Restoration Australia Season 2 Ep 1 Paganin House WA

The ABC's 'Restoration Australia' has a second season. No longer hosted by interior designer Sibella Court, but now by architect and historian Stuart Harrison. It has taken a few years to make and has been contracted out by the ABC to Freemantle Media. The result is more renovation, interior decoration and bathroom fit-out and less restoration. The difference might seem semantic but is critical to the concept of heritage conservation.
The Burrs Charter defines Restoration as:

Returning a place to a known earlier state by removing accretions or by reassembling existing elements without the introduction of new material.

Episode 1 looks at the Ivan Ivanov (or Iwan Iwanoff) designed Paganin house in Perth after a fire that left only the concrete slab and some perimeter walls intact. Ivanov was a Bulgarian-born architect who emigrated to Australia in 1950. his buildings seem quirky even for 1950s and 60s standards. Not pure modernist, but given a flair for a sort of eastern European kitschy love of unusual shapes, shiny materials and multiple textures. The inclusion of the destroyed house in this second series of Restoration Australia, where there is really nothing left to restore, might be the result of a personal choice.  Harrison confesses: “I have a soft spot for the Paganin House, it was actually part of my introduction to architectural Modernism when I was studying architecture here in Perth...His creations were, both then and now, seminal examples of creativity and innovation".

before fire in 2014   
                         
fire damage 2015

restored (reconstructed) 2018

The Paganin house is described as 'a beacon of postwar design amid Perth’s suburban architecture', a 'classic example if Ivanov's 'late expressionist style', a 'brutalist masterpiece', 'one of the earliest examples of open planned interior design' and was noted for its 'heavy touches of marble, timber, laminate and stone'.

While it is clearly not brutalist (being a steel frame clad in glass, metal and stone panels), and it doesn't seem to have been very well known before it burnt down in 2015, appearing only in specialist writings and the occasional obsessive website such as the house nerd, or the Perth 6000 blog, it now has become an 'Iconic Modern Masterpiece', and proof of the sophistication of mid century Australian home design innovation. I don't doubt all this is true, but the show's premise that it is about restoration of historic buildings or as they put it 'follows homeowners across the country as they restore forgotten heritage gems', needs a bit of tweaking to make this one fit in.

The Burra Charter helps  again with a definition of reconstruction:

Returning a place to a known earlier state and is distinguished from restoration by the introduction of new material.

So Episode 1 is really 'Reconstruction Australia'.

What is being restored then? The house is recreated for sure - and in all its shiny surfaces and timber paneling and screens the after shots look convincingly mid century modern. The idea that stands out in the show however, is that it is the restoration of the owner's belief in the house that matters, that the emotional attachment can be recovered and restored by rebuilding the place exactly as it was, as if this somehow wipes out the disaster that occurred.  it makes me think of Dresden, and the reconstructions undertaken to somehow reduce the grief of loss that war, conflict and natural disasters cause. This is a reasonable idea, and one that is proper for heritage to consider. The conservation of cultural heritage is about maintaining and sometimes restoring a belief system, one that says the things from the past somehow make us what we are and maintain our sense of place in the world.
Unfortunately little of this is articulated in the show as it fetishises the accurate recreation of what was lost. We see the metal brackets that supported the timber screens around the dining area, recovered from the fire and reused, becoming a reliquary of the martyred house, despite them being practically invisible and causing additional headaches for the tradies. An internal wall is reconstructed according to the plan (it is believed). "But something's wrong"  the wall is 300mm out and has to be demolished and started again. The show is starting to sound more like The Block or even  Bondi Rescue.

The obsessive concerns for details continue - int the accuracy of the gaps between the timbers; In the worry about matching the Jarrah timber; Even in Ivanov's own house (which is visited to compare) where the books are arranged according to spine colour.

It is this sort of obsessive stylism that seems to drive both the new owner's urge the recreate the house from scratch as well as the host's enthusiasm for the place. One thing that bothered me was the was the ABC parenthesised  'architectural' masterpiece'

 Modernism is still on the rise. Facebook groups extol the glories of mid century modernist homes (mostly architect-designed), post-modernism and even brutalism. We might conclude that concepts of heritage have caught up and these styles can now be seen as part of an architectural history cannon, or they have aged sufficiently for feelings of nostalgia to develop.

The contradictions in the pursuit of the new style, and the conservation of heritage, stand out in the show. The  Modernist credo of stripping away decoration, of honesty in materials, is contradicted by the complicated and fiddly concrete blockwork, and the emphasis on shiny surfaces and expensive or difficult to manufacture or maintain materials. Ivanov's own house the polystyrene packing form concrete casting could well have been Italianate render moldings. but then most architectural theories are full of holes.

The fact that a building, so far gone, can be brought back, and then considered still to be heritage, provides evidence for another way of looking at conservation of cultural heritage. My daughter suggested the Paganin house restorers could next take on the rebuilding of the Corkman Hotel.