Editorial Letter

Paradise Editorial Team

DIY (do-it-yourself) is the sophomore issue of Paradise Journal. Both not much and a great deal has changed in the last year. Most of the editorial team have now finished their postgraduate studies, with a few to begin in the coming year. We are standing in the doorway, or perhaps hesitating before the endlessly forking path. We wonder what comes next. DIY comes as a direct result of this moment we find ourselves in, a train of thought both rambling and precise.

If we are to understand the architectural profession as a pipeline, our futures in practice are fixed. We may find ourselves working as graduate architects, in our choice of small, medium, or large offices. Slowly, or all at once, we may begin to build projects that make worlds. Reliably, these are private residential projects (under 2M), private residential projects (over 2M), a commercial fitout or new build, a commercial tower for a private developer, a residential tower for a private developer, or some mix of commercial and residential uses in a tower for a private developer. We may find that some projects are once in a lifetime: a public amenity, a community building, a public art piece or cultural project, a social housing development, a civic space for public use. We may negotiate on the work we don’t really believe in to have a shot at the real deal.

These are the projects that we imagined for ourselves in school, fresh with a bright-eyed fervour to imagine the ways our world could be improved with thoughtful design. Not that this isn’t always the case, but more often than not we find this aspiration twisted into something that feels a lot more like exploitation—for profit, for power, for infamy. As Douglas Spencer states, “architects have learned to play by, and profit from, the rules of the neoliberal truth game: discredit any and all attempts to address the problems of the world as elitist and despotic…leave everything to the superior calculating powers of the market; resign oneself to enjoying its products rather than interpreting them; don’t think, feel; market yourself; market the market as progressive.”¹

We may observe, design, document. Graduate to architect to senior architect to associate to director. We may find that we measure ourselves up against this pipeline. We may find ourselves valued by our perfectionism and our efficiency, doggedly faithful to the standards of conventional work. They call this best practice. Same as it ever was. Considering what it means to be a professional, we wonder what is offered by the DIY, the amateur, the lovingly inexpert.

Paradise Journal is a labour of love and malcontent. We recognise the limitations in our conventional ways of working as architects, but we cannot discard them completely. For us, DIY is characterised by agency: an exploration of the different ways in which we have influence over our world, outside of the going institutions and accepted practices. It is about material matters, but more than just the object itself—it is about what material builds the world, what manuals and patterns and regulations construct. It is about experiments, about prototypes, about tests and fumblings and simple acts of putting things together. It is about processes of getting there, doing things for each other and making our own ways of being together. DIY leads many lives, but there is always an act of autonomy within, a search for a different way to do things. In it, we allow ourselves to consider what we could do if we did it ourselves.

DIY is colloquially defined as a practice of repair, modification, hacking and improvisation, performed without expertise or the help of certified professionals. In backyards, in sheds, on living room floors, DIY gives birth to an endless syntax of appropriation and wonky workpersonship. A Sunday trip to Bunnings—our nation’s most beloved retailer and sausage vendor—is a way of life.

DIY is commonly thought the domain of the amateur or the hobbyist, but we find these definitions wanting. The creation of the profession itself functions primarily to regulate the ways in which expertise is made useful and accessible in society. However, with safety and quality assurance comes standardisation and limitation.² A definition gives you identity, but hems in your agency. DIY centres the meaning of labour over the title itself, the process over the product. In a personal essay, Xinyi Lim of Megafauna Food thinks on what it means to be a cook instead of a chef.

The DIY method has a long history in this young nation, powerfully entwined with the settler-colonial tradition and identity of so-called Australia. In the form of standing orders and architectural advice books, DIY manuals were themselves the documents that colonised this continent. Dr. Emma Letizia Jones takes time to explore the history of these early handbooks and their relevance to architects today. What does it mean to construct a world from a pattern? In these histories, we find instructions, codes to be deciphered, craft languages written down so as not to be lost. In sewing patterns, in recipes, in manuals, the hand of the author does not matter so much as the information passed on, outwards and down, through generations. As Rowan Lear explores through the work of Fred Ward, these methods of amateur reproduction are not pure copy, but productive in their own right.

Today, the total resilience of our capitalist reality means that whatever we may be able to do ourselves can be sold back to us for a profit. A culture of ease and convenience (a “learned helplessness”)³ has been nurtured by protected manufacturing and production processes. Today, we are the most disconnected we have ever been from the building of our cities and apparatuses of daily life. DIY is about reclaiming skills and becoming architects anew. In their essay, research-based practice Second Edition reveals lessons learnt through their explorations in the circular building economy. This DIY is resourceful and thrifty, yet not always austere. There is a certain abundance made possible by an economy of means, as Joshua Duncan’s Vasse House shows us.

There is energy again for these discussions about DIY culture and the collective form. We resonate with the energy of the lumbung of ruangrupa’s documenta fifteen, of Ann Lui and Ana Miljački’s call for Co-Authoring in Log 54, or the much more local histories of the Tin Sheds that were unearthed during ‘Sydney Buries its Past’ lead by Maya Stocks. The point here is not to achieve originality or dominance, which architectural and cultural production is so often aimed at, but to feel the many trickles of energy flow into each other, swell and form a current. Cooperation over competition. Grassroots gardening initiative Growing Forward write about their experience in appropriating vacant space in Meanjin, and what happens when they try to go legitimate.

What is it that hinders our return to collective modes of being? In a deep dive into Australian strata housing laws, Kieran Patrick explores the power of the party wall in the compartmentalisation of common life. DIY culture has a long history of people making common places for themselves where they do not find them in the mainstream world, making communities where they are invisibilised by normative society. Through photograph and text, Dorcas Tang 邓佳颖 preserves the memory of The Bearded Tit, a queer bar in Redfern, on Gadigal land. History is not as objective as we would like to believe, but there is a radical act in recording your own, in making a new pattern.

The act of DIY is an embodied experience. One through which we appropriate, deviate, make a room of one’s own. These deviations are expressed as externalities: in clothing, in the bumper sticker, in the facades of our home, even in the words that jump from brain to mouth to the air around us and hopefully to some accommodating ears. In exploring the domestic facade as the threshold between inner life and public realm, Miriam Osburn reflects on the expansion of the self. For housemates Marilena Hewitt and Hugh Duke-Freney, the building of a backyard chicken coop during pandemic isolation was a physical exploration through which the self came into focus. Here, we present DIY as a manual labour that leaves space for absent and reflective states of mind. Not for escapism, but for intentionality. Where we consider that our actions are what build us: self, community, world.

The institutions we live under tell us that success looks like growth and accumulation. We are taught to imagine things as scarce because they are more valuable that way. We are engineered like this, to measure ourselves by accepted standards. This measurement makes us.⁴ In DIY, we find that making do offers so much more. That when the soil falls away beneath our feet, we begin again from the ground up.

October 2022