“We saw a picture of it printed in Domus, back to front,” says Howard Raggatt of Australian architects ARM. He’s talking about ARM’s design for the National Museum of Australia, which features a black copy of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, designed to house the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.
Not actually back to front but, rather, a negative. In artist Amie Siegel’s 2015 work Double Negative, two silent, black and white 16mm films simultaneously project images of Le Corbusier’s iconic white Villa Savoye outside Paris, and its black doppelgänger, in Canberra. It was this that Raggatt saw in Domus. Each film follows an identical choreography, moving through the space in the same way (each a “performance” of the other, just as the second villa is a “performance” of the first), and each film was printed as a negative polarity print, reversing black and white. The two architectural protagonists – the white European and the black antipodean – switch identity, and so too do the swans that also feature in the film – the black swans indigenous to Australia are rendered white and vice versa. For a museum of indigenous culture, the choice of the Villa Savoye – a symbol, Raggatt says, of Western enlightenment – has special significance. Rendering this iconic piece of white modernist architecture in black, sees the original transformed in its antipodean re-enactment. Canonical modernism, upside down and back to front.
As a side-note, when talking about copies it may be important to be specific about how they come into the world. Perhaps copies are not made, but rather performed? A third replica Villa Savoye, for instance, features in Katharine Kilalea’s debut novel OK, Mr Field. Here, the villa is fictional (or, at least nothing comes up with a Google search), and it is apparently completely, fictionally faithful (at least in form) to the original. The story concerns Mr Field, a concert pianist who overhears a couple post-concert discussing his qualities as a performer:
“The way he played was just so… so…
Unmusical? The woman said.
Yes, he said, horrible. Mechanical, even. Yet somehow also heartbreaking.”
In this short passage, Kilalea reveals a whole universe of ideas about cultural production, feelings and originality: Le Corbuiser’s famous epithet “Une maison est une machine-?-habiter (A house is a machine for living in)”; the concert pianist whose performances of a score produces “copies”; the irony of the overwhelming feeling of empathetic emptiness generated by an emotionally drained replica. This performance also turns out to have been the pianist’s last (his last copy?) – the train he is riding in is driven into the buffers at high speed, the subsequent crash smashing up his hands and resulting in a large compensation payout. It’s a transport infrastructure disaster that has echoes of another novel about ideas of reenactment, Tom McCarthy’s high-concept Remainder. Given the subject of both books, this echo surely can’t have been coincidental.
Both OK, Mr Field and Remainder speak to sensations of memory and obsession, and how these might be processed through replication. In Remainder, it’s an elusive memory that haunts the protagonist, whose recall of the past has been disrupted by an amnesia caused by the accident which befalls him and whose subsequent compensation payout allows the pursuit of this fugitive recollection. Mr Field’s obsession with the Villa Savoye (or at least its replica) starts when he comes across an article when flicking through a newspaper on his fateful post-concert train ride. Headlined ‘All That Was Left Was His Red Swimming Cap’, the piece is about a minor South African architect named Kallenbach who has been eaten by a shark, and is illustrated by a picture of the replica villa he… designed? Built? Performed? See what I mean? It gets complicated finding the right word for the act of making a copy.
Note: You should remember that Le Corbusier also drowned, in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. And remember too that the scar which is so visible on Corubusier leg in the famous picture of him painting murals in the nude at Eileen Gray’s Villa E-1027 (an act which Gray was furious about) was (self-)mythologised as the zig zagging bite of a shark – although may more realistically have been a wound caused by a boat’s propellor. Is this a case of the re-enactment, then, being more lethal than the original? Note also: In Sergei Eisenstein’s October (1928), a cinematic classic retelling the events that led to the storming of the Winter Palace in October 1917, more extras were killed during filming than in the actual tame handover of power to Lenin’s Communists. So in life, as in Kilalea’s novel, the reenactment brings its own complexities to what appears on the surface to be a simplistic act of copying.
Given ARM’s black Villa – which does get a mention in OK Mr Field, along with another (I think) fictional version of the Villa in Boston “in which every aspect of the original had been shrunk 10 per cent to fit the client’s budget” – it is interesting to consider the location that Kilalea has selected for her reenactment. From what I remember of a fleeting visit to the city, Cape Town feels like a piece of Western urban-ness teleported to Africa. Harbourside developments, shopping malls, luxury hotels and apartment blocks, all built with that form of contextual and historical amnesia which feels the same from Vancouver to Docklands to Auckland. This is another kind of replication – a kind of urban cloning which, even as it colonises the entire surface of the planet, remains innocent of its own oppressive aesthetic and social ideologies. Instead, it weakly offers up the same limited cocktail of lifestyle activities and possibilities of living. Not to mention the ways in which this form of development imagines, then enforces, its own ideas of what constitutes a valid citizen: who, in other words, is included in its vision? Who, on the other hand, is excluded? In post-Apartheid South Africa, these issues remain hardwired into urban planning.
At one point in the novel, an academic visits Mr Field, rocking up at his villa “as though it were a museum rather than a private residence”, and explains the origin of the house, retitled by Kallenbach the “House for the Study of Water”. The academic explains Le Corbusier’s 5 Points (a quick abbreviated recap: 1. Pilotis 2. Roof Garden 3. Free Plan 4. Free Facade 5. Horizontal Windows). She explains too the Johannesburg Group’s application of European modernism in South Africa. This is also the story that Denise Scott Brown tells of her own childhood in Joberg. As she recounted to Domus (and many others):
“My mother’s other passion was architecture. She had studied it at the University of Witwatersrand but had dropped out when money ran out. But while there she had joined some students in an early turn toward Modernism. A letter to those students from Le Corbusier in the middle 30s asks, ‘Could you find a Croesus in Johannesburg to bring me there so we can work together?’ In 1933 my mother approached these architects to design our family home. So I grew up in an International Style house with a mother eager to explain her love of early Modernism.”
But the architect of OK, Mr Field’s Villa goes one step further. Not just influenced by Le Corbusier – working “? la Corbu” – Kallenbach “had been so seduced by the Master, as he’d called him, that he believed the practice of architecture post-Le Corbusier could offer nothing more than to replicate his buildings verbatim.” For committing the ultimate sin of heroic modernism – unoriginality – Kallenbach, Kilalea tells us, was ostracised from the inner circle.
All copies produce complexities that emerge from the way in which they are made, who made them, when, and for what purpose. But in architecture, a fundamental weirdness is introduced because of the issue of context. The same thing in a different place will always have a disjointed quality. Given architecture’s intimate relationship to location (to sun, view, and topography at least, if not history, culture and so forth) an out-of-place quality is inevitable. As Mr Field remarks, “I’d often thought it perverse that a house overlooking the sea should have windows so narrow that they hid all but a sliver of it.” Of course, this is really the product of a window imagined for one view looking out on another.
This is a kind of alienation between “thing” and “place”, between architecture and site. The same seems to occur to the inhabitants of the novel’s Villa. First, prior to his being devoured by a shark, Kallenbach’s wife leaves him. Then, the pianist hoping that a new life in this new home will being some kind of happiness (or at least less unhappiness) is also left by his wife Mim, who is found in the dead of night “standing by the foot of the chaise […] wearing a jacket”, before vanishing. Left alone, Mr Field’s sense of abandonment and emptiness grows. Is this a function of his own circumstances? Or is it a function of the replica Villa? Or even of the original? After all, Le Corbusier’s own carefully staged original photographs of the Villa – the fish on the kitchen counter, the roof terrace with hat and glasses – always seemed to stress its emptiness, as if these signifiers of human habitation only served to amplify its deserted state.
A “mechanical” pianist, holed up in a mechanical reproduction of a machine for living. What might this sterility produce? Could it, like the conversation the pianist overhears on the train, produce something more than the sum of its parts: “I mean there was nothing sad about his phrasing or his interpretation – what was so moving was, how do I say it, well, it’s as if what was so moving was his absence of feeling.” The Villa, like the pianist’s own interior, becomes a void. Its emptiness a place from which to observe other forms of domesticity and other kinds of building.
First, the neighbouring building site, whose clanking, bashing and grinding appears to him as a choreographed soundscape – or, more specifically, like an orchestra tuning up and never reaching the moment of coherence. He watches the builders in the act of construction: “Their activities said Everything can be made good again. The bricklaying said One thing, stacked on another, will amount to something.” Then there is the pianist’s growing obsession with the architect’s widow. After his initial encounter with her to buy the villa, she reappears first in his imagination – her voice apparently talking to him, instructing him, chiding him, and speaking in some kind of romantic manner. Then, thinking he recognises her in a passing car, he follows her home. Parking outside, he spies through her window, imagining the domestic life occurring within. In a world of doppelgängers, a grip on fixed identity becomes smeary. Who and what is really there? What do feelings whose intensity suggests they must be authentic attach themselves to?
Dostoevsky’s novel The Double charts the descent into madness and beyond that the appearance of a doppelgänger brings. Collapse of identity and reason, spiralling doubts and a creeping sense of unreality unravel the protagonist’s psychological coherence of self. OK, Mr Field suggests a far more ambivalent condition: a world of doubles entered into by choice, a self already emptied out of authenticity, and structures of all kinds constructed by precise reproduction. Like Amie Siegel’s work produced by oscillating between poles of original and reproduction, something far less catastrophic than Dostoevsky’s vision occurs in the doubling of the Villa Savoye, and something far more nuanced. In this mode, it’s not a grand battle between truth and lies, the authentic and the fake, good and evil. Instead, these reenactments show us how things are performed into the world though simple and ordinary gestures. They speak not to the easiness of the copy, but rather to the fragility of the world, and to the care and precision necessary for things as they are to be maintained – for things not to shatter or deflate. Its not the fakeness of the copy that is at stake, but rather the precarious and provisional nature of the real.
First published in Designo