Between Art and Garbage

Every artistic form is the expression of something spiritual, something that relates to the soul … Thus it is also spiritual things that determine the modern industrial architect.
—Adolf Behne, Pathetiker und Logiker im Industriebau, 1913

Even to look at it under a clear blue sky, when there is little in the weather to encourage irrational flights of fancy, there is something about the Willoughby Incinerator, a distinctive 1930s industrial building set in suburban parkland on Sydney’s north shore, that sets the imagination in motion. From this nebulous air of mystery the Walter Burley Griffin–designed incinerator emerges as something of an exceptional case, for it’s not often these days that we look to the buildings of industry as exemplars of inspirational architecture. But rewind a century, to another time and another place, and a different story emerges.

Take Milan at the beginning of the twentieth century, an ancient city in the midst of industrialisation. A fresh arrival makes a note in his diary. ‘I want to paint the new,’ he writes, ‘the fruit of our industrial times.’[1] From this impulse come hundreds of modestly sized sketches that translate the industrial buildings, power plants and electricity stations of the surrounding suburbs into monumental, cathedral-like forms, seething with latent energy. The young man is Antonio Sant’Elia, an unknown graduate of architecture who, in 1914, after a fateful encounter with the doyen of futurism, F.T. Marinetti, published his drawings for a new industrial city under the title The Manifesto of Futurist Architecture. The accompanying text, which recent scholarship attributes to Marinetti, states the conditions of a modern industrial architecture, declaring: ‘we must invent and rebuild the Futurist city like an immense and tumultuous shipyard, agile, mobile and dynamic in every detail’.[2]

By the end of 1916, the creator of the sketches of la Citta Nuova (the New City), still two years shy of his thirtieth birthday, was dead. Killed in battle in the First World War, the prodigious young architect was never to see his visions for a new industrial architecture realised in built form, although his association with the futurists immortalised Sant’Elia as an inspiration to generations of architects, artists and designers.

The tragedy of Sant’Elia’s fate aside, what strikes the reader today is the anachronistic nature of his desire. The plethora of industrial buildings that went up in the first half of the twentieth century, ‘the fruit of our industrial times’, may indeed have transformed society in their function but their aesthetic value no longer draws such enthusiastic praise. Yet it was just this type of idealism that came to characterise the Utopian enterprise of many of the key thinkers in modernist architecture. ‘Work must be established in palaces that give the workman, now a slave to industrial labor, not only light, air and hygiene but also an indication of the great common idea that drives everything,’[3] implored architect and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius in his 1911 lecture, Monumental Art and Industry. The same transcendental impulse coursed through the architecture of Peter Behrens, mentor to the young Gropius, whose monolithic Turbine Factory responded to the symbolism and kinetic energy of power generation on a scale to rival the great cathedrals and abbeys of Europe.

It is not my intention here to chart how the ideals of the likes of Sant’Elia, Gropius and Behrens impacted the unfolding of twentieth-century modernist design. Rather, I present their stories to illuminate a certain type of architectural expression that in Griffin’s Willoughby Incinerator appears peculiar but in fact represents a logical fusion of the industrial and the spiritual in an unconventional chapter of the architect’s career. Still remembered by most Australians as the designer of the city plan for Canberra, Griffin, for the most part, was not particularly aligned with the radicalism of his modernist peers. Yet in his foray into industrial architecture, he too was to embrace the ideal that not only could this type of building prove aesthetically innovative but could also actively contribute to the betterment of society.

In the late 1920s Griffin was offered a most unusual commission. Invited to submit a design for an incinerator plant to be built on the site of an unpopular rubbish tip in the Victorian suburb of Essendon, Griffin devised a structure that was charming in its near ecclesiastical appearance. From this initial design Griffin, along with his architectural partner Eric Nicholls, went on to build thirteen such incinerators in suburbs in Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia, the ACT and Queensland.

Today, half the incinerators designed by Griffin and Nicholls have been demolished. But at Willoughby, on a site not far from the suburb of Castlecrag where the Griffins made an indelible mark with their experimental housing projects, the incinerator—generally praised as among the finest surviving examples, is being restored after years of neglect. At the time of writing, a refurbishment of the Willoughby Incinerator involving a conversion into an exhibition space, artist studio and café is about 60 per cent complete and scheduled for completion by early 2011. Not only does this restoration bring the story of the incinerators into the twenty-first century, inviting reflection on their mysterious origins, but it also coincides with a period of increased focus on the fate of industrial relics as a growing number of structures, once harbingers of the future, now face an uncertain future.

Like many industrial buildings, the Griffin incinerators were cutting edge at the time of building only to become redundant within a matter of decades. This speedy descent into obsolescence stemmed from the fact the buildings represented a specific solution to the urban dilemma posed by waste disposal as population growth in the 1920s and 1930s placed serious pressure on local rubbish tips. When an engineer named John Boadle, from Moonee Ponds in Melbourne, patented a revolutionary form of garbage disposal in 1926, his design attracted interest from a number of councils. In Boadle’s reverberatory incineration unit, garbage was heated to such a temperature that smoke and gases were deflected, resulting in markedly lower emissions and what appeared, at the time at least, to be a relatively clean method of waste disposal.

In 1929 Essendon City Council decided to take up the technology and build its own plant. It was quickly realised the planned incinerator’s close proximity to houses called for an aesthetically pleasing building, not too industrial in its outward appearance. Thinking laterally, Griffin looked to an unlikely source of inspiration for his design. He returned to the features of the Peters House, a renowned Prairie-style residence he designed in Chicago in 1906 not longer after leaving the office of Frank Lloyd Wright, translating its geometric, diamond windows and steep tent ceiling into a new, industrial context. This marriage of a domestic style with an industrial structure proved a winning combination that was repeated in later incinerators, including the design for the plant at Willoughby built in 1934, and became a valuable selling point that helped Griffin and Nicholls secure future contracts.

It is hard to imagine today that a measure of sincere idealism, not unlike Gropius’s conviction that industrial buildings should give a sense of the ‘great common idea that drives everything,’ could be expressed in the design of a garbage incineration plant. But according to historian Alasdair McGregor, who charts the architectural achievements of Griffin and his wife, talented architect and fellow American Marion Mahony, in his 2009 biography Grand Obsessions:

the incinerators were an extraordinary element in the Griffin saga. The fact they had this wonderful, playful inventiveness in their design that was applied in such an integral way rather than just as decoration on a building meant it all became a part of the whole. It is the whole flavour of these buildings in trying to convey a dignity greater than their actual function that makes them, I think, really significant.[4]

Yet the incinerators had a serious downside. Despite offering a considerable improvement in worker conditions and comparatively lower emissions, this was still not enough to compensate for the fact the incinerators did emit smoke, which could hardly go unnoticed when they were located in the middle of residential suburbs. In a written statement Willoughby City Council General Manager Nick Tobin explains: ‘the [Willoughby] Incinerator was never popular with local residents, due to smoke and odour issues which forced its closure in 1967. A campaign to save the building from demolition commenced in 1968 and it was the Mayor’s casting vote that saved the building from demolition.’

It’s a stance even Griffin and Mahony themselves would have understood, given they were both passionate nature conservationists. This passion found its fullest expression in their idealistic residential development at Castlecrag, while the recent establishment of Griffin’s reputation as a notable landscape architect complicates our understanding of his and Mahony’s feelings towards the incinerator commissions.

The conundrum is tackled by McGregor in Grand Obsessions where he notes that, when it came to the proposal for an incinerator at a parkland site in Sydney’s Moore Park (moved eventually to the harbourside suburb of Pyrmont), ‘the involvement of Griffin of all people … strikes a jarring note’,[5] an uncharacteristic compromise attributable perhaps to the paucity of work and financial squeeze of the Depression. But in a telephone conversation McGregor counters this by pointing out that the incinerator, ‘when it became a reality was this almost triumphing of art over necessity, which is what is extraordinary about these buildings’.

Mahony likewise praised the architectural achievements of the incinerators in exultant terms in her memoir, The Magic of America. Writing specifically of the soaring Pyrmont Incinerator, built in 1935, Mahony asserted the building ‘will stand, we think, as an historical record of twentieth century architecture … as beautiful, as majestic, as unique as any of the historical records of the past.’[6] Her comment elucidates the fact that, despite having a function that must have caused them both some displeasure, the pair still clearly envisaged their incinerators as modern-day monuments, undertaken with the loftiest of ambitions.

The beautiful and majestic dimensions of the incinerators lay, to some extent at least, in the opportunities they afforded Griffin to further experiment with the building material that came to obsess the architect over the course of his career: reinforced concrete. Noted scholar Jeffrey Turnbull, who will soon publish a study on the architecture of Griffin’s Newman College, points out that the use of reinforced concrete in the incinerators was a continuation of a fascination that was sown early in Griffin’s development as an architect.

‘At the time he was at the University of Illinois, Griffin studied at the engineering hall under a professor who was at the leading edge of reinforced concrete beam design. It would seem that was exciting for him and he certainly studied everything he could about reinforced concrete,’ says Turnbull. His passion ignited, Griffin came to envisage concrete as ‘a new material for a new age. He believed in the idea that a new architecture would emerge out of new techniques. He waxed eloquent about the attributes of reinforced concrete when he submitted his Canberra design and said it was the most inexpensive, most plastic and the most modern of materials.’[7]

Of course the connection between concrete and a ‘new architecture’ for a ‘new age’ was to become a catch-cry of modernists of the likes of Gropius and Le Corbusier. However, where Griffin might have shared their enthusiasm for its architectural properties he was never to embrace the austerity and the break from tradition that the more iconoclastic pioneers rallied for so intensely. The futurists expressed their distaste for ornamental references to past styles in terms positively vitriolic: ‘The new beauty of cement and iron are profaned by the superimposition of motley decorative incrustations that cannot be justified either by constructive necessity or by our (modern) taste, and whose origins are Egyptian, Indian or Byzantine antiquity and in that idiotic flowering of stupidity and impotence that took the name of neoclassicism.’[8]

Whether or not Griffin was familiar with the writings of the futurists can only be speculated upon, but such a statement would undoubtedly have left the architect cold. On the contrary, and as McGregor’s earlier comment indicates, decorative elements were integral to much of Griffin and Mahony’s architecture, including the incinerators. References to the pre-Columbian architecture of Central America proved a common thread among a number of them, and was particularly striking in the Pyrmont Incinerator, which also incorporated ornamental tiles featuring blood-like patterns now interpreted as a visual expression of the Griffins’ fascination with the esoteric spiritual movement of anthroposophy.[9]

At Willoughby, the application of exterior detailing is more restrained than it was at Pyrmont but just as elegant. Here, a streamlined diamond-like pattern cascades down the chimney and along a number of prismatic concrete appendages, mirroring the breaking down of matter that took place via the process of reverberatory incineration inside the building. In a paper on the sources of their work, Turnbull argues the decorative had the effect of humanising the Griffins’ architecture and is one of the main reasons their work has endured and grown in appreciation in recent years. For unlike the ‘value-free and disembodied’ buildings of the modernists, ‘the Griffins’ architecture of inclusion was vague enough, yet extensive enough, to mean something to everybody who experienced it’.[10]

Just what kind of response, then, might the Willoughby Incinerator and its unconventional architectural charms elicit from a visitor today? As the building now stands in a ruinous state, albeit a temporary phase in its path towards full restoration, at the time of writing there is something both thrilling and unsettling about its decay. In the post-industrial age, it seems industrial ruins teetering on the verge of collapse have become romantic. In the writings of Manchester-based author Tim Edensor, they are positively pleasurable, as ‘moving through ruined space can foreground a sharp awareness of the materiality of things that are usually maintained or disposed of. The ruin feels very different to urban space, rebukes the unsensual erasure of multiple tactilities, smells, sounds and sights.’[11]

When the Willoughby Incinerator was temporarily opened to the public in late September 2009 to host a ten-day sculpture prize, visitors were free to wander through its three levels for the first time in years. The council’s Nick Tobin suggests their curious responses reveal just how far community attitudes have changed towards a building that was once denigrated as an ill-fitting industrial eyesore, fit for demolition. ‘During the group exhibition tours, questions arose regarding Griffin, the incinerator and its function over time,’ Tobin explains. ‘Comments by interested parties during the refurbishment have been very enthusiastic with the typical questions being “when will the building open?” and “will it be accessible to the public?”’

The refurbishment process is invariably one that involves much ‘cleaning up’. And when the building reopens permanently, much of the evidence of its decay—visible at the time of the sculpture prize in the form of graffiti, peeled paint, material corrosion, weeds and the like—will be gone. But according to Tobin, ‘some of the existing patina of the building will be retained. It adds to the character and maintains the story of the building’s life.’ Heritage consultants, too, have incorporated interpretive elements intended to allow visitors to visualise how the building once operated. While the renowned Sydney artist Richard Goodwin has been enlisted to install a major artwork at the entrance to its new lift, his design of faceted triangles prompted by Griffin’s original exterior detailing.

These interpretive features aside, no doubt there is also a certain novelty for visitors in knowing that the building which now houses a comfortable café and art space was once the site of an incineration unit that reduced mountains of garbage refuse to cinders. It may be on a relatively small scale, but this adaptive re-use strategy is in keeping with international trends as industrial buildings the world over have proved prime candidates for architectural conversions into art and museum spaces since the 1980s. As Kenneth Powell points out, ‘recycled buildings generate a spontaneous excitement that challenges designers of new museums’.[12] A most striking example is the hulking 200-metre-long brick-clad Bankside Power Station, which now welcomes an influx of thousands of visitors everyday as home to London’s Tate Modern.

The conversion of the Willoughby Incinerator follows the successful adaptation of the Essendon Incinerator into an arts complex and the Ipswich Incinerator—coincidentally the only Griffin structure built in Queensland—as the long-standing home of a community theatre troupe. The flexibility of the incinerators is in keeping with Griffin’s overall design philosophy, suggests Turnbull, who points out that, as an architect, Griffin ‘loved permanence. Frank Lloyd Wright talked about buildings being ephemeral but Griffin didn’t agree. Griffin liked the idea of something being multipurpose in its function, so his buildings were always robust and could take changes in function, they’re big enough and solid enough to take that. I don’t think he would have minded the incinerator technology becoming obsolete so that a new use would have to be found.’[13]

The many industrial buildings of the first half of the twentieth century, then, the ‘fruit of our industrial times’, may not have become monuments in the sense of lasting forever as their early proponents such as Gropius and Behrens had so optimistically intended. It was largely unforeseeable that technology would evolve and move on so quickly. But those industrial relics still standing remain monumental in the sense of serving a commemorative function, as physical links to intangible memories of a not so distant industrial past.

The handful of surviving Griffin incinerators also serve as monuments to the power of vision and what can be achieved when an artistic goal is applied to even the most mundane of functions. Griffin could easily have made his incinerators quite ordinary; perhaps no-one would have minded. But he didn’t. Instead, he left us with a truly unique series of industrial structures that one imagines even the futurists, despite their distrust of ‘motley decorative incrustations’, might happily endorse, for the incinerators were surely ‘agile, mobile and dynamic in every detail’.

Notes

1. Diary entry from Antonio Sant’Elia, quoted in Terry Kirk, The Architecture of Modern Italy: Visions of Utopia 1900–Present, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2005, p. 43. Back to article

2. Antonio Sant’Elia, ‘Manifesto of Futurist Architecture 1914,’ in U. Apollonio (ed.), Futurist Manifestos, Thames & Hudson, London, 1973, p. 170. Back to article

3. Walter Gropius, ‘Monumental Art and Industry,’ as quoted in Reyner Banham, A Concrete Atlantis: U.S. Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture 1900–1925, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1986, p. 198. Back to article

4. Phone interview with Alasdair McGregor, October 2009. Back to article

5. Alasdair McGregor, Grand Obsessions: The Life and Work of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin, Penguin, Melbourne, 2009, p. 428. Back to article

6. Marion Mahony quoted in Donald Leslie Johnson, The Architecture of Walter Burley Griffin, Macmillan, Melbourne, 1977, p. 125. Back to article

7. Phone interview with Jeffrey Turnbull, November 2009. Back to article

8. Sant’Elia, ‘Manifesto of Futurist Architecture 1914’, p. 160. Back to article

9. The Griffins’ association with anthroposophy is explained in James Weirick’s essay ‘Spiritualism and Symbolism in the Work of the Griffins’, in Anne Watson (ed.), Beyond Architecture: Marion Mahony and Walter Burley Griffin—America, Australia, India, Powerhouse Publishing, Haymarket, NSW, 1998. Back to article

10. Jeffrey Turnbull, ‘A Reading of the Griffins’ Early Australian Work’, in P.Y. Navaretti and J. Turnbull (eds), The Griffins in India and Australia: The Complete Works and Projects of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 1998, p. 61. Back to article

11. Tim Edensor, ‘Waste Matter—the Debris of Industrial Ruins and the Disordering of the Material World’, Journal of Material Culture, vol. 10, no. 3 (2005), p. 325. Back to article

12. Kenneth Powell, Architecture Reborn: The Conversion and Reconstruction of Old Buildings, Laurence King, London, 1999, p. 14. Back to article

13. Phone interview with Jeffrey Turnbull. Back to article