Well it was obvious that RMIT should present an exhibition of Peter Corrigan,
he's Australia's leading maverick architect and for over 40 years one of the most original
and stimulating voices in architectural practice.
Peter can be a very dry and funny person, as we all know. The work actually uses humour
as a critical technique. It's kind of a thing about, you know, exposing the humanity of
the work, and exposing a kind of aspect of frailty of what the work represents.
Not the frailty of the work but actually about the human experience, and Peter uses wit and
humour and travesty and opposition and all of those techniques really in a way that enriches
the work.
Building 8 is probably the best known example of a number of accretions that he's 'thefted'
in a way from culture around us.
The corner column is one side of Brancusi's 'Gate of Love' and there's a suggestion here
that it's towards his wife, maybe, who holds the building up.
He divides his passions, so he created hundreds of operas, ballets, drama, three times as
many theatre productions as architectural creations.
Like any authentic thinker, Peter's mind is a tangle of influence, but his own articulation
of architecture, set and costume design is distinct.
There's a very strong link between Peter's set, scenography and architecture - but in
that both of them are directly aimed at provocation, and provocation rather than relaxation, and
that Peter demands, either of his audience sitting in the dark, or his audience being
participants, wandering and journeying through his buildings, a sense of adventure, and a
sense of being alive, to complex contradictory emotions and feelings.
So Peter works on the stage by using very sharp shapes and very direct, almost aggressive
attacks on the eye and you could say that he employs some of that in his more provocative
architecture.
So there's a direct link, in not so much how he achieves it but what he's trying to achieve
which is something more than a relaxed, contented small 'L' liberal humanist happiness - that
the world in Peter Corrigan's mind and I would concur, is more complicated than that and
both our architecture and set design need to express that.
The experience of being in the exhibition, like encountering Peter's cluttered studio
office, will be a dense world of images and the diverse objects that inspire and enrich
his practice.
Peter's library was this kind of treasure trove of stuff from history that you could
look at old German magazines from the twenties and see the interest so if you were even half
interested in the historical precedents of architecture, then Peter had it all there.
I heard about Peter's library as a student. I never had the experience to see it as a
student, but, when I was working with him, I would often have meetings in his library,
surrounded by spines staring back at me and as a consequence of that my own collection
grew largely by an interest in what Peter had on his walls, but also by what Peter generously
offered to me.
What that taught us was actually the value of ideas and that there was this whole world
of ideas that was siloed up in Peter's library that you could look at and also, you know,
imagine yourself being part of that world of ideas if only you could do your work as
well as others.
It became apparent that the exhibition needed to be more about his personality and unique
character and as much as the presentation of his work and so it became an exploration
into his mind and imagination as much as his design method the experience of moving within
the space will be like being immersed in the world of Peter, and hopefully is a little
bit like him in character, so that it's playful and brazen and optimistic, and so that we
can see how the wide cultural field of reference filters down into his work, which is a rarefied
insight.