“Imagine a storefront in Lewisham, a suburb in the Inner West of Sydney seven kilometres from the CBD, conspicuously exposing its contents to a street. Not much to see, though: some wheeled potted plants; a black table slightly too large for the room it sits in; two white curtains, one in the background, the other preventing curious passersby from peeking too much; some books on a shelf in the corner; some more books on display in fabric pockets hanging on a wall; an unfolded carrier bag; and a couch, recently replaced by two tatami mats lifted from the ground by a timber stud structure.

Other minor interventions, barely visible, are even more mundane. A collection of hooks precariously grounds objects, activities, practices and people to this specific location. It is hard to say if they have been attached to the walls for years or have been freshly nailed by the new occupants — a purposeful ambiguity, as with many spaces for rent in Sydney, the tenants’ rights to intervene in its walls is limited. The fragility of these foundations is especially meaningful. They reveal the attitude of the inhabitants towards weight. The hooks made lightness, both conceptual and literal, mandatory, as they won’t hold heavy loads. Instead of defining functions, they require actions — hook, unhook, tie, untie. They are of no use to build partitions, to settle, and yet, they lock, they keep things in place. Their architecture is made of threads and knots, preventing everyday life from moving elsewhere.

Life is indeed essential to this place. Visiting, stopping for a coffee, or engaging in a conversation with the two hosts are actions as necessary as its architecture. They define my relationship with it. I have found myself spending hours there, chatting with the founders, Umi and Janelle, about this place that they call Mori — a symbolic use of the Japanese kanji for ‘forest’, formed by a triplication of the character for the ‘tree.’ Its use recognises one of the founders’ cultural heritage and reminds us we are still foreigners to this land. I like to imagine that it recalls the dark undertones of the word’s Latin meaning, too: We are not here indefinitely. The stratification of reasons and meanings behind the name exemplifies the attitude behind their entire project. The result of long conversations, constant re-evaluations, and relentless doubt, Mori is rarely rushed, but when something happens, it often remains. In that sense, Mori is a sedimentary operation that, slowly, layer after layer, builds a geological solidity, a mirror image of the immediate and weightless architectural interventions it instantiates. This combination of conceptual consistency, playful life and protean materiality may seem like a chance encounter. It is not. It is a conscious response to the conditions in which Umi and Janelle operate: Sydney.

When we started discussing this project, Mori lacked a name or a space. It was a pure will. Janelle and Umi were sure they needed to practice architecture as a form of cultural production. The proposition’s challenges coincided with its potential.

First, Sydney lacked a space of sorts. Unlike other Australian cities, large cultural institutions in Sydney do not include architecture in their collections. Cultural value is limited to a few notable buildings, real estate is the primary value associated with architecture here. Most architectural practices in Sydney failed to provide the critical framework Janelle and Umi were looking for. Rather, they seemed responsible for the scarcity. Sydney, therefore, was a potential site for cultural production no one seemed to claim. Questions around labour, funding and the precarity of the job followed. Self-exploitation and informality are traditional diseases of cultural spaces, yet Sydney’s lack of institutional support only increases the symptoms. This inhospitable context has counterintuitively nurtured generations of artists, collectives and creative practices, generations which Mori could learn from.

Finally, it was unavoidable to address what it means to practice architecture on unceded land — acknowledging that our field is complicit and often acts as a beneficiary of ongoing colonising forces. While contemporary architectural training barely touches on the topic, and the recent Design with Country frameworks seem largely insufficient, the topic’s urgency seemed more apparent for recent graduates emerging from the turbulence of pandemic crises. It sits at the very foundation of all the prejudicial and destructive ways in which human life is played out. As architectural institutions avoid critical discussions of the larger contexts in which architecture operates, there is a need to find tools to address it. With Mori, they do not expect to find all the answers to these issues but hope to provide an apparatus for searching, self-reflecting and reimagining. An apparatus that better reflects the intersectionality present within their version of architecture.

If the brief sounds ambitious, be aware that these are only three topics in a long list that have never stopped growing since our first conversation. Mori is now a few months old, and my conversations with Umi and Janelle are less frequent. At the same time, the mountain range of evidence keeps growing. Mori’s constellation of objects, activities, practices and people expands. Solid enough to survive the Sydney context, temporarily occupying borrowed space, attuned to what the city could be, all its pieces fit behind a large window in Lewisham. Turn the page or stop by; they are waiting for you.”

Urtzi Grau
Barcelona, June, 2022

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