An Obadiah Slope column.
The Saturday Paper might be an unlikely place for good news about a Bible College, some readers of this blog might think. But here’s an insight into Darwin’s Nungalinya College in a review of an Architectural practice, “Incidental Architecture” by the paper’s Architectural critic Naomi Stead, a professor at RMIT. After reviewing an ecologically designed off-grid house called Gingkin, Stead adds…
“I admit I baulked a bit when they invoked Henry David Thoreau: ‘If one designs to construct a dwelling house … Consider first how slight a shelter is actually necessary.’ It’s now widely acknowledged that Thoreau’s mooning about on Walden Pond was enabled by his mum regularly bringing him clean undies and fresh-baked pies. Through one lens, he was simply playing house, enjoying the Spartan pleasures of philosophy while ignoring the invisible labour upon which it all subsisted.
“The architectural profession can have similar blind spots – a tendency to gloss over the labour relations, supply chains and social stratifications undergirding any building, including the raw privilege behind any private commission. Incidental Architecture answers these disciplinary hypocrises with a long-standing commitment to pro bono – or ‘low bono’ – work. There is a genuine moral seriousness in their definition of architecture as a service profession, most evident in their work for Nungalinya, a tri-denominational Aboriginal Christian theological residential college in Darwin.
“Incidental Architecture’s relationship with Nungalinya goes back 15 years. [Co-director Matt] Elkan jokingly describes how, when he first visited and offered his services gratis, asking what he could do to help, the answer came back: nothing. Elkan and [co-director Daina] Cunnunham continued to visit and serve the Nungalinya community with practical tasks such as gardening and maintenance and eventually this evolved into the staged design and construction of a suite of five new group-accommodation units for students.
“People go to Nungalinya – mostly women from outlying settlements and homelands – to study and join a community of fellow believers. The site is like a botanic garden, an immaculately maintained campus with accommodation and shared eating and working places tucked within lush tropical plantings. The new buildings are simple and robust, following the tenets of tropical design – deep eaves, heavy shade, open breezeways. Each is a simple rectangle with a hollow centre, not unlike the Gingkin plan – bedrooms at the four corners joined by a central open space, cooled by hanging ceiling fans. Importantly, they are designed to be both climatically and culturally appropriate.
“These are not schmick or precious buildings. They’re modest and workaday, durable but built very economically. They are distinguished by the evident care and sensitivity in their design, the instantiation of a long and respectful relationship with the community, the each-way learning.
“On the horizon, there’s discussion of a new house for a group of students from Nunglinya in the remote Arnhem Land community of Milingimbi. The architects say ‘they are looking for an architect who’s prepared to go there and design it for free. Sounds like us!'”
The Nungalinya project featured in Architecture Australia magazine.
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Good King Charles: Associate Professor Robyn Whitaker from the University of Divinity commended King Charles III for his public theology efforts in the US on her substack. She picks up a couple of quotes from his speech to the US Congress, including this one:
“It is my hope, my prayer, that in these turbulent times, working together and with our international partners, we can stem the beating of ploughshares into swords.”
Whitacker comments: “King Charles here talks about stemming the tide of turning plough shares into swords. That is, agricultural tools into weapons of war. It’s actually a harsh criticism of the US’s current war on Iran and possibly other military actions and military spending. And he’s inverting here a verse from Isaiah chapter two, verse four, where the biblical vision is of a future time when people will beat their swords into ploughshares, their spears into pruning hooks. That is the biblical vision of taking our weapons and turning them back into agricultural tools. And I think people heard that critique. But if you don’t know Isaiah, you might’ve missed that very subtle but incredibly powerful inversion of the biblical text that was an implied critique of the US. So well done to King Charles. I know there’s a lot of criticism we can say about the abuse of colonial power by the British Empire, but in this case, I thought we saw a king using his power for good and naming some really important things out of his own faith tradition.”
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Transcription blues: Can you guess the Bible book? Here’s how my transcription software rendered a great sermon encouraging us to have the same faith as Paul:
“Paul is deliberately giving the flipping Christians an insight into his take on his own situation, his point of view. And Paul’s situation is not good. We know he’s writing from prison in Rome, where he’s in chains because of his preaching Jesus. Prison today is not a happy place to be. Can you imagine what prison was like 2000 years ago?”