In reading journal reviews of specific projects, we have become accustomed to looking over the project credits, usually at the end of the article, to learn of the project’s design team and associated consultants. But this is not a comprehensive list of a project’s collaborators in the wider context of a designer’s lineage. It does not tell us about the ways in which the project came into being or how it has been reflected upon, and with whom.

In contrast, when I begin a novel, I often start by turning to the acknowledgements page; I want to read the names, and the descriptions of roles, of those who contributed to making manifest the book I hold in my hands. Here, thanks are given to influences and influencers that may span decades – and so, a sole author offers the context within which work happens.

The nature of architectural collaboration underpins the exhibition The Ground is Talking to Us at Objectspace’s Chartwell Gallery. We learn of the importance of conversations and reflections, both in past work and in the making of the exhibition itself, that have passed between Megan Rule and Julie Wilson, and others, over the last 20 years.

The exhibition consists of wall-mounted, dark wood holding landscape-format paper:
22 sheets in all, with drawings and photographs, all in grey scale. These are square images centred on the pages; photographs and drawings alternate across the four walls. Six cardboard models sit within black-topped tables in the middle of the room. The photographs are calm and still. These are moments and parts of buildings: an open Bible sitting in front of a window, a lighted interior within a forest, sky and grass and a distant horizon sliding under the eave of a building, a centred elevation.

These images are interspersed with drawings, which are compelling and intriguing. They are composed architectural fragments, hand-drawn, which begin as plan-like but then undergo a shift; mirrored and skewed, they slide up the page, becoming perspectival, as though the drawing plane has altered and lifted. One is titled: ‘This might be above (or below ground)’, referring to its inherent ambiguity. The origins of these drawings lie with one project – re-imagined, then shared and responded to in writing, and then redrawn, photographed, printed, drawn over – and so leak beyond the parameters of a single building. These iterative, reflective drawings stand apart from the usual drawn component of exhibitions, of reformatted scaled plans, sections and elevations.

On a small, square plinth in the room sit folded A3-sized sheets. These hold a record of dialogue through words and pictures that has resulted in the exhibition itself; this record reflects the blog through which Wilson and Rule communicated during the development of the exhibition, edited and recast. But this is just a part of their longer discussion begun many years ago, and ongoing. Some of the captured exchanges hint at the timing of the generation of the exhibition, including such text as: “Isolation, Isolated Spatial Distance, Proximity, Body Awareness”; “Hygiene Station, Water, Soap, Disinfectant”. But other issues emerge, particularly concerning water-sensitive design and healing community. And questions are posed: “Has tolerance narrowed with precision and refinement?” 

The late Ranulph Glanville, in his wonderfully titled essay An irregular dodekahedron and a lemon yellow Citroën, wrote of the inherently reflective nature of design, that almost everything we research, “which involves us doing and thinking about what we do and think, is, at heart, recursive”. But this reflection is not in isolation; who we choose to develop conversations and trust with, and their lasting influence, needs prominence. Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities tells us of the inhabitants of Ersilia, a city in which strings reflect relationships “of blood, of trade, authority, agency”. Eventually, this labyrinth of strings becomes so dense the city’s inhabitants need to relocate, leaving behind a ruin made up of the “spider webs of intricate relationships seeking a form”.

These often-under-examined and under-documented spider webs of influences, connections and respect, fostered amongst practitioners, have been made present. Here, we see the nature of collaboration, beyond the bounds of the time lines of individual projects, and the importance of a reflective practice manifest in drawing as exchange and exhibition as dialogue. 

This exhibition was developed by Te Kāhui Whaihanga NZIA Auckland branch and held at Objectspace during Auckland Architecture Week 2020.