Hospitality

(on the work of Bruce Rickard)

Two recursive clichés haunt the reception of Bruce Rickard's residential work: the buildings are said to be `great party houses,' and, in them, there is said to be an `integration of architecture and nature.' Clichés have a habit of shutting down inquiry. With a cliché, there is no more to be said. Yet the evidence of Rickard's architecture—that the work endures, that it remains fresh and sustains contemporary engagement—might suggest otherwise. In this essay I would like to say more by unraveling these two clichés. I would like to do this by way of the architecture itself—that is, by way of the spatial, formal, material and tectonic qualities indexed in three key houses: the Curry House 2 at 5 Pindari Place, Bayview (1980); the Marshall House 2 at 61 Gordon Street, Clontarf (1965-7); and the Rickard House 1 (Evatt House) at 51 Finlay Road, Warrawee (1960).

Party

It is worth recalling that the word `party'—in the common sense of gathering for social pleasure—dates from the seventeenth century. Before that, the term meant a part, portion or share resulting from separation, division or spacing-out. The lexicon that flows from the word is instructive: apart, counterpart, depart, department, impart, parti, particle, partition, repartition, tripartite. A party is a divided part; a collectivity set-apart—as in a `search party' or an infantry `division.' Hence also the sense of departure, of taking leave (from a whole) in order to form a separable part, a department—all from the prepositional (hence spatial) etymological root *per, forward, through, toward, before, across, beyond; or *fer, to bear, carry (away). An allied sense comes from the cognate etymon *wer(t), to turn or bend (away, toward and against), Latin versus, the action of one party against another—that is, to become partes extra partes (`parts beyond parts'; a part as an external thing, independent from another): a counterpart, a conversant. `To party' then means to share, to participate in a conversation, a collective event—to let oneself go into that departure, into that leaving.

Visiting these three houses again, so many years later, I couldn't help thinking of Luchino Visconti's monumental ball scene in the 1963 film The Leopard—with Rickard something of a latter-day Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, moving from room to room, conversation to conversation, waltz partner to waltz partner, surveying his domain, taking pleasure in the enjoyment of his guests. The parallel is thoroughly fanciful of course: Don Corbela is an aristocrat living the impending demise of a world and an era. In the film, atmospheres of melancholia and loss are palpable through the decorous, regional sumptuousness of every setting, every moment and every musical interlude. By contrast, Rickard was living through, and at the same time producing, something of a renaissance in Australian architecture through the 1960s and 1970s. What may be common, though—what Rickard might share with the Prince of Salina—is this double characteristic of observation and pleasure taken in the enjoyment of others: what Buddhism calls mudita,[1] `altruistic joy.' Mudita is one of four sublime states of mind (or `divine abodes,' brahma vihara), the other three being loving-kindness, compassion and equanimity; together with their extended virtues of magnanimity, tolerance, generosity, friendliness, and compassion.

The antonym of mudita, of course, is Shadenfreude: the pleasure derived from the misfortune of others—a curiously pervasive mood across contemporary popular media, but antithetical to my recollection of Rickard's natural disposition. A Buddhist by sympathy if not practice, Rickard was by all accounts non-judgmental, with a genuinely open fascination for people as individual characters—living beings with opinions and beliefs, qualities and foibles, mannerisms and gestures, turns of phrase and resonances. He was curious and passionate about the passions of others—what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins would have called their inscape, their internal cartography; and he was above all interested in them.

Rickard’s education, training and practice extended across landscape, planning and architecture. In his studies, he drew substantially from pivotal international figures— Sid Ancher in Sydney, Lewis and Gideon in London, Philip Johnson and, notably, Ian McHarg in Pittsburgh. The ecological land planning approaches of McHarg found their way into Rickard's own investigative processes of mapping, categorizing, inventorying and listing. This became a pivotal habitus in the practice of Bruce Rickard & Associates, Architects, Landscape Architects, Ecological Planners. Overlaying maps of different conditions - ecology, physical land data, land use, climate - frames design opportunities. As described in an office pamphlet, it "allows such questions as what do you want? Where are the major sites for urbanization? Where are the sites for future urban growth? to be answered."[2] The approach is radically cast in specificity - design solutions are prompted by and emerge in the interstices between such layers, as conditions of propensity or mutual suitability that suggest and impose themselves with the force of logic, with a rigor integral to place and capable of driving urban, architectural and landscape propositions.[3]

In sole practice from 1954 Rickard engaged with the avant garde of the day—Harry Howard, Bruce McKenzie, Neville Gruzman, Bill Lucas, Colin Madigan. He shared offices with Harry Seidler and Ken Woolley. His personal library is studded with seminal architectural publications—collected works of Aalto and Le Corbusier, Wright's autobiography, Scarpa; and the great authors—Dostoyevsky, Chekov, Solzhenitsyn, Tolstoy, White, Lessing; the boundary riders William S Burrows, Hunter S Thompson. Isherwood. Predictably, Raynd's Fountainhead. Rickard had a degree in psychotherapy. He read Nietzsche and Freud. He was drawn to the Jungian and Gnostic dimensions of Herman Hesse's Bildungsroman Damien (1919)—a coming of age story of individuation, of subjectivation, of becoming oneself. Here, again, are the signs of one interested in what going on, eager to participate in it, to consume it, to be contemporary, to practice contemporaneity, to be seen to do so, to take pleasure in so being seen.

Whether Rickard's interest was altruistic or not, detached or opportunistic, is maybe irrelevant: the one does not necessarily exclude the other. An enduring memory for me—and I was only ever in the margins (a student once removed, a peripheral colleague, a drop-in at best) was Rickard's gaze: the look in his eyes, at once searching and kind but always smiling. This is what he left me in my occasional contact with him: the interested look of someone waiting to hear something interesting: a question of touch and tact. In fact, `interest'—Latin interesse, 'it is of importance, it makes a difference'—is from inter-, between and esse, to be, `is.' Hence to be interested/interesting is to be in-between, to exist in the margin, interstitially. The common meaning of curiosity, sympathy or concernful appreciation is later, and dates to the eighteenth century. An implication is that the interested one participates without taking sides; that they leave their own to take up an intermediate, impartial position between extremes. In other words, to be interested is simply to listen, to be open and attentive to whatever comes, to welcome its coming.

In that sense, Rickard was hospitable—that is to say, he was a consummate host. But he was also very keen to show off his work. He was wont to throw lots of parties. He would take pains in preparing the house with multiple areas: room to dance; surfaces to sit on, inside and out; corners to cluster in small groups; places to eat, drink and talk; ways to wander from room to room, from room to garden, from group to group, from one interesting person to another. There was always food. He was a good cook and would cook all day in preparation. There was an extensive archive of recipes, far larger than his practice library. There would regularly be thirty for lunch—not formally invited, though; mostly people who just happened to be in the neighborhood, or tag-alongs like myself. He was always socializing, inviting others to socialize, to come over. People felt so unconditionally welcomed that no-one ever wanted to leave.

In letter after letter sent home to his mother during his European travels in the mid 1950s, amid Rickard's solicitous inquiring after family and friends, clients and finances, are picturesque descriptions of natural, rural and city scenes that are as painterly as they are cinematic:

"Inland a little around Newton Abbey we passed many little thatched roofed houses lying smugly in the hollows complete with a little stream and dwarfed by huge trees. One expected to see huge mushrooms surmounted by a fairy. Further inland we passed through a little of the wild and beautiful Dartmoor country where not a tree was to be seen and where the grass was like a lawn and is broken by unexpected rock outcrops. Of course the usual howling wind was blowing.

We had a beautify roast beef dinner on Sunday. They cut us sandwiches and made us a thermos of coffee for our return journey to London."[4]

There are constant references to sociable travelling and convivial encounters:

"Mary had an afternoon tea party last Sunday with about 30 guests including Bill and Jean, Libby Farquhary, George Webster and some new arrivals from Australia. I managed to give it a kick by getting all the blokes to bring bottles of Merrydown cider and Guinness stout. These ingredients when mixed together in the right proportion produce a powerful drop called "Dusky bell." The evening before Tony Spring (who was with us in Austria) and Gill Farrer from Canberra called round and took us to the theatre to see 'Can-can' a very wicked show. After the theatre we came back to our flat and cooked some sole a la Monte Carlo in our fireproof Swedish dishes. Tony had previously bought the sole - which is damned expensive. So all in all we had a very pleasant but costly week end."[5]

 Rickard's hospitality and keen sociability naturally extended into his architecture. It seems that conviviality could be paralleled by a kind of socio-spatial program that gathers multiple rooms into collectives of different intensity and quality; a program of reconciling part to part into assemblages of parts, into a dalliance of parts. Three relevant meanings circulate in the word `dalliance': to think, reckon, tally, count; to talk, narrate, recount; and to delay, (dilly) dally, loiter, amuse oneself, waste time. Worthy of retaining is the (amusing, amorous, flirtatious, erotic, transgressive) sense of play in storytelling, chatting and confabulation.

In Rickard's work, the dalliance of parts is built up over multiple layers. There is play at each layer and between layers so that a very complex network of interactions is set up. The layers comprise at least three registers: site and landscape, geometry and space, sociality and domiciliary life. Each of these is itself multiple—for example, site and landscape extends from the plant species and ecology to topography, geology, hydrology and climate; geometry and space extends from disposition and orientation to pattern, measure and proportion, structure and materiality; sociality and domiciliary life extends from lifestyle patterns, activities programmatic function to mood and ambiance.

Aligning and bringing these parts into neighbourhood is necessary to the concrete achievement of every architectural project. But it is also a means of framing them so they can be indicated and foregrounded; or brought to mind, rendered available and palpable. When conceived in terms of cartography, of mapping-together the multivalent registers of place, space and family, architecture becomes a game board, a setting for the playing-together of possibilities—possibilities of assembling and disassembling, gathering and dispersing, approaching and distancing, arriving and departing, remaining and leaving, enclosing and opening, compressing and dilating, retracting and extending, containing and releasing. Such framing is socio-spatial, but also scenographic, choreographic and cinematic. 

Rickard much enjoyed going to the movies. His taste in film appears to have been eclectic. Apart from keeping up with the latest releases—from Michelangelo Antonioni to Tom Ford—he did like Hitchcock. There may have been something compelling in Hitchcock, an element of intricate suspense and tension that so fascinated one interested in scenario, in how temporality is constructed to build tension, in how that tension is maintained and amplified or released. Indeed in the phenomenon of playfulness, in the tight connections between play, flirtation and the erotic—and this not simply at a cinematic, human level, but in terms of how space itself might be constructed within architectural settings to promote and multiply possibilities of dalliance.

Rickard's deliberate staging in the photographing of his own work is instructive. Many images read like stills from the 1960s New Wave: the family - often his own - posing in constructed scenarios of idealized life; or party guests, disposed around the inhabitable nooks and edges of living rooms, stair landings, terraces, swimming pools and gardens. Rickard's selective scene-setting and framing through photography conveys something of his design values and intentions. Here, architecture appears as a resolutely situated infrastructure for encounter and sociability; as a pretext for the construal of multiple narratives and storylines; as a staging of solicitous or of illicit conversations; as a fractured field of inter-reflections that conflate individuals and groups into constantly changing, ambiguous collectives.

An enduring feature of Rickard's residential work—one that recurs across various modulations and iterations—is the organization of interconnected spaces that enable each to remain open to others within an intricately woven network of rooms and trajectories. As such, spaces become sites of observation, with prospects and perspectives opened up between them; and between interiors and the various external spaces: platforms, decks, courtyards, gardens and bushland extensions. Linear, diagonal and torsional sequences produce complex networks of contraction and expansion, containment and release, attraction and repulsion. Rooms never face one way but always multiple ways, into and through others, within a perforated and concatenated spatial texture: a geometric fabric woven of the crossing of warp and weft—invisible, but haptically present and palpable. At any location in the living area, one is always able to look across—either contiguously within the same space, or thorough openings, doors and windows to separate areas of the house, potentially to other members of the family doing what they do. In this way one is always aware of being part of a collective that is at the same time a momentary and ultimately evanescent gathering of radical singularities. At the same time, one is always aware of the situatedness of these collectives and singularities; aware that the comings and goings of the family take place in the gatherings and dilations, the inclinations and declinations of an environment that exceeds it and yet makes it possible.

This is one reason why Rickard's are successful party houses: they invite and accommodate parties of people clustered in overlapping, juxtaposed groups, always able to glance beyond to more interesting possibilities, always moving between, moving on, keeping the sequence going: parties of people always aware that their experience is shared, that they form part of a collective event, that the collective surrounds them, even as the house folds to gather and disperse them across an occupied terrain. This is also why the houses have atmosphere, because of their circumambience, their calling for a being-with and a being-among-others in the moment.

By geometric turns that overlay and weave systems within a delicate balance, every space is connected to every other space and to the wider setting.  Geometric and spatial weaving shadow the utilitarian weaving of necessary circulation; the observational weaving of multiple prospects and points of view; the socio-spatial weaving of the family's life patterns; the discursive weaving of dalliances, of comings and goings; and the narrative weaving and construal of architecture's place within a ('natural') world.

Nature

The second cliché—that in Rickard's houses there is an `integration of architecture and nature'—readily lends itself to oversimplification, categorization and oblivion. Once we have a name and a label for something we are tempted to set and forget, to overlook or dismiss it. Yet the evidence of Rickard's work resists this kind of trivialization; which is why it remains compelling and of enduringly worth. The cliché is based on an opposition between architecture and nature—and by inference, between building and site, inside and outside (if not between civilization and the uncivilized, between human and animal). Yet in Rickard's work the actual situation between the two is considerably more thoughtful, nuanced and complex.

To begin with, the interface between them is palpable and insistent. At the Evatt House, doors and windows are heavily framed. Doors have to be swung open. Thresholds, and the edges of rooms, are raised or lowered. The vertical scale of the edge spaces is reduced and compressed. Lowered soffits reinforce the borderlines of spaces, tying them back to the interior and to the stone hearth. Light is brought in above and around thresholds, hence darkening and densifying the transition zone, rendering it more viscous.

Yet, at the same time, there is a considerable play of transparency and reflection at the boundary. External views are carefully framed, calibrated to features of the landscape, and form a network of prospects consilient with the spatial system of enclosures and openings, axial extensions, compressions and torsions. But the prevalence of glass, and of unframed but-jointed corners, produce a profusion of reflections and inter-reflections. These iterations overlay and build in density so as to challenge expected transparency with a parallel opacity. The outside is brought in, but the inside is also projected out, together with all of its colorful, familial content: paintings, furniture, flowers, carpets, wall linings. 

There is here a different sense of `integration with nature' than in the facile, normative profusion of picture windows and dissolved boundaries. Rickard's architecture is replete with boundaries, multiply reiterated, though their materiality and presence remain ambiguous and indeterminate. Consider the following moment in the Evatt House. The view is northward from the study (originally Rickard's own office), first to the dining room then to the living room at the far end, then to the gully beyond—with the terraces and roof shadowing the stepped plan: three corners which, because of the frameless but-jointed glass, are at once geometrically assertive and materially indeterminate.

In another register, these inter-reflections produce an additional and significant effect: that of re-turning the orientation of view; that is, of folding and closing the circle of space, or in reconciling its divided parts. Looking eastward in the afternoon, the prospect is deep green and the threshold frames in shadow; but the open and sunny western side of the house is reflected on the inner face of the glass panes and thus projected out into the field of view. West comes to animate east; afternoon glows into the advancing twilight.

This manner of capturing the gloaming—its ambiguous temporality (is it just before sunrise or just after sunset), the effect it has on our perception of boundaries, and the propensity for us to imagine forms that are not there precisely because their edges become indeterminate to our eyes—is also a manner of connecting us to the natural world, its phases and cycles.

There is all this anything but a seamless transition of inside and outside. In fact, these reflective intensities give the glass an unexpected mass and visual weight, magnifying the boundary and amplifying the disjunction between them. The effect reaches a striking level of intensity at the Curry House. Here windows reflect snapshots of distant views across Pittwater, bringing them into the field of the house but as fragments overlaid onto views of the garden and components of the house itself. This effectively compresses and domesticates the expansive setting while at the same time exposing it without compromise. At this point we are suspended some four storeys above a steeply sloping incline, facing east, away from the house and toward a distant sea, just visible above the Newport ridge of Barrenjoey Road.  

Further complexifying the relationship between inside and outside, or metaphorically between architecture and nature, is the structural relationship between building and site. Characteristically, Rickard deploys overlaid, crossed axial geometric systems to weave an underlying spatial structure. This is then modulated by the particular circumstances of site and familial life patterns. The geometric system parallels and deviates from the form of the landscape. The bones of the building shadow the bones of the site—its geology, hydrology, contours and directions. Axial lines that feature in the proportioning of spaces—for example, along which corridors and primary movement patterns are organized, or that are expressed materially by a line of columns, a lowered ceiling, a ridge beam or a masonry retaining wall—are calibrated to landscape features such as ridges, rills or promontories. Orienting itself in terms of refuge and prospect, introversion and extroversion, the house provides a parallel of the landscape in which it is situated. At the same time, the house situates the landscape, appropriating and in a sense civilizing it by bringing into the gamut of a human condition. Moving along corridors, between rooms, across bays, up or down steps, one is also moving across an architectural topography that shadows the landscapes—its contours, declinations and inclinations, ridges and slopes, resistances and yields. One sense in one's own body the drag or velocity of moving uphill, along a contour or slope, to a natural point of survey, under the canopy of a wooded grove, into a clearing, deep into the understory of a forest or the undercroft of a cave.

In the Marshall House living areas, rather than give over the full western edge facing the view across a steep slope, a masonry nook opposite the fireplace controls prospects by directing them diagonally to the northwest and southwest. This masonry element holds space back into the slope as a way of countering the expansive scale of the view, again domesticating it for the family. It also replicates, in the structure of the building, the body's muscular resistance to downslope movement. The two simultaneous energies of expansion and contraction that coincide here stabilize the house against the slope both physically and aesthetically; but they also promote kinesthetic awareness of the landscape while bringing into coincidence the morphological patterns of the site and the living patterns of the family. On the lower level, bedrooms open to a wide, cantilevered deck, whose prospects are more circumspect and directed to understory and ground, rather than to middle-ground and distant horizon as is the case for the living areas. Moving up, down and across within the body of the house is analogous to moving up, down and along the rugged contours of the site, or to gaining broader orienting perspectives by climbing into the upper reaches of a tree and looking out over the forest canopy below.

The habitus that develops through the iterative experience of these sorts of situated coincidences connect person and site in skeletal, muscular and visceral ways—according to a kind of embodied material intelligence. Such affects register in memory, becoming part of the recollective unconscious. They are produced at different scales, paralleling the scales of prospect framed by the house—to distant water bodies and ridge lines, intermediate canopies and foliage, the intricate fine grains of leaves and rocks, the familiar objects ranged along tables, shelves and sills. In this way, the house does not oppose or counteract its context; rather, it brings far and near into a collective neighborhood, within which such relationships are complexified, rendered ambiguous, and consequently opened to multiple possibilities of interpretation.

These readings are latent in Rickard's documented design preoccupations for the Marshall House. Among those were the desire to create "dynamic spatial flow" and "intimate scale"; "building with warm materials left natural"; and "integrating the house with the site respecting the natural qualities of the site—by keeping trees, rocks etc with no excavation." Such generic descriptors are never sufficient to properly explain a design process: a decision making sequence of events during which space and materials have to be precisely measured, scaled and proportioned.

Rickard's statement of "Aesthetic Considerations" for the Curry House is more instructive:

"One of the major aesthetic concerns was with the creation of spatial arrangements in which a continuous space is articulated by architectural elements of walls, floors, ceilings, columns, stairs, concrete, seat etc., continually revealing and playing with vistas, light and shade, solid and voids, scale, textures, etc. This house gave us ample opportunity for exploiting this spatial desire."

In other sections of the same document, Rickard's phrasing reveals something important in his design approach, his architectural desire:

"The micro-climate is typical of Sydney's temperate climate generally... the house responds to this marvelous climate by having each room face north (opening onto generous terraces) to catch the North-East breeze and by indulging in the warm winter sun which penetrates deep into the interior where the heat is soaked up and stored by the slate and concrete floor and released at night."

And elsewhere: "to be able to stand or sit and feel safe inside when on the edge of the cliff and see the view without obstruction"; "to be able to feel cozy and secure inside when the weather is inclement outside." The house is a species of organism, or at least an apparatus: it reveals, plays, responds, has, faces, catches, indulges, soaks, stores, releases. It is characterized by a capacity to afford human activity and interaction: standing, sitting, seeing, feeling safe, cozy, secure. Notably, the apparatus is meant to exploit or capitalize on conditional, specific, particular and concrete situations—not theoretical, universal, general or abstract ideals.

Throughout, there is a recurrent trope of overlaying two systems—one fixed, regular and firm, discontinuous and rhythmic, establishing stability and normally associated with the structural armature of columns and beams; and another, loose fitting and relatively free from the first, continuous and melodic, normally associated with the external skin and walls, or with the patterns of movement organized within the house. This was an explicit `preoccupation' of the Curry House, but is characteristic of all Rickard's work:

"The aim was to achieve a rational structure with a regular mode of supports creating a rhythm. However, on the other hand, we did not want the house to be regulated and controlled by the tyranny of the structure, but rather we wanted to have the skin loosely fitted independently and effortlessly around the structure. Sometimes the skin is on the inside and sometimes on the outside of the structure and is cut over and around the concrete structure as necessary."

We are not in the realm of descriptive architects' statements here. Rickard is not depicting the sculptural features of an architectural object. Rather, he is scripting a process of adjustment and attunement—choreographing how architecture develops from a human encounter and engagement with the circumstantial factuality of climate and site, ambiance and atmosphere.

Here is Rickard in 1955, speculating not merely on the landscape before his yes but, presciently, on an enduring practice and legacy that are yet to come:

"Purity is the best way to describe Norway. It seems as though the air arrives in Norway from Heaven first before going on to London & Sydney to be polluted by the intervening spaces; and I am sure the water from the lakes & rivers of these parts supply the rest of the earth with dewdrops. The trees & grass look as though they have been specially washed for a Royal visit not to mention the houses.

The Landscape is always spectacular. There is never an untidy or ugly spot just, simply, one piece of country is better than another.

While we were waiting for a ferry to cross Sognefjord we pulled up & had lunch on the green level grass beside a rushing river. All about us were high vertical mountainsides with foaming waterfalls forming veins running down the sheer cliffs of the mountains. They say that the mountains are so high & the cliffs are so steep & close together in this part that they see the sun for only four months of the year.

I could go on forever if I had the power & wit to describe this wonderful country but since I have not I shall close now."[6]

Notes

[1] It is worth venturing a link between mudita and the Indo-Germanic etymon *MED, from which derive both `measure' and `mind' (whose function is to meditate on, consider, weigh-up and discriminate). Hence the cognate terms moderation, temperance and mindfulness—that is, attentiveness to the other, to the other's being, to their state of mind, to their enjoyment. This sense of `bringing to mind'—indicating or enabling something (a person, a collective, an idea, a mood; but also an environment, a place) to come forward and become evident, to show itself, to be present—is pivotal to how Rickard's architecture works both socially and tectonically.

[2] Bruce Rickard & Associates. Architects, Landscape Architects, Ecological Planners. Office publication, 7 Ridge Street, North Sydney (undated, after 1971).

[3] See my Mapping: Design. Architectural Theory Review 3: 1, 1998, 35-45. Propensity - the tendencies of a given situation to produce emergent outcomes - contests mainstream design approaches in which abstract design concepts are imposed onto contexts to direct and overcome them. See François Jullien, The Propensity of Things. Towards a Theory of Efficacy in China. Transl. Janet Lloyd. New York: Zone Books, 1999.

[4] Bruce Rickard, letter to his mother, London, 16 September 1954.

[5] Bruce Rickard, letter to his mother, London, 6 February 1955.

[6] Bruce Rickard, letter to his mother, Sogndal, Norway, 16 July 1955.