http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,4957067%255E12... Edification, not edifices By Phillip Adams August 24, 2002 DURING rites of national passage, we colonials discuss the appropriateness of the Australian flag. Is it right to leave the Union Jack stuck in the corner, like a postage stamp on a letter addressing our thoughts back to Britain? Or is it time to do something analogous to Canada, perhaps a eucalyptic counterpart to its maple leaf? During the bicentenary, any number of brave and bold alternatives were proposed, including . . . a Dicky's towel. It was my suggestion that we unfurl a well-worn, rather frayed Dicky's on which could be seen the oily imprint of a basted sunbather, the body impressed on the fabric like the image of Jesus on the Shroud of Turin. But I had to acknowledge that Mike Leunig's idea was better. What he wanted to see, waving proudly in the wind, was a sheet of galvo. Specifically, rusty galvo. Here, for the first time in history, was a flag that wouldn't need any wind to flutter in. Mike's galvanised effort would remain tumescent on even a windless day. But Leunig isn't the only person to have put galvo up the flagpole to see who saluted. The architect Glenn Murcutt is as much a man of iron as the sainted Ned Kelly or those muscular young men who run around in Kellogg's Nutri-Grain commercials. While others agonise over the national identity as it's expressed in film, theatre, poetry or painting, Murcutt tries to keep the flag flying the galvo flag in architecture. And because he's chosen to build houses rather than corporate HQs or five-star hotels (Murcutt expresses a strong preference for the horizontal over the vertical) he's done a lot less damage to the landscape than most in his profession. Which is one of the reasons he was recently anointed the 2002 Pritzker architecture prize laureate. No small thing, given that it was brought into being to "fill a hole" in the Nobel prizes. Murcutt's latest accolade led to a brief encounter on the stage of the Sydney Town Hall. I was asked to interview him on his career in front of a live audience, and we were astonished when 1500 people turned up, thus proving that architecture is increasingly significant in public debate. Just between us, architects worry me. Too many of the best and brightest recall the central character in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, being almost fascist in their authoritarianism. One Australian example (I won't mention his name because he's notoriously litigious) was responsible for one of our most important buildings and, on its completion, issued instructions for all who worked within. No one on the premises would be permitted to put anything personal in their workspace. The great man would choose the knick-knacks that would go on his desks in his offices in his building. I learned this in a letter from one of his victims complaining that she felt as if she were working in a prison. Like ambitious generals or Machiavellian bureaucrats, architects have always needed powerful patrons. They've attached themselves to pharaohs or kings or popes or tycoons or, like Albert Speer to Hitler, to dictators. Architects see themselves at the top of the cultural food chain. Not only do their buildings dwarf all other works of art making them hard to avoid but they're almost invariably an expression of cultural, political, religious or financial dominance. Yet architects, for all their self-importance, are mendicants to and boosters of the mighty. They are lap dogs to the top dogs in any given society. Murcutt is fortunate to escape this world of the all powerful. Unlike Speer, he doesn't need to be a Uriah Heep to a madman or to the other little Hitlers who, all too often, run companies or countries. He's one of the handful of architects, along with Frank Lloyd Wright, who's better known for buildings of a more domestic scale. Since Imhotep built that massive tomb for Zoser, a 5th-dynasty pharoah, famous architects have been linked with the mighty buildings pyramids, palaces, parliaments, town halls, basilicas and skyscrapers of the mighty. In historical terms, of course, these are the buildings that last. The igloo, as elegant a shape as an egg, tends to melt. The Tambaran houses of Papua New Guinea, built from leaves and branches, quickly rot in the tropical conditions. And the homes of ancient Romans and Greeks weren't as durable as the marble temples. Like the wolf huffing and puffing at the homes of the three little pigs, time huffs and puffs at the houses of humanity and they are lost forever. So if Murcutt has noble predecessors, we don't know their names. Yet their rewards have been significant, principally the avoidance of political or ideological brutalism. And if you want to think how political architecture can be, think of the immense controversies that raged over the recent rebuilding of Berlin, and at the growing controversy in New York over what to do at ground zero. Where, as in the attempt to destroy the Pentagon, architectural and cultural symbolism were turned against themselves. Should New Yorkers get their old skyline back, as many of them want? I put this question to Murcutt. And he answered by talking about the monument to the Americans who died in the Vietnam War that great diagonal slab of black marble covered with an endless list of names. He regarded it as miraculous the design had survived the disapproval it attracted. Horizontal rather than vertical. Grim rather than romantic. Murcutt would like to see something similar replace the World Trade Centre. But given Manhattan real estate prices, don't hold your breath. Murcutt's designs echo the feelings of the simple buildings he knew in PNG as a child or saw on Australian farms after his family had moved here. And that's where much of his work began, as extrapolations from barns and shearing sheds into houses that are open to the environment, the scenery, the wind. Some of his buildings sit in the landscape quite assertively, like windmills in a paddock. But others seem to hide, as camouflaged as bush critters. Well done, Glenn Murcutt. Long may your galvo flag flutter. Well done also jya for recent expose and Cryptome,a shining cypherpunk light on the hill.