Surface and Deep Histories

Surface in architecture has had a deeper and a more pervasive presence in the practice and theory of the discipline than is commonly supposed. Orientations to the surface emerge, collapse, and reappear, sustaining it as a legitimate theoretical and artefactual entity, despite the (twentieth-century) disciplinary definition of architecture as space, structure, and function. Even though surface is defended for its pervasiveness (Kurt Forster), its function as a theoretical motif with generative power (Andrew Benjamin), and in constituting the operative principles of modern architecture as a visual phenomenon (Mark Wigley), it occupies the interstice, or the space of the unconscious within architectural discourse, from where it defends its legitimacy as architecturally valuable or ‘functional,’ as opposed to merely visually pleasurable.

Surface and Deep Histories positions surface within the scholarship of critical theory and design-based approaches, and invites academics and designers, and art and architectural historians based in Australia to consider the uses, figurations, scales, and typologies of surfaces. The collection choreographs contributions that focus on a variety of topics, such as montage and construction of colonial modernity and visual culture (Molly Duggins); wallpaper, rational space, and femininity (Anna Daly); the inter-constituted nature of bodies, clothes, and cities (Stella North); the reconstruction of the urban surface through a true integration of information and topology (M Hank Haeusler); James Fergusson’s theory of ornament (Peter Kohane); traditional and new verandahs in Australia (Chris Brisbin); contradictory effects of surface in Green architecture debates (Flavia Marcello and Ian Woodcock); and the thickness of thin curtain walls in contemporary Australian architecture (Anuradha Chatterjee). Surface and Deep Histories shows that surface is not thin — spatially or conceptually. It demonstrates that the practice of surface is simultaneously superficial and pervasive, symbol and space, meaningful and functional, static and transitory, and object and envelope.