When Boyd Went to Japan:
Something on NMBW at Walsh Street House
Mauro Baracco
According to Robin Boyd, Japanese architecture is informed by two conflicting elements: “Yoyoi and Jomon…translating these terms into modern conditions and English, they could possibly be called respectively repose and force, or delicacy and coarseness, or tenderness and callousness…The former quality in these pairs, the Yoyoi, is mostly feminine and usually found only indoors. The latter, the Jomon, is masculine and found mostly in the public street”.1
Thankfully by now the feminine/masculine binary equation has further evolved, opening to levels of relativity and various shades of otherness between these two poles. But, if we stayed for a moment with Boyd’s words, then we could say that the curation and installation design by Marika Neustupny and Nigel Bertram of NMBW—evolving also from research with Monash Architecture students, for the When Robin Boyd Went to Japan exhibition at the Robin Boyd Foundation over February-March 2024 —spurs the re-emersion of the ‘interior’ character of this house originally designed by Boyd as his own family’s residence in the late 1950s. After all, Marika and Nigel themselves admit that the exhibition installation components were minimal in physical presence and character since “very little was required to accommodate (the)…activities (involved with the exhibition)”, and it was possible to “…work with the strong spirit present in the house”.2
The various fit-out components disseminated through the house appeared to somehow stage a ‘temporary renovation’. In the form of “Noren=Curtain”,“Shoji=Screen”, “Engawa=Floor Edge”, “Tatami=Floor Mat”, “Tatetoi=Vertical Gutter “and “Hazagi=Drying Rack,”3 these installations gracefully addressed the sense of spatial continuity4 that informs the indoor/outdoor logic of this house – a building that at the same time also relates to its external urban context through a firm, inscrutable presence, both along Walsh Street and Airlie Bank Lane at the back. Boyd himself was adamant in describing a learned-from Japanese architectural character, informed by an “aesthetic division (between) outdoor and indoor personality”5, between Yoyoi and Jomon, with the indoor space deeply enriched by a devoted sense of spatial and social consideration: “the West keeps its shoes on indoors (whereas) the Japanese tea ceremony, the flower arrangements, the geishas, the graciousness of most social intercourse, all suggest a culture infinitely more refined than that of the West”.6
In the context of these reflections this house aspires and indeed succeeds to be quasi-Japanese, yet it is western with curious hybrids. The entry bridge, for instance is a puzzling element: is this a sort of oblique and elongated veranda? Each tread appears marginally deeper than the standard, much too shallow to be the seating place of a veranda, but not far off the depth of the narrowest of engawa. Perhaps this isn’t a place to spend much time in but a device for further distancing the house from the street, in setback and height, a means to gently harbor the private interiority from the harshness of the public sub-urban world? The Noren/Curtain installed by the curators further delineated such gentle thresholds. Outside, at the main entry, Noren sat as a proxy gate along Walsh street. Inside, they sat above the side-like-back-door between the courtyard and the rear volume housing the exhibition’s library and the bedrooms where Robin and Patricia’s three children resided. The careful placement of Noren seems to play with a strategic ambiguity: on one hand they reaffirm a western-like thresholding act stimulated by the existing staircase-bridge as a connecting element between the urban and private residential worlds. On the other hand, when installed inside, between the private boundaries of the courtyard and library room, they acted more as a pausing device, prompting the visitor to stop for a moment, take off their shoes, leave them on the engawa/floor edge and collect their mind before proceeding further through the exhibition. Indeed experiencing this ‘edge’ as an installational device reflects the precarious boundaries of the existing house itself. After all the glazed walls all around the courtyard’s four sides ambiguously define this ‘open space’ as a neighbouring room to all the other house’s rooms, just with less covered roof.
Various exhibition material inhabited the library space, including photographs, letters and other documents from the Walsh Street Archive and State Library of Victoria. They sat in close proximity and relation to four tatami mats which, placed as furniture within the room itself, established a near-centralised area to pay close attention to the surrounding material. This was an allocation of floor space not imbued with performative function but a concentrated sense of focus toward the exhibition content – which was not abundant, therefore pleasantly not overwhelming, elegantly displayed in a succinct yet highly informative fashion. The Shoji/Paper screens applied to specific portions of the existing windows were instrumental to further sustaining the focused mood of the library space, their translucency gave a sense of seclusion from the happenings of the courtyard, but also an ethereal abstract connection to its activity and shadows. A surprising new perspective was revealed in being low in this tall space, on the floor that is. On the other side of the courtyard, in the main living/dining room, physical models of some Japanese architect-designed houses from the 1950s to the 1970s were exhibited beside a table fully arranged with Japanese designer homewares. The other external installations – the Tatetoi/Vertical Gutter to collect water from the roof and the Hazagi/Drying Bamboo Racks to dry food and various other material – were empathic presences, like furniture finding its place in a room, appropriately participating in the ritual and cadenced acts of this exhibition’s everyday life.
The spatially nuanced curation of this exhibition provides us with something that Boyd himself would have certainly praised, in empathy with his attempted ‘zen-like’ joyful restraint where “feelings of spacious semi-enclosure (and)…easy blending of indoors and outdoors”7 reside side by side. However, on the other hand, I was instigated to wonder about the fact, as it seems, that Boyd himself was hardly able to achieve in life or even exercise such cadenced ritual attitude in his own practice. For instance, the condensed and rather frantic schedule of his travels to and from Japan, as exhibited in the show, are quite indicative of the full, pressed and hectic rhythms of this Melbourne architect. Mark Strizic came into my mind, when he was telling me about how Boyd could never find time to go to the project site when photographs were being taken. Instead, Boyd instructed and consulted the photographer via 1 to 2 minute maximum phone calls. Similar examples of this frenetic intensity in life and work could be corroborated through further conversations I had in the past with some of Boyd’s children and colleagues.
After all Boyd was a quintessential generalist mind, a great example of how architects can relevantly contribute as strategic figures through a broad and multidisciplinary approach – something that Boyd did indubitably throughout his life via prolific activity ranging from design practice extended beyond ‘architecture’, engaging deeply with the Australian Institute of Architects and other organisations, extensively publishing books, magazine reviews and newspaper articles, travelling nationally and internationally, conducting television programs, holding public lectures and occasionally participating in academic activities. Boyd’s everyday life was, I’m sure, considerably different from the cadenced repetitive rhythms of Hirayama, a toilet cleaner in Tokyo who, as the main character of Wim Wenders’ recent film Perfect Days, undertakes his work activities with a strong sense of care and focus. This sensibility, this ‘zen-like’ propensity to concentration, is for Boyd applicable perhaps to an approach able to extrapolate a sense of focus, succinctness, a quick calm from the chaotic mix of two merging worlds: the outside and the inside (of the house), with the inside unrolling its spaces through interrelation of rooms – the courtyard itself as effectively an open room.
This exhibition is an excellent example of the types of outcomes that are possible in the precious environment of house-museums like the Boyd Foundation, in which the relatively contained scale of the existing space provides opportunities for curatorial speculations that can take place through symbiotic correlations between the exhibited content and the exhibition container adaptively reused as a ‘temporary renovation’. In When Robin Boyd Went to Japan the notions of ‘small’ and ‘containment’ with regards to the scale of how and what was exhibited, were brilliantly addressed through a curatorial project that allowed for an immersive type of engagement with the documentation of unknown material through an exhibition installation that captivatingly re-interprets, by momentarily reconfiguring, the character of the existing spaces.
Mauro Baracco Architect, PhD, is a director of Baracco+Wright Architects (B+W, est. 2004) and their related research laboratory B+W+. He teaches and researches: formerly an Associate Professor at RMIT (1996-2020) where he also was the Head of the Landscape Architecture Department (2013-2016), he is currently University Fellow to RMIT and Teaching Associate at MADA-Monash University. Mauro is also a member of the Boyd Circle Leadership Group for the Robin Boyd Foundation. His interest in the local has developed from historical and cultural to include ecological relationships of the built and unbuilt environment. Together with Louise Wright, the other director of Baracco+Wright Architects, they are interested in a role
for architecture that can extend its relationship with the natural world towards one that considers all life. They build, unbuild, rearrange and support buildings and living things. Recently they have been researching the role of reuse and removal of built form in the reimagining of the city. Their work – projects, lectures/presentations, books and writings – is extensively profiled through exhibitions, publications and media platforms.
Notes:
1.Robin Boyd, Kenzo Tange, George Braziller, New York, 1962, p. 20
2.Marika Neustupny, Nigel Bertram, When Robin Boyd Went to Japan, exhibition pamphlet, a partnership between Robin Boyd Foundation, NMBW, CIBI, at the Boyd Foundation, 290 Walsh Street, South Yarra, Melbourne, 18 February – 10 March 2024 3.Translations of Japanese architectural elements taken from Ibid.
4.The notion of ‘spatial continuity’ related to Robin Boyd’s work is discussed in Mauro Baracco and Louise Wright, Robin Boyd: Spatial Continuity, Routledge, London, UK, and New York, USA, 2017
5.Robin Boyd, op. cit., p. 21
6.Ibid.
7.Ibid., p. 13
Image Credits:
Image 1-9: Walsh Street House, Robin Boyd with exhibition interventions by NMBW Photographs: Colby Vexler. Image 1:Noren placed at front entry to the house. Image 2-3, 7 & 9:Engawa, noren and shoji placed between courtyard and rear volume of the house. Image 4-6,8:Tatami placement within rear volume. Image 10: Existing step from front volume to courtyard. Image 11: Shoji datum at upper front volume.
for architecture that can extend its relationship with the natural world towards one that considers all life. They build, unbuild, rearrange and support buildings and living things. Recently they have been researching the role of reuse and removal of built form in the reimagining of the city. Their work – projects, lectures/presentations, books and writings – is extensively profiled through exhibitions, publications and media platforms.
Notes:
1.Robin Boyd, Kenzo Tange, George Braziller, New York, 1962, p. 20
2.Marika Neustupny, Nigel Bertram, When Robin Boyd Went to Japan, exhibition pamphlet, a partnership between Robin Boyd Foundation, NMBW, CIBI, at the Boyd Foundation, 290 Walsh Street, South Yarra, Melbourne, 18 February – 10 March 2024 3.Translations of Japanese architectural elements taken from Ibid.
4.The notion of ‘spatial continuity’ related to Robin Boyd’s work is discussed in Mauro Baracco and Louise Wright, Robin Boyd: Spatial Continuity, Routledge, London, UK, and New York, USA, 2017
5.Robin Boyd, op. cit., p. 21
6.Ibid.
7.Ibid., p. 13
Image Credits:
Image 1-9: Walsh Street House, Robin Boyd with exhibition interventions by NMBW Photographs: Colby Vexler. Image 1:Noren placed at front entry to the house. Image 2-3, 7 & 9:Engawa, noren and shoji placed between courtyard and rear volume of the house. Image 4-6,8:Tatami placement within rear volume. Image 10: Existing step from front volume to courtyard. Image 11: Shoji datum at upper front volume.