Echo of a Fallen Tree: Graeme Gunn AM
In March 2025 Hamilton Gallery will be staging a retrospective exhibition of the work of Graeme Gunn.
Gunn’s first built work, the Shoebridge House (1961) was described by Gunn as, “an echo of a fallen tree” - a reference to his friend and artist Fred Williams’ Fallen Tree series of etchings (1957-62).
As a prelude to the March exhibition, sixteen students from Melbourne School of Design present their Brutalist Archaeology through a collection of collages that excavate the archives of sixteen Graeme Gunn projects across Victoria. These projects are accompanied by original archival material from Gunn‘s archive and a short film by Traces Films that captures Gunn reflecting on his career.
The current exhibition includes the launch of the book Lines Leave Traces – a publication containing 120 of Gunn’s sketches - that considers entanglements between space, place, site, seeing, and time through Graeme Gunn’s parallel practice of drawing and painting. The traces that these drawings leave behind help us to understand that the purpose of building (architecture) is to make a site become a place. These sketches help us to uncover the meanings potentially present in any of Gunn’s expanded environments. These are not simply random geometric shapes and experiments with colours but personal responses to a diverse mix of influences and snapshots.
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Preserving, digitising, and researching architectural archives is the first step in parsing the workings of animportant and currently neglected architectural thinker in Australian culture - Graeme Gunn AM.
Through the course of the semester in the subject Critical & Curatoral Practices in Design, at the Melbourne School of Design (Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning) at the University of Melbourne, students are asked to interrogate the role of the archive as a methodology of preservation but also of display. Drawing on the practices of artists, architects and archivists who used the scrapbook as an important tool for conservation, cataloguing and knowledge transfer of their art or architecture, but also of social and cultural issues surrounding their period of creation, the students first interrogated a suite of archival material provided to them from the Graeme Gunn archive from his home here in Hamilton.
The scrapbook, provides a lens through which to test some assumptions and explore a distinct perspective, and the associated research exercise aims to uncover a disparate collection of ideas as a kind of autobiographical debris. Students (researchers) will have had to forage from their research and from the debris of the modernist era. Drawing archives, books, details, Interviews, magazine articles, newspapers, films, and models will need to be examined in the production of their ‘Digital Scrapbook’ (Archive). Each student has been given a research project selected from Graeme Gunn’s archive.
The exhibition strategy for A Brutalist Archaeology is to present in curatorial symbiosis the archive as a source of history, themes, or ideas, and a ‘New Brutalist Composition’ (Para-Architectural Collage) as the creative outcome of this archival engagement. What you see in this room is this collage. Each student has been tasked with selecting something significant - what we’re calling Vital Fragments - from their Graeme Gunn research material and presenting this in both a digital scrapbook scannable through the QR Code on their didactic panel, and the aforementioned collage. Asked to critically and conceptually translate their archival research into a collage, this approach is a key characteristic of artists whose practice has been studied throughout the semester, including the Independent Group, the Smithson’s, and other architects such as Le Corbusier, Harry Seidler and Mies van der Rohe.
As a collective display the exhibition creates a fusion of contradictory elements and images of “New Brutalism”. The collage’s present us with an ‘archaeology of ideas’ salvaged from the architect’s mind and the exhibition in turn presents these architectural ideas - in the words of the Smithson’s - as a ‘conglomerate order.’ .... in other words, what will be on display is the conceptual thinking behind each student project and not simply the architecture of the selected archival projects. Finally, each student is asked to present and explain their collage through the process of The Didactic & The Collage Explained - employing descriptive text to succintly explain their investigation into Gunn’s archive, architectural practice, ethos and as an ‘instruction for use’ - that is - a persuasive argument, or as a way of navigating the archival research that underpins the collage and the archive.
AAA views digitization as a crucial enabler of archival access and broadcasting. The archive is important as it allows us to continue to shine a light on the making and remaking of our built environment. As The Architectural Review recently suggested, “Whether private or official, physical or digital, or left behind in the ashes and soil on which buildings once stood, the archive has always been profoundly spatial.”
AAA performs as a curatorial entity at Melbourne School of Design and beyond. AAA views exhibitions as necessary for the presentation and representation of architectural research as well as archival practices – exhibitions are also a particular mode for rendering critical thinking in a creative, visual, and experiential way. The exhibition format can as such help us to move Architecture forward by providing an important outlet (as it has historically in times of economic recession) and being a tool to approach questions that architects and audiences should be asking about today’s built environment.
In 2024, AAA will launch The Total Environment, a publication capturing the legacy of project housebuilders Merchant Builders - curated over the last 8 years. The book is a repository, a record, a chronology, and the making of a new, publicly accessible resource. It also represents a prolonged and rigorous process of uncovering information, unearthing ideas, interviewing people, reconnecting people, digitizing collections, and analysing the archetypal suburban spatial intelligence through over 121 suburban house plans.
AAA has been teaching Critical and Curatorial Practices in Design as an MSD research elective subject since 2014. Exhibitions by AAA include MOTEL (2014), Towards a New Archive (2015), The House Talks Back (2016), X-Ray the City (2016), Stylistic Species (2017), Excavating Modernism (2019), Ideas of Subtopia (2022), New Horizons (2023), and The Endless Interior (2023)
This exhibition, designed and produced by Alan Pert, Philip Goad, and Theo Blankley for Hamilton Gallery is supported by The Jock Simmie Architectural History, Urban and Cultural Heritage Research Fund. Its generosity furthers knowledge and access to architectural history, conservation and heritage.