Looking Backward, Looking Forward: Delightful Delays

‘A warm grey fabric lined on the inside with the most lustrous and colourful of silks’: dreams of airships and tropical islands

“…In one way, the hangar's technical form is fully emancipated from art. 74 In another, it is formally congruent with the Fale's roof. Supported by columns, the Fale's roof covers (rather than encloses) like that of the spacious, half-open structure of a Germanic hall (Halle).…”

“…Each of these ruinous schemes held diverse wishimages, and those that still exist (the hangar and the resort) occupy opposite ends of a nineteenth century architectural desire to juxtapose the outmoded with the new, Nature with History. 70 Airfield, hangar, the landscape of the resort, Tropical Village, and Samoan Fale are figures whose energies can be apprehended as "dialectics at a standstill". Ambivalence becomes "marked by a potentiality" and interruption creates conditions of possibility, bringing "what-has-been" into a constellation with the now.…”