contextualised within recent studies of Australian interiors that use innovative forms of research and publication – exhibition, house biography, illustration – and referencing the work of Edward Hollis and Mario Praz, the paper employs the methodology of thick description, with some reference to iconology. This mode of research foregrounds the writing of the author/viewer as a locus of meaning, rather than, say, an imposed theoretical proposition. The room is treated as a pictorial device in which, it is argued, the architect’s arrangement of paintings, furniture, books, and decorative objects can be understood as a “family album,” a staging of personal and family heritage. The approach suits the aims of the paper which are, on the one hand, to explore the application of thick description to architectural interiors and on the other, to suggest how the Vienna Room might reflect back on Edmond’s practice as a founding partner of one of Melbourne’s most celebrated architectural firms, Edmond and Corrigan.

Introduction

This paper offers a reading of a recent interior designed by Melbourne architect Maggie Edmond. Edmond is best known as the co-founder with Peter Corrigan (1939 – 2016) of one of the city’s most prominent architectural firms. From the outset Edmond and Corrigan’s architecture sought to redefine architecture away from the abstractions of international modernism towards a postmodern assembly of references and sometimes startling forms that spoke to a local culture.¹ Their early churches, schools, and parish buildings for Catholic communities in suburban Melbourne, notably the Keysborough Church of the Resurrection (completed 1977) staked their claim as leaders in the emerging architectural debates that heralded postmodernism in Melbourne. While initially working in the suburbs, Edmond and Corrigan’s RMIT University’s Building 8 (1990–4) boldly addressing a formerly dreary section of Swanton Street spearheaded “an emerging trend for free and bold designs within Melbourne’s city centre.”² The practice has, from the outset, won many high profile architecture awards and has contributed buildings across most typologies – private houses, public housing, fire stations, churches, chapels, schools, cultural and institutional buildings.

Maggie Edmond and Peter Corrigan’s influence on architectural practice and discourse in Melbourne has been immeasurable. This influence, importantly, extends beyond buildings. Corrigan was also a noted theatre designer and was something of a cultural provocateur. He was a teacher in the Architecture programme at RMIT where his design studio became a legendary feature of the programme for forty years, influencing generations of graduates. Further, the Edmond and Corrigan office in Little Latrobe Street, a stone’s throw from RMIT, also exerted its influence, employing a host of young architects, many of whom have gone on to have successful careers.³ Edmond too has exerted an influence outside the office, as the citation for the Honorary Doctorate awarded to her by the University of Melbourne in 2015 noted:

During her career, Edmond has been an outstanding contributor to the architecture profession, to education, and within the broader community. [She] is not only a consummate professional and a key part of an internationally significant Australian architectural practice, she is also a model for Australian professional women demonstrating leadership within the broader community of the Australian built environment.⁴

In 2023, the Australian Institute of Architects addressed what it perceived to be an anomalous situation arising from 2003 when its highest award, the Gold Medal, was awarded to only one of its practice partners, Peter Corrigan. The jury invited by the Institute to examine this history concluded that the 2003 Gold Medal did, in fact, celebrate the partnership of Maggie Edmond and Peter Corrigan.

The interior to which I refer is a room in Maggie Edmond’s semi-detached Edwardian house in inner Melbourne that I saw in 2019 soon after its completion. It was an attraction at first sight. On the one hand, I recognised the familiar (to me) arrangements of a collector who was also custodian of her family’s heritage; on the other hand, I saw in many of its objects a story of the Jewish diaspora which has long been a subject of my research.⁵ After the interruption of COVID-19, I visited the house again in 2021 and since then have relied on Edmond’s identification and documentation of objects, timelines, and family history which form the subject matter of this paper. The room, labelled the Vienna Room on the plan, is a part of the larger renovation that Edmond undertook of her house. Apart from situating the room within the ground floor plan, however, I rarely refer to this larger renovation at all. My focus is just the room, and discussion of it is reflected through a personal prism.

Dealing with the Interior

Methodologically, this paper owes something to iconology, a mode of pictorial analysis much in vogue in the twentieth century. Iconology as theorised by Erwin Panofsky understands a work, embedded in personal and cultural history, as the product of a specific, historical environment.⁶ As employed here, “the work” is the room, treated pictorially, and an iconological methodology involves a thick description of its contents and the treatment of them as material culture; it relies on the detached observer whose “thick” explanatory text is the conveyor of meaning. Manu P. Sobti and Peter Scriver’s employed such a methodology in their recent paper on the modern Indian interior that anticipates some of my concerns here.⁷, The iconological approach foregrounds the aesthetic choices and the controlled hand of the designer making those choices that afford the room its “pictorial” quality.

The idea of the architect as curator of their own environment lies at the heart of Sobti and Scriver’s study of the living rooms designed by modernist architects Aditya Prakash, Balkrishna V. Doshi, Charles Correa, and Hasmukh C. Patel for their own use. The authors note the curatorial moves, the “deliberate juxtapositions of traditional Indian textiles and craft objects with iconic modern furniture” that provide “spaces of encounter and dialogue between assemblies of things – semantically disparate or congruous, local and global, innovated or contrived.”⁸ They are also conscious of these homes as autobiographical “exhibition” devices that function as “frames of reference in which to position their own aesthetic experiments and philosophical moorings,”⁹ while emphasising the interconnectivity between the “liminality of observer and the observed … making allowances for multiple readings to emerge on the interior space and the living room core in particular.”¹⁰ While theirs is an historical essay situated within the stream of modernist architectural history it nonetheless opens the interior to the viewer’s imaginary and resonates with my approach to The Vienna Room in this paper.

At the same time, the present paper is positioned within the context of recent Australian scholarship that has demonstrated new ways of thinking about the interior. Rather than approach the interior as a problem, or solution, to spatial design, authorship, or typology, these writings tell us about the objects with which the interiors are composed. For example, Roger Benjamin’s book Growing up Modern: Canberra’s Round House and Alex Jelinek (2022) employs to great effect the genre of house biography, one that combines personal memoir, family history, social and cultural history alongside an account of the architecture of the house and its interior. 46 Gawler Crescent, Canberra, the famous “round house” and Benjamin’s family home was designed by Czech émigré Alex Jelinek for Bruce and Audrey Benjamin in 1956. In his account of the house’s life Roger Benjamin accords considerable space to the objects assembled within – rare art works, bespoke furniture by émigré Austrian cabinetmaker Schulim Krimper and utilitarian everyday objects, the material culture that evokes a life as lived and renders the interior intelligible in a way that the celebrated photographs taken of it by Wolfgang Sievers do not.¹¹

Family history and personal memoir also frame Tim Bonyhady’s Good Living Street: Portrait of a Patron Family, Vienna 1900 (2011) and Sue Course’s Lost Letters from Vienna (2019) which recount the migration of the related (they are cousins) Gallia and Langer families from Vienna to Australia after the Anschluss, the Nazi annexation of Austria into the German Reich in 1938.¹² The families also brought with them furnishings and decorative objects that had formerly defined the interior schemes of their apartments in Vienna, which had been designed by two of Austria’s most celebrated architects, Joseph Hoffmann and Adolf Loos. Their accounts of the dispossession and dispersal of their family homes highlight both the transience of designed interiors and their fragility as ideas even though the objects within them survive; both the Gallia and Langer furniture proved alien in their new Australian suburban contexts, eventually finding their way into the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria.¹³

The interior designed by Viennese émigré architect Ernest Fooks for the house he occupied with his wife Noemi has been the subject of a different sort of research investigation. In December 2016, Alan Pert and Philip Goad with students from the Melbourne School of Design curated the exhibition “Ernest Fooks – The House Talks Back” which was staged in the Fooks house at 32 Howitt Road in the Melbourne suburb of Caulfield. The house, as the curators noted “became an integral part of the exhibition. Together, with various collected artefacts, newly recreated Fooks objects and fragments, and a vast array of archival documents, it became a mouthpiece for a different form of architectural biography.” It was also a new form of interior research and one which, by allowing the contents of the house to “speak” – in particular the library which was reassembled from the various collections into which it had been dispersed – led to a reconsideration of Fooks’ architecture, “from the inside out.”¹⁴

While the modes of research and presentation undertaken by Benjamin, Bonyhady, Course, Pert, and Goad differ, each of their projects offers, by its deep engagement with the world of objects, the “Empire of Things,” a context into which to place this present essay. In addition, each contributes important documentation to the growing body of research about the life of what we might call émigré objects in post-war Australia, which is also a concern of this paper.

Closer to my subject is Michael Spooner’s 2020 innovative textual and visual reconstruction of the office of Edmond and Corrigan at 46 Little La Trobe Street, Melbourne, which he undertook after the office vacated the building following Corrigan’s death in 2016 and Edmond had transferred the practice to a studio in her house.¹⁵ Spooner reconstructs the interior of the building by interweaving personal observation and description, oral history, redrawn plans and sections, and his extraordinary digital collages or capriccios that re-present the office, its history, design development, and contents together with proposals for alterations undertaken by students in his architecture studio at RMIT. Spooner, who is a bibliophile, spends some time describing the development of a space for a library which was always known as Corrigan’s library. Corrigan’s library was one of the celebrated architectural libraries in Melbourne¹⁶ and quite apart from its practical function as a tool for pleasure and research, it proclaimed the architect as a public intellectual and became itself the subject of public discourse. In 2004, Corrigan was invited to deliver a keynote address at the 21st SAHANZ conference LIMITS on the library. In 2013, it was recreated in the exhibition “Peter Corrigan: Cities of Hope” curated by Vanessa Gerrans at RMIT Gallery; Cities of Hope being the title of the monograph on Edmond and Corrigan published ten years earlier.¹⁷ As the title suggests, the exhibition focused on Corrigan and featured a selection from Corrigan’s vast personal library of over 3000 books; among them key architectural works such as J Leeke’s 1669 Vignola, early editions of Palladio, and major collections on Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Mies van der Rohe.¹⁸

The library occupied a double height space to the south of the Little La Trobe Street building and was bisected by a mezzanine, one half of which was occupied by the library and the other half by Edmond’s office overlooking the studio below. But this personal space of Edmond remains unexplored in Spooner’s account. The Vienna Room therefore can be seen as a pendant or counterpoint to the public acknowledgement of Corrigan’s library, a balancing out perhaps.

Two other works have been enlightening in this dialogue with objects, Mario Praz’s The House of Life (1964) and Edward Hollis’s The Memory Palace: A Book of Lost Interiors (2014).¹⁹ Both Praz and Hollis evoke the resonance of objects within interiors in ways that I find alluring; they describe interiors as living places created in the presence of their assembly of things, rather than designed spaces that in architectural discourse are accessed largely at second hand by drawings and photographs.

At the Threshold

In 2017, Maggie Edmond designed alterations and additions to her two-storey, Edwardian house in North Carlton, an inner-city suburb of Melbourne. The plan is a deft reworking of the typically thin turn-of-the-century layout for a semi-detached villa, letting in light along the boundary where possible and providing increased amenity for her own occupation combining living and work. Architects in Melbourne have been reworking these plans for decades and have become adept at creating contemporary liveability from their rigid little dimensions, as here. Entering from the front porch, moving past the front office, study, and open gallery to the kitchen, all rendered in muted shades of grey and white, we arrive at the threshold of the new living room. The boundary between the kitchen and this room is demarcated by two broad steps down which we enter a double height space with south facing skylights and east facing glass doors surrounded by small glazed panels that provide limited light and ventilation for thermal control of the space (Figs. 1 & 2).

Figure 1. The Vienna Room looking east. Photo John Gollings.

Figure 2. The Vienna room looking west photo John Gollings.

At the threshold to this room, labelled on the plan the Vienna Room, you are almost overwhelmed by saturated colour and abundance; the room is full of furniture, objects, and pictures which you initially perceive as a field of rich colour – golds, browns, blacks – rather than as individual pieces. The carefully conceived architecture of the room is all but obscured by its array of objects. I was at once vividly reminded of another Melbourne interior, that of Mietta O’Donnell’s renowned city restaurant “Mietta’s” in Alfred Place that was once described by Australian-born English food writer Bruce Palling as exhibiting a “Central European vibe and the notion of Austro-Hungarian chic.”²⁰

The expectation in contemporary interiors is that the living rooms in such elderly houses as Edmond’s be rather sparsely furnished leaving a good area of unencumbered floor space opening out through extensive glazed doors to the garden, affording an uninterrupted spatial flow between interior and exterior. This spatial diagram is indeed one of the dominant tropes of modernism that has survived into the present and is more or less mandatory, perhaps even a cliché of contemporary domestic design. The living room as a discrete, walled container has been abandoned and in its place we have a spatial extension where it is not always easy to find one’s place. But Edmond has closed off the extended horizon with double doors surrounded by “small panes [that] fell into place in a deliberate gesture to minimize not to maximize the engagement with the garden courtyard.”²¹ The room asserts its character as a container not as a through space to somewhere else. Perhaps, this is Edmond’s most radical gesture – an emphatic denial of the expectation of the open house in favour of an enclosed living room consonant with Viennese apartment living.

There are a limited number of ways in which one can enter and move around the room, and at each turn, the viewer is confronted by a different arrangement of objects on the wall and on the floor. Hence, the type and arrangement of objects within the room, rather than its architectural or spatial character forces itself on the viewer’s attention. It affirms that interiors can be animated by the objects that are the accumulation of time and living experience and that these objects, having histories of their own as cultural artefacts, are intimately bound up in the memory, identity, and history of the creators of the interior. They are, at the same time, embedded in the cultural fabric of the exterior world from which they have been taken and to which they might return one day in a cycle of loss and renewal. The arrangement of objects within a room is evanescent, fleeting, constantly under threat by rearrangement, dispersal, and the vagaries of time and evolving habits. Interiors are continually lost, as Edward Hollis reminds us, and histories of interiors are therefore largely histories of representations of interiors.

The Room Layout

The floor plan (Fig. 3) shows three dotted rectangles more or less in the centre of the room which indicate the basic arrangement of the furniture. Moving from the kitchen to the garden or west to east, the first zone is occupied by a side table on which are piled books and a flamboyant nineteenth-century porcelain urn. The second, middle zone is defined by three sofas that form a C-shaped enclosure about a low coffee table on which rest piles of books and another urn, green with gilt bronze mounts; the third zone, near the glazed garden doors, is the domain of the grand piano, one small armchair, and a newly introduced chaise by Grant Featherston that came from the Edmond and Corrigan office in Little La Trobe Street and on which Corrigan was known “to enjoy an afternoon nap.”²² Further furniture is arranged along the walls comprising European pieces from around the turn of the century including a vitrine and two heavily carved oak hall chairs and, on the south wall a long black console designed by Edmond to house the audio equipment; on top sits the TV screen. Books and objects occupy every flat surface. While the floor plan does not give much away about furnishing, a painting schedule indicates how Edmond organised the collection of pictures on the north and south walls. When I commented on this Edmond responded:

There’s definitely a methodology to hanging art. It can’t be done effectively on the spot. Rather like a colour board works, the sizes and juxtapositions are the key not the content.²³

Figure 3. Maggie Edmond, proposed ground floor plan, 2017 courtesy of the architect.

The room is anchored by a large oil painting on the north wall (Fig. 4). It is a portrait of Edmond’s grandmother Lona (Leonie) Suchestow and her father Leo as a child: spotlit from above it commands the wall, the creamy skin of heads and necks and Leo’s white shirt glowing in a dark background. It provides the colour key for the rest of the room over which Edmond has exerted a strict tonal control. Beneath the portrait is a heavy timber-framed upholstered Biedermeier sofa festooned with cushions on one side of which is a small 1940s settee and matching armchair and on the opposite side a black leather B&B sofa that was commandeered by Basil and Bessie, the Australian terriers who supervised my second visit in 2021. The coffee table was a wedding gift. The diversity of this furniture array is subdued by the restricted colour palette of timber, upholstery, and printed cushion fabric.

Figure 4. Maggie Edmond, proposed painting plan, 2017 courtesy of the architect.

The portrait of Leonie and Leo Suchestow by Lviv-born Viennese painter Leo Bernhard Eichhorn is the centre piece around which a dozen other pictures circulate; a portrait of young Leo’s paternal Suchestow grandfather, Lipe Suchestow; European landscapes by Johan Varone and Nicholas Epstein; a gilt-framed screen print by New Zealand-born Australian artist Mike Green; works by prominent Melbourne modernists Thomas Challen and Arnold Shore of the pre-war period and pictures from the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s by Peter Booth, Rick Amor, and Philip Hunter, the last two being friends of the architects. While the European pictures are traditional in style, the Australian pictures describe a local modernist trajectory. Shore was an important early proponent of modernism in Melbourne from the late 1920s into in 1930s and, with George Bell established the influential Bell-Shore School of painting in 1932. Booth, Amor, and Hunter are two generations younger, coming to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s (Hunter, who painted a portrait of Peter Corrigan in 1996 died at the age of 57 in 2017) but all representing a certain artistic sensibility associated with Melbourne. Booth’s themes included “the supernatural, the fantastic, the paranormal, and disturbed states of mind.”²⁴ Amor observed of his own work: “I use very dark tones … The memory of unease and anxiety just comes to the surface … The sky is always lowering into the sea, the beach is deserted and something awful has happened or is about to happen.”²⁵ Working through European traditions of figuration, Hunter “sought to recreate the historical narrative painting tradition of the Northern Hemisphere and relocate or re-imagine it into the context of the Southern Hemisphere.”²⁶ The works of these artists are cerebral, somewhat uneasy, they condone narrative, they allude both to expressionism and surrealism as modes of disruption - all of which can be related in general to the architecture of Edmond and Corrigan.²⁷ These works are adjacent to a drawing by American architect Daniel Libeskind with whom Corrigan carried on an extensive correspondence. Libeskind began his career as an architectural theorist and professor before embarking on his practice in his early 50s; combining practice with the academy would also be a hallmark of Corrigan’s professional life. But Libeskind was also a Polish-born Jew, a member of the Jewish diaspora who arrived in New York when he was 13 and thus the position of the drawing near the Eichhorn portrait of Leonie and Leo Suchestow references their shared histories.

On the south wall opposite is a large painting by Roger Kemp, a Melbourne painter of a generation between Shore and the contemporary artists, a “visionary modernist”²⁸ whose metaphysical concerns dominated his art. He was a friend of the architects and Corrigan responded strongly to his work, collaborating with him in the 1986 George Paton Gallery exhibition “5AR 5 Artists 5 Architects” curated by Val Austin. Around the Kemp are arranged about ten other pictures including another by Kemp and several more by Challen, including a large nude and a portrait of Edmond’s maternal grandmother that were formerly part of one painting Challen completed while a student at the National Gallery School, subsequently cut in half by Edmond’s aunt. The nude plaster figure of a woman on a pedestal near the garden door is also a Challen student work.

I had seen the portrait of Leonie Suchestow and Leo before – it was prominently displayed in a light-filled room at 1032 Drummond Street (Fig. 5). I spent some time at the property sorting through the legendary studio in the back garden which housed part of the Edmond and Corrigan office archive that Edmond and Matthew Corrigan donated to the RMIT Design Archives. The downstairs living rooms of the large house were also filled with a somewhat overwhelming array of objects and pictures and rugs, growing over the years as Edmond recalls, a bit like Topsy.

I remember the furniture in the room just evolved in time; it grew and grew. We occupied the house about 1995, but the furniture and the piano from my parents wouldn’t have come there until after my father died − 2003. Before that it would have been very minimal, the black B&B leather couch came from the old office in Little La Trobe Street, the black coffee table was a wedding present in 1986.²⁹

Figure 5. 1032 Drummond Street, view of living room.

Photo courtesy Maggie Edmond

Their arrangement while fulsome was also quite loose, layered up against walls painted pale blue, pink, and orange one of which had a frieze composed of framed Japanese prints and drawings. The colour scheme was similar to that of the office and the many pictures and objects that referenced the theatre, together with another extensive library in a separate room, suggested the spill-over from Corrigan’s professional life into his home. Much of the furniture from this house made its way down the road, to provide a setting with a very different ambience, indeed the contrast between the two Drummond street interiors is striking; the one, heterogeneous, somewhat theatrical in its staging, and put together by two people over several years, the other conceived as a unified and coherent composition by a single vision. The movement of furniture and objects and their re-arrangement in new spaces typifies the life cycle of interiors. “When we move” Hollis notes, “we fill our new homes with objects from the old one; we repaint or paper the walls, we might even knock them down. Then we lay the table, light the candles, and sit down to eat.’’³⁰ But these new interiors only survive for a time.

Vienna Room

The Jewish diaspora which brought Viennese refugees and exiles to Australia just prior to and after WWII, also brought, for those who were fortunate enough to escape the Nazi looting of Jewish homes, their household goods.³¹ While the interiors for which these objects were made were lost to the families – for interiors are ephemeral – some of the furniture, silverware, glassware, and ornaments were retained. Hollis notes that all interiors whether they last for centuries or seconds, “disappear in the end.” Even those “that have been reassembled and preserved, but without anyone to inhabit them, they, too are lost.” He was thinking of Praz who wrote:

Where things are listed in a catalogue … given numbers, fixed to walls or protected by velvet ropes so that no ill-disposed visitor may rob or deface - in common opinion - all is death and graveyard.³²

Such has been the fate of the Gallia and Langer suites.

Unlike the interior of her shared home with Peter Corrigan, Edmond has conjured an aesthetic for her new room from a creative engagement with her early twentieth-century Viennese family background:

The room was called the Vienna Room from day one. The name was on the concept drawings and planning drawings and I recall the council planner asking if I was going to open a Vienna coffee house. It was driven by the Viennese furniture, paintings and artefacts which kindly invited the Challen collection and the Edmond & Corrigan contemporary painting collection to create a soiree room for social and musical gatherings.³³

Edmond’s father Leo was born in Vienna. But like a great number of Viennese residents at this time, his forebears came not from the centre but from the outer regions of the Austro-Hungarian empire. His father, Dr Abel Suchestow was born in Lviv and married Lona (Leonie) Rosenheck daughter of Lviv-born Dr Salomon Rosenheck, city doctor of Kolomyya, a town about half way between the Romanian border and Lviv. The Jewish population of Lviv was 28% in 1910 and 32% in 1931 and Jews had long played a prominent role in this culturally important multi-ethnic centre. Abel Suchestow was a prosperous businessman with property in the region but he and Leonie moved to Vienna where Leo was born in 1913; they lived there as Lviv passed first into Polish territory after WWI and then into the USSR after the Soviet and National-Socialist invasions of 1939–1942 when Jews and Poles were deported (it was integrated into Ukraine in 1991). Leo studied law in Vienna but in 1938 left his home town and made his way to Australia via England. Leonie and Abel and his sister escaped Vienna with their household goods and sheltered at the Rosenheck family farm in Romania. The whole family reunited in Melbourne after the war.

Traces of their former family life hang on the north wall of the Vienna Room. Small samplers stitched when Leonie was a young girl from 1901 to 1903 and the Eichhorn portrait painted after the war, about 1920, affirm her presence in the room. Nearby is a portrait of Leonie’s father-in-law, Leo’s grandfather, Lipe Suchestow. Leo had been born when the family came to Vienna, and they lived in Jaquinstrasse near the Belvedere in an apartment block that no longer exists. It was probably during this time that they assembled the glassware and silverware collected in the vitrine placed against the north wall, as some of the latter is reminiscent of contemporary designs by Josef Hoffmann and the Sudfeld company, while the imposing silver centrepieces mounted on plinths were popular table ornaments in central Europe before and during the war. Opposite, a silver coffee and tea service rests on a tea trolley or bar cart that is almost identical to one designed by Adolf Loos in 1904.

The rituals of a leisured and communal family life evoked by these objects resonate with Leonie and Leo’s portrait which was an optimistic affirmation of continuity over disjunction. Eichhorn specialised in historical and genre painting and this picture, rejecting the radical aesthetics of the Viennese Secession, adopted a style that affirmed tradition, prosperity, and comfort in the face of the economic and political upheavals of post-war Vienna. At about the same time, Oskar Wlach and Josef Frank were formulating the guiding principles that would define their design, materialised in their business Haus & Garten, for a bourgeois way of living adapted to the new interwar reality, Wiener Wohnkultur. For Frank, the home “should be a refuge from the outside world” and “designed to offer comfort, both physically and psychologically” which, as Christopher Long has observed, “was especially directed at the city’s Jewish bourgeoisie.”³⁴ There is perhaps an echo of Wiener Wohnkultur in the Eichborn portrait and also, although in circumstances that are completely different, in Edmond’s creative evocation of her family’s past in the Vienna Room.

For Hollis, the history of the interior is a history of how “we have made ourselves at home in the world,” for, he continues ”(t)he ways in which we build, arrange, fill, and decorate the rooms we live in are exercises in building little worlds.”³⁵ Material objects such as furniture or glassware and silverware are an expression of both the culture that designed and made them, and more particularly, the lives of those who handled, owned, and used them as objects in circulation in their world. As Hollis notes, rooms “are the meeting place for many things, architecture and furniture, object and surfaces, commodities and images, and, of course, people.”³⁶ And it is the last element, the people, that is so frequently absent in discussion about interiors. More often than not, histories of the interior are histories of representations (drawings, reconstructions, photographs, and descriptions) of the interior which is all that is left.

The Memory Palace

Edward Hollis opens his book The Memory Palace with a “thick” description of his grandmother’s sitting room, surveyed on his regular visits:

The fireplace is surrounded by pictures and little tables, upon which perch, precariously, flowers, ashtrays, and yesterday’s Daily Telegraph. There’s a sofa, four armchairs, a dining table, two corner cupboards, and two sideboards There are two thimbles, paperweights, carriage clocks, statuettes, samplers and vases. There are light bulbs, and biros, and a cupboard full of broken hoovers …

But it isn’t a mess. Everything has been carefully constructed, arranged, collected, matched, and ordered to compose the whole room into a picture.³⁷

His grandmother’s room is a thread which guides Hollis through his expansive and unorthodox exploration of lost interiors because interiors, he notes, often only become legible at the moment they are lost.³⁸ For Hollis, “rooms and memory have always been bound up with one another” hence the modern interior is an impossibility because “modernity implies a rejection of the past, a commitment to the future, and a deliberate forgetfulness.”³⁹ In contrast, he suggests, “Interiors do not just remind us who we are, where we’re from, or how to behave. They remind us to remember. In fact, the story of memory always begins with a room.”⁴⁰ From here Hollis reverts to the idea of the memory palace, a rhetorical conceit famously described in the Latin treatise on rhetoric Rhetorica ad Herrenium (On Rhetoric) around 90 BCE. This text describes a systematic method for remembering large quantities of data by visualising it as objects placed against distinct backgrounds in a sequence of interior rooms as in a palace:

The artificial memory includes backgrounds and images. By backgrounds I mean such scenes as are naturally or artificially set off on a small scale, complete and conspicuous, so that we can grasp and embrace them easily by the natural memory — for example, a house, an intercolumnar space, a recess, an arch, or the like. An image is, as it were, a figure, mark, or portrait of the object we wish to remember; for example, if we wish to recall a horse, a lion, or an eagle, we must place its image in a definite background.⁴¹

For Mario Praz, the interior was:

a museum of the soul, an archive of its experiences, and becomes perennially conscious of itself; the surroundings are the resonance chamber where its strings render their authentic vibration.⁴²

The “resonance chamber” is activated when the diverse elements that a room contains “resonate together to create a particular Stimmung [mood].”⁴³ And this mood is closely attuned to memory. So, the history of the interior is also a history of the art of memory. But memory is not as straightforward as the memory palace suggests, which was after all the product of a rhetorical necessity - a mnemonic device to recall large quantities of things. The memory palace operates in the mind’s eye. But memory conjured by objects in a room is not the same at all; it is fluid, complicated, multi-directional, and imbricated with the present. But, as Hollis astutely observes – one creates interiors to remember and in so doing build one’s own memory palace.

Interiors are also, Hollis argues, “miniature worlds,” microcosms that reflect the context of their construction, the macrocosm, “all things [being] encoded with belief.” He goes on, however, to note that “buildings and objects change much more slowly than the order of things that made them” so that while interiors are momentary the objects with which they are composed, live on.⁴⁴ There is therefore an inbuilt temporal discontinuity in interiors that provides the space in which memory can function.

There are three classes of objects that have been arranged to create Edmond’s “memory palace.” One, which is aesthetically prominent relates to Edmond’s paternal ancestors from Kolomyya (her grandmother’s childhood embroideries) and Lviv/Vienna (paintings by Eichhorn, Johan Varone, Nicholas Epstein, and European furniture, glass, silverware and, out of sight in the kitchen a Viennese coffee grinder used every day by Edmond’s father Leo Suchestow). The pictures and objects, the latter designed by unrecorded studios but in recognisably European taste, are reminders of the lost apartment at Joquinstrasse to which they once belonged. They record and pay tribute to Edmond’s central European heritage. Survivors of the Jewish diaspora live on happily, unlike the Gallia and Langer furniture, in contemporary Australia. Their place in this interior is very much in the spirit of Adolf Loos, who was relaxed about recycling old furniture in new interiors if it served its purpose, practically and emotionally.⁴⁵ In one way, we might say that Edmond has created her room for these émigrés, provided for them a stage on which to perform their new life and be reinterpreted anew.

Another group comes from the family of her Bendigo-born mother Linda Suchestow, a fashion designer whose garments were manufactured under the label Linda Patricia and are represented in the National Gallery of Victoria.⁴⁶ The small settee and matching armchairs were hers. Formerly Linda Challen, she was a sister of Thomas Arthur Challen (Edmond’s Uncle Tom) an artist and left-wing cartoonist who spent much of his working life in Sydney. Challen is probably best known in Melbourne for his 1937 portrait of Moira Madden, one of the several now held in the collection of the State Library of Victoria; from this period is the small portrait of Patricia Dowry wearing a jaunty hat on the north wall.⁴⁷ Challen emerges as a key figure in Edmond’s family assembly represented not only by his paintings, student sculpture and, by association the Shore painting, but also by four photographs of Japanese actors in kabuki makeup, a selection from a larger collection of photographs of Japan, that oversee operations in Edmond’s kitchen as they had for twenty years at 1032 Drummond Street.

The third class of objects is those Edmond and Peter Corrigan collected together, a disparate group including modern pieces such as the B & B sofa and the Featherston chaise joined by antique European furniture like the Biedermeier sofa and black-stained oak cabinet, possibly German, which Corrigan bought in the 1990s to complement the Suchestow Viennese furniture. The Australian paintings discussed above, some decorative objects and dozens of books are in this group. The fact that Corrigan supplemented the original Viennese collection with additions bought in Melbourne suggests a shared regard for Edmond’s family heritage.

Edmond’s intricate and masterly curation of her living room is an exercise in balance. The Viennese legacy suggests domestic comfort and prosperity, the Wiener Wohnkultur that her ancestors enjoyed prior to 1938. Its evocation here is a reminder of what has been lost and this resonates strongly through the room but does not overpower it. Balancing the Austrian heritage is that of her maternal family and her own life with Peter Corrigan, and this Australian heritage is represented as one of creativity. By subduing the room to aesthetic control Edmond suggests to the viewer that she understands her place in the world to be a continuum with the past, explicated by the past.

Conclusion

This exploration has brought me to two conclusions. One is methodological. It may well be that a powerful way to grasp the meaning of an interior is to capture it while it is still alive, to be the observer whose job it is to describe, “thickly,” what is before them. Mario Praz attempted to do this in his 1965 book The House of Life which is, in simple terms, a tour of his apartment in Rome, now, ironically, a museum.⁴⁸ Praz leads his reader through his rooms whose walls and floors were, and still are, covered in objects chosen and collected by him over a lifetime. As he travels from room to room, each object conjures a memory of its acquisition, some recondite observation about its history, aesthetic, and manufacture, some person associated with it, some author with a pertinent comment, so many overlapping ripples created by each stationary object. Each attaches itself to the story of Praz’s life so the tour is thronged with people and events and his apartment appears as a microcosm of his life. While Praz was the author of his own home and its publication, his example indicates the power of objects to resonate through description of them whether one is the author of the collection or not. While the objects in Maggie Edmond’s Vienna Room have been chosen by her for personal significance and associations, they have been ordered in such a way that the private sphere elides with the public, inviting external response.

The other conclusion is conjectural. Can an interior designed by an architect for her own use be read against her professional practice? As Sobti & Scriver observe: “An architect’s interior designs may, perhaps inevitably, reflect their larger body of work, but they also lend a potentially even more revealing ‘insideout’ perspective upon that repertoire itself.”⁴⁹ Pert and Goad contemplated the same phenomenon in their exhibition of the interior of the Ernest Fooks house. In an interview in 2013 about the firm’s 1985 entry to the State Library of Victoria and Museum of Victoria refurbishment competition, Peter Corrigan observed that “Architecture has always been a time place and culture proposition, in other words time place and culture is another possible way of highlighting our identity, who we are and thus enable us to think about who we might be.”⁵⁰ He offers the Sydney Opera House, Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance, and the suburban house as expressive of an Australian identity. Conrad Hamann, who was also interviewed about that project, notes that the Edmond and Corrigan competition entry went against the corporate international modernism popular in Melbourne at the time by addressing cultural specificity and national identity, offering a cultural resistance to the international continuum with a building that addressed “what it was like to be great public building in Melbourne and Australia.”⁵¹ Cultural specificity and national identity are ideas with which the practice of Edmond and Corrigan is closely identified. But what, we might ask, is national identity or cultural specificity? Today, these ideas are fraught; we recognise and celebrate the multitude of identities that can be described as Australian; they resist abstraction into a sentence or, indeed, a building. Yet at the same time this question does allow a reflection back on the Vienna Room. Maggie Edmond has designed a living room, a space that traditionally oscillates between private and public, as a receptacle for an assemblage of pictures, objects, furniture, and books that together construct a kind of family album. Its pages illustrate a heritage that arises from a meeting of worlds, that of the émigré and the settler and of two cities, Vienna and Melbourne, and is formed by the intersecting cultures of those worlds and cities, resonating with and amplifying each other across the room. This heritage of migration and settlement typifies Australia that has since World War II encouraged high levels of migration and where over half the population today was either born overseas or has a parent who was born overseas, as in Edmond’s case.⁵² Viewed in this context, the Vienna Room proposes a counter argument to a singular idea about Australian identity and cultural specificity. It proposes that culture is complex, flexible, and mobile, a continuum that requires those who remember, those who record and those who create.

Acknowledgments

I owe a debt of gratitude to Maggie Edmond for her generosity in allowing me to write about this room and for answering my many questions about its furniture and objects, their arrangement and her family. I also salute the reviewers of the draft of this paper whose comments were perceptive and useful.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Conrad Hamann, Cities of Hope: Australian Architecture and Design by Edmond and Corrigan 1962–1992 (OUP Australia and New Zealand, 1993).

2. “Citation for Doctor of Architecture honoris causa” accessed September 11, 2023, https://about.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/file/0021/15906/edmond.pdf, Peter Corrigan & Maggie Edmond, Building 8: Edmond and Corrigan at RMIT, (Melbourne: Schwartz Transition, 1996).

3. Vivian Mitsogianni and Patrick Macasaet, Influence: Edmond & Corrigan + Peter Corrigan (Melbourne: Uro Publications, 2019).

4. “Citation for Doctor of Architecture honoris causa” accessed September 11, 2023, https://about.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/file/0021/15906/edmond.pdf.

5. Harriet Edquist, Ernest Fooks, Architect (Melbourne: RMIT University School of Architecture & Design, 2001); Jane Eckett and Harriet Edquist Melbourne Modern. European art and design at RMIT since 1945 (Melbourne: RMIT Gallery, 2019); Philip Goad, Ann Stephen, Andrew McNamara, Harriet Edquist, and Isabel Wunsche, Bauhaus Diaspora and beyond. Transforming education through art, design and architecture (Carlton Vic: Miegunyah Press, 2019); Harriet Edquist “Vienna Abroad: Viennese interior design in Australia 1940–1949,” RMIT Design Archives Journal, 9, no. 1 (2019), 8–35.

6. Erwin Panofsky, and Gerda Panofsky, Studies in Iconology. Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York; London: Harper and Row, 1972); a similar method was applied in Harriet Edquist, “The Private Library of Harold Desbrowe-Annear, Architect,” Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin, 26, no. 1 (2002).

7. Manu P. Sobti and Peter Scriver, “Personal Journey or Tectonic Practice: Thick Descriptions of Curated Residential Interiors by Four Indian Architects,” Fabrications, 32, no. 1 (2022), 82–109,

https://doi.org/10.1080/10331867.2022.2091838.

8. Sobti and Scriver, “Personal Journey,” 84.

9. Sobti and Scriver, “Personal Journey,” 94

10. Sobti and Scriver, “Personal Journey,” 94.

11. Roger Benjamin, Growing up Modern. Canberra’s Round House and Alex Jelinek (Baraddon ACT: Halstead Press, 2022).

12. Tim Bonyhady, Good Living Street. Portrait of a Patron Family, Vienna 1900 (New York: Pantheon Books, 2011); Sue Course, Lost Letters from Vienna (Melbourne: Wild Dingo Press, 2019).

13. “Vienna 1913” National Gallery of Victoria 1984; “Vienna Art & Design,’ National Gallery of Victoria, 2011 accessed September 8, 2023, https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/vienna/.

14. Alan Pert & Philip Goad, ”Ernest Fooks - The House Talks Back. Between the Savage and the Scientific Mind” accessed September 10, 2023, https://www.sahanz.net/wp-content/uploads/pert-a-goad-p-ernst-fooks-the-house-talks-back.pdf.

15. Michael Spooner, ”46 Little Latrobe Street: the office of Edmond & Corrigan, “ RMIT Design Archives Journal, 10, no. 1 (2020), 6–29.

16. The other acclaimed libraries being those of Lovell Chen, Miles Lewis, and Richard Aitken.

17. Conrad Hamann, Cities of Hope: Australian Architecture and Design by Edmond and Corrigan 1962–1992 (OUP Australia and New Zealand, 1993).

18. accessed September 10, 2023, https://rmitgallery.com/exhibitions/peter-corrigan-cities-of-hope/.

19. Mario Praz, The House of Life. Translated by Angus Davidson (London: Methuen, 1964); Edward Hollis, The Memory Palace. A Book of Lost Interiors (London: Portobello Books, 2014).

20. “Reflections on Mietta O’Donnell” accessed April 26, 2023, https://www.gastroenophile.co.uk/2012/03/reflections-on-mietta-odonnell-by-bruce.html.

21. Maggie Edmond to Harriet Edquist, email correspondence, 25 September 2021.

22. Spooner, “46 Little Latrobe Street,” 22.

23. Maggie Edmond to Harriet Edquist, email correspondence, 23 July 2021.

24. John McDonald, “Peter Booth,” accessed September 8, 2023, https://www.johnmcdonald.net.au/2023/peter-booth/.

25. Sasha Grishin, “Rick Amor: Enduring Presence,” accessed September 8, 2023, https://artcollector.net.au/rick-amor-enduring-presence/.

26. Jenepher Duncan, “Memorial for Philip Hunter, artist,” accessed September 13, 2023, https://library.unimelb.edu.au/southbank-library/collections/special-collections/special-coll-folder/art150/about2/articles/memorial-for-philip-hunter,-artist.

27. The Surrealist vein in Edmond and Corrigan was referenced very early on in John Gollings’s photographs of the former Chapel of St Joseph, Box Hill, and Kay Street Housing.

28. The title of a retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2019, accessed September 10, 2023, https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/exhibition/roger-kemp/.

29. Maggie Edmond to Harriet Edquist, email correspondence, 19 July 2021.

30. Edward Hollis, The Memory Palace, 8.

31. Edquist, “Vienna Abroad,” 6–33.

32. Mario Praz, An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration: from Pompeii to Art Nouveau (London: Thames & Hudson 1982) quoted in Hollis, The Memory Palace 8–9

33. Maggie Edmond to Harriet Edquist, email correspondence, 25 September 2023.

34. Christopher Long, “Refuge and Respite: Oskar Wlach, Max Eisler, and the Culture of the Modern Jewish Interior” in Designing Transformation. Jews and Cultural Identity in Central European Modernism, ed. Elana Shapira (London: Bloomsbury 2021), 164.

35. Hollis, The Memory Palace, 14.

36. Hollis, The Memory Palace, 6.

37. Hollis, The Memory Palace, 3.

38. Hollis, The Memory Palace, 9.

39. Hollis, The Memory Palace, 14.

40. Hollis, The Memory Palace, 15.

41. On Rhetoric, Book III (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1954) accessed April 23, 2023, https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Rhetorica_ad_Herennium/3*.html

42. Mario Praz, An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration, in Hollis, The Memory Palace, 6.

43. Hollis, The Memory Palace, 6.

44. Hollis, The Memory Palace, 14.

45. Edquist, “Vienna Abroad,” 10.

46. ”The National Gallery of Victoria holds over 300 items from this studio” accessed September 2, 2023, https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/explore/collection/artist/7702/.

47. Joan Kerr, “Thomas Arthur Challen,” accessed September 2, 2023 https://www.daao.org.au/bio/version_history/thomas-arthur-challen/biography/?p=1&revision_no=30.

48. Praz, The House of Life, 20.

49. Sobti & Scriver, “Personal Journey,” 86.

50. accessed September 8, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zp4VL-8huqk.

51. accessed September 8, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cheqnpAoD_g.

52. accessed September 8, 2023, https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=percentage+of+second+generation+Australian+migrant&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8.