Published in New Zealand by

FREERANGE PRESS
PO Box 6706 Marion St
Wellington

Copyright © 2010 Gerald Melling

All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-0-473-16484-3

Book design by Nick Sargent

Printed by Graphic Press, Levin

Thanks are due to Shenuka de Sylva and her

architecture students, where this saga began;
to all the people I worked with in Colombo
and Kalutara; to Arunjyoti Hazarika for on-
site assistance; to Ian Cassells and Caitlin
Taylor (The Wellington Company), generous
sponsors of my second sojourn to Sri Lanka;
to Allan Morse for his forebearance during
my repeated absence from our busy office;
to Geoff Cochrane for his patient ear(s); and
to my partner Christine Norman for suggest-
ing the self-awarded sabbatical which finally
wrote this book.

A shorter version of Muddy Water first ap-

peared in Architecture New Zealand, March/
April 2006.

Photographic credits are due to Eresh Weera-

suriya, Arunjyoti Hazarika, various students
from Wellington School of Architecture, Sri
Lanka Architect magazine, and the author.
Tsunami Box
Gerald Melling
Contents
Still Air 9

Muddy Water 21

Puddling 31

Dry Land 51

Gold Ingots 61

India Hot! 75

Turbulence 87

Aftershock 105
T he literature which audits the performance of
international aid in areas of crisis and disaster
is necessarily objective - by definition a literary
accountancy, it must carefully balance its books. To
the common citizen, however, aid is a subjective
handshake pumped from the warmth of the
peoples’ heart, and this book’s equilibrium is a rush
of blood to the head.
It is the tale of an architectural journey -
grunting beneath its baggage - into the dizzy
tropics of emergency housing, in post-tsunami Sri
Lanka. Loaded with heavy ideas about regionalism,
cultural awareness, and an ‘architecture for people’,
it staggers and totters, and drops to its knees before
- finally - regaining its feet.
In preparing an article based on my Sri Lankan
baptism for the magazine Architecture New Zealand
in 2006, I am cheated by the numerical limit on
words. Somewhere between the blink of a haiku and
the yawn of War and Peace, there’s an appropriate
length of text on such a subject. And an apposite
point of view, in a story of a personal architecture.

G.M., Colombo, 2008

Still Air
Wellington, 2005

A journey, for example

begins with a voice
calling your name out
behind you.

Anne Carson1

1
Glass, Irony, and God, Anne Carson, New Directions, 1992
6
B oxing Day, 2004. Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka,
Thailand - the tongue of the sea and its terrible
thirst... Screened by a television, I’m anaesthetised.
A horror movie, surely - a Hollywood jape?
I lick the dryness from my lips. And - just like
you - I empty the pocket to fill up the soul.

As the throat of Asia swallows its tsunami in

enormous suffocating gulps, I sip a latte (trim
milk) outside a cafe overlooking Cook’s Beach on
New Zealand’s Coromandel peninsular, and the
toll of a year’s endeavour ebbs away on the tide.
Engrossed in the Kiwi summer ritual of beach, bach
and bonhomie, my only plan is the extension of the
moment, for as long as the sun might stretch its
friendly smile.
News of the deluge of that oriental coastline by
a delinquent turn of its tide, however, clouds this
moment in a thick and swirling mist. Cook’s Beach
reveals a latent menace, hitherto unnoticed.

7
*

In an age of casual international travel, the flight

of fancy is a dream come true. Though scarcely
understood, the cultural connection is all too easily
made, and at the turn of the 21st century - on my
Asian debut, and courtesy of a plodding carbon
footprint - I trace the edges of the South China Sea,
from south to north Vietnam.
Disdaining Ho Chi Minh’s tourist warpath, I’m
taken prisoner-of-peace, the voluntarily captive.
I wear the coolie’s hat, and taste the Spring in the
spring roll. Of the multitude of vessels that skim the
shallow, silted waters of Hoi An, I favour the bright
blue fishing boat with the fish-eye on its prow.
Three years later, and a mere three months
prior to that sudden tsunami - for a full ten days
in October, 2004, at the onset of a belated, rite-of-
passage to India - I cycle the coastal villages south
of Goa, a parallel universe to suburban Whitiangi
or the cliffs of Cook Strait. Though necessarily
superficial, this brief flirtation with the Arabian
Sea is sufficiently enduring to brutally enhance
all subsequent media illustrations of the heave of
heavy water. Caught in the painterly light of the
inward eye, lines of fishing boats anchored in sand
await dusk, and another lamplit night on damp
horizons. Mornings carpet the beach in glistening
silver fish, promptly vacuumed by the fishers’
wives and rolled-up for the market. And from
undulating dunes, sari-hustling teenage girls giggle
like irridescent ghosts.
Though the coasts that make the news are
further south, I can hear the roar of the Wave.

8
*

Saddled with cash and cans of Coke, the Agencies

of Relief - Oxfam, Red Cross, World Vision, USAid -
mount their charging white horses. ‘In God we trust’,
the powerful dollar notes - collateral to the lending
of a hand. That it be paid our full attention, we pass
the hat to pay the wages of virtue.
Muttered allegations of the conditional aid
of disaster capitalism are coyly dismissed as the
spurious theories of conspiracy and cranks, and we
return - content that Thy Good Work is done, or will
be - to the good civilian’s modest occupation.
Ensuing months recede like a spent tsunami.

Whilst my work is only loosely called architecture,

I may accurately describe myself as an architect.
Ambiguously derivative, this uneasy relationship
is clarified by the statutes of another calling - law,
and its lawyer. The architect is protected by an act of
registration, leaving architecture - as it must - free to
roam the streets. The intent of this legal safeguard
shapes a level of professional competence in the
technical and contractual aspects of the building
process. Its assumed beneficiary is the architect’s
willing victim, otherwise known as the client.
Neglected (or - more precisely - unencumbered)
by such invasive patronage, the culture of an
architecture without architects finds its tradition in
the complacent virtues of vernacular construction
and folk art, and those rude coastal shelters of Asia
fallen victim to the tsunami exemplify this category
of building at its most basic level of utility and
9
resources. Such insight is itself, of course, purely
architectural, and the well-meaning intervention
of a conscious architecture in such circumstances
is generally assumed to be a fruitless - if not
destructive - undertaking.
Compelling evidence of a fluent, lower-case
architectural language does exist, however, literally
sidelined by its Upper-Case Discourse in a typeface
of much smaller, thinner font. Notable examples
of this marginilia include Christopher Alexander’s
spectacular vernacular in Lima, Peru2, for example Christopher Alexander’s innovated vernacular
(way back in 1969), and the life’s work of the detailing at Lima

relatively obscure Laurie Baker3 (an Englishman at 2

Alexander’s entry in this international
architectural competition for low-cost
home in southern India) which - between them, and
housing split the jury to such an extent
on opposite sides of the world - place architecture that a minority of the panel declared his
scheme the winner - an unprecedented,
unflinchingly in the exalted company of tool-kits,
and unrepeated, phenomenon. See Ar-
indispensibly useful and sharply honed. The theory chitecural Design, May, 1970
of A Pattern Language4, followed by its practice... 3
That Laurie Baker is perceived as little
more than an architectural eccentric is
a crushing indictment on the values of
*
mainstream architecture. See Laurie Bak-
er: Life, Work, Writings, Gautam Bhatia,
Viking, New Delhi, 1991
The architectural history of urgent housing -
both temporary and permanent - is a catalogue 4
A Pattern Language, Christopher Alex-
ander, Oxford University Press, New
of desperate opportunism, from the hard-nosed
York, 1977
industrial chic of pre-cast concrete egg-crates and
conical igloos, to the soft-eyed double-vision of
folded cardboard domes and walls made of water-
filled wine bottles. Architecture, it seems, treats
a State of Emergency as a Utopian Declaration
of permissible excess, like the fire alarm triggers
a short, unscheduled playtime for bullies at a
boarding school. Rough ‘em up quick, we have limited
time!
Which should not be confused with quick
thinking. The role of an architecture - if there is one
10

5
Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh is known as
‘the beautiful city’ by Indians who have
never been there.
- in a fractured world of life-changing trauma is to
support the recovery of a broken spirit, not lazily
amputate in favour of prosthetics. It is servant
to a powerless and vulnerable group of people,
where the individual family is instantly reduced
and re-shaped by forces beyond its control, and
its community splintered and scattered. If not
completely vanished, its dwellings - whether a
candle-lit shanty with gaps in its rough-boarded
walls, or a rough concrete villa with a cracked-tile
roof - are irreparably damaged.
Homelessness wants its house back, in a
recognisable form.
The Wellington School of Architecture is running
a final-year design course on the post-tsunami
housing of southern Sri Lanka. The Convenor - a
lecturer at the institution, and a native of what used
to be Ceylon - plans a field trip to the island, along
with twenty avid architecture students fund-raising
a rort.
I learn this from the esteemed Indian Student,
an imported undergraduate from the Le Corbusier-
designed College of Architecture in the city of
Chandigarh, the Punjab’s celebrated, Le Corbusier-
designed capital.5 The Indian Student is currently
resident in Wellington to fulfil a complusory, six-
month practical-experience component of his
course, and - in search of a meaningful social life
- has made appropriate connections within the
drafty halls of the local architectural acadamie. He
fully understands why this small item of news
might be of interest to me - I once admonish both
11
him and his peers for their collective ignorance of
Jane Drew’s thoughtful low-cost terraced housing
in Chandigarh6, just a few blocks down the tree- 6
Le Corbusier designated the less glam-
orous work at Chandigarh to his assis-
lined, Le Corbusier-designed boulevard from their tants. Jane Drew’s sensitive terraces of
hallowed in-situ concrete studios. Indian students small houses (below) lining the edges
of public courtyards are far more part
are fully familiar, of course, with the Le Corbusier- of the life of the city than Corbusier’s
designed High Court, his Parliament Building, his isolated and inaccessible government
buildings.
Secretariat, and his clumsy lump of sculpture, the
Open Hand - this is, it seems, how architecture
expects itself to work. Perhaps more significantly,
the Indian Student knows of my respect for Laurie
Baker.
So - as attracted to a decent rort as any acquisitive
student - I attach myself to this warm-blooded idea
like a leech subsequently clings to my forearm in
a Sri Lankan rubber plantation. I suck until I’m
stuck, and the bloated pragmatist known as the
Practising Architect - so beloved of the precocious
baby architect - will kindly assist the Student until
he himself may find more useful work.
I’m the reality check on a real opportunity. I buy
a ticket, on myself.

Serious business demands quality stationary. I

choose a soft-bound A5 notebook from Whitcoulls,
less prissy than the type hallowed by the memory of
Bruce Chetwin but no less demanding of consistent
graphic or literary standards. Basil Spence may
have doodled his Beehive on a napkin7, but this is 7
Basil Spence’s ‘napkin sketch’ for Wel-
lington’s new parliament building - al-
disaster architecture of quite another kind.
legedly drawn at the table of a State din-
Rendered in the cool of Wellington evenings, ner -.is probably an urban myth. Though
publicly scorned as glib and superficial,
my urgent sketches of an imagined tropical house
the idea is privately enjoyed by many
are immediately precise, and not - as might be architects for its casual artistry

12

8
The fruit of the jackfruit tree is highly
valued as a staple food in sri lanka.
expected - loose and impressionistic. I have the
answers, it seems, to my own questions.
The notebook reveals drawings of a small
courtyard house that might easily, and variously,
attach itself to others, and thus initiate - given
the opportunity of a specific location - the
incremental construction of a small community. I
call it ‘TSUNAMI BOX’, and tentatively print this
deliberately architectural title at the foot of each
page in small capital letters as fragile as coral. Built
of concrete blocks and clay-tiled, mono-pitched
roofs, the rooms of the house are permanently open
to an internal court and a jackfruit tree8, the latter
ostentatiously highlighted by the green of a Resene
pencil. The walled entrance may be arranged, if
required, into a modest shop for supplementary
income.
Though drawn freehand, the images are
carefully scaled at 1:100 - floor plan, cross-and-
longitudinal sections, elevations, and an exploded
axonometric. Diligent in assumptions but impatient
of due process, they are frighteningly complete.
Using local techniques, an experienced builder
might usefully employ them, just as they are,
without elaboration.
Impatient for the journey, I leave myself behind.
13
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