Published in New Zealand byF R E E R A N G E P R E S S

PO Box 6706 Marion StWellington

Copyright © 2010 Gerald MellingAll rights reserved

ISBN: 978-0-473-16484-3

Book design by Nick SargentPrinted by Graphic Press, Levin

Thanks are due to Shenuka de Sylva and her architecture students, where this saga began; to all the people I worked with in Colombo and Kalutara; to Arunjyoti Hazarika for on-site assistance; to Ian Cassells and Caitlin Taylor (The Wellington Company), generous sponsors of my second sojourn to Sri Lanka; to Allan Morse for his forebearance during my repeated absence from our busy office; to Geoff Cochrane for his patient ear(s); and to my partner Christine Norman for suggest-ing the self-awarded sabbatical which finally wrote this book.

A shorter version of Muddy Water first ap-peared in Architecture New Zealand, March/April 2006.

Photographic credits are due to Eresh Weera-suriya, Arunjyoti Hazarika, various students from Wellington School of Architecture, Sri Lanka Architect magazine, and the author.

Tsunami Box

Gerald Melling

Still Air

Muddy Water

Puddling

Dry Land

Gold Ingots

India Hot!

Turbulence

Aftershock

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21

31

51

61

75

87

105

Contents

The literature which audits the performance of international aid in areas of crisis and disaster

is necessarily objective - by definition a literary accountancy, it must carefully balance its books. To the common citizen, however, aid is a subjective handshake pumped from the warmth of the peoples’ heart, and this book’s equilibrium is a rush of blood to the head. It is the tale of an architectural journey - grunting beneath its baggage - into the dizzy tropics of emergency housing, in post-tsunami Sri Lanka. Loaded with heavy ideas about regionalism, cultural awareness, and an ‘architecture for people’, it staggers and totters, and drops to its knees before - finally - regaining its feet. In preparing an article based on my Sri Lankan baptism for the magazine Architecture New Zealand in 2006, I am cheated by the numerical limit on words. Somewhere between the blink of a haiku and the yawn of War and Peace, there’s an appropriate length of text on such a subject. And an apposite point of view, in a story of a personal architecture.

G.M., Colombo, 2008

Still AirWellington, 2005

A journey, for examplebegins with a voicecalling your name outbehind you.

Anne Carson1

1 Glass, Irony, and God, Anne Carson, New Directions, 19926

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Boxing Day, 2004. Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand - the tongue of the sea and its terrible

thirst... Screened by a television, I’m anaesthetised. A horror movie, surely - a Hollywood jape? I lick the dryness from my lips. And - just like you - I empty the pocket to fill up the soul.

*

As the throat of Asia swallows its tsunami in enormous suffocating gulps, I sip a latte (trim milk) outside a cafe overlooking Cook’s Beach on New Zealand’s Coromandel peninsular, and the toll of a year’s endeavour ebbs away on the tide. Engrossed in the Kiwi summer ritual of beach, bach and bonhomie, my only plan is the extension of the moment, for as long as the sun might stretch its friendly smile. News of the deluge of that oriental coastline by a delinquent turn of its tide, however, clouds this moment in a thick and swirling mist. Cook’s Beach reveals a latent menace, hitherto unnoticed.

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*

In an age of casual international travel, the flight of fancy is a dream come true. Though scarcely understood, the cultural connection is all too easily made, and at the turn of the 21st century - on my Asian debut, and courtesy of a plodding carbon footprint - I trace the edges of the South China Sea, from south to north Vietnam. Disdaining Ho Chi Minh’s tourist warpath, I’m taken prisoner-of-peace, the voluntarily captive. I wear the coolie’s hat, and taste the Spring in the spring roll. Of the multitude of vessels that skim the shallow, silted waters of Hoi An, I favour the bright blue fishing boat with the fish-eye on its prow. Three years later, and a mere three months prior to that sudden tsunami - for a full ten days in October, 2004, at the onset of a belated, rite-of-passage to India - I cycle the coastal villages south of Goa, a parallel universe to suburban Whitiangi or the cliffs of Cook Strait. Though necessarily superficial, this brief flirtation with the Arabian Sea is sufficiently enduring to brutally enhance all subsequent media illustrations of the heave of heavy water. Caught in the painterly light of the inward eye, lines of fishing boats anchored in sand await dusk, and another lamplit night on damp horizons. Mornings carpet the beach in glistening silver fish, promptly vacuumed by the fishers’ wives and rolled-up for the market. And from undulating dunes, sari-hustling teenage girls giggle like irridescent ghosts. Though the coasts that make the news are further south, I can hear the roar of the Wave.

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*

Saddled with cash and cans of Coke, the Agencies of Relief - Oxfam, Red Cross, World Vision, USAid - mount their charging white horses. ‘In God we trust’, the powerful dollar notes - collateral to the lending of a hand. That it be paid our full attention, we pass the hat to pay the wages of virtue. Muttered allegations of the conditional aid of disaster capitalism are coyly dismissed as the spurious theories of conspiracy and cranks, and we return - content that Thy Good Work is done, or will be - to the good civilian’s modest occupation. Ensuing months recede like a spent tsunami.

*

Whilst my work is only loosely called architecture, I may accurately describe myself as an architect. Ambiguously derivative, this uneasy relationship is clarified by the statutes of another calling - law, and its lawyer. The architect is protected by an act of registration, leaving architecture - as it must - free to roam the streets. The intent of this legal safeguard shapes a level of professional competence in the technical and contractual aspects of the building process. Its assumed beneficiary is the architect’s willing victim, otherwise known as the client. Neglected (or - more precisely - unencumbered) by such invasive patronage, the culture of an architecture without architects finds its tradition in the complacent virtues of vernacular construction and folk art, and those rude coastal shelters of Asia fallen victim to the tsunami exemplify this category of building at its most basic level of utility and

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resources. Such insight is itself, of course, purely architectural, and the well-meaning intervention of a conscious architecture in such circumstances is generally assumed to be a fruitless - if not destructive - undertaking. Compelling evidence of a fluent, lower-case architectural language does exist, however, literally sidelined by its Upper-Case Discourse in a typeface of much smaller, thinner font. Notable examples of this marginilia include Christopher Alexander’s spectacular vernacular in Lima, Peru2, for example (way back in 1969), and the life’s work of the relatively obscure Laurie Baker3 (an Englishman at home in southern India) which - between them, and on opposite sides of the world - place architecture unflinchingly in the exalted company of tool-kits, indispensibly useful and sharply honed. The theory of A Pattern Language4, followed by its practice...

*

The architectural history of urgent housing - both temporary and permanent - is a catalogue of desperate opportunism, from the hard-nosed industrial chic of pre-cast concrete egg-crates and conical igloos, to the soft-eyed double-vision of folded cardboard domes and walls made of water-filled wine bottles. Architecture, it seems, treats a State of Emergency as a Utopian Declaration of permissible excess, like the fire alarm triggers a short, unscheduled playtime for bullies at a boarding school. Rough ‘em up quick, we have limited time! Which should not be confused with quick thinking. The role of an architecture - if there is one

2 Alexander’s entry in this international architectural competition for low-cost housing split the jury to such an extent that a minority of the panel declared his scheme the winner - an unprecedented, and unrepeated, phenomenon. See Ar-chitecural Design, May, 1970

3 That Laurie Baker is perceived as little more than an architectural eccentric is a crushing indictment on the values of mainstream architecture. See Laurie Bak-er: Life, Work, Writings, Gautam Bhatia, Viking, New Delhi, 1991

4 A Pattern Language, Christopher Alex-ander, Oxford University Press, New York, 1977

Christopher Alexander’s innovated vernacular detailing at Lima

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- in a fractured world of life-changing trauma is to support the recovery of a broken spirit, not lazily amputate in favour of prosthetics. It is servant to a powerless and vulnerable group of people, where the individual family is instantly reduced and re-shaped by forces beyond its control, and its community splintered and scattered. If not completely vanished, its dwellings - whether a candle-lit shanty with gaps in its rough-boarded walls, or a rough concrete villa with a cracked-tile roof - are irreparably damaged. Homelessness wants its house back, in a recognisable form.

*

The Wellington School of Architecture is running a final-year design course on the post-tsunami housing of southern Sri Lanka. The Convenor - a lecturer at the institution, and a native of what used to be Ceylon - plans a field trip to the island, along with twenty avid architecture students fund-raising a rort. I learn this from the esteemed Indian Student, an imported undergraduate from the Le Corbusier-designed College of Architecture in the city of Chandigarh, the Punjab’s celebrated, Le Corbusier-designed capital.5 The Indian Student is currently resident in Wellington to fulfil a complusory, six-month practical-experience component of his course, and - in search of a meaningful social life - has made appropriate connections within the drafty halls of the local architectural acadamie. He fully understands why this small item of news might be of interest to me - I once admonish both

5 Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh is known as ‘the beautiful city’ by Indians who have never been there.

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him and his peers for their collective ignorance of Jane Drew’s thoughtful low-cost terraced housing in Chandigarh6, just a few blocks down the tree-lined, Le Corbusier-designed boulevard from their hallowed in-situ concrete studios. Indian students are fully familiar, of course, with the Le Corbusier-designed High Court, his Parliament Building, his Secretariat, and his clumsy lump of sculpture, the Open Hand - this is, it seems, how architecture expects itself to work. Perhaps more significantly, the Indian Student knows of my respect for Laurie Baker. So - as attracted to a decent rort as any acquisitive student - I attach myself to this warm-blooded idea like a leech subsequently clings to my forearm in a Sri Lankan rubber plantation. I suck until I’m stuck, and the bloated pragmatist known as the Practising Architect - so beloved of the precocious baby architect - will kindly assist the Student until he himself may find more useful work. I’m the reality check on a real opportunity. I buy a ticket, on myself.

*

Serious business demands quality stationary. I choose a soft-bound A5 notebook from Whitcoulls, less prissy than the type hallowed by the memory of Bruce Chetwin but no less demanding of consistent graphic or literary standards. Basil Spence may have doodled his Beehive on a napkin7, but this is disaster architecture of quite another kind. Rendered in the cool of Wellington evenings, my urgent sketches of an imagined tropical house are immediately precise, and not - as might be

6 Le Corbusier designated the less glam-orous work at Chandigarh to his assis-tants. Jane Drew’s sensitive terraces of small houses (below) lining the edges of public courtyards are far more part of the life of the city than Corbusier’s isolated and inaccessible government buildings.

7 Basil Spence’s ‘napkin sketch’ for Wel-lington’s new parliament building - al-legedly drawn at the table of a State din-ner -.is probably an urban myth. Though publicly scorned as glib and superficial, the idea is privately enjoyed by many architects for its casual artistry

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expected - loose and impressionistic. I have the answers, it seems, to my own questions. The notebook reveals drawings of a small courtyard house that might easily, and variously, attach itself to others, and thus initiate - given the opportunity of a specific location - the incremental construction of a small community. I call it ‘TSUNAMI BOX’, and tentatively print this deliberately architectural title at the foot of each page in small capital letters as fragile as coral. Built of concrete blocks and clay-tiled, mono-pitched roofs, the rooms of the house are permanently open to an internal court and a jackfruit tree8, the latter ostentatiously highlighted by the green of a Resene pencil. The walled entrance may be arranged, if required, into a modest shop for supplementary income. Though drawn freehand, the images are carefully scaled at 1:100 - floor plan, cross-and- longitudinal sections, elevations, and an exploded axonometric. Diligent in assumptions but impatient of due process, they are frighteningly complete. Using local techniques, an experienced builder might usefully employ them, just as they are, without elaboration. Impatient for the journey, I leave myself behind.

8 The fruit of the jackfruit tree is highly valued as a staple food in sri lanka.

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