After Austerica (2012)

Fabrications, 2020

Since the nineteenth century a physically distant Metropolis has been invoked to determine the validity of Australian architectural projects and their ideas, and the assumption is this Metropolis sends out resolved principles to a provincial culture. This view assumes that actual immigration to Australia equals cultural erasure. It assumes Australia’s architectural culture is infantile or child-like and must accept a continual and necessarily painful education- the pedagogical focus-to animate local architecture. It is frequently asserted that architects whose capacities do not seem adequately recognised in Australia would always fare better in this Metropolis. The Metropolis proves, on closer inspection, to be nebulous and varied in location. Its constituent countries and cultures, usually associated with “age” and cultural power, have warred with each other constantly, and have consistently driven architects from its perceived membership. Its principles are frequently changing and...

Architectural Theory Review, 2003

The dynamism and mobility of architects in their approach to architectural design practice provides a context that emphasises that architecture, like culture, is not static or rooted in place, but is intricately configured through the dual processes of locality and mobility – both physical and theoretical. The production of architecture in Australia, as in other immigrant-rich societies, provides a case for reinforcing the theory that architectural mobility and travel are integral to the architecture of place. This issues paper sets out to re-examine the contribution of geo-cultural influences upon Australia’s architectural lineage and considers a diverse range of themes across an equally broad timeframe; British colonial transpositions; the dissemination of Modernism in Australia; the latent contribution of mid-twentieth century European émigré architects; and the secreted history of Australia’s Asian architecture. Common to all, however, is the notion of architectural translation as a process of influences transmitted, transposed or adapted to other contexts. It uses Australia as the focus from which to consider how global criticism, ideas and theories have travelled and continue to travel transversely across time and place, from the late-eighteenth century well into the twenty-first. This paper investigates translations through narratives, processes, networks and traces of architectural manifestations and begins to draw lines of influence.

In his Modern Architecture since 1900 (1982 ff.) William J.R. Curtis attempts to present a "balanced, readable overall view of the development of modern architecture from its beginning until the recent past" and to include the architecture of the non-western world, a subject overlooked by previous histories of modern architecture. Curtis places authenticityat the core of his research and uses it as the criterion to assess the historicity of modern architecture. While the second edition (1987) of Curtis's book appeared with just an addendum, for the third edition (1996) he undertook a full revision, expansion and reorganisation of the content. The new edition, it will be posited, does present a more 'authentic' account of the development of modern architecture in other parts of the world, presenting a comprehensive view of Australian architecture. Compared to the additions and modifications of other post-colonial examples, there is scant difference in Curtis' account of Australian modern architecture between the first (1982) and the third (1996) editions. Even in the third edition (1996) the main reference to Australian modern architecture is confined to the Sydney Opera House as well as a brief commentary of the work of Harry Seidler, Peter Muller, Peter Johnson, Rick Leplastrier and Glenn Murcutt. In the years separating the two editions, regionalism in architecture was debated and framed in different ways by Paul Rudolph, Kenneth Frampton and Curtis, among others. In analysing the absence of Australian architecture as a 'golden' example of regionalism, this paper presents a critical overview of Curtis' understanding of the notion of an ‘authentic’ regionalism.

Built, Unbuilt and Imagined Sydney is a humble collection of essays based on built and unbuilt works (residential, commercial, interiors, and so on) of interest in Sydney, inclusive of public art, object or furniture design, key invited or public lectures, studios, current projects in making, competitions, collaborations, exhibitions, installations, and outreach work. The focus is on the innovative and the original not the ordinary and the functional. The purpose of this is to reveal the expanded field of architecture, and that the practice of architecture exceeds the work legally defensible under the title of the architect. The emphasis is placed on practice as an intellectual activity and on contemporary practice of architecture as the meaningful exercise of social, political, and critical knowledge, skills, and mindset in an urban, spatial, and tectonic condition. The book reveals that all or most architects either adopt as their own or have an interest in an(other) field, such as visual art, urbanism and landscape, virtual reality and three dimensional imaging, installation art and lighting design, and so on. The book aims to reveal therefore the multidisciplinary, urban orientations, and fluid forms of practice. The essay format as opposed to a monograph or historical survey on a place or period in Australian architecture is deliberate. The aim is to capture not the formal outcome of the architectural practice but to capture the vitality and intensity of architectural thought behind it all. The collection will pick out the creative DNA of the city, as it represents a snapshot of the intensity that marks the critical and creative culture and enterprise informing the architectural scene in Sydney.

Paolo Soleri's Arcosanti project is an incomplete experimental urban complex at Cordes Junction, in the Arizona desert. This paper develops a conceptual framework for exploring Arcosanti through reference to the notion of "history/becoming": a term coined by philosopher Craig Lundy. 1 This composite notion is formed through the conjunction of two individual terms 1. Lundy, History and Becoming, 9, 184.

UQ Press, 2009

Efforts to define an Australian architectural identity have often been compromised by conflicting historical affinities and geographical realities. Under the certainties and assumptions vested in the British Empire, relationships with Asia in the Australian architectural imagination were typically ambivalent. History had extended Europe far beyond its shores. The far-flung geography of Australasia was to be ignored as best as possible, the distance overcome by ever-faster transport and communications. With the formal end of empire in the mid-twentieth century, and the new geo-political and economic focus on the development of neighbouring nation states, the nature and dynamics of architectural encounter between Asia and Australasia ostensibly changed significantly. Yet, as this paper explores, modernity was in many respects just a new face to the former imperial order. In architecture as in other fields, the new institutional frameworks and agencies that emerged to aid the process of post-colonial modernisation and development still reflected the values and technocratic scaffolding of empire. Strategic new frameworks like the Colombo Plan scholarships programs brought future leaders among the first postcolonial generations of South and SouthEast Asian architects to study in Australian universities, but curricula throughout the ex-colonial Commonwealth remained tied to the old imperial core through the RIBA accreditation and examination system. Through the propagation of modern architecture strong neo-colonial North/South links were thereby developed between architectural educators and professionals in the emerging nations of postcolonial Asia and benchmark institutions in the UK and its former settler dominions, including Australia.

The paper examines the reorientations of the appreciation of ugliness within different national contexts in a comparative or relational frame, juxtaposing the British, Italian, and Australian milieus, and to relate them to the ways in which the transformation of the urban fabric and the effect of suburbanization were perceived in the aforementioned national contexts. Special attention is paid to the production and dissemination of the ways the city’s uglification was conceptualized between the 1950s and 1970s. Pivotal for the issues that this paper addresses are Ian Nairn’s Outrage: On the Disfigurement of Town and Countryside (1956) Robin Boyd’s Australian Ugliness (1960), and the way the phenomenon of urban expansion is treated in these books in comparison with other books from the four national contexts under study, such as Ludovico Quaroni’s La torre di Babele (1967) and Reyner Banham’s The New Brutalism: Ethic Or Aesthetic? (1966).

The paper aims to examine the reorientations of the appreciation of ugliness within different national contexts in a comparative or relational frame, juxtaposing the British, Italian, Australian and American Milieus, and to relate them to the ways in which the transformation of the urban fabric and the effect of suburbanization were perceived in the aforementioned national contexts. The paper’s methodology will be based on the principles of transnational historical research, focusing on how connections function as central forces for historical processes. A point of departure will be the idea that the “transnationalization” of a historical discourse is based on the effort to understand the impact of cross-border relations on the transformation of certain concepts and ideas in each of the national contexts under study. The transnational approach in social sciences aims to take into consideration the historical di-mension when analysing how international exchanges of ideas and values evolve. Therefore, the exchanges between the four different cultural and socio-economic contexts under study will be examined on the basis of a relational analysis of the production and dissemination of the ways the city’s uglification was conceptualized between the 1950s and 1970s. Pivotal for the issues that this paper will address are Robin Boyd’s Australian Ugliness (1960) and Donald Gazzard’s Australian Outrage: The Decay of a Visual Environment (1966), and the way the phenomenon of urban expansion is treated in these books in comparison with other books from the four national contexts under study, such as Peter Blake’s God’s own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America’s Landscape (1964), Ludovico Quaroni’s La torre di Babele (1967) and Reyner Ban-ham’s The New Brutalism: Ethic Or Aesthetic? (1966). Special attention will also be paid to Boyd’s contributions to The Architectural Review from 1951 to 1970 and to the recently published book entitled After The Australian Ugliness (2021) and edited by Naomi Stead. The paper places particular emphasis on the analysis of a selection of never-before-published photographs taken by Robin Boyd during the late fifties when he spent some time as visiting professor at MIT and travelled around the US. Apart from the photographs of Boyd, those of Australian photographer Nigel Buesst are also examined. These photographs by Buesst were originally appeared in the 1968 and 1971 editions of The Australian Ugliness.The questions addressed in this paper are relevant to the architectural history of Australia or New Zealand, in the sense that one of its main case studies will be the case of Gold Coast Architecture. As Andrew Leach notes, in “The Gold Coast Moment” (2014), Boyd tried to interpret the “Tiki aesthetic” employing the term ‘Austerica’ in order to describe the neon signs and a “rainbow of plastic paint’ mere extensions of a cultural surface that captured, too deep suntans and what one writer called a ‘climate dictated exposure”.