Garangtua

Infrastructures of the Carnivalesque

What if we were to ponder an architecture that defies convention and subverts habitual production. How can humour, fantasy, parody and satire begin to sow the seed of an architecture of absurdity, an infrastructure of the carnivalesque and an urbanism of the grotesque?

In 1534, François Rabelais published Gargantua and Pantagruel, a convoluted book documenting the excessive exploits of two gluttonous giants. Gargantua’s breeches required 1,106 yards of linen and his purse was made of an elephant’s testicle. Pantagruel, his son, boasted a mouth so large that entire cities were built on his teeth, complete with “tennis courts, handsome galleries, beautiful meadows and many vineyards.”

The book transgresses conventional boundaries of style and subject, responding to aspects of allegory, fantasy, social critique, wordplay, parody, satire etc. His criticisms of the Roman Catholic Church are so telling that it is difficult to believe that Rabelais was a priest for most of his life. The characters themselves have also contributed to our language - gargantuan and pantagruelian, typically applied to things larger-than-life. Rabelaisian synonymous with vulgar.

Rabelais’ uninhibited and unconventional approach to literary expression was subject to great criticism, especially by the College de la Sorbonne who placed it on a list of condemned books in 1542.

In 1965, Mikhail Bahktin published Rabelais and His World which argued that for centuries, Rabelais’ book has been misunderstood. He posits the validity of the carnival as the antithesis to ‘civility’. Whereas civility demanded seriousness and sobriety, carnival was marked by its humour and laughter. Carnival was a terrain for the deliberate and self-consciously anti-authoritarian.

The terrain in which we will be testing this on is the Main Outfall Sewer; a 27km long abandoned sewer that stretches from the phantom city of Cocoroc to Spotswood. It was planned during the Marvellous Melbourne era in the 1880s and completed during the Great Depression in the 1890s. It was the largest civil engineering project ever undertaken in Victoria and was solely responsible for the formation of the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works (MMBW).