Snake charmer - Uluru National Park Cultural Center, Ayers Rock, Australia

Architectural Review, The, Nov, 1996 by Dan Underwood

This extraordinary building lies almost in the shadow of the mighty Ayers Rock in the middle of Australia, and in many ways attempts to bridge Aboriginal and the general culture by telling stories about the place and the people which are brilliantly layered over each other.

To Anangu, the Aboriginal people of central Australia, Uluru (Ayers Rock) is understandably a sacred place, for it rises huge, red and majestic from the desert, its deeply eroded visage eloquent of infinite time. The Rock is the centre of the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park and Anangu wanted to make a focus which could help to explain their culture and its relationship(1) with the amazing place to the numerous tourists who visit the mysterious symbolic centre of the continent.

The centre is about a kilometre south(2) of the huge hill. When Greg Burgess, his colleagues Kevin Taylor and Kate Cullity (landscape architects) and the display designer Sonja Peter were asked to make the building, they spent over a month on the site with local people, ingesting the nature of the place by walking it and having it explained by Anangu in paintings, tales and song. With the partnership of the Rangers of the Australian Nature Conservation Agency, the community evolved a brief and preliminary layouts were sketched out in sand, trial ideas which were later elaborated in paintings commissioned to explain the nature of men's and women's notions of the project.

They decided that it was imperative to ensure the least possible disturbance of the site the contour at which the sand dunes of the desert meet the microclimate created by Uluru, where bearded grass, umbrella bush and bloodwood trees begin to dominate the desert oaks and spinifex of the endless shifting sandy plains. But it is an ancient dead desert oak that forms the focus of the complex.

Just as preservation of the fragile landscape and eco-system was a priority, the building itself had to be made with the greatest respect for its place. It evokes the sinuous complex morphology of the dunes, yet at the same time makes a series of stable and memorable places in the middle of the endlessly shifting sand. Burgess describes the approaches to it in which 'the building appears as a mysterious undulating presence of skin, sinew and shadow, emerging and disappearing, looking, approaching, withdrawing'.

Rarely does an architect make words that capture the presence of his building so well. The thing itself is in two parts which enclose an open centre round the oak. Two sinuous plans represent (or have come to do so) Liru and Kuniya, snakes from the mythology of Anangu, which watch each other warily across the central battlefield and face the southern face of Uluru on which their Tjukurpa (or tribal law - see footnote 1) is inscribed. The southern building contains the entrance and the main display galleries. The northern one includes the shop, cafe and an oval multi-purpose hall. The two are linked by fences that curve across the red desert earth to enclose outdoor exhibition areas. To the west there is a big enclosed space for Inma dances. All the open areas are intended to be shaded by specially planted vines and brush; wiltjas(3) will be made when they are required for particular purposes.

Both buildings are shaded by floppy roofs which undulate like the surrounding dunes, yet when seen close-to seem like the delicate soft layering of the tissues of a live mussel, or the many layers of an old-fashioned cricket umpire's hat. The upper parts of the roofs are covered in copper tiles,(4) the lower layers which generously offer shade all round the two snake-plans are clad in shaggy bloodwood shingles, a friendly brim to welcome you into the protective shade of the buildings. The brims shade both the massive walls and people, contributing to the energy efficiency of the structures.

The layered roof is symbolic of the overlaid levels of thought in the design. At one level, this is a complex which panders to gawping tourism, and offers visitors the products of immemorial Aboriginal culture as keepsakes, souvenirs deprived of context and meaning. This is the fundamental economic base of the operation, but it has nobler aspects. It is perhaps racist to suggest that people should not sell what they are used to making - no one for instance would question my right to sell these words to the editor of the AR. Making words for sale is one of my crafts - why should a person who makes for instance boomerangs or sand paintings not be able to sell his labour in exactly the same way? In so doing, it is possible that his work will give people brought up in a completely different culture some notion of his own values.

This possibility is greatly enhanced by Burgess's building: you may be indifferent to the fact that you enter the building through a symbolic serpent's mouth, but you would have to be very insensitive indeed to avoid all reference to snakeness in the sinuous routes and patterns through the building. You are walking through a myth, and the great skill of the architect and his collaborators has been to create the experience without ever falling into kitsch or vulgarity: it is a line that is tightrope difficult to pursue and it has been accomplished with great dignity. For instance, on entering the Tjukurpa space beyond the entrance, you are simultaneously in a snake's guts, wandering through the winding topography of the dunes and in a gallery which shows some of the finest Anangu paintings, while being instructed in words about some of the significance of the place and its people.