Michael Green

Writer and producer

Asylum

In Culture, The Big Issue on

In a small room at Oregon State Hospital, in Salem, north-western USA, hundreds of shiny copper urns line up like cans on a supermarket shelf. Dating from 1920s and earlier, they contain the unclaimed ashes of the asylum’s former residents.

The image comes from a new book of photography by Chris Payne, Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals. It is a room guarding burnt bodies and souls. Who were these people? How did they live? And why are they here, like this?

These themes fascinated the architect-turned-photographer for six years as he documented 70 decaying mental hospitals across 30 US states.

“I fell in love with the buildings and the places – the communities that the hospitals had been,” he says, “and with thinking about the thousands of people who had lived, worked and died there.”

Asylum is a grand, melancholy tribute to the lives spent in the institutions and to the astonishing scale and quality of the buildings themselves.

In 2002, when Payne needed a new project, a friend suggested he visit abandoned mental hospitals. The New York-based photographer drove to Pilgrim State Hospital on Long Island. Opened in 1931, it was the largest hospital ever built in the world – at its peak, it housed over 14,000 patients. “I was amazed to find this abandoned city just sitting there,” he says. “I quickly learned it wasn’t isolated to one hospital or one area. It was all over the country.”

From the mid-19th to the early-20th century in the US, nearly 300 institutions were built for the insane – often designed by prominent architects and always set in spacious grounds. The facilities were intended to offer calm and comfort, to treat inhabitants by means of fresh air and beautiful surrounds. The hospitals functioned as self-sufficient communities, including farms, workshops and auditoriums, and in some cases, even cafés and bowling alleys.

But care diminished as hospitals became overcrowded and pressed by tight budgets. Then, as treatment came to encompass extreme methods such as electro-shock therapy, ‘asylum’ became a by-word for squalor and abuse.

Payne’s elegiac photos, with flaking colour and tender light, show beauty in places we least expect. “Every society has its asylums, but I think there is a misconception that the buildings are bad and should be torn down. In a way, the stigma of mental illness has been passed onto the architecture of the buildings,” he says.

His previous book documented abandoned substations that had powered the New York subway. His photography shows the architecture of an optimistic era, a time when industrialism promised human progress. “I’m fascinated with buildings that really had purpose. We don’t build like that anymore,” Payne says. “And I think it represents a shift in the way we function as a society. It’s sad we’ve lost that faith in building.”

Lives in the balance

In Culture, The Big Issue on

Young people still want to join the circus, even if they don’t always have to run away from home to do it. In Australia, one school is dedicated to training aspiring balancers, clowns, jugglers and trapeze artists.

It is just before lunchtime at the National Institute of Circus Arts in Melbourne. The 2009 showcase performance is just weeks away. In a stuffy rehearsal room, 14 final-year students listen carefully as the show’s directors give staging instructions for part of the act. The details are precise. Circus is a serious business.

Meanwhile, one of the muscular young men, Aidyn Heyes, bends nonchalantly into a handstand. He stays there, waggling his legs for a while, then shifts from two hands to just one. Minutes later, on his feet again, he amuses a classmate by putting a milk crate on his head.

“We’re all the kind of people who try to get everyone else to look at them,” Heyes says later. His speciality is balancing on his hands.

The institute – the only school of its kind in Australia – opened in 1999, and accepted its first bachelor students two years later. Each year it accepts 24 performers from the scores more who audition.

The students train five days a week, from nine to five, and miss out on the long holidays granted by normal universities. Even so, with the showcase performance approaching, Heyes says preparation time is short. “A lot of the stuff we do in our acts pushes our limits as far as they’ll go. Even though we rehearse and rehearse, no one ever feels like they have enough practice time.”

Heyes grew up in Rosebud on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula and spent his spare time surfing and doing yoga. “Ever since I was young I could always jump up into a handstand and stay there,” he says, constantly stretching and shifting his limbs as he talks. “I’d chill out a few hours a day just doing handstands at home because I enjoyed it.”

Like other circus artists, the 22-year-old uses and experiences his body in ways that gravity-adhering members of the community could scarcely ever comprehend. “When you hit the balance properly, especially with one-arm handstands, it feels like something else is holding you there,” he says. “It feels light, like you’re floating in water.”

The showcase performance is the final step before the students try to enter the real circus world. Some aspire to joining international companies, hotels or cruise ships; others, to making a living from corporate gigs, events or busking. Heyes plans to set himself up as a freelance circus performer, mixing work and travel.

For now, however, he must train and focus for the show. “Hand balancing, like juggling and tightwire, requires single-point concentration,” he says. “When you’re performing, you’ve just got to block everything else out.”

Published in The Big Issue, to accompany a photo essay by Christina Simons.

The biggest catch

In Culture, Environment, The Big Issue on

Every year, fishermen and worshippers flood a faraway island in Bangladesh. Photographer Rodney Dekker went there to record traditions that may soon go under.

Most of the year, Dublar Char is nearly uninhabited. The remote island lies at the southern end of the Sundarbans, a vast tidal mangrove forest on the Bay of Bengal. Then, from mid-October to mid-February, thousands of fishermen sweep in from around Bangladesh. Hindu pilgrims come in their thousands too, for Rash Mela, an annual three-day festival with a 200-year history.

Last year, photographer Rodney Dekker joined the influx. “There were fishing boats everywhere. They are all connected and people walk over each boat to get to the land,” he says. The fishermen dry their catch on the broad beach, then bag and ship the fish to markets in the capital, Dhaka.

With the festival on, the island was vibrant. “There was dancing and singing, and people were worshipping clustered around a little temple,” Dekker says. “There was lots of energy and atmosphere.”

Situated in the fertile Ganges Delta, Bangladesh is one of the poorest, most densely populated and lowest-lying countries on earth. Exposed to rising sea levels, melting Himalayan glaciers and increased cyclone frequency, the country’s people are critically vulnerable to the effects of climate change. A Bangladeshi rights organisation, Equity and Justice Rights Group, estimates that 30 million people on the southern coastline are already facing its consequences.

That’s the reason for Dekker’s journey. “Dublar Island will be one of the first places in Bangladesh to be affected by sea level rise and this culture will be lost as a result,” he says.

The 34-year-old photographer is a former environmental scientist. In Australia, he has shot series on droughts, floods and bushfires. “My photographic interests come from my interest in environmental problems,” he says. “Part of what I’m trying to do is to show people what is happening in the world as a result of climate change.”

In November 2007, Dublar Island was lashed by Cyclone Sidr. Development organisation Save the Children estimated that between 5,000 and 10,000 people died in the storm. “It was the most severe cyclone on record in the Bay of Bengal,” Dekker says. “Cyclones are becoming more intense and frequent and the timing is different now. One of the fishermen I interviewed and photographed on Dublar Island was wondering why cyclones are coming in winter. He doesn’t know.”

The fisherman’s prospects aren’t good. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has predicted that 22 million people in Bangladesh will become climate refugees by 2050.

But it’s industrialised countries, including Australia, who are responsible for the bulk of historical greenhouse gas emissions. “The poorer countries are the ones who will feel the effects [of climate change] the most, and we’re the cause of it,” Dekker says.

Rodney Dekker travelled to Bangladesh with the help of a grant from the SEARCH Foundation. You can view an eyewitness account of his journey on the Oxfam website.

Shacking up

In Architecture and building, Culture, The Age on

Out of the square, a new exhibition at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, drops in on local beach house architecture – past, present and future. Michael Green brushes off the sand and tours five of the best.

From its genesis as a humble shack to the cantilevered glass showcase of today, the beach house has long been an important part of Victoria’s architectural vernacular. Many fine examples are dotted around our coastal fringes but it is along the Mornington Peninsula – from the western foreshore to Port Phillip Bay – that our beach-house identity has been defined. By the 1950s, “nearly every architect of note who worked in Melbourne build a house there at some time,” wrote architect Robin Boyd in 1952 in Australia’s Home. “And in most cases they allowed themselves to experiment, to be freer and easier than was their custom in the city.” A new exhibition, opening Thursday at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, will track the journey from conception to creation of 35 of the most exciting projects, including the following.

Ranelagh (Ship House)

If a good beach house should evoke the sea, then Ranelagh is safely moored to success. The ‘Ship House’ boasts ground floor porthole-windows and an elegant steel spiral staircase leading to a sunroom and roped-off viewing decks.

Built in 1935 and still standing today, the Mt Eliza home is one of the oldest featured in the MPRG exhibition.

In May 1936, it graced the cover of The Australian Home Beautiful. The magazine praised its designer, “that very modern architect, Mr Roy Grounds”, and judged that the Ship House was “one of the most intriguing seaside houses Melbourne has ever seen”.

Grounds, best known for the National Gallery of Victoria on St Kilda Road, built the two-bedroom cottage for his family. It was an innovative structure for its time, built with pre-fabricated cement and steel panels. The ship shape and stark materials stood out against the open landscape, and the upper deck commanded a spectacular view of the bay.

As Home Beautiful declared, the Ship House, “is definitely a ship aground, but no wreck.”

Ryan House

Tucked behind a sand dune, this Somers hideaway was both eye-catching and unassuming. Designed by architect Peter Burns and built in 1963, the modest, elliptical Ryan House rested comfortably in a grove of tea-trees and banksias.

Unfortunately, like a number of buildings in the exhibition, the home has since been demolished. Doug Evans, former associate professor of architecture at RMIT, says the shack didn’t “attempt to swallow the view”. Instead, it was “an introverted little thing, a bit like a rowboat turned upside down.”

It had sloping cedar walls, with both bubble and vertical slit windows. Bedrooms curved along one wall. “In the centre”, Burns wrote in 1963, “a concrete volcano of a fireplace springs from a warm brick floor and is capped by a curving copper canopy and flue.”

“It’s certainly got that hippy look about it,” Evans admits. But it wasn’t a slapdash counterculture hut. Burns was interested in caves as an analogy for home. He wanted to create places of refuge and belonging away from the wars and economic upheavals of the twentieth century.

“It was all about enclosure,’ Evans says. “He hit on something that was interesting other architects around the world in the fifties and sixties – the insecurity of the modern condition.”

Sorrento House 1982

“Beach houses should be fun to be in,” says architect Col Bandy. And his early eighties getaway is just that. The Sorrento House is an informal, low maintenance escape from city life.

The three-bedroom wooden home has an unusual design. “It’s basically a pitched-roof house but it has pieces chopped out and bits added on that change it quite dramatically,” Bandy says. The weatherboards are set at opposing angles. “At that stage of my career I liked the idea of manipulating traditional forms.”

The home was built on a block thick with tea-tree and Bandy decided to keep as much as possible. He tried to create “a more natural object in a natural environment.”

Exhibition curator Rodney James describes a relaxed, playful holiday home. “It’s the classic weekender. It has flowing open spaces inside, so when extra people come you can find room for them. It’s about bringing people together rather than sending them to the outskirts of the house.”

St Andrews Beach House

Sean Godsell’s creation rises above the scrub and dunes in a standoff with the Southern Ocean. The striking 2005 retreat has caught a wave of prestigious awards, including the Australian Institute of Architects Robin Boyd Award in 2006.

The long, rectangular structure with a gaping mouth looks, strangely, like a beautiful shipping container. The building both protects from the elements and adapts to them. Its rusting steel skin shelters a three-bedroom home, with the living and sleeping areas separated by a weather-exposed deck.

Set on stilts, the St Andrews Beach House also reinterprets the older-style buildings of the area. In years gone by, there were many fibro-cement shacks on sticks along the peninsula back beach.

Despite it’s intimidating exterior, the interior is neither too formal nor too precious. “The purpose of going to the beach for the weekend is to relax,” Godsell says. “When you’ve just spent a day surfing, there’s nothing more boring than not going inside because you might destroy the flooring.”

Unlike beach houses further north, Victorian weekenders must be comfortable throughout very different seasons. Godsell says the winter wind at St Andrews Beach is furious and bitterly cold. “When a storm brews at sea it comes straight across that coast. [In the house] there’s a giant picture window and deck where you can sit and watch – it’s some of the best free theatre you’ll ever get.”

Platforms for pleasure

So far, peninsula architecture has been more progressive and experimental than its suburban cousin – that’s the inspiration for the MPRG exhibition. But what comes next? To find out, curator Rodney James commissioned the Platforms for Living project. Five firms each designed a speculative house for a different coastal region.

For their part, WSH Architects fashioned Platforms for Pleasure, an action-packed, tongue-in-cheek getaway for the bay beach at Sorrento. It’s a re-imagined shack for the 21st century, radically different from a city home.

“Beach houses are becoming like normal houses,” says WSH director Andrew Simpson, disapprovingly. Instead, his team pictures a seaside springboard for leisure and pleasure. The outdoor space is designed for activities as varied as rock climbing and astronomy, while the indoor living area is simple and compact. It could be only 50 square meters – five times smaller than the current average home.

Simpson says the concept is meant to be both entertaining and radical, but also reflect the firm’s approach to sustainability. “We’re trying to come up with designs that respond to contemporary lifestyles but do so over a much smaller floor area.”

Cafe Nostalgia

In Culture, Social justice, The Big Issue on

Published in The Big Issue, with a beautiful illustration by Lisa Engelhardt.

Michael Green sips a bittersweet cup in Buenos Aires, a city that has survived the best and worst of times.

On my first day in Buenos Aires I caught the trail of lost love: a friend’s love, not mine. But then the sultry city lured me in.

Not long ago, my friend lived here with his Argentine girl. They had an apartment in Palermo, just north of the centre. A wrought-iron balcony over a shady street. His favourite café, Café Nostalgia, on the corner. ‘They make the only decent coffee in Buenos Aires’, he told me, but he mustn’t have minded the bad coffee. He lounged for days on end in cafés and cantinas, watching the old couples leaning close, listening to the secret card games in the corner.

That was after they broke up. Immersed in the city and lost in confusion, he delayed his return for months. Finally, he went home, for good, and one morning soon after, my plane landed.

That afternoon I walked past his two apartments, the one he shared with the girl and the one where later, he lived alone. As the sun shuffled through the leaves of the knobbly-trunked trees I imagined my friend’s memories. I imagined being in love with the girl and the city. I felt his exhilaration at carving a new, unusual life and felt his uncertainty at its end. I arrived at Café Nostalgia with a list of his old haunts in my hand: travelling alone, with a bittersweet trail to follow.

Bittersweet suits Buenos Aires. Porteños, the people of Buenos Aires, are famously haughty and brooding. Thirteen million live in the city at the mouth of Río de la Plata and history lingers and threatens them like a heavy cloud in the distance. In the last sixty years they have seen dictatorship and despair, war and torture, poverty and economic collapse. But they are famous too, for their reputation as lovers.

At the turn of the 20th century Argentina was rich. It sat among the ten richest countries of the world, and it’s capital bears the marks of wealth: boulevards, parks, plazas and opulent French architecture; tall, carved doors that lead to marble staircases; a blue art-deco spire growing between plain apartments.

But it isn’t so rich anymore. Another night, as I drank my coffee, a small boy hunched in the opposite gutter, ripping open garbage bags and pulling out plastic bottles under the yellow streetlights. In the café, the ceiling fans swirled, the football was on the television and no one paid the boy any attention.

After the peso crashed in 2001, the city changed. A new phenomenon emerged: Los Cartoneros. They are the ghosts pushing trolleys, scavenging the city’s rubbish from sundown, extracting anything recyclable and scattering the rest. It’s hard, long, degrading work for little return. My friend had told me about them before I came. ‘The city doesn’t quite know what to do with them’, he said.

In 2003, the government registered 10,000 cartoneros, but now no one knows the exact numbers. They come from the provinces and spread through the streets every night, catching the city in a great web of poverty, and maybe even sobering the rich and the tourists as they look out from their bars.

Tango, the tourist icon of Buenos Aires, was once the music of the poor. On Sundays, struggling Spanish and Italian immigrants dressed up and danced while the rich turned up their noses. Now, nightly tango spectaculars have become slick foreign money-spinners. At many community dance halls, though, young porteños are claiming it back.

‘On a Thursday night at Cochabamba 444,’ my friend said, ‘you can drink a few beers and watch the people dance tango.’ The doorway opened from a dark street to a narrow dance floor surrounded by simple tables and chairs. The crowd brought a change of shoes for dancing and hung their small bags from hooks on the wall.

With a flick of the eyes, the men asked the women to dance and the floor filled: firm bodies gliding, pausing, leaning; interlocking, kicking legs. They moved with eyes closed and impassioned faces, as though savouring the flavour of a fine wine.

The tango is heartbreak to a tune. Another night, in a small old bar called ‘El Boliche de Roberto’, two silver-haired tango singers played as a storm came down heavily outside. High up on the walls, the wooden shelves were stocked with antique liquor bottles now black and dusty. The young, fashionable crowd shared the anguished lyrics, mouthing the words and staring into their drinks. Then for one song, almost everyone in the bar sang along, and the sadness changed to joy.

Now I am back at Café Nostalgia, on my last afternoon in Argentina, already reminiscing. My plane leaves tonight. Here I am, looking out at the flower stall beneath the trees, daydreaming of the city. I followed my friend’s bittersweet trail, and I too, have fallen for his lost love – Buenos Aires. I never did meet the girl.