Struggling to choose where to begin writing about this city, I decided I'd break the ice with something just a little bit topical. I want to talk about a building that, if unlikely to be described as conventionally handsome, has its own loyal fan base, and whose days, for better or worse, are likely numbered.
You are looking at the Total Carpark, also known as Total House. If you don't know it, you'll find it at the corner of Russell and Little Bourke. This heroically clunky structure was designed in 1964 by Bernard Joyce of Bogle Banfield and Associates. The Total has been on my mind since reading late last year that this site has been purchased by a Shanghai developer who plans to erect a 60 storey something-or-other here. Truthfully, I don't know how broad the Total's appeal is - probably not very; but design-savvy types seem to be fond of it, and the office structure that floats above the parking slabs (traditionally likened to a giant TV set) has, for a long time, been home to a good number of architecture and design practices.
Personally, I am fond of the Total and will miss it, but I don't particularly want to get into heritage protection or town planning issues in this blog. (If you are interested in the democratic angle, or just want to keep abreast of current heritage issues, the folk at Melbourne Heritage Action are right across it.) The questions I'm more interested in exploring are questions like why I, or others I meet, are attracted to particular buildings, why these buildings look the way they do, and what, if they speak to us, they seem to be saying.
Whether you love, hate or have no feelings at all about the Total Carpark, may to some degree depend on how you feel about the style or movement known as 'Brutalism' (or more specifically, Japanese Brutalism - but more on that later). The Total doesn't really fit the standard image of a Brutalist building - and in fact I think that's what charms me about it, but I think the best way to understand what this building, or any building, is trying to say to us, is to begin by looking at the wider context.
Brutalism has a bit of an only-a-mother-could-love reputation, which is worth examining further, but first, here are some shots of another Melbourne building that probably better fits the stereotypical/postcard image of Brutalism - This is the Plumbers and Gasfitters Union Building on Victoria Street. This is Brutalism in the '70s.
One of the difficulties with describing Brutalism is that it was popular (among architects, if not among people) over several decades - 1950s through to early 1980s in some cases - and across several continents, producing a diverse range of examples. Its forms vary between the outlandishly sculptural and the grimly utilitarian, with assoications ranging from socialism to sci-fi, and from public universities to public urination. Some things with which Brutalism is rarely associated include commercialism, laissez-faire economics, laughter, irony and puppy dogs. That bit about public urination, by the way, refers to the reputation of some of the social housing projects that were delivered in the Brutalist manner in the 1960s - particularly in the UK, and about which Prince Charles had this to say: "You have to give this much to the Luftwaffe, when it knocked down our buildings, it didn't replace them with anything more offensive than rubble." The word Brutalism, by the way, comes from French 'béton brut' meaning 'raw concrete'.
Just for the Prince of Wales, here are a couple of English Brutalist icons:
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| Grimly sculptural: London's National Theatre. Note that English Brutalism particularly is characterised by the grey-on-grey effect of raw concrete and drizzly weather. Brutalism looks best in arid climates. I do actually really like this building. |
The Total Carpark doesn't particularly resemble either of the classics above, but it's nice to have a bit of global context. Coming home to Melbourne then, the architects of the Total Carpark are said to have been influenced, in particular, by Japanese Brutalism. The building below is a museum designed by Kiyonori Kikutake (1960), and seems like a very likely source for the Total.
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It is worth observing that a number of Japanese examples like this one by Kikutake seem to incorporate - alongside the chunky/blocky/heavy elements that are the hallmark of Brutalism (and tend to give Brutalist buildings a sort of forbidding, fortress-like appearance) - a somewhat more delicate aspect. Even those huge beams and columns at the front seem vaguely reminiscent of traditional Japanese timber construction (the kind of thing architects today go nuts for). These two buildings below are by Kenzo Tange: The Kagawa Prefectural Government Building (1958) and Tange's own house (1953). The concrete-as-a-metaphor-for-timber idea is quite apparent here.
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| (Click images to view source) |
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To say that the Total Carpark shares this dainty/delicate aspect is probably straining a bit hard; but you can see, if you look back at the first photo, how the Total achieves, similarly to Kikutake and Tange, a sense of floating horizontal planes, by means of floors that are cantilevered (not supported at the ends or edges, i.e., projecting out into space) in both directions. If you look at the underside of the office bit (the TV), you can see that, like the Japanese examples, the Total features beams that appear to cross each other at the corners - emphasising this 2-way cantilever business.
The fact that this is one of the Total's most sensitive features has clearly eluded whoever added that snake of metal ducting (presumably to serve the spiky crown of telecom things you can see on the roof). If I get around to it, I might do a whole post on this sort of vandalism.
This sort of structural exhibitionism (the exposed crossed-beams and daring cantilevers) is quite a common feature of Brutalist architecture. One aspect of this structural emphasis is simply a "Look at what we can do with modern building technology" thing, which has had a place in architecture forever and continues to be pursued with undiminished enthiusiasm (think of the Beijing's CCTV tower by Rem Koolhaas); but there is another aspect of this which seems more particular to Brutalism (whether we're talking about early '60s utilitarian or late '70s sculptural fantasy), and has a lot to do with not wanting to dress buildings up - not wanting to give them façades. The vibe is deliberately cold and direct: "You are looking at the brutal truth of this building". Even where the forms seem arbitrary sculptural and a little bit Star Wars (see Plumbers and Gasfitters Union building above), you'll often find that the architect had some dubious functional justifcation for why that particular room needed to be hanging out in space. Here is a building at Melbourne University that illustrates this point. The architect decided to save space by allowing the lecture theatres' tiered seating to thrust out into space so that you can walk underneath it.
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| Beautiful |
While I was at Melbourne Uni, I also took this next photo. (Universities have always been good testing grounds for new architectural ideas, and Brutalism is no exception):
I can't imagine what functional justification this second example might have had, but it really doesn't matter. The important thing about these structural gymnastics and this 'honest' functional expressionism is that they are a symbol of what you might call 'brave modernity'. And the more bizarre and sculptural these structural forms become, the more we move over form 'brave modernity' into 'brave futurism'.
It is important that Brutalist buildings over-emphasise this 'modernity' aspect, because the modernity aspect has to work against that other important aspect of Brutalism - the heavy, chunky, concrete thing. Clearly, you have to work hard to make your building look modern and progressive when it is built like a mediaeval fortress.
To explain where this heavy concrete look came from, we need to talk about one of history's biggest architectural stars - Le Corbusier.
Going back a bit, 'brave modernity' was already in full swing during the decades prior to World War II, but it was not Brutalist. After the First World War, European avant-garde architects were ready to wipe away history and rebuild the world from scratch. The buildings Le Corbusier and others designed were pure, gleaming white prisms - light, bright, and thoroughly sanitised. Rather than express the thickness of walls, the effect was to show that with the aid of a modern steel or concrete frame, your walls could in effect be paper thin white membranes, or just glass. These two photos are of the Bauhaus School in Dessau, designed by Walter Gropius (completed 1926).
Moving forward a couple of decades, Le Corbusier gave birth to Brutalism almost inadvertently, when he was forced to use cheap concrete rather than expensive steel for his Unité d'Habitation (a 17-storey housing block) in Marseille in cash-strapped 1947. Le Corbusier fell in love with the material, and likened the rough texture of raw concrete, with all the lines, holes and other marks left by the formwork (the timber used to create moulds for the poured concrete), to wrinkles and other imperfections in human skin. He started to talk about creating beauty out of ugliness, and there is a raw, primal quality to much of his work after this time. It is almost as though, following World War II, the gleaming white optimism of the 1920s had been chastened somewhat or altogether replaced by something that, at least in some of Le Corbusier's work, manifested a sort of air-raid shelter-cum-monastery aesthetic. Every Brutalist building with its clunky, sober concrete (or sometimes brick) walls, can be traced back to this:
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| Le Corbusier's Unite d'Habitation, Marseille |
If you are finding it difficult to see how the Total Carpark fits into this picture, the fact that its long concrete balustrades have been painted a dark aquamarine blue probably isn't helping. To get the proper raw-concrete effect, you need to look at it from the east where, unfortunately, you miss out on the structural cantilevering discussed earlier:
Below is a photo from the State Library of Victoria collection, showing the Total as it once looked. This photo makes it look like the whole thing was painted white, but I wonder if that's just a problem with the exposure. I had expected to learn that the whole thing was once just unpainted concrete. I'd love it if somebody could confirm this for me.
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| Instagram fans, eat your hearts out. |
What I love about this photo - and I think the effect is successful whether it's raw concrete or a sparkling coat of white paint we're looking at - is that it captures the sort of heroic spirit I was referring to earlier when I used the phrase 'brave futurism'. To me, this image speaks of a time of visionaries who knew what was good for you - and, goodness knows, Brutalism was tough medicine. Here is a vision of a high-tech future - perfectly controlled, gloriously and brutally efficient and unsentimentally rational.
Retuning to Le Corbusier, it is perhaps a little bit easier to understand this sort of tough-love utopianism in the context of war-ravaged Europe. I'm hazy on how Brutalism took hold in Japan, but I believe Tange was a Le Corbusier fan, and, while I can't pretend to know what the mood was like in Japan in the years following WWII, It is easy to imagine that a mode like Brutalism, which seems to say, "I'm damaged and scarred, but here I stand, gazing boldly into the future", might have had some resonance.
Notwithstanding both the Total's remoteness from any post-apocalyptic setting, and the minor alterations that have muddied its Brutalistic aspect, this building still holds a steely, heroic gaze. That the 'gaze' metaphor keeps pressing me owes, I think, to the somewhat anthropomorphic effect of the cantilevered office block. The Total really looks like it has a face:
There is a wonderful disjunction between the grimy car park and the office block which mysteriously floats above it - a disjunction that is amplified by the offices' expansive, glass curtain-wall, which contrasts Brutalism's rough concrete aesthetic with the sleek, glassy language of mid-century corporate confidence. The awkwardness is almost sublime.
In this and other ways, the Total Carpark is perhaps a slightly awkward example of a Brutalist building, and its details are not always the most elegant. But I'm beginning to realise that this aspect of awkwardness is actually contributing to what I like about this building - the sense of a struggle with its surroundings. A sense of struggle is, I suppose, sort of part and parcel of Brutalism anyway; but the Total is not just at odds with an imaginary apocalypse, or a crumbling bourgeois world, it is at odds with a city that has no 'crumbling bourgeois' issues, and doesn't really need any bold, heroic visions, thanks all the same.
Yes, the Total Carpark is a bit of a sore thumb, but that's exactly why I hope it hangs around for a while yet. I find beauty in its unsolicited, awkward, quixotic futurism. Melbourne is, after all, a city of sore thumbs - people love this city for its diversity of architectural voices, and I feel that the Total has something unique and valuable to add to the Babel-scape.
Of course, time has a disfiguring effect on futuristic visions, and in its dense urban setting (Brutalist buildings are generally most at ease standing alone on a grassy hill somewhere), a building like the Total could perhaps evoke for you more of a grimy, cyberpunk feel - or some other association I haven't thought of. For me though, the bold, heroic image is still what wins out. I smile whenever I look up at that glassy robot face, gazing bravely into the future. It is an image of a mad, uncompromising vision in a city that never asked for one.
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