Godsell and Corrigan merit an elliptical mention in the second to last AD – The Innovation Imperative. In a chapter (“Final Draft”) by Dr Gretchen Wilkins, our refugee family units appear to have been used to illustrate processes that are flexible or amorphous in representational terms. The implication is, seemingly, that if there are such fertile ‘unfinished’ multivariances in unbuilt work, surely there are parallels or infiltrations of such practices into the built.

A welcome read, although we remain curious as to our classification as operating ‘entirely within the representational realm of architectural practice…’

G&C are pleased to announce the joint winners of the Jimmy Watson’s Canopy design competition.

We would like to congratulate both Mikhail Rodrick, with the coherent and sly ‘Jimmy’s Pendulum,’ as well as Brad Wray of Branch Studio Architects, with the laconic ‘Humble of Hills Hoists.’

A full listing of results outlines other placed entries, as well as listing commendations and judges comments. We encourage all to peruse them – there are some gemlike and wonderful ideas in these projects.

The response to this (very) short notice competition has been heartening and suggests an alternative, and far more enjoyable, avenue for the critique and unpacking of planning submissions, as well as a broader discussion around our shared architectural heritage.

Well done to all who entered – you should all have a well deserved glass, or flagon, or a rundlet or tierce, of wine.

Frank + Patricia

… There’s a scene in that wonderful book by George Johnston – “My Brother Jack.” And it’s got Dave Meredith sitting outside at some retsina soaked tavern on a little Greek island; shaded by vine-leaves, cooled by a soft Aegean breeze. There’s food and booze and the long laziness of self-imposed exile. But this being David Meredith, despite all of this …. he’s complaining. He finds a lot to complain about, this character. This time, in this paradisiacal setting, it’s actually about class. He’s been cornered by a drunk English toff, who’s complaining as well – complaining that nobody understands what it’s like to be the youngest son of a youngest son. It’s about primogeniture, you see? And this pisses Meredith off – he snaps at this sunburnt peer; saying, and I paraphrase, ‘Yeah, well, you’ll never know what it’s like to be the younger son of a Melbourne tram driver…’

That struck a chord with me. I read the book for the first time when I came down from Maryborough, when I’d just started in at Melbourne. And I was in my very own taverna, with my very own retsina – sitting in Jimmy Watsons after Romboyd had had such a go at it. To a kid from the country, it absolutely felt like a greek island – I mean, how could I know any different? And so here I am, sitting in this little pocket of European sophistication, listening to the scions of the great families of Melbourne whining about their lot. And I’m Meredith – rising up, raging, sopping wine about, playing up my origins as a country kid – outpacing their complaints with half-fabricated stories about the depredations of my childhood. I think I used the term ‘mulesing.’ And ‘flyblown…’

That was actually how I met Pat – in Jimmy Watsons, insulting her and her friends.  Not the most auspicious of starts. But then again, I wasn’t David Meredith. I always knew when to stop complaining…

Transcript – Frank Godsell, Sept 2000, Weekend Arts, Radio National

Jimmy Watson’s has always held a special place in my heart. It is, after all, where Patricia and I first met. The white-stucco behemoth always seemed – however inaccurate a reading – to form a catalytic hinge for Melbourne; a point around which a great cultural shift accreted and spilled out over the city proper. Conversation and castigation; client meetings and commiserations – the whole spectra of human activity wrapped up in that tidy little tavern. And that’s not even considering its inarguable architectural merit – its lasting legacy, not just to the Lygon Streetscape, but to the Melbourne architectural community.

So it was with some trepidation that we scoured the current planning proposal for the emplacement of a permanent awning structure across the Lygon street frontage. Our immediate reaction, and one I suspect was felt by many, was of outrage. But we were also conscious that Romboyd’s scheme had been, fundamentally, an alteration – a clever, neat and cost-effective stitching together of three late-Victorian shopfronts. Given that the property remains in the Watson family hands, and given the flexible and iterative nature of the building itself (including the poorly named ‘wolfs’ lair’ addition to its rear) it seemed that there might be incipient potential in this new shade structure.

Rather than reviling the proposed awning, we’d like to see it as just one small part of a potential family of solutions – a thousand different ways to shade the Watson’s façade. But we are too heavily invested – unable to move without our own experiences colouring our responses. So we turn to you, the broader architectural community. To students and practitioners and laypeople alike – we turn to you, to (very quickly, for planning closes on the 8th of March) sketch a design for an alternative shade structure for Jimmy Watson’s Wine Bar.

We would like to think of this competition as an alternative model for responding to planning proposals – a form of constructive criticism through design.

Frank + Patricia

 Brief: A canopy to shade existing seating along Jimmy Watsons Lygon Street frontage.

Submission Material: A single A3 landscape digital file (PDF or JPG)

Due: 9am, Friday 8th March, 2013 (one week, one A3 sheet)

Jury: G&C + MASSINOFF + BUSTOVIBUSTOVIC

Prize: Publication + the satisfaction of a good deed done + a good bottle of wine

Current Planning Proposal: http://bit.ly/XHqR08

Site Photos & Drawings: http://godsellandcorrigan.com/media/jimmy-watsons-competition/

Submissions & Enquiries: godsellandcorrigan@gmail.com

Courtesy of our colleagues in Astana – a detailed rendering of the Pinnacle. Poster prints are available from KazCosmos.

The following piece by Frank Godsell was originally published in the September issue of the Critical Australian Review of Architectural Criticism (Australia).

When Elly – our eldest daughter – was seven, she disappeared into the bowels of Flinders Street station. I was not initially worried; our family has a cross-generational knack for spatial awareness; an unerring ability to locate ourselves whatever the terrain. Confident that she’d be able to orientate herself and fold herself back down to our schedule, I left the station and spent an hour or so at the National Gallery staring at the space where the Weeping Woman used to be.

But an hour passed, and Eleanor didn’t re-appear. I started to worry – I hurried back to the station concourse; began searching the ill-lit labyrinth. It was edging in to twilight, and I was just enlisting the help of some of the station staff to search the clinker track-beds and cluttered tunnels in amongst the heavy bluestone footings when she re-appeared. She’d been down in the drivers’ cafeteria, busily haranguing them about their scheduling; she’d told them she was researching a school paper and had spent the time explaining the multifarious flaws in, for example, running the central station in a radial network as if it were a terminus. This was her favourite topic (and it remains a passion of hers, albeit in a much more official capacity) – she used to go on about it for hours, with little charts and graphs and network diagrams. It was something she could get entirely too wrapped up in; it had taken her a good five hours for her to tire of this didactic game and come wandering back to find me.

She was safe. But I confess that I still have nightmares about those long five hours; still have dreams where the old bituminous ramps – long-gone now – stretch out into endless, echoing passages that thrust themselves thousands of metres below the level of the platforms; dreams where I’m following faint voices down amidst the gravel-rubble and the old iron-bark sleepers; dreams where I’m once again hunting for something disappeared, something lost.

Because Flinders street is a place where things can be lost.

Ticket-stubs. Entire train services. Curious children, in my case.

And, in the case of Premier Baillieu, the point and purpose of an entire architectural design competition.

I cannot think of a positive way to put this. I have not heard a single good word said about the current Flinders Street ideas competition – not a single kind word, from the smallest of graduate practices to the largest national offices; from the students entering it as part of their design classes to the academics and teachers supporting them.

I have, however, heard a number of unkind words, some of which I am unable (and unwilling) to repeat. The general consensus is that the project is simultaneously too open-ended and altogether too restrictive. I tend to agree with this apparent contradiction – the brief is entirely concerned with infrastructural and operational issues, welded together with a number of positive motherhood statements; a kind of recapitulation of Melbourne’s platitudinal planning policy in miniature. For an ideas competition, the brief is preternaturally limiting.

But even within this straightjacket framework, there is a conspicuous lack of aspiration. The restructuring and rationalisation of Flinders Street is a serious infrastructural project – a task that, by the government’s own admission, needs to be done. Why it has been shoe-horned into an architectural exercise is beyond me. I know that a number of entrants removed themselves from the competition in frustration as it became clear that their interrogation of the station’s potential was rendered moot by the blinkered requirements of the current operator and the trepidation of policy makers.

The competition is further stymied by the absolute lack of funding to push any winning design ahead. Certain voices have suggested that this is a simply a way to alert foreign capital to the potential for redevelopment. Those of an even more cynical bent have implied that the entire process is a way of rubber stamping an impossible design and safely pushing the project into the ‘too-hard’ basket – a case for a future government to pursue, decades down the track.

The competition should have been an opportunity to re-investigate the city’s relationship with the river, to build upon the putative successes of Federation Square as event and public space. An opportunity to rethink this ill-shaped behemoth, this unsettling accretion of a hundred haphazard decisions that hunkers down by the lazy Yarra Yarra and reminds us of the kind of city we once were.

Instead we have had a process that, to paraphrase the erstwhile Lindsay Tanner, is marked by ‘managerial competence and the arbitration of the competing claims of differing economic groups.’ These are necessary qualities – but they are not the qualities that engender new directions, new visions. They can only play with what has gone before – condemning us to that slow, inward spiral of the status quo.

We remain a strange and a lucky city. And we have had the benefit of our most galling of mistakes, our most egregious missteps, being offset by cheap peripheral land, relatively unconstrained growth, a high level of private wealth and an undemanding urban population.

But we cannot continue surviving through luck – nor from the consumption of these fossil resources. We cannot afford to be conservative, or unimaginative, as our city heads ever closer to a population of five, or six, or eight million. If we are to navigate a way into a more equitable urban future, we have to begin discussing the city again, through mechanisms that are at once more open and more liberal; encouraging subversion, play and nuance.

Otherwise we will be lost.

And this time, I am not sure we will be found.

“…Yes. I agree. It is entirely possible that future generations will regard our actions with contempt. But, gentlemen, we need to steel ourselves against such fears. In the end, we must do what is required to maintain the Australian way of life, the safety of our cities and the prosperity and strength of our great nation. It may be monstrous, but it must be done!”

Lieutenant General Alexander Seddon, Transcript, Australian Commonwealth Police Wiretap. September, 1970

1.

In the spring of 1970, a series of meetings unfolded in a quiet suburban villa in South Canberra. Attendance was uncharacteristically eclectic; not the usual apparatchiks and bureaucrats

Anyone loitering by the topiary sentinels at the lip of the driveway would have witnessed a bewildering procession: a convoy of Argentinian secret police, a team of Game Theorists from the RAND corporation, a convocation of clergy, a train of social scientists from the GDR and a pair of rather confused Cambridge neuroscientists amongst others. The observer, pausing in the shadow of a box hedge, might well have wondered what possible occasion could warrant such a delegation.

The local media was conspicuously quotidian on this front. The meeting was acknowledged, but any explanation was frustratingly elliptical. To onlookers, it was just another day in a contemporary technocracy – specialists convening for vaguely defined reasons. Canberrans gawked at the more outré of the ensemble, and then returned to more pressing concerns. Another technology summit. Another junket for international experts.

Yet the meetings, which often ran late into the night, on into the darkness before dawn, were concerned with something far more profound – something that could have a direct and irrevocable impact, upon the lives of every Australian. The tabled agenda – referring to the meeting as ‘COA 01′ – was illuminating:

1) The continued stability and prosperity of Australian society

2) The continued safety and viability of the inner city

But the implicit and unstated purpose of this process was even simpler:

3) Control.

2.

The COA attendees had seen the race riots in Watts and Detroit. They’d seen the student revolts in Paris. They’d seen the sectarian split in Derry and Belfast. They’d seen the radicalisation of the inner urban in Italy. They’d seen the hollowing out of the great cities – in the new world and the old.

And they wanted no part of it.

Because their Australia – their imagined continent – was a nation defined by a communitarian imperative. A covenant between left and right, between rural and urban polities; a country dominated by a meeting in the middle.

They saw the tectonic shifts. They were desperately afraid; of the demographic changes, of emergent and inherently democratic technologies, of the long march of liberalisation.

They were afraid.

They craved control.

3.

Soma is sort of Ayurvedic medicine – a kind of general panacea drawn out of equal parts of mythology and religious practice in the Ganges valley. Its closest relation in the western canon is Ambrosia – the source of the Olympian pantheon’s immortality. The compound may also be familiar to alert readers through its central presence in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Here, the substance is transformed from a sanctifying agent to a no-less-complex soporific; a numbing, pleasurable, ambient drug; a powerful tool of control within Huxley’s posited world-state.

It is this latter concept that would prove so interesting to the COA conference delegates; not the milk-sap drink extracted from an obscure himalayan vine, but the chemical means to establish order and control. In his later years, Huxley had experimented extensively with Soma – working with a number of North Indian botanical experts to develop structured dosage yields and extraction and synthesis processes. A very limited outline of the drug’s formulation can be found in his penultimate work, ‘The Windows of Interrogation.’

But this was the the creation of Soma in small doses, in limited amounts. The COA required a vast, industrialised process to deliver the smog-like blanket mandated by their protocols. It would not be easy to develop an inexpensive chemical analogue to the milk-sap plant – not even with the insights of Huxley’s confiscated diaries and journals.

Yet, standing on the cusp of the 70′s, with both the psychedelia of the sixties, and the complex machinations of the Vietnam Era psyops behind them, the COA seemed to think that they were ably positioned to try…

A fluoridated base/A tricyclic ring of chlorpromazine/Lithium. Crushed into minute particles. Aerosolised.

Success.

Now all that was needed was a mechanism for its dispersal.

4.

Victoria was the only state to entertain the COA guidelines and recommendations. In the waning years of the Bolte government ambitious plans for a series of seventy-seven Soma towers were drawn up. These were long slender concrete cigarillos belching out a fine aerosol mist; blanketing the city of Melbourne in soporific smog. The towers were never designed to be uniform; height, orientation and positioning were dictated by prevailing winds, surrounding infrastructure, and population densities. From a broad, copper clad base, their profiles rapidly narrowed – whittled down to near-needlepoints that almost disappeared against the skyline.

The proposed towers were to be supported by an elaborate network of underground pipes and access conduits. The constituents of Soma were extremely volatile – and were only to be combined when they had reached the chrome-and-ceramic diffuser at the pinnacle of a tower. Each ingredient had its own feed-line and was maintained at distinct temperatures and pressures; the resulting tangle of plumbing and turbo-pumps resembling, in the words of one engineer, ‘a maddeningly complex rocket engine, and every bit as capricious…’

5.

The involvement of the project architects, Godsell and Corrigan, presents something of a mystery. Politically, the exercise appears in opposition to their earlier work – the left-leaning tiques, capsule projects, and their substantial oeuvre of communal and cluster housing. However, as the scheme was presented as a public health project, it is possible that they were unaware of the underlying goals of COA and the Soma Towers. They took the commission, solidifying a formal resolution to towers that had previously been under the aegis of the board-of-works.

Frank Godsell simply notes that ‘the project was appealing in all its simple dichotomies; the machine and the mute exterior, the nexus of chaos and control.’ It is possible that he is referring to the evident tension between both the liberative and repressive tendencies of high technology; a long-term fascination of the duo. The project is also marked by the subtle subversions characteristic of the firm’s work; the baseline design incorporated certain symmetries, balances, and symbolic relationships that appeared to tie the structure back into Soma’s Indian origins.

6.

There were complications in the marriage of design resolution and engineering requirement. The narrow concrete stems of their towers necessitated a complete overhaul of the feedline and plumbing systems; mechanisms that had been designed for a larger, open, scaffold tower. These complications pushed the delivery of the system back by years – slipping from its promised ’71 delivery to a staggered implementation that would be finished by the summer of ’76. There were further complications as Bolte was succeeded by Rupert (later Sir) Hamer – a moderate figure in the Liberal party, and one who was understandably wary of vast engines of political and social control.

But the real death-knell for the Soma towers was the conspicuous political indifference of the Australian population. The radical future, the popular uprising feared by the COA never came to pass; potentially volatile inner urban areas were tempered by processes of gentrification, broader populations mollified by affordable tract housing on the city fringes. In the end, the COA had not reckoned with the innate conservatism of the Australian polity.

The construction of the towers was halted, the half-completed infrastructural underpinnings  buried. The formula for SOMA was declassified and repurposed as a high quality veterinary tranquilliser.

Godsell and Corrigan’s blueprints were quietly shelved.

7.

But policy is cyclical. Old solutions can be dusted off, reappraised, and put to new work. Soma is ritually re-brewed, and the wheel turns.

Recent policy decisions have led to a rapid expansion of Melbourne’s urban territory – the increasingly porous growth boundary shifting to house hundreds of thousands of new dwellings. It appears that this sprawling edge-urban territory will accommodate the bulk of our growing population.

This comes at a cost. The nature of fringe breeds a new kind of epidemic ill-health. A car-dependent framework, low dwelling densities, and reduced walkability engenders staggering obesity rates; complemented by increases in cardiovascular disease. The prevalence of physical maladies is mirrored in the mental; bodily disease overshadowed by soaring rates of depression, anxiety and a general anomie.

Yet government after government appears willing to wear these outcomes, if it means an economic and expedient provision of new housing. The policy of sprawl seems unlikely to change – indeed, cannot, if we hope to accommodate growth without significantly altering the existing urban fabric.

In this landscape, the Soma towers are being reappraised; not as tools of control, but as mechanisms for a very necessary amelioration. Soma can be reformulated to address the burgeoning mental health crisis – incorporating recent developments in anti-anxiety and anti-depressant medication. The fundamental engineering principles behind the towers are as applicable today as they were forty years ago, and the expansion of underlying infrastructure may prove easier on greenfield estates than in established urban territories.

There are whisperings of mandatory provisions for Soma towers in all new development areas. Some may dismiss these as pure hyperbole – grist from the rumour mill. What remains uncomfortably true is the inimical nature of new suburbs, and the very desperate lengths we will have to go to render them socially, and medically, sustainable.

Despite the Soma tower’s distasteful origins, it may represent one of the only viable solutions to our own paralysis on issues of growth and sprawl.

If we are unwilling to alter policy, a future skyline dominated by a series of slender, smog enshrouded towers seems more and more likely.

Note: Since this article was written, the current state government finalised the last of their logical inclusions in the UGB, and presented the broad structure plans for outer-urban growth corridors. These areas will accommodate nearly 1.2 million new Melbournians by the 2030s.

SOMA towers form a core aspect of this policy direction, and Godsell and Corrigan are now able to publicly discuss their involvement with this vast infrastructural investment. Network and structure details on these new towers will be posted over the coming weeks.

The day will come when rising sea levels will enable Australia-bound asylum seekers to sail right into the nightmarish maw of Melbourne’s Luna Park. Here, within the fortified bounds of the famed Scenic Railway, it is proposed they should acclimatise to urban life before being processed for integration into the Australian suburbs. Of course, unless you’re seeking asylum from New Zealand or Tasmania, Melbourne may seem an impractical entry point. Nevertheless, under a new refugee management proposal, there may be no other way in.

Be it Indigenous land rights, water catchment areas, or refugee status, issues concerning territory often arise in the national debate. However it isn’t often we find architecture playing such a central role. In the wake of the recent High Court decision ruling the Labor Government’s Malaysian Solution unconstitutional, high profile Melbourne architects Godsell & Corrigan have been called upon to develop an alternative solution to the nation’s refugee containment strategies.

According to the blueprints, Australia’s suburban backyards will be dotted with – the oddly named – Refugee Family Units (RFU’s), each containing a single refugee. RFU’s are to be fitted to the back fence of ordinary Australian backyards and networked via existing back lane infrastructure. According to director Frank Godsell, Godsell & Corrigan won the commission on the strength of earlier speculative work developing mobile and ’non-territorial’  capsule structures  – similar in purpose, if not scale, to Archigram’s ‘walking cities’. Sadly, in its current incarnation the RFU lacks the limbs of its predecessor; an unfortunate development that strips its occupant of any agency or mobility.

Indeed, the RFU has suffered several budget cuts, rendering the once well-appointed design as something more akin to a Metabolist dog house than a futuristic vision of idyllic nomadicism. Fortunately in the capable hands of Godsell & Corrigan, the units retain a sense of utility and aesthetic integrity. While tight, each RFU contains a single mattress, toilet and basin; the building envelope deftly contoured to its function. It could well be described as an oversized prosthesis– a shield or artificial skin that allows the human body to assume the function of national border. Indeed, Patricia Corrigan informs me much time was spent scrutinising the space saving strategies employed by developers working in the international student apartment market.

While never stated explicitly, it is apparent from speaking with Frank Godsell and Patricia Corrigan that this particular commission is a source of great personal anguish. Besides their clear attempts to make the most of a restricted brief, it would appear their own interests are in bringing the grim face of refugee incarceration to the attention of the voting public. According to Godsell, ‘the prevalence of political NIMBYism in this country has, until now, ensured that Australians need never come to personal terms with the fate of refugees seeking asylum in their country. On-shore or offshore; the ugly reality of detention policies can be ignored’. The RFU is attempting to correct this. Godsell & Corrigan are turning NIMBYism on its head – turning backyards into ideological battlefields.

At first blush it appears the RFU has political support, although a cynic might consider the government, having exhausted every alternative, has nowhere else to turn. Significant efforts have been made to gain public approval – there’s the Refugee Bonus for participating families, the removal of any windows contravening ‘overlooking’ regulations and, of course, a household Carbon offset generated by a refugee biomass converter. Another key sweetener is the proposed repurposing of laneway infrastructure to allow for easy access by immigration correction officers without disturbing the host families. These access ways will also serve as the only open space accessible to the detainees. Indeed the implementation of this two-part class system has been the major selling point for Australian households. It would seem humanity isn’t a drawcard.

As with each of Australia’s refugee ‘solutions’, the current proposal has significant shortcomings. Reading through the strategic fine print, RFU’s are to be classified as zones of extra-territoriality, indefinitely excluding their occupants from Australia’s migration zone and associated rights of asylum. What we’re seeing is effectively a mirror of Christmas Island – transplanted into suburban backyards. This does not bode well.  If the scheme fails, it will only galvanise support for the Minister’s preferred Malaysian Solution.

There is also concern about the potential for abuse. How will we treat our backyard guests – as fellow human beings or as captive animals? The disturbing social parable of Lars von Trier’s ‘Dogville’ springs to mind. Or perhaps worse – are our asylum seekers doomed to be the victims of a dispassionate and indifferent Australian populace? Characteristically treading a political tightrope, Godsell & Corrigan appear to be signalling their concern on the issue. From their RFU dogbox aesthetic to the haunting refurbishment of the Luna Park processing centre, no attempt has been made to airbrush the ugly reality of refugee detention.

Of course, this may well be a watershed moment in our collective treatment of asylum seekers. ‘Perhaps, with refugee communities occupying our laneways, Australians will seek to help their new neighbours free themselves from the shackles of a second class existence’, Corrigan reflects, ‘by drawing this issue into the domestic sphere, perhaps we can summon the death knell for indefinite and arbitrary mandatory detention’.

One can only hope.

The recent Capathetical Competition has sparked interest within the firm, and led us, once more, back to the archives.

Ideas of Australian identity and Australian ownership are becoming increasingly tortuous. Our major cities are some of the largest in the world – not simply in terms of gross area, but in population. A long-standing debate has centred on our continued ability to provide sustainable stewardship of our natural resources; on the actual ‘carrying capacity’ of our territory. The entire debate is idealogically coloured – the lowest population estimates are couched in a vision of a hyper-fragile landscape, ill-equipped to handle even two-dozen million on the fertile coastal margins – the high estimates appear to be hangovers of the late-colonial era; positing a nation of a hundred million; a global player and a bulwark against expansionist attitudes from the nebulous asian north.

Neither are particularly charming or optimistic visions. Both miss the critical element of a broad Australian culture – adaptability, and the small footprint. Both ignore the dramatic social, cultural and real capital embodied in our coastal cities; in the existing urban fabrics and approaches developed over two hundred years of territorial occupation.

Whatever our background, the display of conspicuous wealth, the over-engineered solution, the technocratic approach, should be anathema.

And, again, we have the particularly Australian conceit of ‘proving’ oneself – of demonstrating our parity with older, more established players.

In Europe and America, the rhetoric has shifted. There are no new cities. There are systems, rather, of rediscovery. Un-planning the mutual excesses of the old soviet economies of the east and the late-conservative bastardisation of the liberal democratic structures of the west.

In the developing global south, the focus is not on the development of new urban approaches, but the rapprochement – the mutual interstice of project with existing ‘organic’ urban development; the slum, the informal settlement.

Only in the resource driven gulf states, and all too familiar landscapes of single-party regimes do we see a continued commitment to the ideal of the planned, symbolically charged ‘city.’

The very idea of a new capital – of a new city – of new permanent territorial claims on a territory that is ill equipped to accommodate it, seems fatuous.

These are not song-lines. The appropriation of indigenous cultural markers as a means of circumscribing our own paucity of culture is one of the worst excesses of recent decades. Rather, these resemble the great, offensively syncretic earth-markings of the Marree Man – leviathan, aggressive European excisions in the garb of indigenous sublimation.The new Australian capital city is a lonely, rusting entity, endlessly, aimlessly wandering the vast endoheric interior of the country – leaving the last European scars on a landscape that repudiates it.

You think Laika was lonely?

Spare a thought for poor Gagarin – twenty days in a tiny, claustrophobic capsule, with only a purloined balalaika for company. Twenty days before that first, almost inaudible report as another metal bauble nosed its way into the crooked gap between the steel sphere of the life-support capsule and the eight-faced jewel of the retro-rocket.

The Amerikano, Alan Shephard, in the tiny conical flask of Freedom 7. He punched through to Gagarin’s cosy coffin in a matter of minutes. Neither of them were de-orbiting – spot welds and oxy-acetlyne cuts would work well enough to hold in the air.

A month later, Grissom, in the identical, matte-black Liberty Bell. A week later, Titov, in the second Vostok – carapace gleaming in the dawn-light; proud, strong soviet workmanship counterposed with the technocratic assemblages of the Americans. A shouted greeting to each new-comer, and then, the work.

There were more spot welds, re-wiring of precious batteries and fuel cells – the laborious task of seeding row upon row of sorghum and wheat – growing in light-weight plastic trays in inflated greenhouses that ballooned like twisted, fungal growths from the now-uneeded exit-hatches.

The following year, their numbers swelled. Glenn. Carpenter. Nikolayev and Popovich. Shirra. Each man with another few cubed metres of living space – another hundred litres of water – another bagged kit of seed for sowing. The craft grew in a concentric cluster – welded in order of arrival, growing in spirals like the fibonacci’d germs of seeds in a sun-flower’s inflorescence.

Cooper. Bykovsky. Tereshkova – the first woman to join them. Walker – their first transient; pilot of the X-15 rocketplane. The triumvirate in Voskhod 1 – the strange twins in Voskhod 2.

By the start of 1965, the little woven nest comprised fourteen craft, and any number of bubble-like accoutrements slung from and sutured to their silver and chromium surfaces.

In later years, this concretion would be known – with some degree of irony – as the ‘retirement home’, but for now it was the incipience, the nucleus, of the greatest structure mankind would ever, unknowingly, secretly, blindly build.

Pinnacle, they called it. Poinsetta. Raythorne.

Space-junk, to the uncharitable.

The final tower of babel.

The last skyscraper we’d ever build.

Context

In 2011 we participated in a project alongside RosCosmos and the Kazakstani government; a design for a commemorative structure marking the 50th anniversary of Gagarin’s epochal first spaceflight. The rocket that lofted him him into orbit launched from Baikonur – the former Soviet spaceport in the north of Kazakstan – and there was discussion of a twinned institution being built in both Astana and Moscow.

The project fell through, for reasons that are both rather dull, and restrained by a political gag order. The design – unlike Gagarin’s Vostok – never got off the ground.

But one thing we learnt from our time in Baikonur and Russia’s Star-city, one thing we gleaned, was the half-secret; most of the things that were shot up there never came back down. Astronaut and Cosmonaut came together, up there in low-orbit; cludging their little capsules into viable, permanent stations. And so, even as our rationale for staying in Astana evaporated, we set about mapping, charting this weird, ever growing agglomeration of space junk.

It’s a long term project. The mapping – mirroring the continued, additive growth of the ‘Pinnacle’ – may never end.

And this, then, may be the most bizarrely positive take on the nature of incompleteness.

We look forward to it never ending.