Lyons

Demain, le 16 mai, marquera le centième anniversaire du décès, à l'âge de 54 ans, de Julien Baudrier, l'âme et la cheville ouvrière de la Bibliographie lyonnaise, dont il a réussi à publier les 11 premiers volumes (1895-1914), en se basant sur les travaux de son père, Henri, et les siens propres.

Emerging out of the research for the David Saunders Founders Grant (SAHANZ), this paper argues that as a historiographical lens, surface marks the periphery of architectural history, constrained ordinarily by disciplinary conventions of space, structure, function and programme. It constructs a brief theoretical history of the architectural surface, which reveals its five modes of figuration – the representational; the urban marker or threshold; the performative; the transient (optically and physically); and the methodological. Excavating these orientations in the works designed and built by Lyons in Victoria, ACT, and NSW reveals the shift from representational and transient to performative and urban attitudes to surface, informed by the attention to the public realm, the questioning of typologies, and the examination of the nature of surface itself. Utilizing a psychoanalytic metaphor, this paper connects the investigation of surface with the unveiling of the unconscious, and hence the critical in architectural discourse. Surface’s significance as critical is preserved by its liminal status as interior/exterior, functional/superfluous, deep/shallow, local/global and so on. Positioning the works of Lyons against other practices in Australia, this paper advocates surface as a tentative ‘window’ into one of the shared themes or theoretical positions in Australian architecture.