- Rm 590, G04 Wilkinson Building
School of Architecture, Design and Planning
The University of Sydney, NSW 2006 AU
- Architectural Criticism, Manfredo Tafuri, Architectural History, Architectural Theory, Architecture, ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY, THEORY AND CRITICISM, and 26 moreHistory and theory of architecture, History and Theory of Modern Architecture, Art History, Modern Architecture, New Zealand, Italian Renaissance Architectural History, Francesco Borromini, Giovanni Battista Piranesi 1720-1778, Modern Italian Architecture, New Zealand Architecture, Postmodern Architecture, Architectural Journalism, History of Historiography, Historiography (in Art History), University Architecture, Italian architecture, Paolo Portoghesi, Urban History, History of Art, Baroque art and architecture, Art Criticism, Mannerism, Renaissance antiquarianism, Intellectual History, Philosophy of Culture, and Storia Dell'Architetturaedit
- Andrew Leach is Professor of Architectural History at the University of Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Pla... moreAndrew Leach is Professor of Architectural History at the University of Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning, where has taught since 2016. In 2018 he was a Wallace Fellow at the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies Villa I Tatti; in 2019–20 he held the Stuckeman Professorship of Interdisciplinary Design at Penn State.edit
编辑推荐 ☆藏在建筑里的城市小史，从七丘之城、世界之都、教皇之城到现代首都，勾勒罗马三千年跌宕起伏的城市演进 ☆跟随建筑学者在真实的街区寻访历史，拆解建筑与遗迹中交织的悠久历史，将建筑遗迹与电影、传说、故事、壁画一一对应 ☆皇帝、教皇、国王、独裁者等历代罗马统治者，如何用建筑宣示权威与野心？ ☆32开平装小开本，可随身阅读，探索罗马的理想读物 内容简介... more
编辑推荐
☆藏在建筑里的城市小史，从七丘之城、世界之都、教皇之城到现代首都，勾勒罗马三千年跌宕起伏的城市演进
☆跟随建筑学者在真实的街区寻访历史，拆解建筑与遗迹中交织的悠久历史，将建筑遗迹与电影、传说、故事、壁画一一对应
☆皇帝、教皇、国王、独裁者等历代罗马统治者，如何用建筑宣示权威与野心？
☆32开平装小开本，可随身阅读，探索罗马的理想读物
内容简介
罗马城如同一张羊皮纸，在数个世纪里被不断覆盖、重建。从万神殿到扎哈·哈迪德设计的MAXXI曲线，建筑学教授安德鲁·利奇解读建筑、历史遗迹、城市街道及其背后的建造意图，为读者勾勒出一系列历史速写。每一章他都带领读者在真实的街区寻访历史，将建筑遗迹与电影、传说、故事、壁画一一对应，帮助读者了解罗马这座城市如何形成，又如何被历史塑造。
作为曾经的帝国中心、世界之都、文艺复兴中心以及现代首都，罗马城中数不清的文化叠加交织在一起，在建筑上体现尤为明显。王政时代的砖块建筑几乎被大理石替代，罗马帝国时期的神殿或被遗弃，或用于教堂建筑，圣彼得大教堂见证了基督教会从一个卑微的开局发展为触角伸及四方的精神帝国，特尼米车站的改建则是人道主义取代法西斯价值观在建筑上的表达。
作者都根据罗马所处的不同时代依次规划出线路图，在真实的罗马街区寻访历史，解读建筑上不同的历史层次，依次想象罗马从起源到王政时期、帝国时期、中世纪、文艺复兴时期、意大利王国时期以及短暂的第三帝国时期。通过挖掘建筑背后的历史细节，深度呈现罗马的魅力。
☆藏在建筑里的城市小史，从七丘之城、世界之都、教皇之城到现代首都，勾勒罗马三千年跌宕起伏的城市演进
☆跟随建筑学者在真实的街区寻访历史，拆解建筑与遗迹中交织的悠久历史，将建筑遗迹与电影、传说、故事、壁画一一对应
☆皇帝、教皇、国王、独裁者等历代罗马统治者，如何用建筑宣示权威与野心？
☆32开平装小开本，可随身阅读，探索罗马的理想读物
内容简介
罗马城如同一张羊皮纸，在数个世纪里被不断覆盖、重建。从万神殿到扎哈·哈迪德设计的MAXXI曲线，建筑学教授安德鲁·利奇解读建筑、历史遗迹、城市街道及其背后的建造意图，为读者勾勒出一系列历史速写。每一章他都带领读者在真实的街区寻访历史，将建筑遗迹与电影、传说、故事、壁画一一对应，帮助读者了解罗马这座城市如何形成，又如何被历史塑造。
作为曾经的帝国中心、世界之都、文艺复兴中心以及现代首都，罗马城中数不清的文化叠加交织在一起，在建筑上体现尤为明显。王政时代的砖块建筑几乎被大理石替代，罗马帝国时期的神殿或被遗弃，或用于教堂建筑，圣彼得大教堂见证了基督教会从一个卑微的开局发展为触角伸及四方的精神帝国，特尼米车站的改建则是人道主义取代法西斯价值观在建筑上的表达。
作者都根据罗马所处的不同时代依次规划出线路图，在真实的罗马街区寻访历史，解读建筑上不同的历史层次，依次想象罗马从起源到王政时期、帝国时期、中世纪、文艺复兴时期、意大利王国时期以及短暂的第三帝国时期。通过挖掘建筑背后的历史细节，深度呈现罗马的魅力。
Research Interests:
Italian architecture has long exerted a special influence on the evolution of architectural ideas elsewhere - from the beaux-arts academy's veneration of Rome, to modernist and postmodern interest in Renaissance proportion, baroque space,... more
Italian architecture has long exerted a special influence on the evolution of architectural ideas elsewhere - from the beaux-arts academy's veneration of Rome, to modernist and postmodern interest in Renaissance proportion, baroque space, and mannerist ambiguity. This book critically examines this enduring phenomenon, exploring the privileged position of Italian architects, architecture, and cities in the architectural culture of the past century.
Questioning the deep-rooted myth of Italy within architectural history, the book presents case-studies of Italy's powerful yet problematic position in 20th-century architectural ideologies, at a time when established Eurocentric narratives are rightly being challenged. It reconciles the privileged position of Italian architecture and design with the imperative to write history across a more global, diverse, heterogenous cultural geography. 20 chapters from distinguished international scholars cover subjects and architects ranging from Alberti to Gio Ponti, Aldo Rossi, Manfredo Tafuri, Vittorio Gregotti; cities from Rome and Venice to Milan; and an array of international architects, movements, and architectural ideas influenced by Italy. The chapters each question where, how, and why the disciplinary edifice of 20th-century architecture-its canon of built, visual, textual, and conceptual works-relied on Italian foundations, examining where and how those foundations have become insecure.
Indispensable for students and scholars of both Italian and global architectural history, Italian Imprints on Twentieth-Century Architecture provides an opportunity to consider the architectural and urban landscape of Italy from substantially new points of view.
Contributions by the editors, as well as by Jean-Louis Cohen, Giorgia Aquilar, Raúl Martínez Martínez, Ute Poerschke, Caspar Pearson, Frank Bauer, Federica Vannucchi, Daniel A. Barber, Lionel Devlieger, Rosa Sessa, Maristella Casciato, Chris French, Diane Ghirardo, Ignacio G. Galan, Silvia Micheli and Lorenzo Ciccarelli, Dijia Chen, Philip Goad, Francesca Torello, and Daniela Ortiz dos Santos.
Questioning the deep-rooted myth of Italy within architectural history, the book presents case-studies of Italy's powerful yet problematic position in 20th-century architectural ideologies, at a time when established Eurocentric narratives are rightly being challenged. It reconciles the privileged position of Italian architecture and design with the imperative to write history across a more global, diverse, heterogenous cultural geography. 20 chapters from distinguished international scholars cover subjects and architects ranging from Alberti to Gio Ponti, Aldo Rossi, Manfredo Tafuri, Vittorio Gregotti; cities from Rome and Venice to Milan; and an array of international architects, movements, and architectural ideas influenced by Italy. The chapters each question where, how, and why the disciplinary edifice of 20th-century architecture-its canon of built, visual, textual, and conceptual works-relied on Italian foundations, examining where and how those foundations have become insecure.
Indispensable for students and scholars of both Italian and global architectural history, Italian Imprints on Twentieth-Century Architecture provides an opportunity to consider the architectural and urban landscape of Italy from substantially new points of view.
Contributions by the editors, as well as by Jean-Louis Cohen, Giorgia Aquilar, Raúl Martínez Martínez, Ute Poerschke, Caspar Pearson, Frank Bauer, Federica Vannucchi, Daniel A. Barber, Lionel Devlieger, Rosa Sessa, Maristella Casciato, Chris French, Diane Ghirardo, Ignacio G. Galan, Silvia Micheli and Lorenzo Ciccarelli, Dijia Chen, Philip Goad, Francesca Torello, and Daniela Ortiz dos Santos.
Research Interests: History, Architecture, Modern Italian History, Italian Studies, Identity (Culture), and 8 moreModernist Architecture (Architectural Modernism), Modern Architecture, Italian Renaissance Architecture, History of architecture, Contemporary Italian History and Politics, Italian History, History of Urban Planning, and Modernism and Postmodernism In Architecture
此书考量了自19世纪末建筑史学科出现以来建筑史学家所提出的问题。建筑史学家如何把历史与当下联系起来？如何将历史考据转化为历史叙事？建筑史对建筑从业者是否有用，又在哪些方面起作用？里奇将建筑史视作一个开放的学科，并围绕建筑史知识从三个领域展开论述：艺术史、历史学和建筑学。他认为，本书标题所提出的问题富有启示意义，为从历史角度研究建筑学提供了多种路径。... more
此书考量了自19世纪末建筑史学科出现以来建筑史学家所提出的问题。建筑史学家如何把历史与当下联系起来？如何将历史考据转化为历史叙事？建筑史对建筑从业者是否有用，又在哪些方面起作用？里奇将建筑史视作一个开放的学科，并围绕建筑史知识从三个领域展开论述：艺术史、历史学和建筑学。他认为，本书标题所提出的问题富有启示意义，为从历史角度研究建筑学提供了多种路径。 通过对西方及全球建筑史的介绍性回顾，本书将会扩展建筑学、艺术史和历史学的学生的研究视角、理论框架，推动研究生和建筑史学家对当前相关研究领域的探讨。
Research Interests:
The Gold Coast is Australia’s most rapidly changing city – regularly compared to Miami and Las Vegas for its embrace of bad taste and the good life; and with Dubai for its sudden moments of high-rise assuredness and seeming lack of... more
The Gold Coast is Australia’s most rapidly changing city – regularly compared to Miami and Las Vegas for its embrace of bad taste and the good life; and with Dubai for its sudden moments of high-rise assuredness and seeming lack of restraint in either the ambitions of building or their manifestations.
Beautifully illustrated throughout, this book offers the first comprehensive history of the city and its architecture, documenting its rise from a series of seaside villages in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the present-day city, set to host the 2018 Commonwealth Games. Considering city plans, architectural works, landscape formations and modes of inhabitation over the time in which the Gold Coast has been peopled, it considers the role of architecture in carrying the city forward. Its main focus is on the contemporary city and the conditions that have given rise to its character - high rise, bad taste and skewed towards the beach edge.
Beautifully illustrated throughout, this book offers the first comprehensive history of the city and its architecture, documenting its rise from a series of seaside villages in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the present-day city, set to host the 2018 Commonwealth Games. Considering city plans, architectural works, landscape formations and modes of inhabitation over the time in which the Gold Coast has been peopled, it considers the role of architecture in carrying the city forward. Its main focus is on the contemporary city and the conditions that have given rise to its character - high rise, bad taste and skewed towards the beach edge.
Research Interests:
The Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning is one of the oldest architecture schools in Australia, housed within one of the country’s founding ‘sandstone’ universities, the University of Sydney. But while this history might... more
The Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning is one of the oldest architecture schools in Australia, housed within one of the country’s founding ‘sandstone’ universities, the University of Sydney. But while this history might lend it a reputation for being a bastion of tradition, since its inception the school has also been at the forefront of wave after wave of innovation in architectural education and practice, both in Australia and globally.
This book tracks developments at the architecture school since Leslie Wilkinson’s appointment as Australia’s first Chair in Architecture 100 years ago. From its important role in the development of then-new fields such as architectural science and computer-aided design, to its formative influence on the development of environmentally and socially sustainable design in Australia, and more.
The story of an institution, with all its specificity, SYDNEY SCHOOL reflects on broader developments in the education of architects, designers, and planners and the many specialisations that gather around these professions. The story told in these pages will appeal both to alumni of the school and to all interested in the history of education in architecture, design, and planning.
Edited and with contributions by Andrew Leach and Lee Stickells, SYDNEY SCHOOL includes essays by Paul Jones, Simon Weir, Daniel J Ryan, Catherine Lassen and Julie Willis, Glen Hill, Duanfang Lu and Peter Webber, and Martin Tomitsch.
This book tracks developments at the architecture school since Leslie Wilkinson’s appointment as Australia’s first Chair in Architecture 100 years ago. From its important role in the development of then-new fields such as architectural science and computer-aided design, to its formative influence on the development of environmentally and socially sustainable design in Australia, and more.
The story of an institution, with all its specificity, SYDNEY SCHOOL reflects on broader developments in the education of architects, designers, and planners and the many specialisations that gather around these professions. The story told in these pages will appeal both to alumni of the school and to all interested in the history of education in architecture, design, and planning.
Edited and with contributions by Andrew Leach and Lee Stickells, SYDNEY SCHOOL includes essays by Paul Jones, Simon Weir, Daniel J Ryan, Catherine Lassen and Julie Willis, Glen Hill, Duanfang Lu and Peter Webber, and Martin Tomitsch.
Research Interests:
Manfredo Tafuri’s 1966 book L’architettura del Manierismo nel Cinquecento europeo is an early and oft-overlooked instance of his decades-long inquiry into the architectural history of early modern Italy. Read today, it comes across as... more
Manfredo Tafuri’s 1966 book L’architettura del Manierismo nel Cinquecento europeo is an early and oft-overlooked instance of his decades-long inquiry into the architectural history of early modern Italy. Read today, it comes across as both an imperfect attempt at a scientific treatment of his subject and an engaged plea for a new orientation in the historiography of architecture. Leach presents a brief guide to this book, acknowledging its relationship with more widely read works on the problem of doing history in the architectural culture of the nineteen-sixties and making the case for its importance for contemporary reflections on the relationship between architecture’s past and present.
Research Interests:
A short history of a big subject ...
Research Interests:
Examining discomfort’s physical, emotional, conceptual, psychological and aesthetic dimensions, the contributors to this volume offer an alternate, cultural approach to the study of architecture and the built environment. By attending to... more
Examining discomfort’s physical, emotional, conceptual, psychological and aesthetic dimensions, the contributors to this volume offer an alternate, cultural approach to the study of architecture and the built environment. By attending to a series of disparate instances in which architecture and discomfort intersect, On Discomfort offers a fresh reading of the negotiations that define architecture’s position in modern culture. The essays do not chart comfort’s triumph so much as discomfort’s curious dispersal into practices that form ‘modern life’ – and what that dispersion reveals of both architecture and culture.
The essays presented in this volume illuminate the material culture of discomfort as it accrues to architecture and its history. This episodic analysis speaks to a range of disciplinary fields and interdisciplinary subjects as extends our understanding of the domestication of interiors (and objects, and cities, and ideas), the conditions under which – by intention or accident – they discomfort.
Contents:
Thinking Through Discomfort (David Ellison and Andrew Leach), 2. ‘Good God Mrs Nicholson!’ Slaves and Domestic Disquiet in Eighteenth-century Scotland (Dolly MacKinnon), 3. Thoreau’s Economy (Andrew Ballantyne), 4. Wandering Sensations: Supernatural Discomforts and Modern Domesticity (David Ellison), 5. Climatic Discomforts: [Sub]tropical Climates, Racial Character and the Nineteenth-century Queensland House (Deborah van der Plaat), 6. Technological Progress as an Obstruction to Domestic Comfort: Hugo Van Kuyck and the Introduction of the American Example in Post-war Belgium (Fredie Floré), 7. Everything but the Orgy Truck: Shopping for Radical Architecture at MoMA, 1972 (Alexandra Brown), 8. It’s Not me, It’s You (Andrew Leach), 9. The Wolfers House by Henry Van de Velde, as Occupied by Herman Daled (Bart Verschaffel), 10. Blind Windows: A Particularly Domestic Discomfort (Chris L. Smith), 11. Reality without Restraint: Bathtime in the Villa dall’Ava (Christophe Van Gerrewey)
The essays presented in this volume illuminate the material culture of discomfort as it accrues to architecture and its history. This episodic analysis speaks to a range of disciplinary fields and interdisciplinary subjects as extends our understanding of the domestication of interiors (and objects, and cities, and ideas), the conditions under which – by intention or accident – they discomfort.
Contents:
Thinking Through Discomfort (David Ellison and Andrew Leach), 2. ‘Good God Mrs Nicholson!’ Slaves and Domestic Disquiet in Eighteenth-century Scotland (Dolly MacKinnon), 3. Thoreau’s Economy (Andrew Ballantyne), 4. Wandering Sensations: Supernatural Discomforts and Modern Domesticity (David Ellison), 5. Climatic Discomforts: [Sub]tropical Climates, Racial Character and the Nineteenth-century Queensland House (Deborah van der Plaat), 6. Technological Progress as an Obstruction to Domestic Comfort: Hugo Van Kuyck and the Introduction of the American Example in Post-war Belgium (Fredie Floré), 7. Everything but the Orgy Truck: Shopping for Radical Architecture at MoMA, 1972 (Alexandra Brown), 8. It’s Not me, It’s You (Andrew Leach), 9. The Wolfers House by Henry Van de Velde, as Occupied by Herman Daled (Bart Verschaffel), 10. Blind Windows: A Particularly Domestic Discomfort (Chris L. Smith), 11. Reality without Restraint: Bathtime in the Villa dall’Ava (Christophe Van Gerrewey)
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Contents: Considering the Gold Coast, Aysin Dedekorkut–Howes, Caryl Bosman & Andrew Leach; All that glitters: An environmental history ‘sketch’ of Gold Coast City, Jason Byrne & Donna Houston; Holidaying on the Gold Coast, Noel Scott,... more
Contents:
Considering the Gold Coast, Aysin Dedekorkut–Howes, Caryl Bosman & Andrew Leach; All that glitters: An environmental history ‘sketch’ of Gold Coast City, Jason Byrne & Donna Houston; Holidaying on the Gold Coast, Noel Scott, Sarah Gardiner & Aysin Dedekorkut–Howes; Transport: From cream cans and campers to city centres and commuters, Daniel O’Hare & Matthew Burke; The Gold Coast: Innovation Incubator for the Real Estate Development Industry? Eddo Coiacetto, Sacha Reid & Andrew Leach; Changing landscapes: Gold Coast residents and the impacts of rapid urban development, Caryl Bosman; Thirty years of Gold Coast architecture, Andrew Leach; The politics of paradise: Intergovernmental relations and the Gold Coast, Michael Howes; The changing face of local government on the Gold Coast, Paul Burton; Selling the City, Ruth Potts, Sarah Gardiner & Noel Scott; City With/out a Plan, Aysin Dedekorkut–Howes & Severine Mayere; Looking Beyond the Horizon, Aysin Dedekorkut–Howes & Caryl Bosman
Considering the Gold Coast, Aysin Dedekorkut–Howes, Caryl Bosman & Andrew Leach; All that glitters: An environmental history ‘sketch’ of Gold Coast City, Jason Byrne & Donna Houston; Holidaying on the Gold Coast, Noel Scott, Sarah Gardiner & Aysin Dedekorkut–Howes; Transport: From cream cans and campers to city centres and commuters, Daniel O’Hare & Matthew Burke; The Gold Coast: Innovation Incubator for the Real Estate Development Industry? Eddo Coiacetto, Sacha Reid & Andrew Leach; Changing landscapes: Gold Coast residents and the impacts of rapid urban development, Caryl Bosman; Thirty years of Gold Coast architecture, Andrew Leach; The politics of paradise: Intergovernmental relations and the Gold Coast, Michael Howes; The changing face of local government on the Gold Coast, Paul Burton; Selling the City, Ruth Potts, Sarah Gardiner & Noel Scott; City With/out a Plan, Aysin Dedekorkut–Howes & Severine Mayere; Looking Beyond the Horizon, Aysin Dedekorkut–Howes & Caryl Bosman
Research Interests:
This book presents those projects to have received recognition in the first three decades of the architecture awards of the Gold Coast Division and Gold Coast and Northern Rivers Region of the Australian Institute of Architects. A series... more
This book presents those projects to have received recognition in the first three decades of the architecture awards of the Gold Coast Division and Gold Coast and Northern Rivers Region of the Australian Institute of Architects. A series of dossiers present the outcomes of each awards cycle, accompanied by commentary synthesising jury comments and press coverage of each year's deliberations and outcomes.
Research Interests:
In his landmark volume Space, Time and Architecture, Sigfried Giedion paired images of two iconic spirals: Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International and Borromini’s dome for Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza. The values shared between the baroque... more
In his landmark volume Space, Time and Architecture, Sigfried Giedion paired images of two iconic spirals: Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International and Borromini’s dome for Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza. The values shared between the baroque age and the modern were thus encapsulated on a single page spread. As Giedion put it, writing of Sant’Ivo, Borromini accomplished “the movement of the whole pattern […] from the ground to the lantern, without entirely ending even there.” And yet he merely “groped” towards that which could “be completely effected” in modern architecture-achieving “the transition between inner and outer space.”
The intellectual debt of modern architecture to modernist historians who were ostensibly preoccupied with the art and architecture of earlier epochs is now widely acknowledged. This volume extends this work by contributing to the dual projects of the intellectual history of modern architecture and the history of architectural historiography. It considers the varied ways that historians of art and architecture have historicized modern architecture through its interaction with the baroque: a term of contested historical and conceptual significance that has often seemed to shadow a greater contest over the historicity of modernism.
Presenting research by an international community of scholars, this book explores through a series of cross sections the traffic of ideas between practice and history that has shaped modern architecture and the academic discipline of architectural history across the long twentieth century. The editors use the historiography of the baroque as a lens through which to follow the path of modern ideas that draw authority from history. In doing so, the volume defines a role for the baroque in the history of architectural historiography and in the history of modern architectural culture.
Contents:
Defining a problem: modern architecture and the baroque, Maarten Delbeke, Andrew Leach and John Macarthur; Engaging the past: Albert Ilg’s Die Zukunft des Barockstils, Francesca Torello; Größstadt as Barockstadt: art history, advertising and the surface of the neo-baroque, Albert Narath; The ‘restless allure’ of (architectural) form: space and perception between Germany, Russia and the Soviet Union, Luka Skansi; Geoffrey Scott, the baroque and the picturesque, John Macarthur; Against formalism: aspects of the historiography of the baroque in Weimar Germany, 1918-1933, Ute Engel; Riegl and Wölfflin in dialogue on the baroque, Evonne Levy; Beyond the Vienna School: Sedlmayr and Borromini, Marko Pogacnik; Pevsner’s Kunstgeographie: from Leipzig’s baroque to the Englishness of modern English architecture, Mathew Aitchison; The future of the baroque, ca. 1945, Andrew Leach; Giedion as guide: Space, Time and Architecture and the modernist reception of baroque Rome, Denise R. Costanzo; Reading Aalto through the baroque: constituent facts, dynamic pluralities, and formal latencies, Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen; Taking the sting out of the baroque: Wittkower in 1958, Andrew Hopkins; Pierre Charpentrat and baroque functionalism, Maarten Delbeke; From spatial feeling to functionalist design: contrasting representations of the baroque in Steen Eiler Rasmussen’s Experiencing Architecture, Anthony Raynsford; From Michelangelo to Borromini: Bruno Zevi and operative criticism, Roberto Dulio; Between history and design: the baroque legacy in the work of Paolo Portoghesi, Silvia Micheli; Steinberg’s complexity, Michael Hill; The ‘recurrence’ of the baroque in architecture: Giedion and Norberg-Schulz’s approaches to constancy and change, Gro Lauvland; The future of the baroque, ca. 1980, Maarten Delbeke and Andrew Leach; Bibliography; Index.
The intellectual debt of modern architecture to modernist historians who were ostensibly preoccupied with the art and architecture of earlier epochs is now widely acknowledged. This volume extends this work by contributing to the dual projects of the intellectual history of modern architecture and the history of architectural historiography. It considers the varied ways that historians of art and architecture have historicized modern architecture through its interaction with the baroque: a term of contested historical and conceptual significance that has often seemed to shadow a greater contest over the historicity of modernism.
Presenting research by an international community of scholars, this book explores through a series of cross sections the traffic of ideas between practice and history that has shaped modern architecture and the academic discipline of architectural history across the long twentieth century. The editors use the historiography of the baroque as a lens through which to follow the path of modern ideas that draw authority from history. In doing so, the volume defines a role for the baroque in the history of architectural historiography and in the history of modern architectural culture.
Contents:
Defining a problem: modern architecture and the baroque, Maarten Delbeke, Andrew Leach and John Macarthur; Engaging the past: Albert Ilg’s Die Zukunft des Barockstils, Francesca Torello; Größstadt as Barockstadt: art history, advertising and the surface of the neo-baroque, Albert Narath; The ‘restless allure’ of (architectural) form: space and perception between Germany, Russia and the Soviet Union, Luka Skansi; Geoffrey Scott, the baroque and the picturesque, John Macarthur; Against formalism: aspects of the historiography of the baroque in Weimar Germany, 1918-1933, Ute Engel; Riegl and Wölfflin in dialogue on the baroque, Evonne Levy; Beyond the Vienna School: Sedlmayr and Borromini, Marko Pogacnik; Pevsner’s Kunstgeographie: from Leipzig’s baroque to the Englishness of modern English architecture, Mathew Aitchison; The future of the baroque, ca. 1945, Andrew Leach; Giedion as guide: Space, Time and Architecture and the modernist reception of baroque Rome, Denise R. Costanzo; Reading Aalto through the baroque: constituent facts, dynamic pluralities, and formal latencies, Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen; Taking the sting out of the baroque: Wittkower in 1958, Andrew Hopkins; Pierre Charpentrat and baroque functionalism, Maarten Delbeke; From spatial feeling to functionalist design: contrasting representations of the baroque in Steen Eiler Rasmussen’s Experiencing Architecture, Anthony Raynsford; From Michelangelo to Borromini: Bruno Zevi and operative criticism, Roberto Dulio; Between history and design: the baroque legacy in the work of Paolo Portoghesi, Silvia Micheli; Steinberg’s complexity, Michael Hill; The ‘recurrence’ of the baroque in architecture: Giedion and Norberg-Schulz’s approaches to constancy and change, Gro Lauvland; The future of the baroque, ca. 1980, Maarten Delbeke and Andrew Leach; Bibliography; Index.
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“Mimarlık tarihi nedir?” 19. yüzyılın sonundan itibaren kültürel tarih ve sanat tarihi biçiminde yaygınlık kazanmaya başlayan modern akademik alan için sorulan bir soru. Bu soruyla birlikte, mimarlık tarihi üzerine yazan ve mimarlık... more
“Mimarlık tarihi nedir?” 19. yüzyılın sonundan itibaren kültürel tarih ve sanat tarihi biçiminde yaygınlık kazanmaya başlayan modern akademik alan için sorulan bir soru. Bu soruyla birlikte, mimarlık tarihi üzerine yazan ve mimarlık tarihçilerinin çalışmalarını inceleyenlerin karşılaştığı kavramsal sorunlara Andrew Leach’in incelikli üslubuyla bir giriş yapılıyor.
Mimarlık tarihyazımına ilişkin yaklaşımların değerlendirildiği kitapta, tarihsel mimarlık bilgisinin oluşma, toplanma ve yayılma yolunu biçimlendiren temel sorunlar ortaya konuyor. Modern mimarlık tarihinin kendi sınırları ve ilgileri hakkında bilgi edindiği retorik, analitik ve tarihselci gelenekler irdelenerek 20. ve 21. yüzyıldaki mimarlık tarihçilerinin karşılaştıkları çatışmalar ele alınıyor. Ayrıca son dönemdeki mimarlık tarihyazımının tarihi ve mimarlığın “kuram dönemi”nin mimarlık tarihçileri üzerindeki etkisi inceleniyor.
Mimarlık tarihyazımına ilişkin yaklaşımların değerlendirildiği kitapta, tarihsel mimarlık bilgisinin oluşma, toplanma ve yayılma yolunu biçimlendiren temel sorunlar ortaya konuyor. Modern mimarlık tarihinin kendi sınırları ve ilgileri hakkında bilgi edindiği retorik, analitik ve tarihselci gelenekler irdelenerek 20. ve 21. yüzyıldaki mimarlık tarihçilerinin karşılaştıkları çatışmalar ele alınıyor. Ayrıca son dönemdeki mimarlık tarihyazımının tarihi ve mimarlığın “kuram dönemi”nin mimarlık tarihçileri üzerindeki etkisi inceleniyor.
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Inaugural Professorial Lecture, Gold Coast campus, Friday 10 October 2014 at 6pm.
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What is Architectural History? considers the questions and problems posed by architectural historians since the rise of the discipline in the late nineteenth century. How do historians of architecture organise past time and relate it to... more
What is Architectural History? considers the questions and problems posed by architectural historians since the rise of the discipline in the late nineteenth century. How do historians of architecture organise past time and relate it to the present? How does historical evidence translate into historical narrative? Should architectural history be useful for practicing architects? If so, how? Leach treats the disciplinarity of architectural history as an open question, moving between three key approaches to historical knowledge of architecture: within art history, as an historical specialisation and, most prominently, within architecture. He suggests that the confusions around this question have been productive, ensuring a rich variety of approaches to the project of exploring architecture historically. Read alongside introductory surveys of western and global architectural history, this book will open up questions of perspective, frame, and intent for students of architecture, art history, and history. Graduate students and established architectural historians will find much in this book to fuel discussions over the current state of the field in which they work.
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There is a great deal of interest and activity in the interdisciplinary space between the visual arts and architecture. Many artists use building materials or architectural representations. Architects and critics speak, with few cautions,... more
There is a great deal of interest and activity in the interdisciplinary space between the visual arts and architecture. Many artists use building materials or architectural representations. Architects and critics speak, with few cautions, of architecture as “art”. Is it possible, then, that architecture is returning to a longer-term, older position as an art with sibling relations to other disciplines? What is it today to speak of architecture as an art, and what should we make of the long history of this question? The essays in this volume address these issues on conceptual and historical grounds, the writers drawing from papers and discussions presented at a colloquium of the Architecture Theory, Criticism and History (ATCH) Research Group of the University of Queensland, Australia, hosted by Brisbane’s Institute for Modern Art on August 17 and 18, 2007.
Table of Contents:
Architecture, Disciplinarity and the Arts: Considering the Issues – John Macarthur & Andrew Leach; On Art and/or Architecture Being an Obstacle- Bart Verschaffel; Architecture and the System of the Arts – John Macarthur; James Fergusson’s Theory of Architecture and the Phonetic Arts – Peter Kohane; Disciplinary Contrasts: Science, Art, and the Imagination in the Nineteenth-Century Writings of William Lethaby, John Ruskin, and Alexander von Humboldt – Deborah van der Plaat; Wilhelm Worringer, Gothic Vitalism and Modernity – Darren Jorgensen; Problems for Architecture in the Art of Le Corbusier- Antony Moulis; André Bloc in Iran – Daniel Barber; Throwing Light on Our Intentions – Andrew Leach; Serial Techniques in the Arts: General Ambitions and Particular Manifestations – Sandra Kaji-O’Grady; Buildings, Photographs, Sculptures: On Medium and Disciplinarity in the Work of the Bechers – Naomi Stead; Callum Morton’s Architecture of Disguised Difference – Rosemary Hawker; Icon and Ideology – Craig Johnson; Tectonics: Testing the Limits of Autonomy- Gevork Hartoonian; A-disciplinarity and Architecture? – Mark Dorrian
Table of Contents:
Architecture, Disciplinarity and the Arts: Considering the Issues – John Macarthur & Andrew Leach; On Art and/or Architecture Being an Obstacle- Bart Verschaffel; Architecture and the System of the Arts – John Macarthur; James Fergusson’s Theory of Architecture and the Phonetic Arts – Peter Kohane; Disciplinary Contrasts: Science, Art, and the Imagination in the Nineteenth-Century Writings of William Lethaby, John Ruskin, and Alexander von Humboldt – Deborah van der Plaat; Wilhelm Worringer, Gothic Vitalism and Modernity – Darren Jorgensen; Problems for Architecture in the Art of Le Corbusier- Antony Moulis; André Bloc in Iran – Daniel Barber; Throwing Light on Our Intentions – Andrew Leach; Serial Techniques in the Arts: General Ambitions and Particular Manifestations – Sandra Kaji-O’Grady; Buildings, Photographs, Sculptures: On Medium and Disciplinarity in the Work of the Bechers – Naomi Stead; Callum Morton’s Architecture of Disguised Difference – Rosemary Hawker; Icon and Ideology – Craig Johnson; Tectonics: Testing the Limits of Autonomy- Gevork Hartoonian; A-disciplinarity and Architecture? – Mark Dorrian
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In 1984, a small group of architects and historians from Australia and New Zealand met in Adelaide to present research on the history and historiography of architecture. Since then, under the wing of the Society of Architectural... more
In 1984, a small group of architects and historians from Australia and New Zealand met in Adelaide to present research on the history and historiography of architecture. Since then, under the wing of the Society of Architectural historians, Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ), these meetings have become one of the key architectural history conferences internationally.
Shifting Views draws together a selection of writing from across twenty-five years of these conferences to provide a fascinating view into the region's architectural history discipline. The essays collected here, from such diverse thinkers as Judith Brine, Joan Kerr, Miles Lewis, Sarah Treadwell, Philip Goad, Julie Willis and Mike Austin, reflect some of the most illuminating debates from these conferences.
Together these essays capture a tone of critical enquiry and the conditioins of writing architectural history in Australia New Zealnd. Shifting Views takes us into the mechanics of architectural history-making, exposing its foundations and demonstrating how they can be called account. It shows us how architectural history has been made and revised, giving us a glimpse of the means by which our past becomes our history.
Shifting Views draws together a selection of writing from across twenty-five years of these conferences to provide a fascinating view into the region's architectural history discipline. The essays collected here, from such diverse thinkers as Judith Brine, Joan Kerr, Miles Lewis, Sarah Treadwell, Philip Goad, Julie Willis and Mike Austin, reflect some of the most illuminating debates from these conferences.
Together these essays capture a tone of critical enquiry and the conditioins of writing architectural history in Australia New Zealnd. Shifting Views takes us into the mechanics of architectural history-making, exposing its foundations and demonstrating how they can be called account. It shows us how architectural history has been made and revised, giving us a glimpse of the means by which our past becomes our history.
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The Italian architect and historian Manfredo Tafuri (b. Rome, 1935; d. Venice, 1994) made a decisive contribution to the practice of architectural history, yet the breadth of his bibliography and the depth of his perception into... more
The Italian architect and historian Manfredo Tafuri (b. Rome, 1935; d. Venice, 1994) made a decisive contribution to the practice of architectural history, yet the breadth of his bibliography and the depth of his perception into historical problems remains largely unexplored even today. The first English-language book to consider his contribution to architectural culture, it opens an overdue discussion on both the premises of his practice and the historical questions that consequently emerge.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, History, Intellectual History, Architecture, Marxism, and 17 moreItalian Studies, Renaissance Studies, Biography, Martin Heidegger, Philosophy of History, Postmodernism, Modern Architecture, Historiography (in Art History), Jean Paul Sartre, History of Historiography, 20th century Avant-Garde, Student movements, Existentialism, 1968 in Europe, Manfredo Tafuri, History of Philosophy, and Historiography of Art History
Campus Confessions asks how ideas about education meet theories of architectural practice in he establishment of the Central Institute of Technology on its Heretaunga (NZ) site. New ideas about technical training in New Zealand, a local... more
Campus Confessions asks how ideas about education meet theories of architectural practice in he establishment of the Central Institute of Technology on its Heretaunga (NZ) site. New ideas about technical training in New Zealand, a local engagement with the New Brutalism, and an architect known for his humour and irreverence all compound to form this interesting chapter in New Zealand's modern architectural history.
Research Interests: Visual Studies, Education, Architecture, History of Education, Modern Architecture, and 9 moreHistory of New Zealand, New Zealand, Brutalism, University Architecture, New Brutalism, Technical and Vocational Education and Training, Reyner Banham, History of Technical Education, and Modern Architecture and Urban Planning
Architect Friedrich H. Neumann escaped from Nazi persecution and left Vienna for New Zealand in 1939. Over the following twenty-five years, Newman (his name from 1947) worked for the Governement Architect’s Office in Wellington. This book... more
Architect Friedrich H. Neumann escaped from Nazi persecution and left Vienna for New Zealand in 1939. Over the following twenty-five years, Newman (his name from 1947) worked for the Governement Architect’s Office in Wellington. This book presents Newman through his own archive of writing, and gives a first overview of his life and works in Vienna, in Russia (1932-1937), and in New Zealand, where Newman was appointed head of the Hydro-electric Design Office and responsible for all government housing design.
The lectures include: A moral approach to social order; On architectural education; The functional aspect of overall design; The interrelation of engineering Design and architecture; Beauty in engineering; Social factors in architecture and their implications for New Zealand; Housing Design; New Zealand housing in the light of an expanding society; Architecture in hydro design; The architect’s design and his status: comments on a visit to England, France, and Italy; Design.
The lectures include: A moral approach to social order; On architectural education; The functional aspect of overall design; The interrelation of engineering Design and architecture; Beauty in engineering; Social factors in architecture and their implications for New Zealand; Housing Design; New Zealand housing in the light of an expanding society; Architecture in hydro design; The architect’s design and his status: comments on a visit to England, France, and Italy; Design.
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Preface to a collection of essays by and on Manfredo Tafuri, published in Farsi. Text first published in English in Circa 1 (2023) on the basic of a lecture given in Venice in 2014.
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This paper addresses the process and patterns by which private property was applied on the Australian continent. Alongside lease-holdings (limited by term, or perpetual) and squatting practices, the identification and documentation of... more
This paper addresses the process and patterns by which private property was applied on the Australian continent. Alongside lease-holdings (limited by term, or perpetual) and squatting practices, the identification and documentation of private property in both individual cases and in aggregate over a large geography offers a compelling approximation of the appearance and spread of British-Australian settlement. Plots and patterns of private land ownership can be read in relation to other forms of land use and tenure that are each subject to specific historical legal instruments and definitions. This paper explores how, in particular, the first generation alienation of private property might be constructed, represented and theorised through a critical approach to the tools and practice of GIS. What are the technical considerations in identifying the extent of a site and mapping its transfer into private hands? How far can the process of mapping the initial alienation of parcels of Crown land over time expose legacies of colonial practices in present-day methods? And serve as a testbed for the generation of other layers that capture, for instance, patterns of informal privatisation; or interact with other phenomena—most notably that of frontier violence—that likewise occur on land, in time. The paper locates this work among the problems of mapping colonial land occupation with tools that share a heritage with the surveying tools that allowed that same acquisition; while at the same time seeking to use our “more-than-maps” approach to critical GIS to consider ongoing appropriation and dispossession on Aboriginal land.
Research Interests: Real Estate, History, Geography, Digital Humanities, Landscape Architecture, and 15 moreProperty Law, Digital History, Landscape History, British Imperial and Colonial History (1600 - ), Australian History, Critical GIS, Indigenous Land Rights, Land Rights, Mapping, Colonization studies, Land Surveying, Land Law and Administration, History of commons, commoning, communal property, Land Alienation, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
Published in English for the first time in Circa, this is the text of a lecture delivered in Venice at an event (2014) marking twenty years since the death of Manfredo Tafuri.
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Contribution to a book edited by Frida Grahn. The work of Venturi Scott Brown and Associates and its antecedents celebrates a modern sense of mannerism that has often been explored in relation to Venturi’s training and early... more
Contribution to a book edited by Frida Grahn.
The work of Venturi Scott Brown and Associates and its antecedents celebrates a modern sense of mannerism that has often been explored in relation to Venturi’s training and early experience. This essay will locate these claims in terms of Denise Lakofsky’s education in London and its legacies—at once historicizing and operational. It will consider what a student in 1950s London might have known of mannerism, and how, drawing in the teaching and writing of Pevsner, Summerson, Blunt, and others. It will place recollections of this moment by Scott Brown into conversation with archival records and published accounts of this moment.
About the book:
From the bustle of Johannesburg to the neon of Las Vegas, Denise Scott Brown’s advocacy for “messy vitality” has transformed the way we look at the urban landscape. Unconventional, eloquent, and with a profound sociopolitical message, Scott Brown is one of our era’s most influential thinkers on architecture and urbanism. The anthology Denise Scott Brown In Other Eyes – marking the 50th anniversary of the seminal Learning from Las Vegas – paints a portrait of Scott Brown as seen through the eyes of leading architectural historians and practitioners. It features new scholarship on her education on three continents, her multi- disciplinary teaching, and her use of urban patterns and forces as tools for architectural design – a practice documented in a new comment by Scott Brown, noting that sometimes “1+1>2.”
With contributions by Craig Lee, Mary McLeod, Robin Middleton, Andrew Leach, Denise Costanzo, Carolina Vaccaro, Marianna Charitonidou, James Yellin, Lee Ann Custer, Sarah Moses, Sylvia Lavin, Joan Ockman, Valéry Didelon, Katherine Smith, Inès Lamunière, Frida Grahn, Jacques Herzog, Stanislaus von Moos, Christopher Long, Hilary Sample, Aron Vinegar, Françoise Blanc, Denise Scott Brown, and Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum.
The work of Venturi Scott Brown and Associates and its antecedents celebrates a modern sense of mannerism that has often been explored in relation to Venturi’s training and early experience. This essay will locate these claims in terms of Denise Lakofsky’s education in London and its legacies—at once historicizing and operational. It will consider what a student in 1950s London might have known of mannerism, and how, drawing in the teaching and writing of Pevsner, Summerson, Blunt, and others. It will place recollections of this moment by Scott Brown into conversation with archival records and published accounts of this moment.
About the book:
From the bustle of Johannesburg to the neon of Las Vegas, Denise Scott Brown’s advocacy for “messy vitality” has transformed the way we look at the urban landscape. Unconventional, eloquent, and with a profound sociopolitical message, Scott Brown is one of our era’s most influential thinkers on architecture and urbanism. The anthology Denise Scott Brown In Other Eyes – marking the 50th anniversary of the seminal Learning from Las Vegas – paints a portrait of Scott Brown as seen through the eyes of leading architectural historians and practitioners. It features new scholarship on her education on three continents, her multi- disciplinary teaching, and her use of urban patterns and forces as tools for architectural design – a practice documented in a new comment by Scott Brown, noting that sometimes “1+1>2.”
With contributions by Craig Lee, Mary McLeod, Robin Middleton, Andrew Leach, Denise Costanzo, Carolina Vaccaro, Marianna Charitonidou, James Yellin, Lee Ann Custer, Sarah Moses, Sylvia Lavin, Joan Ockman, Valéry Didelon, Katherine Smith, Inès Lamunière, Frida Grahn, Jacques Herzog, Stanislaus von Moos, Christopher Long, Hilary Sample, Aron Vinegar, Françoise Blanc, Denise Scott Brown, and Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum.
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A book is being developed from this event, in which the full, developed paper will appear. The cycles through which key figures of Italian culture have been commemorated by the nation’s institutions—centenaries of birth and death—by... more
A book is being developed from this event, in which the full, developed paper will appear.
The cycles through which key figures of Italian culture have been commemorated by the nation’s institutions—centenaries of birth and death—by now offer up resolved and coherent views on their subjects as they come around. Early events addressing the legacies of key figures in the history of architecture were, however, much less resolved, and significantly more contested. In this paper, I reflect on the manifold ways in which the figure of Francesco Borromini was constructed by historians of art and architecture, by architects, curators, archivists and other cultural agents on the occasion of the tercentenary of his death. Bruno Zevi’s involvement in the organisation of this wide-ranging programme, and in part to the specific idea he advanced of a transhistorical spatiality connecting the Roman baroque to American organisicism (as one example), ensured that the complexity of Borromini as an artistic and biographical subject is actively countermanded by a series of abstractions. These locate Borromini within a sense of history likewise reliant on an idea of architecture that can be productively reduced to a fundamental spatiality—a language held in common with the modern architect rather than an essential condition to which Borromini (for instance) adheres. This paper reflects on this event: its elements and contributors, and the main lines of its debates (many of which are captured in a robust acts), focussing on the linguistic analogy as well as the event as a setting for the meetings of disciplinary languages concerned with works of architecture in their history.
The cycles through which key figures of Italian culture have been commemorated by the nation’s institutions—centenaries of birth and death—by now offer up resolved and coherent views on their subjects as they come around. Early events addressing the legacies of key figures in the history of architecture were, however, much less resolved, and significantly more contested. In this paper, I reflect on the manifold ways in which the figure of Francesco Borromini was constructed by historians of art and architecture, by architects, curators, archivists and other cultural agents on the occasion of the tercentenary of his death. Bruno Zevi’s involvement in the organisation of this wide-ranging programme, and in part to the specific idea he advanced of a transhistorical spatiality connecting the Roman baroque to American organisicism (as one example), ensured that the complexity of Borromini as an artistic and biographical subject is actively countermanded by a series of abstractions. These locate Borromini within a sense of history likewise reliant on an idea of architecture that can be productively reduced to a fundamental spatiality—a language held in common with the modern architect rather than an essential condition to which Borromini (for instance) adheres. This paper reflects on this event: its elements and contributors, and the main lines of its debates (many of which are captured in a robust acts), focussing on the linguistic analogy as well as the event as a setting for the meetings of disciplinary languages concerned with works of architecture in their history.
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We know enough about images. We know that they hide as readily as they reveal, and that the truth of what is captured is tempered always by the artifice of the frame and the intentions behind the eye. They come to us easier, now, than... more
We know enough about images. We know that they hide as readily as they reveal, and that the truth of what is captured is tempered always by the artifice of the frame and the intentions behind the eye. They come to us easier, now, than ever. We can see more than we can have wished to see before, and even though we know how they work, they shape what we know of the world. In what will for many be remembered as a long 2020, the disastrous effects of climate change, regional warfare, political unrest and its civil counterpart, reckonings with racism and colonial pasts, the global refugee crisis, and (what else?) the pandemic have played out on both screens and streets—and rarely (ever?) on the same terms. Matters of scale, density, governance, and economy, as well as cultural habits and devices—that is, the specificities of these experiences—are nonetheless captured by media that turn what at times has seemed a complex universal event with epicentres into something that is not the same here as it is there. We may yet flatten the distinctions we can still appreciate in the moment as we begin to capture this time as history, measuring specific episodes against an abnormal global norm, but for now we know that Hong Kong, Melbourne, Chicago and Rio de Janiero demand quite different accounts of this present moment.
The once raw experience of the Second World War and its aftermath is, perhaps, the most recent comparable moment—widespread, uneven, and evocative. As David Escudero’s book shows, though, [...]
The once raw experience of the Second World War and its aftermath is, perhaps, the most recent comparable moment—widespread, uneven, and evocative. As David Escudero’s book shows, though, [...]
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A brief reflection on the relationship of the growth of studies in the historiography of architecture and the context offered by theoretical discourse and architecture's so-called theory moment.
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A contribution to the edited volume "Terms of Style in Art History", edited by Valérie Kobi.
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This essay attends to the overlooked writing on mannerism by Giusta Nicco Fasola (1901–60). It argues that this work contributes significantly to a discourse at once testing the expressionism premises of the mannerism presented across the... more
This essay attends to the overlooked writing on mannerism by Giusta Nicco Fasola (1901–60). It argues that this work contributes significantly to a discourse at once testing the expressionism premises of the mannerism presented across the 1920s, 30s and 40s and reconciling the modern stakes of mannerism with its sixteenth-century origins. Fasola’s work, it suggests, has not been as well recognised as it might have been, and that its claims can be heard echoed across the 1960s, in an intense yet short-lived reappraisal of this term in the historiography of architecture. It locates this work here in order to pursue its significance in a larger project.
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An architectural history that foregrounds materials over the intentions of architects and other agents of procurement and design places works and the means of their production into fields that do not map neatly on to established... more
An architectural history that foregrounds materials over the intentions of architects and other agents of procurement and design places works and the means of their production into fields that do not map neatly on to established geographies. Drawing on a recent body of work concerned with those architectural histories of the Tasman world and the interplay of extractive industries and “grey” architecture, this paper reflects on the conceptual stakes of prioritising specific industries over habitual historiographical frames. Timber’s dual standing as an extracted resource subject to the vicissitudes of trade, and as a building material deployed in settings immediately adjacent to forests and at significant distances from its point of origin, exposes the complexity of a form of architectural history attentive to historical events and the images history necessarily draws from them. The paper responds to a proposal by Mark Crinson intended to address this complexity, suggesting that an architectural history of timber in the specific setting of the colonial Tasman world may offer a useful test.
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An architectural history that foregrounds materials over the intentions of the architects and other agents of procurement and design places works and the means of their production into fields that do not map neatly on to established... more
An architectural history that foregrounds materials over the intentions of the architects and other agents of procurement and design places works and the means of their production into fields that do not map neatly on to established geographies. Drawing on a recent body of work concerned with those architectural histories of the Tasman world and the interplay of extractive industries and “grey” architecture, this paper reflects on the conceptual stakes of prioritising specific industries over habitual historiographical frames. Timber’s dual standing as an extracted resource subject to the vicissitudes of trade, and as a building material deployed in settings immediately adjacent to forests and at significant distances from its point of origin, exposes the complexity of a form of architectural history attentive to historical events and the images history necessarily draws from them. The paper responds to a proposal by Mark Crinson intended to address this complexity, suggesting that an architectural history of timber in the specific setting of the colonial Tasman world may offer a useful test.
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This is an unpublished paper, delivered to the symposium Indagine sul manierismo (Pisa) in December 2020. Across the 1940s and ’50s, scholars in Britain, the United States and Italy began to publish articles on the modern history of the... more
This is an unpublished paper, delivered to the symposium Indagine sul manierismo (Pisa) in December 2020. Across the 1940s and ’50s, scholars in Britain, the United States and Italy began to publish articles on the modern history of the term mannerism, principally for the history of painting, but increasingly for the history of architecture. Essays like Marco Treves’s “Maniera” (1941), Nikolaus Pevsner’s “The Architecture of Mannerism” (1946) and Anthony Blunt’s “Mannerism in Architecture” (1949) marked this territory out as a reflection on developments in historiography since the end of the eighteenth century, and focussed on the decades since Max Dvořák delivered his seminal lecture on El Greco. A number of essays by the architect and historian Giusta Nicco Fasola explore these themes, and sit within this development, but at the outset of a distinct second phase of disciplinary self-reflection. Alongside such scholars as Georg Weiss and Eugenio Battisti, she explored the implications of the tension between the drive for historical acuity (the relationship between mannerism and a Vasarian maniera) and contemporaneity (the relationship between mannerism and the modern, mediated by history) that would find full expression in the later writing by, among others, Manfredo Tafuri, on the architecture of the sixteenth century and its lessons for architectural design and historiography. While this would find its full-throated expression into the 1960s, Fasola herself died at the start of that decade (aged 59) and the gains of her work were absorbed—without due credit—by the scholars who wrote the most prominent contributions to the “question of mannerism” in that decade. This paper will recover the main lines of Fasola’s writing on mannerism and locate her as an important precedent for the work that would define the shape of discourse on this theme across the 1960s and ’70s.
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Distance is both conceptual and actual. It is overcome or exploited in all manner of ways that have consequences for the history of architecture. It is fostered in the critical attitude. And collapsed when history is invoked in the... more
Distance is both conceptual and actual. It is overcome or exploited in all manner of ways that have consequences for the history of architecture. It is fostered in the critical attitude. And collapsed when history is invoked in the present. It shapes the relationship of Europe to its Antipodes, as well as of Europe to its neighbours. Its presence is necessary for claims upon disciplinarity; its absence, the dissolution of disciplinary boundaries. In what ways has distance figured in the history of architecture? What has it altered? What has it prevented? What has it allowed? What does it permit, even now? These lines opened the call for papers for Distance Looks Back, the first combined meeting of the EAHN and SAHANZ (Sydney, 10-13 July 2019, http://distance2019.sydney). This meeting served, first, to break down the distance that keeps the activities of these two highly compatible communities at a remove from one another. It also served to explore the very idea of distance as a practical consideration of the architectural historian’s work and as a persistent theme in architectural history and its conceptualisation.
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On mannerism and Robert Venturi (on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture).
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Frampton’s critical regionalism is notable for the degree to which he conflates analysis and judgment. The forewords, prefaces and introductory essays to new books on those architects or by those writers who address this theme have, over... more
Frampton’s critical regionalism is notable for the degree to which he conflates analysis and judgment. The forewords, prefaces and introductory essays to new books on those architects or by those writers who address this theme have, over time, become assumed strategic importance for the historian in securing his critical fortunes—an enduring process of confirmation and demonstration of a position carved out, in some cases, decades earlier. This essay reads across these short but pointed pieces to see how Frampton continues to explore the ideas, tropes, or values that secure his enduring relevance to contemporary architectural culture, locating an aspect of his ‘project’ therein.
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Australia’s laid-back, sun-drenched beach lifestyle has been a celebrated and prominent part of its official popular culture for nigh on a century, and the images and motifs associated with this culture have become hallmarks of the... more
Australia’s laid-back, sun-drenched beach lifestyle has been a celebrated and prominent part of its official popular culture for nigh on a century, and the images and motifs associated with this culture have become hallmarks of the country’s collective identity. Though these representations tend towards stereotype, for many Australians the idea of a summer holiday at the beach is one that is intensely personal and romanticised – its image is not at all urbanised. As Douglas Booth observed, for Australians the beach has become a ‘sanctuary at which to abandon cares – a place to let down one’s hair, remove one’s clothes […] a paradise where one could laze in peace, free from guilt, drifting between the hot sand and the warm sea, and seek romance’.1 Beach holidays became popular in the interwar years of the twentieth century, but the most intense burst of activity – both in touristic promotion and in the development of tourism infrastructure – accompanied the postwar economic boom, when family incomes were able to meet the cost of a car and, increasingly, a cheap block of land by the beach upon which a holiday home could be erected with thrift and haste. In subtropical southeast Queensland, the postwar beach holiday became the hallmark of the state’s burgeoning tourism industry; the state’s southeast coastline in particular benefiting from its warm climate and proximity to the capital, Brisbane. It was here – along the evocatively named Gold Coast (to Brisbane’s south) and Sunshine Coast (to its north) [1] – that many families experienced their first taste of what is now widely celebrated as the beach lifestyle [2]. As one reflection has it:
In the era before motels and resorts, a holiday at the Gold and Sunshine coasts usually meant either pitching a tent and camping by the beach or staying in a simple cottage owned by family or friends […] Simplicity, informality, individuality […] were the hallmarks of these humble places.
In the era before motels and resorts, a holiday at the Gold and Sunshine coasts usually meant either pitching a tent and camping by the beach or staying in a simple cottage owned by family or friends […] Simplicity, informality, individuality […] were the hallmarks of these humble places.
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Contribution to the workshop "Maniera and Mannerisms: A Historiographic Paradigm of Cinquecento Art" (Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome, June 5-6 2018). It outlined a book-in-development from research as a Wallace Fellow at the Villa I Tatti... more
Contribution to the workshop "Maniera and Mannerisms: A Historiographic Paradigm of Cinquecento Art" (Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome, June 5-6 2018). It outlined a book-in-development from research as a Wallace Fellow at the Villa I Tatti (2017-18 academic year), provisionally titled "Unstylish Style".
Research Interests:
The history of architectural education at the University of Sydney has been inflected from the very beginning by the question of usefulness: of the graduate to his or her profession; of the University to society; and of the quality of the... more
The history of architectural education at the University of Sydney has been inflected from the very beginning by the question of usefulness: of the graduate to his or her profession; of the University to society; and of the quality of the work undertaken by students and graduates to Sydney itself. These questions have surfaced with each major reconfiguration of the syllabus, each new degree added to the University’s stable, and with each new discipline or specialisation given a home in what was long called the Faculty of Architecture. What subjects are proper to a professional course of study in architecture? What should distinguish those architecture graduates with a university education? And an education from the University of Sydney in particular? While questions of these sort might now tend to hover somewhere between curriculum planning and marketing, in anticipation of the first class of enrolments in the Bachelor of Architecture in 1918, the appointment of the University’s inaugural Chair of Architecture later that year, and the foundation of the Department and then Faculty of Architecture in 1918 and 1920, respectively, these were existential questions that involved not only the university community—both within and well beyond those teaching courses in architecture—but also the leadership of the New South Wales Institute of Architects and among those whose voices gave shape to cultural commentary in Sydney. [...]
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There is increasing interest among architectural historians in addressing environmental concerns on both historical and theoretical terms. Simultaneously, other fields have been looking to architectural scholarship to understand the... more
There is increasing interest among architectural historians in addressing environmental concerns on both historical and theoretical terms. Simultaneously, other fields have been looking to architectural scholarship to understand the historical relationship between the built and the natural environment. For architectural historians, and others, this has also involved correlating the shifting discourse on environment with a history of architectural transformations and disciplinary expansions. These engagements have made clear that the environmental history of architecture does not simply add more objects to the historical database, but also changes the terms of historical analysis, as new matters of concern and new conceptual frameworks come to the fore. This paper gathers together a dialogic set of projections from scholars responding to the question of how we might newly understand the historical relationship between the built and the natural environment, and the opportunities and challenges this new phase presents to scholars, design researchers, and architects.
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Workshop paper to "Maniera and Mannerisms A Historiographic Paradigm of Cinquecento Art," Bibliotheca Hertziana--Max Planck Institute for Art History, Rome, June 5-6, 2018
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Among the roles assumed by architectural periodicals in Australia’s postmodern decades was that of collapsing the distance between the world and the antipodes. By the end of the 1970s this distance was less palpable than it had ever been,... more
Among the roles assumed by architectural periodicals in Australia’s postmodern decades was that of collapsing the distance between the world and the antipodes. By the end of the 1970s this distance was less palpable than it had ever been, with architects enjoying unprecedented mobility in their study and practice, but the work being undertaken at the centres of international architectural discourse was also itself more mobile than it had ever been: a matter less of buildings than books, in which privileged location was not about experience but an authority underpinned by institutional power. Considering as a matter of intentions the editorial projects of two Australian architecture journals, this essay reflects on the local effects in Australia of the increased status of discourse as a mode of architectural practice and thought separable from the production of buildings. It considers how these periodicals defined their position within Australian architectural debate while serving as vehicles for the transmission of postmodern models and ideas. [...]
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My basic contention, hardly controversial, is that so far as it describes something historical and specific (not necessarily oppositional), as a term or concept that functions scientifically (in the broadest sense), baroque is an artefact... more
My basic contention, hardly controversial, is that so far as it describes something historical and specific (not necessarily oppositional), as a term or concept that functions scientifically (in the broadest sense), baroque is an artefact of the long twentieth century. [...]
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This paper positions the Salvation Army Reform Centre for Girls in Toowong (completed 1962), also known at the time as Kalimna Vocational Centre for Delinquent Girls, in the modern history of the architecture of southeast Queensland.... more
This paper positions the Salvation Army Reform Centre for Girls in Toowong (completed 1962), also known at the time as Kalimna Vocational Centre for Delinquent Girls, in the modern history of the architecture of southeast Queensland. Placing the frame of the building’s response to Brisbane’s subtropicality into conversation with other, intersecting, histories, the paper reflects on the relationship between an (architectural) history of intentions and an (institutional) history of their compromise. Designed by Robin Spencer for the Brisbane architectural firm E.P. & A.I. Trewern, Kalimna operated as a detention centre and correctional facility for young women who were committed to the institution’s care by the court. Its new buildings attended to the Salvation Army’s own wish to modernise the centre, privileging permeability and a conditional freedom and securing the expression of these values in its architecture. Following its closure as a reform centre in 1977, the institution has, though, drawn attention for its mistreatment of its wards, and the architectural history of this site has become entangled with inquiry into the history of institutional child abuse that has given rise to a number of State and Commonwealth led efforts to right a systematically maintained wrong. This paper explores the undercurrents of the building’s subtropicality and of the benign intentions of design for climate in this institutional setting.
Research Interests: Architecture, Architectural History, Modernist Architecture (Architectural Modernism), Modern Architecture, Modernism, and 10 moreTropical Architecture, Institutional Design, Australian architecture, Brutalism, Public Inquiries, New Brutalism, Salvation Army, Queensland history, Abuse in institutional care, and Brutalism In Modernism
... at the heart of the idea of discomfort is a distinctively modern sense of individual subjectivity, wherein that which ought to be (or which might otherwise be) is above all defined for the self. The individual experiencing discomfort... more
... at the heart of the idea of discomfort is a distinctively modern sense of individual subjectivity, wherein that which ought to be (or which might otherwise be) is above all defined for the self. The individual experiencing discomfort is self-aware, even if not acutely so – discomfort is not, after all, insurmountable, since one can bear it, more so than pain, at least, more so than humiliation. The discomfort we sense in others is, likewise, an empathetic reaction. Even if not justified or justifiable, it is tested against an idea of what seems reasonable. Discomfort is not something that one can put up with beyond what can be explained, since the idea runs to the limits of what the individual can bear. Samuel Beckett understood the potency of occupying those limits in Waiting for Godot (1953), and later, more emphatically, in Happy Days (1961), where the prospect of shelter dwindles to the figure of a middle-aged woman wedged in a carceral mound of earth. Whereas to be uncomfortable allows for a degree of assessment – something at which the ergonomist might make an educated guess – one might experience or foster discomfort in ideas and stances as much as in environments. There are many things that may not sit well, other than we ourselves. And with this awareness in the self, whether its source is an undertaking that worries the conscience or a dull pain creeping up from the buttocks, is an empathetic sense of how another, too, might experience discomfort. In this identification of discomfort as an experience lies the intersecting notions of the individual and the normal against which the prevailing social, ergonomic and psychological paradigms shape one’s proper place in the modern age ....
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A reflection on architectural criticism in five parts: on the relationship between architecture and art; on the accountability of architecture to the world beyond architecture (and to itself); on what architectural criticism can do; on... more
A reflection on architectural criticism in five parts: on the relationship between architecture and art; on the accountability of architecture to the world beyond architecture (and to itself); on what architectural criticism can do; on judgment; and on their implications for today (with reference to recent works on US race relations and environmental impact).
NB This is the pre-review version of the published chapter.
NB This is the pre-review version of the published chapter.
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Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture at 50 Museum of Modern Art, NY, Nov 11, 2016 I will start with an instance of the distant reception of Complexity and Contradiction. The first issue of the Australian journal Transition,... more
Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture at 50
Museum of Modern Art, NY, Nov 11, 2016
I will start with an instance of the distant reception of Complexity and Contradiction. The first issue of the Australian journal Transition, launched in 1979, opened with a long essay by architect and critic Philip Drew on “Mannerism in Contemporary Architecture”. His essay began by recounting the ready-to-hand formula of a mannerist art responding to a fifteenth-century worldview thrown into crisis before making the equally conventional leap to what he cast as the “mannerist” trajectory of modern architecture after its first heroic flourish. In this setting, mannerism abounds on the modern stage: the brutalist turn, the work of Archigram and Stirling and, later, Isozaki, the projects of Team Ten and the LCC. That Venturi attracts Drew’s attention is obvious, since he explicitly invokes the architecture of sixteenth-century Italy and seventeenth-century England, and, too, widely cites references to Elizabethan metaphysical poetry as read through the eyes of its modernist “New” critics. The modern mannerism Venturi would appear to embody is, as Drew puts it, “the style of a cultivated international elite,” drawing on popular culture but rendering it rarefied. His article is, admittedly, a blunt instrument, and it appeared in a review making its first tentative gestures toward a world of architectural debate located here rather than there. But it tracks an observation made widely before and since. To quote Drew: “The effect of Venturi’s argument is to legitimate the adoption of a mannerist aesthetic in contemporary architecture.” Drew is wrong, of course, or at least mostly so. But as a document of a mediated reception of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and of the first generational rejection of the enthusiasm with which it was greeted in the 1960s, it is informative. The pages of Transition explore the question of Australia’s relationship with the postmodern in the issues that follow, where the question of modernism’s legacy immediately becomes a matter of the postmodern, and where postmodernism quickly distils to a question of a so-called Venturian postmodernism—the postmodernism that takes the final polemical chapter of Complexity as its springboard—which, in turn, was posed, again and again, as a question of a contemporary mannerism. Again and again, the named names of contemporary architecture across the early 1980s who made it to Australia and were cornered by the young and hungry correspondents of Transition were asked for their stance on postmodernism, and whether they considered themselves mannerist.
1979 was hardly the moment to start getting excited about mannerism, but the now-beleaguered concept had enjoyed something of a renewal in the history of art and in the history of letters across the 1950s 1960s. Read ungenerously Venturi was doing little more than scratching an itch that had formed in the minds of a good number of critics and historians anxious to understand, through history, the role of art in society in the wake of the Second World War and the role, in turn, of the individual therein. Beyond the intellectual trajectory through Friedländer and Pevsner, who together gave the category critical credence—first in the study of painting, then in architecture—the most widely read attempt to understand a mannerist recurrence in the architecture of the twentieth century was Colin Rowe’s article on the theme, published in the Architectural Review in 1950. Denise Costanzo has detailed the exchanges (and echoes of exchanges) between Rowe and Venturi on this theme. Venturi’s own notes show his attention to Rowe’s treatment of ambiguity in the modern uptake of the cinquecento case. But while Rowe’s article in AR was prominent in architectural culture, he was one of many processing this art historical legacy for the twentieth century. A session of the International Congress for the History of Art held in New York in 1961 laid out the state of the field as it had been revived since the War—a document, too, of the rearranged institutional landscape on both sides of the Atlantic following a wave of intellectual migration from Central Europe. And from this session, the two major synthetic studies of the period were published by the end of the decade, by John Shearman and Craig Hugh Smyth. James Ackerman had likewise published his Michelangelo and Palladio in these years—all available as Penguin paperbacks. It is stretching things to invoke a mannerist moment in which Venturi was an active participant—feeding back into an organised discussion in the history of art. But it is hard to sustain the idea of his interest in mannerism as a consequence solely of a direct encounter with its exemplary works in Rome. Indeed, his encounter of Roman architecture was mediated by the seminars organised for American academicians by Bruno Zevi through the Istituto Nazionale di Urbanistica—and Zevi’s own account of the parallels of mannerism to the modern age are among the least nuanced we can encounter, where, in his catalogue essay for Michelangiolo Architetto, the Reformation parallels the Holocaust; and the crisis of classicism recurs in the crisis of Reason.
...
A selection of papers will be published.
Museum of Modern Art, NY, Nov 11, 2016
I will start with an instance of the distant reception of Complexity and Contradiction. The first issue of the Australian journal Transition, launched in 1979, opened with a long essay by architect and critic Philip Drew on “Mannerism in Contemporary Architecture”. His essay began by recounting the ready-to-hand formula of a mannerist art responding to a fifteenth-century worldview thrown into crisis before making the equally conventional leap to what he cast as the “mannerist” trajectory of modern architecture after its first heroic flourish. In this setting, mannerism abounds on the modern stage: the brutalist turn, the work of Archigram and Stirling and, later, Isozaki, the projects of Team Ten and the LCC. That Venturi attracts Drew’s attention is obvious, since he explicitly invokes the architecture of sixteenth-century Italy and seventeenth-century England, and, too, widely cites references to Elizabethan metaphysical poetry as read through the eyes of its modernist “New” critics. The modern mannerism Venturi would appear to embody is, as Drew puts it, “the style of a cultivated international elite,” drawing on popular culture but rendering it rarefied. His article is, admittedly, a blunt instrument, and it appeared in a review making its first tentative gestures toward a world of architectural debate located here rather than there. But it tracks an observation made widely before and since. To quote Drew: “The effect of Venturi’s argument is to legitimate the adoption of a mannerist aesthetic in contemporary architecture.” Drew is wrong, of course, or at least mostly so. But as a document of a mediated reception of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and of the first generational rejection of the enthusiasm with which it was greeted in the 1960s, it is informative. The pages of Transition explore the question of Australia’s relationship with the postmodern in the issues that follow, where the question of modernism’s legacy immediately becomes a matter of the postmodern, and where postmodernism quickly distils to a question of a so-called Venturian postmodernism—the postmodernism that takes the final polemical chapter of Complexity as its springboard—which, in turn, was posed, again and again, as a question of a contemporary mannerism. Again and again, the named names of contemporary architecture across the early 1980s who made it to Australia and were cornered by the young and hungry correspondents of Transition were asked for their stance on postmodernism, and whether they considered themselves mannerist.
1979 was hardly the moment to start getting excited about mannerism, but the now-beleaguered concept had enjoyed something of a renewal in the history of art and in the history of letters across the 1950s 1960s. Read ungenerously Venturi was doing little more than scratching an itch that had formed in the minds of a good number of critics and historians anxious to understand, through history, the role of art in society in the wake of the Second World War and the role, in turn, of the individual therein. Beyond the intellectual trajectory through Friedländer and Pevsner, who together gave the category critical credence—first in the study of painting, then in architecture—the most widely read attempt to understand a mannerist recurrence in the architecture of the twentieth century was Colin Rowe’s article on the theme, published in the Architectural Review in 1950. Denise Costanzo has detailed the exchanges (and echoes of exchanges) between Rowe and Venturi on this theme. Venturi’s own notes show his attention to Rowe’s treatment of ambiguity in the modern uptake of the cinquecento case. But while Rowe’s article in AR was prominent in architectural culture, he was one of many processing this art historical legacy for the twentieth century. A session of the International Congress for the History of Art held in New York in 1961 laid out the state of the field as it had been revived since the War—a document, too, of the rearranged institutional landscape on both sides of the Atlantic following a wave of intellectual migration from Central Europe. And from this session, the two major synthetic studies of the period were published by the end of the decade, by John Shearman and Craig Hugh Smyth. James Ackerman had likewise published his Michelangelo and Palladio in these years—all available as Penguin paperbacks. It is stretching things to invoke a mannerist moment in which Venturi was an active participant—feeding back into an organised discussion in the history of art. But it is hard to sustain the idea of his interest in mannerism as a consequence solely of a direct encounter with its exemplary works in Rome. Indeed, his encounter of Roman architecture was mediated by the seminars organised for American academicians by Bruno Zevi through the Istituto Nazionale di Urbanistica—and Zevi’s own account of the parallels of mannerism to the modern age are among the least nuanced we can encounter, where, in his catalogue essay for Michelangiolo Architetto, the Reformation parallels the Holocaust; and the crisis of classicism recurs in the crisis of Reason.
...
A selection of papers will be published.
Research Interests:
Cullinen Lectures, Rice School of Architecture, Houston TX, Oct 31, 2016 I have recently seen published a book I wrote with blood. A history of Rome. A short history. Three thousand years—no, more—in just over three hundred pages. When... more
Cullinen Lectures, Rice School of Architecture, Houston TX, Oct 31, 2016
I have recently seen published a book I wrote with blood. A history of Rome. A short history. Three thousand years—no, more—in just over three hundred pages. When my daughter Amelia first saw it—she is nine years old—she said, “It’s so miniature! Is it meant to be so small?” To which the correct answer is “no, of course not; it’s Rome for goodness sake”. It should be something that borrows from the scale of Gregorovius eight volumes on the medieval city. Even something that is meant to be accessible should at least try to be detailed, respect the density of the history. So no, it shouldn’t be small (speaking to its nature). It’s not a cute city with a cute history. For historians of all kinds, be they historians of architecture, urban historians, historians of religion, historians of the classical world, of water, of commerce, of society, of childhood—of whatever—for historians of all kinds, Rome is the white whale, and we learn much about the limits of our respective fields in our pursuit of it. [...]
I have recently seen published a book I wrote with blood. A history of Rome. A short history. Three thousand years—no, more—in just over three hundred pages. When my daughter Amelia first saw it—she is nine years old—she said, “It’s so miniature! Is it meant to be so small?” To which the correct answer is “no, of course not; it’s Rome for goodness sake”. It should be something that borrows from the scale of Gregorovius eight volumes on the medieval city. Even something that is meant to be accessible should at least try to be detailed, respect the density of the history. So no, it shouldn’t be small (speaking to its nature). It’s not a cute city with a cute history. For historians of all kinds, be they historians of architecture, urban historians, historians of religion, historians of the classical world, of water, of commerce, of society, of childhood—of whatever—for historians of all kinds, Rome is the white whale, and we learn much about the limits of our respective fields in our pursuit of it. [...]
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We test the assumptions of this roundtable by reflecting on what we position here as an artificial if useful distinction: between those disciplinary habits and norms of architectural historians focussed on pre-modern epochs and those... more
We test the assumptions of this roundtable by reflecting on what we position here as an artificial if useful distinction: between those disciplinary habits and norms of architectural historians focussed on pre-modern epochs and those working with the modern age. Despite appearances there is not a dearth of historiographical studies in pre-modernist architecture, but that this attention to history’s mechanisms is played out on two registers. The first is of architectural history as a product of the long twentieth century itself, where its histories function as modern artefacts—even when they concern subjects that might be cast as medieval, renaissance or baroque. The studies of the histories of these eras, we claim, use the proximity of modern knowledge to enter the mediated worlds of a deeper history, and to approach those worlds by understanding the nature and circumstances of their mediation. This, we argue, is the study of historiography to better understand the modern era and its legacy, and in a way compounds the problem identified by the chair. The second register relates to the rise over the later twentieth century of a professional art (and architectural) history that draws no operating distinction between the world of ideas and artistic and architectural production—and in which attention to the fine grain demands attention, too, to the treatment of that fine grain within the discipline to date, and in which, therefore, historiography is processed as a matter of course within histories of the epochs under review. Both historiological registers, we argue, ultimately speak to twentieth-century disciplinary legacies and to an increasingly demonstrable capacity to consciously attend to the interplay of architecture and history—across history, for a range of disciplinary audiences—in which history itself, in all its guises, functions as an artefact while its historian confront the complications of contemporaneity.
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A year before the RAIA journal Architecture in Australia treated the new Queensland city of Gold Coast to close scrutiny in a monographic issue, E. J. (Eddie) Hayes in 1958 penned an article reflecting on the problem of designing for a... more
A year before the RAIA journal Architecture in Australia treated the new Queensland city of Gold Coast to close scrutiny in a monographic issue, E. J. (Eddie) Hayes in 1958 penned an article reflecting on the problem of designing for a booming seaside town quickly outgrowing itself: “Gold on the Sand.” Schooled in Southport, Hayes was one of a very small number of architects practising in the Gold Coast in the post-war decades. This paper places his published reflections on the city into dialogue with his domestic architecture, demonstrating strategies for an architectural practice invested in the Coast as an urban and developmental situation. These comprised principally of houses produced along the coastal strip and its waterways that addressed the problem of the long narrow lot – reconciling the logic of development as expressed in plot ratios with a beach topography. It focuses on the Miller House (Southport, 1964), which extended this experimentation into the 1960s as a mature expression of both the problem and the firm’s response to it, going on to win Queensland’s House of the Year award in 1965. It was an intelligently conceived riverside house with distinctively painted gold front door, exercising the repertoire of architectural elements with which Hayes & Scott secured their reputation. The Miller House is here read as an emblem of the reconciliation of their architecture and this development-driven city.
Research Interests: Architecture, Land and Property Development, Interior Design, Architectural History, Interior Design (Architecture), and 7 moreModern Architecture, Domestic Space, History of architecture, History and Theory of Modern Architecture, Australian architecture, Queensland history, and The Modern Interior
Since the nineteenth century, historians and theoreticians of architecture have tended examine the baroque in those moments when the relationship between the production of architecture and its historical analysis, between doing... more
Since the nineteenth century, historians and theoreticians of architecture have tended examine the baroque in those moments when the relationship between the production of architecture and its historical analysis, between doing architecture and doing history, has been open to contention. Generation after generation, scholars have been prompted to pay attention to the baroque to consider the limits of architectural history as a field and to advance new propositions concerning the relation of contemporary architectural practice and thought to its past. [...]
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This essay considers the general significance of a reading of two Australian exhibitions in 2013-14 that processed the legacy of Learning from Las Vegas in relation to the recent exhibition Las Vegas Studio (Stadler & Stierli, curators).... more
This essay considers the general significance of a reading of two Australian exhibitions in 2013-14 that processed the legacy of Learning from Las Vegas in relation to the recent exhibition Las Vegas Studio (Stadler & Stierli, curators). By turning to a little known reading context for this work, the essay considers the problem of normalising the reception of LLV and its legacy in contemporary architectural and historiographical debate.
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The idea that the writing and teaching of art and architectural historians has lent values and ambitions to the development of twentieth-century architecture is now widely accepted by its scholars. The studies that have considered this... more
The idea that the writing and teaching of art and architectural historians has lent values and ambitions to the development of twentieth-century architecture is now widely accepted by its scholars. The studies that have considered this coincidence, and especially those written since the turn of the twenty-first century, have demonstrated the clear intellectual debt of modern architecture to modernist historians who were ostensibly preoccupied with the art and architecture of earlier epochs. This volume extends this work by contributing to the dual projects of writing both the intellectual history of modern architecture and the modern history of architectural historiography. It considers the many and varied ways that historians of art and architecture have historicized modern architecture through its interaction, in particular, with the baroque: a term of contested historical and conceptual significance that has often seemed to shadow a greater contest over the historicity of modernism.
As the following chapters attest, whether this traffic of ideas was driven by the historian or fostered by the architect, the century leading up to the various postmodern declarations for the new historicism that emerged around 1980 evidences a long process of sifting through historical research and distilling from it moments – be they forms, concepts or models of the architect’s practice and its scope – against which to calibrate the ambitions of architecture across the modern era. By considering the many examples presented here and the sometimes surprising extent of their inter-referentiality and their shared dependence on certain sources – even when put to drastically different uses – this book interrogates an historiographical phenomenon that is widely appreciated but rarely called to account. [...]
As the following chapters attest, whether this traffic of ideas was driven by the historian or fostered by the architect, the century leading up to the various postmodern declarations for the new historicism that emerged around 1980 evidences a long process of sifting through historical research and distilling from it moments – be they forms, concepts or models of the architect’s practice and its scope – against which to calibrate the ambitions of architecture across the modern era. By considering the many examples presented here and the sometimes surprising extent of their inter-referentiality and their shared dependence on certain sources – even when put to drastically different uses – this book interrogates an historiographical phenomenon that is widely appreciated but rarely called to account. [...]
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In a letter dated June 22, 1946, Erwin Panofsky wrote to his former student and fellow art historian William S. Heckscher. A fellow alumnus of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, Heckscher was then teaching courses in German... more
In a letter dated June 22, 1946, Erwin Panofsky wrote to his former student and fellow art historian William S. Heckscher. A fellow alumnus of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, Heckscher was then teaching courses in German language and English literature at the University of Manitoba as the tail end of a wartime interlude between academic appointments in the history of art. Panofsky’s letter reads thus:
Concerning Baroque as a style, I can only refer your friend to a forthcoming article by [Wolfgang] Stechow (Oberlin College) but I do not know whether he already has proof prints and would be willing to give them avant la lettre. Another impending article by [Ulrich] Middeldorf (Chicago University) is concerned with the vicissitudes of the term and will certainly be of interest but has not appeared either so far as I know. In the meantime, I am sending along an unpretentious lecture of my own fabrication which you may pass on to Mr. Daniells if you are sure that he will return it. I may want to use it again if occasion offers. It is not very good and full of typographical and other errors but he may get some ideas, if only by way of opposition.
The “unpretentious lecture” to which Panofsky drew Heckscher’s attention was his now famous piece “What is Baroque?” This was first prepared in the mid-1930s, substantially revised over several years and published posthumously in 1994 in an essay collection edited by Irving Lavin. The article of Stechow’s was published in 1946 with the title “Definitions of the Baroque in the Visual Arts,” appearing in “A Special Issue on Baroque Style in the Various Arts” of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. The essay of Middeldorf’s to which Panofsky refers is recalled only to be set aside. Middeldorf’s own writings and papers include no such piece, suggesting a name misremembered or, if our correspondent indeed accurately recalled writing by Middeldorf on this theme, it would seem that his reflections are, for the moment, beyond our reach.
These reflections, including his own, to which Panofsky points Heckscher and his correspondent Daniells, each attend to the “vicissitudes of the term,” as Panofsky put it, and to the expanded scope the idea of the baroque enjoyed after a period of inter-war reassessment within and beyond its earliest domain, namely the history of art. From the end of the nineteenth century onwards, historians of painting and sculpture, literature and music made their own claims upon the baroque, in some cases accommodating it where it had not previously appeared in the critical lexicon, and in others recalibrating the meaning most popularly ascribed to it by Heinrich Wölfflin and his generation to understand the post-Renaissance developments of the classical tradition, or by his predecessors to understand the stylistic consequences of the Counter-Reformation. In the light of a sustained attempt to consider the critico-historical value of baroque variously as an historical or platonic category for the history of letters, the visual arts, or music, the legacy of this 1930s expansion was an apparently more neutral image of the baroque than that which had entered the twentieth century—a term Panofsky already considered neutral in relation to the use made of it by writers of the eighteenth century and the early decades of the nineteenth. As we will see, this neutrality was itself quietly contentious when seen in light of the relationship made explicit between art history and political ideology in the interwar years. Comparing Panofsky’s critical ambitions with those of Stechow reveals two radically different attitudes towards the term’s potency in the post-war era. [...]
Concerning Baroque as a style, I can only refer your friend to a forthcoming article by [Wolfgang] Stechow (Oberlin College) but I do not know whether he already has proof prints and would be willing to give them avant la lettre. Another impending article by [Ulrich] Middeldorf (Chicago University) is concerned with the vicissitudes of the term and will certainly be of interest but has not appeared either so far as I know. In the meantime, I am sending along an unpretentious lecture of my own fabrication which you may pass on to Mr. Daniells if you are sure that he will return it. I may want to use it again if occasion offers. It is not very good and full of typographical and other errors but he may get some ideas, if only by way of opposition.
The “unpretentious lecture” to which Panofsky drew Heckscher’s attention was his now famous piece “What is Baroque?” This was first prepared in the mid-1930s, substantially revised over several years and published posthumously in 1994 in an essay collection edited by Irving Lavin. The article of Stechow’s was published in 1946 with the title “Definitions of the Baroque in the Visual Arts,” appearing in “A Special Issue on Baroque Style in the Various Arts” of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. The essay of Middeldorf’s to which Panofsky refers is recalled only to be set aside. Middeldorf’s own writings and papers include no such piece, suggesting a name misremembered or, if our correspondent indeed accurately recalled writing by Middeldorf on this theme, it would seem that his reflections are, for the moment, beyond our reach.
These reflections, including his own, to which Panofsky points Heckscher and his correspondent Daniells, each attend to the “vicissitudes of the term,” as Panofsky put it, and to the expanded scope the idea of the baroque enjoyed after a period of inter-war reassessment within and beyond its earliest domain, namely the history of art. From the end of the nineteenth century onwards, historians of painting and sculpture, literature and music made their own claims upon the baroque, in some cases accommodating it where it had not previously appeared in the critical lexicon, and in others recalibrating the meaning most popularly ascribed to it by Heinrich Wölfflin and his generation to understand the post-Renaissance developments of the classical tradition, or by his predecessors to understand the stylistic consequences of the Counter-Reformation. In the light of a sustained attempt to consider the critico-historical value of baroque variously as an historical or platonic category for the history of letters, the visual arts, or music, the legacy of this 1930s expansion was an apparently more neutral image of the baroque than that which had entered the twentieth century—a term Panofsky already considered neutral in relation to the use made of it by writers of the eighteenth century and the early decades of the nineteenth. As we will see, this neutrality was itself quietly contentious when seen in light of the relationship made explicit between art history and political ideology in the interwar years. Comparing Panofsky’s critical ambitions with those of Stechow reveals two radically different attitudes towards the term’s potency in the post-war era. [...]
Research Interests:
The tercentenary commemorations in 1967 of Borromini’s death had demonstrated how an historical subject like the oeuvre of this key figure of the Roman baroque could sustain the attentions of many varied modes of historical analysis.... more
The tercentenary commemorations in 1967 of Borromini’s death had demonstrated how an historical subject like the oeuvre of this key figure of the Roman baroque could sustain the attentions of many varied modes of historical analysis. Lectures, exhibits, books, films and many other interventions treated Borromini’s buildings (realized and otherwise), his drawings and inventories (as sources and documents alike), the Opus Architectonicum, secondary historical and biographical accounts and so forth as legitimate historical subjects. They had visited upon them the disciplinary tools of art historians from Rudolf Wittkower to Giulio Carlo Argan alongside new scholarship by those invested in Borromini’s archives, in the restoration of his buildings, in his manner of design, in his reception and in the lessons offered by his work to the present. Borromini emerged from this event as a complex and interdisciplinary historical and biographical subject that could exist in an architectural culture experiencing a watershed moment of disciplinary maturity—a form of détente between conflicting historiographical investments, with the academic and public program of the anno borrominiano demonstrating a format within which these interests could occupy the same corpus. The investment of the architect-historian in such a figure as Borromini was, at this time, as legitimate as that of the art historian specializing in architecture (or, even generally, in the art of the seventeenth century), as was that of the architect practicing (and thinking) in a manner demonstrating his or her cognizance of the present’s historicity. [...]
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The recent appearance in English of Henri Lefebvre’s hitherto unpublished work Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment – his only book explicitly dedicated to architecture and one in which he finds pleasure in the Spanish resort town of... more
The recent appearance in English of Henri Lefebvre’s hitherto unpublished work Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment – his only book explicitly dedicated to architecture and one in which he finds pleasure in the Spanish resort town of Benidorm – prompts a moment of reflection on other seaside cities that sprang up in the 1960s and 1970s, seemingly from nowhere, and then slunk smoothly into varying states of borrowed glamour or disrepute over subsequent decades; cities in which high-rises are hotels and apartment blocks rather than corporate headquarters, and where the resident population is oriented largely towards the various service industries that keep afloat an economy built on permanent
transience. To an international suite of other exemplars, measured always against the success of such models as Miami, Honolulu and Acapulco, Australia offers its own Gold Coast: a city–territory locally famous for its brash development logic, poor grasp of architectural quality, organised crime and political conservatism. The Gold Coast is home to Wet and Wild, Movie World and the Big Brother House, and the location for Muriel’s Wedding and Gettin’ Square. [...]
transience. To an international suite of other exemplars, measured always against the success of such models as Miami, Honolulu and Acapulco, Australia offers its own Gold Coast: a city–territory locally famous for its brash development logic, poor grasp of architectural quality, organised crime and political conservatism. The Gold Coast is home to Wet and Wild, Movie World and the Big Brother House, and the location for Muriel’s Wedding and Gettin’ Square. [...]
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The paper reflects on methodological issues in writing the history of a city where the balance between architectural culture and the architecture profession favours the latter. It will consider how to write architectural history that... more
The paper reflects on methodological issues in writing the history of a city where the balance between architectural culture and the architecture profession favours the latter. It will consider how to write architectural history that accounts for this balance while assessing the relationship between architectural thought and the work of the architect by means of specific cross-sections through the city. It positions architectural history alongside the histories of planning, transportation, commerce, tourism, governance and so forth to unpack a subject that -- in terms of architectural theory -- risks being regarded as mundane, but which offers insights into the status of architecture in the city in the present moment. The paper reflects on the framing of two forthcoming books: GC30+, a study of the history of the Gold Coast Architecture Awards (1984-2013) (URP Research Report 2015); and Off the Plan, a multi-author, multi-disciplinary history of the city's urbanisation and development (CSIRO Publishing 2015).
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Tafuri published L’architettura del manierismo (1966) in a moment of disciplinary uncertainty in which the historian’s responsibilities to knowledge and society were by no means regarded with clarity. At Venice, Bruno Zevi had until 1963... more
Tafuri published L’architettura del manierismo (1966) in a moment of disciplinary uncertainty in which the historian’s responsibilities to knowledge and society were by no means regarded with clarity. At Venice, Bruno Zevi had until 1963 (and his move to Rome) propagated an idea of history as a repository of lessons to be read in a contemporary key, exploring the twentieth-century legacies of historical figures to project their prescience and enduring utility. The sixteenth century was, consequently, held as a moment of crisis resonating with those of the post-war era: both moments sustaining a loss of universal certainties and loosing, too, a sense of what architecture could offer society as a whole. From the very beginning of the book Tafuri positioned Zevi’s easy parallelism as a source of crisis in architecture’s historiography—a criticism that ran deep in his reading not only of Zevi’s work, but of the entire Crocean tradition in which the legitimacy of historical subjects was tested against their contemporary value. The “moral and political” crisis (as he put it) inflecting architecture as a result of the tumultuous decade bookended by Luther in Wittenburg and the Duke of Bourbon in Rome was Zevi’s subject. Tafuri rendered this as a basic error in architectural history’s purported mission, which he addressed in L’architettura del manierismo by weighing up an intellectual inheritance drawn from the histories of art and architecture. Out of this emerges a sense of architectural history as a disciplinary effort, held together on terms that parallels his analysis of mannerist architecture as a body of work and thought that in its unity overcame its internal oppositions. This is not yet the Tafuri of Teorie e storia dell’architettura, which he would immediately go on to write, but it contains the disciplinary germs of the problems and paradoxes that would define his contribution to the historiography of architecture.
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Research Interests:
This inaugural professorial lecture discusses the roles and responsibilities of the architectural historian. It reflects on the work of Manfredo Tafuri, but also the institutional circumstances and settings in which the author’s own... more
This inaugural professorial lecture discusses the roles and responsibilities of the architectural historian. It reflects on the work of Manfredo Tafuri, but also the institutional circumstances and settings in which the author’s own formation as an historian of architecture took place. It concludes with an introduction to the themes of the author’s current research on the Australian city of the Gold Coast.
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Lecture delivered to Manfredo Tafuri 1994-2014, Giornata internazionale di studi, Palazzo Badoer, IUAV, November 4, 2014
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Étirée sur plus de 50 kilomètres le long du Pacifique, à une heure de trajet au sud de Brisbane, la Gold Coast fait figure d’anomalie parmi les villes d’Australie. C’est une agglomération sans urbanisme, un pur produit de la rencontre... more
Étirée sur plus de 50 kilomètres le long du Pacifique, à une heure de trajet au sud de Brisbane, la Gold Coast fait figure d’anomalie parmi les villes d’Australie. C’est une agglomération sans urbanisme, un pur produit de la rencontre entre loisirs balnéaires et spéculation immobilière. Un historien de l’architecture qui y a élu domicile s’interroge sur ses raisons d’en faire un sujet d’étude.
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Research Interests:
Among those instances in which architectural culture attended to the demands and invitations of radical philosophy, few exceed in impact the translation enacted by Tafuri of a Trontian critica dell’ideologia into the architectural domain.... more
Among those instances in which architectural culture attended to the demands and invitations of radical philosophy, few exceed in impact the translation enacted by Tafuri of a Trontian critica dell’ideologia into the architectural domain. Famously presented in the pages of Contropiano (1969, 71, 72) and Progetto e utopia (1969)—and, importantly, in L’Architettura dell’Umanesimo (1969)—Tafuri’s critica dell’ideologia architettonica served not only to position architecture as entirely complicit with the capitalist system, but also to isolate historical research as a form of work and a critical action capable of demonstrating this same complicity. Tafuri conceived of and institutionalized architectural historiography as working within the institution of architecture as a form of conscience, laying bare the tension between the historical moment and the longue durée in order to undermine the authority of historical narrative and to activate the otherwise latent radical character of historical knowledge. The program of research, conferences and publications intended to address this function gravitated towards studies in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and culminated in Ricerca del rinascimento, Tafuri’s masterful return (after Teorie e storia dell’architettura) to the five-centuries-long arc from the (anachronistic) origins of architecture’s relationship with capitalism to its capitulation to capitalism’s forces, mediated as this capitulation was by an ideological device lending architectural thought an increasingly sturdy defense from a reality that might otherwise hold it to account. While many readers, including architects, found in Tafuri’s work the targets and language of an architectural critique of ideology—of a politicized architecture capable of undermining architecture’s participation in the system—the deep analysis of the modern era through which he activated historiographical representation as an agent of ideological critique was widely read by that same readership as a retreat, on Tafuri’s part, into the problems of the past. The institute established to train architects with the historiographic skills necessary to foment an ideological critique within architecture was caught up in precisely this paradox—by turning to the origins of the modern epoch, scholars and students became accountable to the scholarship of that era. Rather than explicitly returning the lessons of the Renaissance within a critique of contemporary architectural ideology, or indeed positioning that work so as to confront the thought of a contemporary architectural culture, the work of the Venice School—as it has become widely known—enacted an unintentional retreat at odds with the principles of its formation. At a moment when the possibility of a critique of architectural ideology returns to centre stage in light of dramatically altered exterior circumstances for architectural practice (the crisis of capitalism), the image of Tafuri’s moment of critical clarity has again been touted as a touchstone for architectural criticism. What, this contribution seeks to ask, is at stake in appreciating the failures of this moment alongside its possibilities? What insight lies in a fresh assessment of the ambitions of Tafuri’s critica dell’ideologia architettonica when read alongside the trajectory of the department that gave it institutional form and legitimacy, or when read against the representation of that project in the Anglophone theory moment? These questions are treated as present-day provocations to understand the intellectual exchange maintained, even now, with the 1970s uptake of a Trontian critique into architecture.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests: Philosophy, Aesthetics, Ethics, Education, Architecture, and 12 moreQuality, Judgment and decision making, Procurement, Architectural Education, Architectural History, Drawing, Drawings (Architecture), Architectural Theory, Construction Procurement, Art Criticism, Architectural Criticism, and Reyner Banham
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
In the cities of Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand, real estate seems to be almost a second nature. It is a pervasive fact in daily life, structuring the economy and the environment. Wealth is tied up in it, our planning systems serve... more
In the cities of Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand, real estate seems to be almost a second nature. It is a pervasive fact in daily life, structuring the economy and the environment. Wealth is tied up in it, our planning systems serve it, and our culture obsesses over how to obtain and improve it. But real estate has no independent history or power in itself. Its role in the history of our cities and settlements depends on a whole range of human and non-human agents: individuals who buy, sell and invest in real estate; states that enable and regulate it; corporations that finance its purchase and provide its insurance. Understanding the history of our cities through the lens of real estate depends, therefore, on grasping the ways in which these agents have organised our environment to privilege and serve the interest of real estate.
Key books on Australian cities such as Cannon’s The Land Boomers (1966), Sandercock’s Cities for Sale (1975), Davison’s The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne (1978), and Daly’s Sydney Boom and Sydney Bust (1982) put real estate at the centre of the story of urban development. More recently, scholars across a range of fields including architectural history, human geography, planning and law have reanimated the discussion around land, planning and real estate by asking probing questions about what taking possession of property really means, especially for First Nations people for whom it often means dispossession. This conference provides an opportunity to build on that work and carefully consider the range of implications that real estate has for research in, and perspectives on, urban and planning history.
The 17th meeting of the Urban History/Planning History Group invites papers on all aspects of urban and planning history in Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand and the wider Pacific region. As always, this forum welcomes contributions that explore among other things –
i) the history of planning, design and regulation of public spaces, infrastructure, and private development;
ii) papers on planners, urban designers and architects involved in the city-making process in any period;
iii) work on the historiography of cities as well as new work on the history of social groups and how they adapted to and reshaped urban environments
iv) research on the historical evolution of urban policy focused on heritage, the natural environment, and industry.
The 2024 conference differs somewhat to most previous UHPH meetings in that it is built around three streams: 1) Possession and Dispossession; 2) Housing Histories; and 3) FIRE (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate). We especially welcome submissions that connect with one of these specified conference streams. Please see stream descriptions below.
Conference Streams
1. Possession and Dispossession
Stream Convenors: Andrew Leach (USyd) Amelia Thorpe (UNSW) and Dallas Rogers (USyd)
This stream invites papers that explore how techniques of land alienation, property transfer, and the systems through which property-as-capital is maintained, can inform a longer history of real estate in the towns, cities and territories of the Tasman world and corresponding settings. How have ideas of property ownership—from the Crown to the citizen—shaped the histories of urbanism and planning in these territories? What adaptations were necessary to make English property ‘work’ in the colonies, and what impacts did those adaptations have for property more broadly? How did its specific form of imposed sovereignty disrupt that which it sought to displace? And how has the recognition and activation of First Nations sovereignty challenged ideas and practices around property? This stream explores origins and effects, as well as practices of reclamation and resistance. It invites contributions from scholars and students exploring the ways in which property regimes have been established, moderated, and extended in the urban and planning histories of the Oceanic colonies and across the Australian continent; and it welcomes papers that offer a lens on this setting from further afield.
2. Housing Histories
Stream Convenors: Stephen Pascoe (UNSW), Fiona Gatt (Deakin) and Rachel Goldlust (Latrobe)
Capitalist discourses and practices of housing production have been central to the dynamics of settlement within Australasian colonialism. While homeownership has been celebrated and studied as foundational to settler culture, histories of renting, public housing, landlordism and homelessness have received comparatively less attention. Interrogating the boundaries of ‘home’ in conversation with the commoditisation of land can further illuminate how we understand the nature of work, leisure, planning, communality and design. This stream, facilitated by the New Housing History Network, seeks to encourage scholarship that is conceptually expansive and critically reflective of where the field has been, and where it can go. We are calling for new kinds of housing histories that embrace the moral, political, and environmental implications of where and how we dwell.
3. FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate)
Stream Convenors: Maren Koehler (USyd) and Jasper Ludewig (Newcastle)
The stream invites papers that explore the intersections between real estate as it manifests spatially and physically in urban environments and the seemingly immaterial workings of finance and actuarial calculation. FIRE industries have a long history of actively shaping architecture and urban development. Banks and insurance companies initiate and enable real estate developments at various scales and their financial logics have limited and defined the form and planning of buildings. The industry has been a key driver in the establishment of Central Business Districts (CBDs) of cities, with their head offices and prestige developments initiating new directions and intensities in urban development. While finance has frequently been considered neutral, the technologies of finance capital that facilitate real estate have been—and still are—actively involved in processes of colonisation and settlement. The stream welcomes contributions that highlight the agency of actors and organisations in the FIRE sector and their impact on cities and the environment more broadly.
Timeline
Deadline for Abstracts: January 31, 2024
Successful Applicants Notified: March 31, 2024
Written Paper Submitted to Session Chairs: June 30, 2024
Conference Dates: July 11–13, 2024
Abstract Guidelines:
Abstracts should be no more than 300 words and should be submitted as a word or pdf document via email to: UHPH2024@antipodes.city
Please ensure your email includes a version of the abstract with author details and one anonymised for blind peer review.
Key books on Australian cities such as Cannon’s The Land Boomers (1966), Sandercock’s Cities for Sale (1975), Davison’s The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne (1978), and Daly’s Sydney Boom and Sydney Bust (1982) put real estate at the centre of the story of urban development. More recently, scholars across a range of fields including architectural history, human geography, planning and law have reanimated the discussion around land, planning and real estate by asking probing questions about what taking possession of property really means, especially for First Nations people for whom it often means dispossession. This conference provides an opportunity to build on that work and carefully consider the range of implications that real estate has for research in, and perspectives on, urban and planning history.
The 17th meeting of the Urban History/Planning History Group invites papers on all aspects of urban and planning history in Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand and the wider Pacific region. As always, this forum welcomes contributions that explore among other things –
i) the history of planning, design and regulation of public spaces, infrastructure, and private development;
ii) papers on planners, urban designers and architects involved in the city-making process in any period;
iii) work on the historiography of cities as well as new work on the history of social groups and how they adapted to and reshaped urban environments
iv) research on the historical evolution of urban policy focused on heritage, the natural environment, and industry.
The 2024 conference differs somewhat to most previous UHPH meetings in that it is built around three streams: 1) Possession and Dispossession; 2) Housing Histories; and 3) FIRE (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate). We especially welcome submissions that connect with one of these specified conference streams. Please see stream descriptions below.
Conference Streams
1. Possession and Dispossession
Stream Convenors: Andrew Leach (USyd) Amelia Thorpe (UNSW) and Dallas Rogers (USyd)
This stream invites papers that explore how techniques of land alienation, property transfer, and the systems through which property-as-capital is maintained, can inform a longer history of real estate in the towns, cities and territories of the Tasman world and corresponding settings. How have ideas of property ownership—from the Crown to the citizen—shaped the histories of urbanism and planning in these territories? What adaptations were necessary to make English property ‘work’ in the colonies, and what impacts did those adaptations have for property more broadly? How did its specific form of imposed sovereignty disrupt that which it sought to displace? And how has the recognition and activation of First Nations sovereignty challenged ideas and practices around property? This stream explores origins and effects, as well as practices of reclamation and resistance. It invites contributions from scholars and students exploring the ways in which property regimes have been established, moderated, and extended in the urban and planning histories of the Oceanic colonies and across the Australian continent; and it welcomes papers that offer a lens on this setting from further afield.
2. Housing Histories
Stream Convenors: Stephen Pascoe (UNSW), Fiona Gatt (Deakin) and Rachel Goldlust (Latrobe)
Capitalist discourses and practices of housing production have been central to the dynamics of settlement within Australasian colonialism. While homeownership has been celebrated and studied as foundational to settler culture, histories of renting, public housing, landlordism and homelessness have received comparatively less attention. Interrogating the boundaries of ‘home’ in conversation with the commoditisation of land can further illuminate how we understand the nature of work, leisure, planning, communality and design. This stream, facilitated by the New Housing History Network, seeks to encourage scholarship that is conceptually expansive and critically reflective of where the field has been, and where it can go. We are calling for new kinds of housing histories that embrace the moral, political, and environmental implications of where and how we dwell.
3. FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate)
Stream Convenors: Maren Koehler (USyd) and Jasper Ludewig (Newcastle)
The stream invites papers that explore the intersections between real estate as it manifests spatially and physically in urban environments and the seemingly immaterial workings of finance and actuarial calculation. FIRE industries have a long history of actively shaping architecture and urban development. Banks and insurance companies initiate and enable real estate developments at various scales and their financial logics have limited and defined the form and planning of buildings. The industry has been a key driver in the establishment of Central Business Districts (CBDs) of cities, with their head offices and prestige developments initiating new directions and intensities in urban development. While finance has frequently been considered neutral, the technologies of finance capital that facilitate real estate have been—and still are—actively involved in processes of colonisation and settlement. The stream welcomes contributions that highlight the agency of actors and organisations in the FIRE sector and their impact on cities and the environment more broadly.
Timeline
Deadline for Abstracts: January 31, 2024
Successful Applicants Notified: March 31, 2024
Written Paper Submitted to Session Chairs: June 30, 2024
Conference Dates: July 11–13, 2024
Abstract Guidelines:
Abstracts should be no more than 300 words and should be submitted as a word or pdf document via email to: UHPH2024@antipodes.city
Please ensure your email includes a version of the abstract with author details and one anonymised for blind peer review.
Research Interests:
Distance is both conceptual and actual. It is overcome or exploited in all manner of ways that have consequences for the history of architecture. It is fostered in the critical attitude. And collapsed when history is invoked in the... more
Distance is both conceptual and actual. It is overcome or exploited in all manner of ways that have consequences for the history of architecture. It is fostered in the critical attitude. And collapsed when history is invoked in the present. It shapes the relationship of Europe to its Antipodes, as well as of Europe to its neighbours. Its presence is necessary for claims upon disciplinarity; its absence, the dissolution of disciplinary boundaries. In what ways has distance figured in the history of architecture? What has it altered? What has it prevented? What has it allowed? What does it permit, even now?
This theme opens the door to questions of representation and communication in the history of architecture; questions of travel and migration; and of the mobility of expertise, institutions and ideas. As a lens, distance allows us to reflect on the construction of identity in and through architectural works both defined as such (Architects and Architecture) and “grey”. It invites us to consider moments of counterpoint, imaging or critique. It provokes us to clarify, recalibrate, expose, suppress, or legitimise. Works, projects, architects and other agents in the conceptualisation and construction of architecture, cities and landscapes are, from a remove, perceived on terms different from the immediate and the close. Artefacts and ideas subjected to distance acquire something of this perspective, whether they are physically moved or subject to representation at a remove. Distance can be inconvenient; and useful.
The conference welcomed original papers that explored the import of distance for architectural history from any direction. Proposals treated a diverse range of temporalities and geographies. They addressed the consequences of literal distance for architectural culture in its history: communication, travel, mobility, isolation, exile, or technical and intellectual networks. They also considered the figurative role of distance in forms of criticality, historicity and thought. Some papers reflected on the mechanisms and nature of architectural history through such concepts as immediacy, instrumentality or relevance; or of neutralization or obsolescence. An idea of distance was used by some contributions to think through distinctions (in disciplines, practices or institutions) between architectural history and criticism, architectural history and archaeology, architectural history and area studies, architectural history, urban history, histories of science and technology, the history of art, etc. These distinctions were also invoked in order to reflect on architecture and its neighbouring professions and practices. Similar attention was paid to the devices used by architectural historiography to manage distance: historiographical and critical nomenclature; theoretical terms and tropes; and other means of negotiating proximity. Consideration was even given to the very historiographical valence of distance – as, for instance, productive criticality or problematic estrangement.
One strand of the conference theme responds to the special issue of Architectural Histories (2018) asking “What is Europe?”. The theme invokes, too, the ideas at the centre of the lecture series convened by New Zealand historian Keith Sinclair in 1960: Distance Looks Our Way; and in Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey’s Tyranny of Distance (1966). What are the effects of remoteness on an antipodean response to architecture’s historical metropole? Or of the significance of the globe beyond its “centres”? What occurs when isolation is made operative?
The idea of distance, in this sense, invites self-reflection as much as advancement of new knowledge. It was therefore particularly pleasing to receive papers that reflected on distance in order to reflect on the concept of Europe and the European and its consequences for architecture beyond a strictly defined European geography. Welcomed, also, were papers that considered the architectural history and culture of Asia, Australasia and the Pacific in their global contexts.
Following an immensely rewarding set of conference sessions, and the lively conversations that revolved around them, a selection of the presented papers are reproduced here as proceedings.
This theme opens the door to questions of representation and communication in the history of architecture; questions of travel and migration; and of the mobility of expertise, institutions and ideas. As a lens, distance allows us to reflect on the construction of identity in and through architectural works both defined as such (Architects and Architecture) and “grey”. It invites us to consider moments of counterpoint, imaging or critique. It provokes us to clarify, recalibrate, expose, suppress, or legitimise. Works, projects, architects and other agents in the conceptualisation and construction of architecture, cities and landscapes are, from a remove, perceived on terms different from the immediate and the close. Artefacts and ideas subjected to distance acquire something of this perspective, whether they are physically moved or subject to representation at a remove. Distance can be inconvenient; and useful.
The conference welcomed original papers that explored the import of distance for architectural history from any direction. Proposals treated a diverse range of temporalities and geographies. They addressed the consequences of literal distance for architectural culture in its history: communication, travel, mobility, isolation, exile, or technical and intellectual networks. They also considered the figurative role of distance in forms of criticality, historicity and thought. Some papers reflected on the mechanisms and nature of architectural history through such concepts as immediacy, instrumentality or relevance; or of neutralization or obsolescence. An idea of distance was used by some contributions to think through distinctions (in disciplines, practices or institutions) between architectural history and criticism, architectural history and archaeology, architectural history and area studies, architectural history, urban history, histories of science and technology, the history of art, etc. These distinctions were also invoked in order to reflect on architecture and its neighbouring professions and practices. Similar attention was paid to the devices used by architectural historiography to manage distance: historiographical and critical nomenclature; theoretical terms and tropes; and other means of negotiating proximity. Consideration was even given to the very historiographical valence of distance – as, for instance, productive criticality or problematic estrangement.
One strand of the conference theme responds to the special issue of Architectural Histories (2018) asking “What is Europe?”. The theme invokes, too, the ideas at the centre of the lecture series convened by New Zealand historian Keith Sinclair in 1960: Distance Looks Our Way; and in Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey’s Tyranny of Distance (1966). What are the effects of remoteness on an antipodean response to architecture’s historical metropole? Or of the significance of the globe beyond its “centres”? What occurs when isolation is made operative?
The idea of distance, in this sense, invites self-reflection as much as advancement of new knowledge. It was therefore particularly pleasing to receive papers that reflected on distance in order to reflect on the concept of Europe and the European and its consequences for architecture beyond a strictly defined European geography. Welcomed, also, were papers that considered the architectural history and culture of Asia, Australasia and the Pacific in their global contexts.
Following an immensely rewarding set of conference sessions, and the lively conversations that revolved around them, a selection of the presented papers are reproduced here as proceedings.
Research Interests:
In his last published article (“A Black Box”), Reyner Banham argued that architecture owed fifteenth-century Tuscany a debt for fostering a concept, disegno, against which it was long measured as a body of knowledge. Architects from... more
In his last published article (“A Black Box”), Reyner Banham argued that architecture owed fifteenth-century Tuscany a debt for fostering a concept, disegno, against which it was long measured as a body of knowledge. Architects from Tuscany and elsewhere regarded Rome as a live lesson in their art. Italy’s cities have long been held as important for the evolution of architectural ideas elsewhere, its architects and architecture crucial points of reference for the disciplinary knowledge of modern architecture. Italian footprints can be found across histories of twentieth-century architectural culture, just as many parts of the world have found it important to “return” to Italy for instruction. The longue durée of Beaux-arts academicism’s veneration of Rome, the Venice School’s critical histories, and modernist and postmodern interest in Baroque space, Renaissance proportion, Mannerist ambiguity and postmodern referentiality are only a few examples of many recurrent sites, architects, authors, and frameworks observed or read into Italian architecture, cities and critical discourse that occupy prominent positions in the twentieth century’s historiography of architecture. The conflicted message of Le Corbusier’s “The Lesson of Rome” (in Vers une architecture) encapsulates Italy’s (and history’s) complex place in modern architectural culture as both problematic foil and powerful inspiration: to understand twentieth-century architecture, one must know Italy.
And yet, to study Italy’s pervasive impact on contemporary architecture inevitably invokes a contentious privilege. In the age of “global” architectural history and the corrective moves needed to read architecture into those situations (geographical, economic, racial, or cultural) where it had been overlooked, Italy’s long-term prominence in the historiography of architecture and the artistic imagination demands reflection. How to embrace the complexity of the Italian peninsula’s history while acknowledging the clear lessons its architecture offered architects elsewhere? To account both for the specificity of cultural and political contexts and the abstractions derived from them? Does the study of Italian architecture—in curricula, and through institutions—reinforce an idea of architecture and the historical authority of its values that cannot be sustained either in professional education or historical research? Does pursuit by twenty-first century scholars of a deeper, broader Italy enrich the historical and critical references of contemporary architecture, or foster a rift between scholarship and its uptake? Is there any way left to study the history of Italian architecture beyond Italy that promotes a more open disciplinary map?
And yet, to study Italy’s pervasive impact on contemporary architecture inevitably invokes a contentious privilege. In the age of “global” architectural history and the corrective moves needed to read architecture into those situations (geographical, economic, racial, or cultural) where it had been overlooked, Italy’s long-term prominence in the historiography of architecture and the artistic imagination demands reflection. How to embrace the complexity of the Italian peninsula’s history while acknowledging the clear lessons its architecture offered architects elsewhere? To account both for the specificity of cultural and political contexts and the abstractions derived from them? Does the study of Italian architecture—in curricula, and through institutions—reinforce an idea of architecture and the historical authority of its values that cannot be sustained either in professional education or historical research? Does pursuit by twenty-first century scholars of a deeper, broader Italy enrich the historical and critical references of contemporary architecture, or foster a rift between scholarship and its uptake? Is there any way left to study the history of Italian architecture beyond Italy that promotes a more open disciplinary map?
Research Interests:
The nineteenth-century architectural history of what Philippa Mein Smith (among others) has called the ‘Tasman world’ has long been shaped by the nationalist historiographies of twentieth-century Australia and New Zealand. Developments in... more
The nineteenth-century architectural history of what Philippa
Mein Smith (among others) has called the ‘Tasman world’
has long been shaped by the nationalist historiographies of
twentieth-century Australia and New Zealand. Developments in
the region’s colonial architecture from the 1780s onwards have
thus fed later narratives of national foundations. The call for
this session invited scholars to work against the grain of that
problematic nationalism by addressing the architecture and
infrastructure of those colonial industries operating across the
early colonies of New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land and New
Zealand, and connecting that ‘world’ to the economies of the
British Empire, the ‘Anglosphere’, and architectural geographies
defined by trade. These papers thus return to the colonial era
of the South Pacific informed by the gains of post-colonial
history, four-nations British historiography, studies of global
colonial networks and systems, and an appreciation for ‘minor’
forms of historical evidence and architectural practice. Armed
thus, the papers in this session consider the architecture of
the Tasman world from the 1780s to the 1840s in its historical
circumstances, exploring architecture across three different
registers: intentioned works definitively cast as Architecture;
the ‘grey’ architecture (after Bremner) of industries,
transhipping and colonial infrastructure; and as an analogy for
the relationships, systems and structures of the colonial project
and its economic underpinnings. Papers move around and
across the Tasman Sea.
Philippa Mein Smith begins the session by exploring how the
concept of the Tasman World and trans-colonial historiography
activates the industrial architecture of sealing. Stuart King
then homes in on the timber industry of Van Diemen’s Land
and its import for a geography spanning from the Swan River
Colony to California. Harriet Edquist considers the role of the
Vandemonian Henty brothers in the settlement of Western
Victoria, tempering a celebration of their pastoralism by
recalling the displacements and disruptions wrought by their
arrival. Bill Taylor attends to the informal ‘industry’ of pilfering
and looks through the lens it offers on the Australian ports
and their relationships with Britain. In the final paper, Robin
Skinner pursues the matter of representation in his treatment
of Burford’s dioramas of the three colonial ‘capitals’ of this
period. Together, the papers in this session contribute to a postnationalist
architectural history of the Tasman colonies that
figures the place of this region in the nineteenth-century British
world and beyond.
Abstracts on pp 77-81 of the published programme.
Mein Smith (among others) has called the ‘Tasman world’
has long been shaped by the nationalist historiographies of
twentieth-century Australia and New Zealand. Developments in
the region’s colonial architecture from the 1780s onwards have
thus fed later narratives of national foundations. The call for
this session invited scholars to work against the grain of that
problematic nationalism by addressing the architecture and
infrastructure of those colonial industries operating across the
early colonies of New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land and New
Zealand, and connecting that ‘world’ to the economies of the
British Empire, the ‘Anglosphere’, and architectural geographies
defined by trade. These papers thus return to the colonial era
of the South Pacific informed by the gains of post-colonial
history, four-nations British historiography, studies of global
colonial networks and systems, and an appreciation for ‘minor’
forms of historical evidence and architectural practice. Armed
thus, the papers in this session consider the architecture of
the Tasman world from the 1780s to the 1840s in its historical
circumstances, exploring architecture across three different
registers: intentioned works definitively cast as Architecture;
the ‘grey’ architecture (after Bremner) of industries,
transhipping and colonial infrastructure; and as an analogy for
the relationships, systems and structures of the colonial project
and its economic underpinnings. Papers move around and
across the Tasman Sea.
Philippa Mein Smith begins the session by exploring how the
concept of the Tasman World and trans-colonial historiography
activates the industrial architecture of sealing. Stuart King
then homes in on the timber industry of Van Diemen’s Land
and its import for a geography spanning from the Swan River
Colony to California. Harriet Edquist considers the role of the
Vandemonian Henty brothers in the settlement of Western
Victoria, tempering a celebration of their pastoralism by
recalling the displacements and disruptions wrought by their
arrival. Bill Taylor attends to the informal ‘industry’ of pilfering
and looks through the lens it offers on the Australian ports
and their relationships with Britain. In the final paper, Robin
Skinner pursues the matter of representation in his treatment
of Burford’s dioramas of the three colonial ‘capitals’ of this
period. Together, the papers in this session contribute to a postnationalist
architectural history of the Tasman colonies that
figures the place of this region in the nineteenth-century British
world and beyond.
Abstracts on pp 77-81 of the published programme.
Research Interests:
In 1957, Clinton Hartley Grattan, one of Australia’s most important foreign observers, wrote of the shadow of the “urban” in legends of the Australian “bush”.1 He argued that the early frontiers of Australian settlement were frontiers of... more
In 1957, Clinton Hartley Grattan, one of Australia’s most important foreign observers, wrote of the shadow of the “urban” in legends of the Australian “bush”.1 He argued that the early frontiers of Australian settlement were frontiers of men with private capital, or entrepreneurs, and those frontiers thus carried more elements of the urban than is commonly realised. Such early colonial enterprises around Australia’s south and southeastern coasts, and across the Tasman included sealing, whaling, milling and pastoralism, as well as missionary, trading and finance ventures. In advance of official settlements in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, entrepreneurs mapped coastlines, pioneered trade routes and colonised lands. Backed by private capital they established colonial infrastructural architecture effecting urban expansion in the Australian colonies, New Zealand and beyond. Yet this architecture is rarely a subject of architectural histories. [...]
Tasmanian College of the Arts, organised by Harriet Edquist (RMIT) and Stuart King (UTas), October 17-18, 2016
Tasmanian College of the Arts, organised by Harriet Edquist (RMIT) and Stuart King (UTas), October 17-18, 2016
Research Interests: Cartography, Digital Humanities, Architecture, Maritime History, Public Art, and 23 moreUrban History, Digital History, Colonialism, Australia, Landscape History, Architectural History, Nineteenth Century British History and Culture, Financial History (History), British Imperial and Colonial History (1600 - ), Australian History, Economic history/Trade history/Oriental trade, History of New Zealand, Agricultural History, Critical Cartography, Infrastructure, Whaling, New Zealand, History of Landscape Architecture, Tasmania, New South Wales, History of Agriculture, History of surveying, and Anglosphere
The concept of “mannerism” has been susceptible to shifts in historiographical values across the twentieth century. Although the scope of Renaissance (or classicism) and baroque implied the redundancy of mannerism and rendered it... more
The concept of “mannerism” has been susceptible to shifts in historiographical values across the twentieth century. Although the scope of Renaissance (or classicism) and baroque implied the redundancy of mannerism and rendered it problematic, it retained a fluctuating currency as a term to explain the coincidence of several factors that ostensibly lent it conceptual credibility and historical specificity: the assertion of individual artistic agency; the expression of the undermined worldview of the universal church. Such themes as a loss of universal order and a crisis of civilization might have made sense of the architecture of mannerism, but they resonated, too, with the path of twentieth-century culture, and inflected its architecture, historiography and debate over the course of a long twentieth century. In writing the architectural history of mannerism, modern historians of art and architecture negotiated the historiographical theme of culture in crisis, exploring its architectural symptoms and consequences as well as models of restitution. This session will consider the historiographical periodization of mannerism as a product of modern thought, and position the historiography of mannerist architecture as a dimension of the twentieth-century history of architecture. It will initiate a discussion on the discursive formulations that owe a debt (acknowledged or otherwise) to the historiography of architectural mannerism. We invite proposals exploring mannerism as an ordering device in the historiography of architecture indexing twentieth-century conceptualizations of architectural history; as a body of historical work associated in the twentieth-century with the dual themes of individual agency and cultural crisis; and as a theme in the intellectual history of twentieth-century architecture.
Research Interests: Art History, Architecture, Renaissance Studies, Renaissance, Architectural History, and 15 moreModernist Architecture (Architectural Modernism), Architecture in Italian Renaissance and Baroque Art, Postmodernism, History of Art, Architectural Theory, Modern Architecture, Italian Renaissance Art, Renaissance Rome, History and Theory of Modern Architecture, Postmodern, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Architectural Design, Mannerism, Architettura Moderna, and Modernism and Postmodernism In Architecture
In “The ‘New Empiricism-Bay Region Axis’,” Stanford Anderson described Bay Region modernism as “a regionally derived architecture with parallels in other parts of the world.” Across the Pacific, and in counterpoint to the Bay Area,... more
In “The ‘New Empiricism-Bay Region Axis’,” Stanford Anderson described Bay Region modernism as “a regionally derived architecture with parallels in other parts of the world.” Across the Pacific, and in counterpoint to the Bay Area, historians have documented how architects in Australia and New Zealand drew on the timber building traditions of Scandinavia, Japan and California in developing modern dialects within a global network of regional modernisms. If such consequences of this model as architectural nationalism and critical regionalism have become problematic, though, what other relationships between architecture and geography might help to account for the Pacific in the decades following the Second World War? We invite contributions that explore the architectural history of the Pacific Basin (incorporating the Rim defined by the Americas, Australasia and Asia and the islands within), in which the idea and geography of the Pacific has conceptual import. Papers might attend to mobility, to the transfer of models, to the work of Pacific-orientated multi-national architectural practices, or to regional debates in which the Pacific figures as an idea. Papers might consider the Pacific reception of American, Asian and Australasian architecture, or the mechanisms by which pan-Pacific relationships were established and maintained, such as travel, publication, education and events. The session will focus on the period from the end of the Pacific War to the end of 1980s, and hence to the transition from modern to postmodern architectures across this semi-global geography. What does the Pacific offer to the history of twentieth-century architecture? To the notion of a global architectural history? Or to the various regional and national architectural histories in which it is implicated?
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
A special issue edited by Steven Lauritano and Wouter Van Acker, including an introductory essay by the guest editors, a conversation between Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen and Amander Reeser Lawrence, a translation of the interventions by Oswald... more
A special issue edited by Steven Lauritano and Wouter Van Acker, including an introductory essay by the guest editors, a conversation between Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen and Amander Reeser Lawrence, a translation of the interventions by Oswald Mathias Ungers and Colin Rowe to the Architektheorie Internationale Kongress of 1967; and papers by Alessandro Toti, Joseph Bedford, Frida Grahn, Richard W. Hayes, and Benoît Vandevoort; and a review by Michael Abrahamson.
Research Interests:
An open issue, presenting new work by Federico Soriano and Maria Dolores Palacios Díaz, Felix McNamara, Peter Šenk, Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió, Aaron Tobey, Philip Goad, and Catherine Lassen and Cameron Logan; with reviews by Stathis G.... more
An open issue, presenting new work by Federico Soriano and Maria Dolores Palacios Díaz, Felix McNamara, Peter Šenk, Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió, Aaron Tobey, Philip Goad, and Catherine Lassen and Cameron Logan; with reviews by Stathis G. Yeros, Aleksandr Bierig and Michael Hill.
Research Interests:
An open issue, presenting papers by Alberto Franchini; Nadi Abusaada; Dalal Musaed Alsayer and Ricardo Camacho; Michael Fowler; David Beynon, Freya Su and Van Krisadawat; Matthew Mindrup; and Jesse Honsa; and reviews by Franz Anton Cramer... more
An open issue, presenting papers by Alberto Franchini; Nadi Abusaada; Dalal Musaed Alsayer and Ricardo Camacho; Michael Fowler; David Beynon, Freya Su and Van Krisadawat; Matthew Mindrup; and Jesse Honsa; and reviews by Franz Anton Cramer and James Lesh.
Research Interests:
A special issue guest edited by Sven Sterken (KU Leuven) and Dennis Pohl (TU Delft), with a thematic introductory essay by the editors and new papers by Daniel R Quiroga Villamarín; Olga Touloumi; Óskar Örn Arnórsson; Cathelijne Nuisink... more
A special issue guest edited by Sven Sterken (KU Leuven) and Dennis Pohl (TU Delft), with a thematic introductory essay by the editors and new papers by Daniel R Quiroga Villamarín; Olga Touloumi; Óskar Örn Arnórsson; Cathelijne Nuisink and Annamaria Bonzanigo; Kenny Cupers, Cole Roskam and Girma Hundessa; and Mark Sawyer, Georgia Lindsay and Nadia Alaily-Mattar; and reviews by Clemens Finkelstein and Sina Brückner-Amin.
Research Interests:
A special issue guest-edited by Eunice Seng (HKU) and Jiat-Hwee Chang (NUS), containing new articles by Diana Jean Martinez, Tzafrir Fainholtz, Rixt Woudstra and Hannah le Roux, Albert Brenchant-Aguilar, Phoebe Springstubb, Guanghui Ding... more
A special issue guest-edited by Eunice Seng (HKU) and Jiat-Hwee Chang (NUS), containing new articles by Diana Jean Martinez, Tzafrir Fainholtz, Rixt Woudstra and Hannah le Roux, Albert Brenchant-Aguilar, Phoebe Springstubb, Guanghui Ding and Charlie Qiuli Xue, Edward Denison and Guang Yu Ren, and Amanda Achmadi and Brendan Josey; with a review by Chatri Prakitnonthakan.
Research Interests:
An open issue, with papers by Caroline Ford, Yoonchun Jung, Mark Sawyer and Georgia Lindsay, Linda Buhagiar, Pavlos Lefas, and Elizabeth M. Keslacy, and a review by Felix McNamara.
Research Interests:
A special issue of ATR on financialized space edited by Jasper Ludewig and Maren Koehler, with papers by Amy Thomas, Elliott Sturtevant, Charles Rice, Anne Kockelkorn, Dasha Kuletskaya, Marco Moro, Sony Devabhaktuni, Eva Schreiner, and... more
A special issue of ATR on financialized space edited by Jasper Ludewig and Maren Koehler, with papers by Amy Thomas, Elliott Sturtevant, Charles Rice, Anne Kockelkorn, Dasha Kuletskaya, Marco Moro, Sony Devabhaktuni, Eva Schreiner, and Alexandra Quantrill; a report by Caley Horan, Peter James Hudson, Maren Koehler, Jasper Ludewig, Amy Thomas, and Alexia Yates; and a review by Cameron Logan.
Research Interests:
An open issue of ATR, with papers by Bart Verschaffel, Shannon Starkey, Steven Cooke and Hannah Lewi, Dorit Fershtman, Tom Avermaete and Cathelijne Nuijsink, and Laura Belik; with reviews by Iva Glisic, WIlliam M. Taylor, Hannah Lewi,... more
An open issue of ATR, with papers by Bart Verschaffel, Shannon Starkey, Steven Cooke and Hannah Lewi, Dorit Fershtman, Tom Avermaete and Cathelijne Nuijsink, and Laura Belik; with reviews by Iva Glisic, WIlliam M. Taylor, Hannah Lewi, Paul Carter, Michael Carter, and Michael Faciejew.
Research Interests:
A special, double issue on the theme of timber, guest edited by Laila Seewang and Irina Davidovici and including papers by (in part 1) Laila Seewang, Stuart King and Andrew Leach, Erik Carver, Erin S. Putalik, Maryia Rusak, Fredie Floré,... more
A special, double issue on the theme of timber, guest edited by Laila Seewang and Irina Davidovici and including papers by (in part 1) Laila Seewang, Stuart King and Andrew Leach, Erik Carver, Erin S. Putalik, Maryia Rusak, Fredie Floré, Julia Marin and Bruno De Meulder, Cathelijne Nuijsink in conversation with Momoyo Kaijima; and (in part 2) Will Davis, Cameron Macdonell, Karl Kiem and Ann-Christin Stolz, Yasmina El Chami, Diego Arango Lopez, Shuntaro Nozawa and Yosuke Komiyama, Alan Powers, and Marianne Burkhalter and Christian Sumi.
Research Interests:
A special, double issue on the theme of timber, guest edited by Laila Seewang and Irina Davidovici and including papers by (in part 1) Laila Seewang, Stuart King and Andrew Leach, Erik Carver, Erin S. Putalik, Maryia Rusak, Fredie Floré,... more
A special, double issue on the theme of timber, guest edited by Laila Seewang and Irina Davidovici and including papers by (in part 1) Laila Seewang, Stuart King and Andrew Leach, Erik Carver, Erin S. Putalik, Maryia Rusak, Fredie Floré, Julia Marin and Bruno De Meulder, Cathelijne Nuijsink in conversation with Momoyo Kaijima; and (in part 2) Will Davis, Cameron Macdonell, Karl Kiem and Ann-Christin Stolz, Yasmina El Chami, Diego Arango Lopez, Shuntaro Nozawa and Yosuke Komiyama, Alan Powers, and Marianne Burkhalter and Christian Sumi.
Research Interests:
A thematic issue on the model, edited by Matthew Mindrup and Matthew Wells, with contributions by Stefaan Vervoort; Davide Pisu; Shota Vashakmadze; Felipe Loureiro, Roberto Bartholo, Gabriel Bursztyn, and Luiz Ribiero; Dijia Chen; Claudia... more
A thematic issue on the model, edited by Matthew Mindrup and Matthew Wells, with contributions by Stefaan Vervoort; Davide Pisu; Shota Vashakmadze; Felipe Loureiro, Roberto Bartholo, Gabriel Bursztyn, and Luiz Ribiero; Dijia Chen; Claudia Conforti, Fabio Colonnese, Maria Grazia D'Amelio, and Lorenzo Grieco; Yvette Putra; and David Lund.
Research Interests:
A combined special issue, including articles on the historiography of architectural mannerism by Luke Morgan, Tiffany Lynn Hunt, and Matthew Critchley; and on the Covid 19 moment (Covid--Quid Tum?), with reflections by Christophe Van... more
A combined special issue, including articles on the historiography of architectural mannerism by Luke Morgan, Tiffany Lynn Hunt, and Matthew Critchley; and on the Covid 19 moment (Covid--Quid Tum?), with reflections by Christophe Van Gerrewey, Albena Yaneva, Daniel A. Barber, Léa-Catherine Szacka, Lee Stickells, Jennifer Ferng, Caspar Pearson, Juliana Maxim, and Adam Jasper.
Research Interests:
An open issue, with papers by Samuel O'Connor-Perks, Rajesh Heynickx and Stéphane Symons; Panayiota Pyla and Petros Phokaides; Isabel Rousset; Matthew S. Rowe, Joris Gjata and Shawhin Roudbari; and David Escudero. And with reviews by Amy... more
An open issue, with papers by Samuel O'Connor-Perks, Rajesh Heynickx and Stéphane Symons; Panayiota Pyla and Petros Phokaides; Isabel Rousset; Matthew S. Rowe, Joris Gjata and Shawhin Roudbari; and David Escudero. And with reviews by Amy Clarke, Hélène Frichot, Marina Lathouri and Amir Taheri.
Research Interests:
An open issue, with papers by Rosemary Spooner, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, Gareth Abrahams, and Alexandra Brown and Léa-Catherine Szacka, and reviews by David Theodore and Simon von Wolkenstein.
Research Interests:
The nineteenth-century architectural history of what Philippa Mein Smith and others have (now famously) called the “Tasman world” has long been shaped by the nationalist historiographies of twentieth-century Australia and New Zealand.... more
The nineteenth-century architectural history of what Philippa Mein Smith and others have (now famously) called the “Tasman world” has long been shaped by the nationalist historiographies of twentieth-century Australia and New Zealand. Developments in the region’s colonial architecture from the 1780s onwards have thus fed later narratives of national foundations, often obscuring the more complex relationships of that world’s constituent colonies and resource geographies, both marine and terrestrial, as well as the highly varied ways in which the colonial enterprise was experienced and played out by the indigenous populations it most affected.
For this issue, we invited scholars to work against that grain of what we have understood as a problematic nationalism by addressing the architecture and infrastructure of those colonial industries operating across the early colonies of New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land and New Zealand and connecting that “world” to the economies of the British Empire, the so-called “Anglosphere,” and with architectural geographies defined by economic activity. These papers thus return to the colonial era of the South Pacific informed by the gains of post-colonial history, four-nations British historiography, studies of global colonial networks and systems, and an appreciation for “minor” forms of historical evidence and architectural practice.
Over the past two decades the transnationalist agenda in contemporary historiography, beginning with “Atlantic World” studies and “Connected” histories, has dramatically reshaped how we see and understand the interconnected world in which we live. Nothing is as contained as it might first appear, especially within the borders of the modern nation state. This applies equally to the British world during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including between what were initially separate crown colonies. The insights provided by these scholarly movements have spawned whole genres that have come to encompass “World” and “Global” history (with their own journals), as well as other oceanic spheres of influence besides the Atlantic, such as the Pacific and Indian oceans. The “Tasman world” that this volume inhabits is part of this wider historiographic trend, and may be seen as enlarging upon recent attempts to position the history of the built environment firmly at the heart of transnational and inter-colonial studies.
Armed and inspired thus, the authors in this special issue have set out to consider the architecture of the Tasman world from the 1780s to the 1850s in its historical circumstances and to treat those decades that preceded by some time the familiar division of the Australian colonies that would coalesce into a twentieth-century nation, distinct from its trans-Tasman neighbour, whose economy was once more interdependent on that of Van Diemen’s Land and New South Wales.
These papers explore architecture in three different registers: intentioned works definitively cast as Architecture; the “grey” architecture (as Bremner has named it ) of industries, transhipping and colonial infrastructure; and finally of architecture as an analogy for the relationships, systems and structures of the colonial project and its economic underpinnings. Papers move around and across the Tasman Sea, but beyond it as well, following the money, so to speak, as well as the soft capital of reputation and diplomacy.
Together, the papers in this issue contribute to a post-nationalist architectural history of the Tasman colonies that figures the place of this region in the nineteenth-century British world and beyond. The terms of reference offered by Philippa Mein Smith, among others, in her book Remaking the Tasman World, published a decade ago, have been important to the way we have conceptualised this issue, so we are particularly pleased to include her work here. She begins the issue by exploring how the concept of the Tasman World and trans-colonial historiography activates the industrial architecture of sealing. She tracks the different ways in which this history can be posited as architectural history, from her recalibration of the timeline of European architecture’s first informal appearances in New Zealand to the homesteads and warehouses of sealers in Sydney and along the Hawkesbury, to those developments that rested squarely on a financial foundation built of seal furs.
Stuart King then homes in on the timber industry of Van Diemen’s Land (today’s Tasmania) and its import for a geography spanning from the Swan River Colony in the west to California in the other west. How did timber move around the island and across both the Bass Strait and the Tasman Sea? To what ends was it put to work? What kinds of claim does this allow for a Tasmanian architecture? Harriet Edquist then considers the role of the Vandemonian Henty brothers in the settlement of Western Victoria, tempering a celebration of their pastoralism by recalling the displacements and disruptions wrought by their arrival, and recalibrating the chronology of the settlement of Port Philip when that chronology is read through an industrial or resource driven lens.
A paper by Robin Skinner then pursues the matter of representation in his treatment of Burford’s dioramas of the three colonial “capitals” of this period: Hobart Town, Sydney, and Kororareka and the Bay of Islands. He considers the content portrayed by Angus Earle and amplified through its representation for British audiences in London. Mechanisms of control and surveillance, race relations, resources, religion and culture all draw visual comment, conditioning the way the Tasman Sea colonies were understood in their infancy. Bill Taylor’s consideration of the informal “industry” of pilfering reads port structures and the sites of labour and the distribution of resources through their permeability. Offering a way to read the relationship between the Australian ports and their counterparts across the British Empire (not least, Calcutta and Canton), he shows how these sites enacted a transactional stability between the dues accorded work and the value of those goods distributed through the Commissariat.
This issue of Fabrications originated with a SAHANZ-sponsored session at the fifth biannual meeting of the European Architectural History Network, held in Tallinn, Estonia, in June 2018. It grows, in turn, from a long-term discussion around global enterprise and the South Pacific, staged in 2016 and 2017 in Hobart and Edinburgh (supported by RMIT, the University of Tasmania and the University of Edinburgh), and which has, in part, evolved out of the EU-funded COST Action “European Architecture Beyond Europe,” chaired by Mercedes Volait at INHA and Johan Lagae at Ghent.
All five of the papers delivered at Tallinn in 2018—by Harriet Edquist, Stuart King Philippa Mein Smith, Robin Skinner, and Bill Taylor—have been revised and amplified for this thematic issue, responding both to the discussion we enjoyed in Tallinn and the comments offered by our expert reviewers. At Tallinn, we were included in a conference-long track on “the world of Europe’s peripheries,” which introduced an immediate an obvious tension into our discussion that remains live in these papers. Is this ultimately European or British architectural history at a remove? Or Australian architectural history that draws authority from the gravity of the centre? Or does it have value in its own terms? The more we have pondered this question, the clearer it seems that the proper answer lies in a balance wherein historic episodes tell us both of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century architectural history of the Tasman world—a geography with its own conditions and history—and of the history of the worlds with which the Tasman intersects, not necessarily as a periphery, but also respecting the realities of trade and travel in these decades that placed Port Jackson or Fiordland at a remove from many of the world’s commercial and cultural hubs.
Note: this is the pre-production text of the editorial for this issue.
Contents:
Philippa Mein Smith / The Sealing Industry and the Architecture of the Tasman World
Stuart King / The Architecture of Van Diemen's Land Timber
Harriet Edquist / Portland Bay and the Origins of European Architecture in Port Phillip 1828-1836
Robin Skinner: "Dreamt of, but Utterly Unknown!": The Earle Panoramas of the Tasman World
William M. Taylor / Pilfering and the Tasman World: Convict Commerce and the "Securitisation" of Space in Early Colonial Sydney
For this issue, we invited scholars to work against that grain of what we have understood as a problematic nationalism by addressing the architecture and infrastructure of those colonial industries operating across the early colonies of New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land and New Zealand and connecting that “world” to the economies of the British Empire, the so-called “Anglosphere,” and with architectural geographies defined by economic activity. These papers thus return to the colonial era of the South Pacific informed by the gains of post-colonial history, four-nations British historiography, studies of global colonial networks and systems, and an appreciation for “minor” forms of historical evidence and architectural practice.
Over the past two decades the transnationalist agenda in contemporary historiography, beginning with “Atlantic World” studies and “Connected” histories, has dramatically reshaped how we see and understand the interconnected world in which we live. Nothing is as contained as it might first appear, especially within the borders of the modern nation state. This applies equally to the British world during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including between what were initially separate crown colonies. The insights provided by these scholarly movements have spawned whole genres that have come to encompass “World” and “Global” history (with their own journals), as well as other oceanic spheres of influence besides the Atlantic, such as the Pacific and Indian oceans. The “Tasman world” that this volume inhabits is part of this wider historiographic trend, and may be seen as enlarging upon recent attempts to position the history of the built environment firmly at the heart of transnational and inter-colonial studies.
Armed and inspired thus, the authors in this special issue have set out to consider the architecture of the Tasman world from the 1780s to the 1850s in its historical circumstances and to treat those decades that preceded by some time the familiar division of the Australian colonies that would coalesce into a twentieth-century nation, distinct from its trans-Tasman neighbour, whose economy was once more interdependent on that of Van Diemen’s Land and New South Wales.
These papers explore architecture in three different registers: intentioned works definitively cast as Architecture; the “grey” architecture (as Bremner has named it ) of industries, transhipping and colonial infrastructure; and finally of architecture as an analogy for the relationships, systems and structures of the colonial project and its economic underpinnings. Papers move around and across the Tasman Sea, but beyond it as well, following the money, so to speak, as well as the soft capital of reputation and diplomacy.
Together, the papers in this issue contribute to a post-nationalist architectural history of the Tasman colonies that figures the place of this region in the nineteenth-century British world and beyond. The terms of reference offered by Philippa Mein Smith, among others, in her book Remaking the Tasman World, published a decade ago, have been important to the way we have conceptualised this issue, so we are particularly pleased to include her work here. She begins the issue by exploring how the concept of the Tasman World and trans-colonial historiography activates the industrial architecture of sealing. She tracks the different ways in which this history can be posited as architectural history, from her recalibration of the timeline of European architecture’s first informal appearances in New Zealand to the homesteads and warehouses of sealers in Sydney and along the Hawkesbury, to those developments that rested squarely on a financial foundation built of seal furs.
Stuart King then homes in on the timber industry of Van Diemen’s Land (today’s Tasmania) and its import for a geography spanning from the Swan River Colony in the west to California in the other west. How did timber move around the island and across both the Bass Strait and the Tasman Sea? To what ends was it put to work? What kinds of claim does this allow for a Tasmanian architecture? Harriet Edquist then considers the role of the Vandemonian Henty brothers in the settlement of Western Victoria, tempering a celebration of their pastoralism by recalling the displacements and disruptions wrought by their arrival, and recalibrating the chronology of the settlement of Port Philip when that chronology is read through an industrial or resource driven lens.
A paper by Robin Skinner then pursues the matter of representation in his treatment of Burford’s dioramas of the three colonial “capitals” of this period: Hobart Town, Sydney, and Kororareka and the Bay of Islands. He considers the content portrayed by Angus Earle and amplified through its representation for British audiences in London. Mechanisms of control and surveillance, race relations, resources, religion and culture all draw visual comment, conditioning the way the Tasman Sea colonies were understood in their infancy. Bill Taylor’s consideration of the informal “industry” of pilfering reads port structures and the sites of labour and the distribution of resources through their permeability. Offering a way to read the relationship between the Australian ports and their counterparts across the British Empire (not least, Calcutta and Canton), he shows how these sites enacted a transactional stability between the dues accorded work and the value of those goods distributed through the Commissariat.
This issue of Fabrications originated with a SAHANZ-sponsored session at the fifth biannual meeting of the European Architectural History Network, held in Tallinn, Estonia, in June 2018. It grows, in turn, from a long-term discussion around global enterprise and the South Pacific, staged in 2016 and 2017 in Hobart and Edinburgh (supported by RMIT, the University of Tasmania and the University of Edinburgh), and which has, in part, evolved out of the EU-funded COST Action “European Architecture Beyond Europe,” chaired by Mercedes Volait at INHA and Johan Lagae at Ghent.
All five of the papers delivered at Tallinn in 2018—by Harriet Edquist, Stuart King Philippa Mein Smith, Robin Skinner, and Bill Taylor—have been revised and amplified for this thematic issue, responding both to the discussion we enjoyed in Tallinn and the comments offered by our expert reviewers. At Tallinn, we were included in a conference-long track on “the world of Europe’s peripheries,” which introduced an immediate an obvious tension into our discussion that remains live in these papers. Is this ultimately European or British architectural history at a remove? Or Australian architectural history that draws authority from the gravity of the centre? Or does it have value in its own terms? The more we have pondered this question, the clearer it seems that the proper answer lies in a balance wherein historic episodes tell us both of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century architectural history of the Tasman world—a geography with its own conditions and history—and of the history of the worlds with which the Tasman intersects, not necessarily as a periphery, but also respecting the realities of trade and travel in these decades that placed Port Jackson or Fiordland at a remove from many of the world’s commercial and cultural hubs.
Note: this is the pre-production text of the editorial for this issue.
Contents:
Philippa Mein Smith / The Sealing Industry and the Architecture of the Tasman World
Stuart King / The Architecture of Van Diemen's Land Timber
Harriet Edquist / Portland Bay and the Origins of European Architecture in Port Phillip 1828-1836
Robin Skinner: "Dreamt of, but Utterly Unknown!": The Earle Panoramas of the Tasman World
William M. Taylor / Pilfering and the Tasman World: Convict Commerce and the "Securitisation" of Space in Early Colonial Sydney
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A thematic issue on the crowd, edited by Cameron Logan and Janina Gosseye, with papers by Emily Eastgate Brink and William M. Taylor, L:uoisa Iarocci, Xusheng Huang, Toby Mackay and Simone Brott, Stephen Walker, and Evelyn Kwok; and... more
A thematic issue on the crowd, edited by Cameron Logan and Janina Gosseye, with papers by Emily Eastgate Brink and William M. Taylor, L:uoisa Iarocci, Xusheng Huang, Toby Mackay and Simone Brott, Stephen Walker, and Evelyn Kwok; and reviews by Jason Dibbs and Mahroo Moosavi.
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A thematic issue on the architecture exhibition as environment, edited by Alex Brown and Léa-Catherine Szacka, and with contributions by Manuel Rodrigo de la O Cabrera, Jordan Kaufdman, Ross Elfline, Samuel Korn, Christophe Van Gerrewey,... more
A thematic issue on the architecture exhibition as environment, edited by Alex Brown and Léa-Catherine Szacka, and with contributions by Manuel Rodrigo de la O Cabrera, Jordan Kaufdman, Ross Elfline, Samuel Korn, Christophe Van Gerrewey, Rebecca Uchill, and Maarten Liefhooghe.
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A special issue, edited by Peter Scriver, Amit Srivastava and Duanfang Lu, with contributions by Cecilia L. Chu, Ying Wang and Hilde Heynen, Anoma Pieris, Thomas Oommen, Sambit Datta and David J. Beynon, and Ari Seligmann.
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An open issue, with essays by Courtney Skipton Long, Robert Alexander Gorny, Timothy Hyde, Alexander Eisenschmidt, and (jointly) Daniel A. Barber, Lee Stickells, Philip Goad, Deborah van der Plaat, Daniel J Ryan, Cathy Keys, Maren... more
An open issue, with essays by Courtney Skipton Long, Robert Alexander Gorny, Timothy Hyde, Alexander Eisenschmidt, and (jointly) Daniel A. Barber, Lee Stickells, Philip Goad, Deborah van der Plaat, Daniel J Ryan, Cathy Keys, Maren Koehler, Farhan Karim, William Taylor and Andrew Leach; and reviews by Jasper Ludewig, Alexandra Brown and Elizabeth Musgrave.
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"Reclaim, Resist, Speculate: Situated Perspectives on Architecture and the City": a special issue edited by Isabel Doucet and Hélène Frichot, with an interview by Isabel Doucet with Didier Debaise and Benedikte Zitouni and articles by... more
"Reclaim, Resist, Speculate: Situated Perspectives on Architecture and the City": a special issue edited by Isabel Doucet and Hélène Frichot, with an interview by Isabel Doucet with Didier Debaise and Benedikte Zitouni and articles by Pauline Lefebvre, Adam Walls, Ruth Sacks, Catharuna Gabrielsson, Bianca Elzenbaumer, and Janet McGaw; and reviews by Jonathan Metzger and Chris L. Smith.
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A thematic issue of the journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, drawing on work presented at the annual meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians in Chicago, 2015. * The community of... more
A thematic issue of the journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, drawing on work presented at the annual meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians in Chicago, 2015.
*
The community of scholars served by SAHANZ is quite naturally preoccupied with the Pacific. So many islands are surrounded by it. It is the edge of so many continents. The Pacific presents historians of architecture—defined in the most generous terms—with an incalculable number of subjects of study in its own right, even as it serves as a setting that shapes the kind of scholarship and the kinds of problems towards which scholars who are one way or another defined by the Pacific are drawn. It determines, to varying degrees, the outlook of the architectural history that happens in and around it, be it the study of contemporary South Pacific architecture by Jennifer Taylor and James Connor (reviewed in volume 25 of this journal); or the Mike Austin’s decades’ worth of scholarship on the “Pacific” worldview; or, further afield, Reyner Banham’s reflections (in Los Angeles) on the relationship between maritime settlement and westward expansion in shaping the Pacific’s import to the cities of the American West Coast.
Naturally, then, almost every issue of this journal contributes to a growing body of research on the Pacific as a setting, theme or problem: the architecture and planning of islands and continents; the soft architecture of the complex geopolitical and trade relationships that nations with a stake in the Pacific at once foster and challenge; and the question of the relationship of this semi-global territory to the world as a whole.
The papers that appear in this issue of Fabrications therefore amplify attention to a geography that is rarely overlooked in the pages of this journal, but which is here posed a little more forcibly. What, for architectural history, is the Pacific Basin, encompassing the Pacific Ocean, its borders across the Americas, Australasia and Eastern Asia, and the many dozens of its islands? What does it offer—as a subject, or a territory—to a disciplinary field that has become preoccupied with the global? A field that has absorbed the lessons of postcolonialism? And that has grasped as well as any field might grasp the importance of studying works of architecture alongside modes of intellectual and technical exchange? What is the Pacific as an idea? And how has the idea of the Pacific interacted with the various “realities” toward which it leads? How does the significance of the Pacific change for architecture’s various agents in Russia, Peru or Taiwan? In Norfolk Island, Kiribati or Canada? To what extent is the Pacific a complex field, unified by water, and to what extent a series of discrete cultural settings made complex at the edges?
In asking if we can speak of an architectural history of the Pacific Basin, this issue of Fabrications invokes three ways in which the Pacific already figures in architectural history. The first is as an idea, bound to the tradition (Romantic, imperial, colonial) of imagining the Pacific outside of experience. The second: as a setting, in which buildings are needed, architects put to work, technologies developed or applied, or events occur that result in historically noteworthy works of architecture and urbanism. The third of this is in its absence, as a condition to be overcome, an obstacle removed by thinking about the relationship between one part of the world and another in different ways. This latter Pacific embodies distance as a dimension of architectural work that allows for a kind of practical simultaneity that eliminates altogether the obstacle of the ocean, while at the same time invoking it as a precondition of the relationships prevented by the problems of time and navigation.
It was not always as easy to overcome the Pacific as it is now, and the papers that follow demonstrate the different ways in which the Pacific is brought into play. Anoma Pieris recalls a period when the Pacific was a battleground, prompting a new cartographic layer of prison “islands” demarcated along lines of aggression and allegiance and interacting with a global network of islands on one side or another of the Second World War. Christoph Schnoor takes a single island as his setting, testing the conditions of architectural production on Samoa across different phases of its modern colonisation and independence against the images of a Pacific architecture that occupy the minds of writers, artists and architects alike; and that assume importance, therefore, for their political potency. An article by Jeffrey Ochsner then tests the import of the Pacific for the architecture of Seattle in the American North-West, and in particular the mechanisms by which knowledge of Japanese architecture was invoked in the modernism of this region. Ke Song and Jianfei Zhu present a series of instances whereby an image of American modernity was invoked in a Chinese architecture making overtures to the western world from within the depths of the Cold War. This timing coincides, too, with the trajectory of Philip Goad’s study on the evolving relationship between Australian and American architectural practices that shaped the nature of Australia’s import for Asia and the South Pacific in the second half of the twentieth century—but a relationship predicated on the mobility of culture and personnel across a distance that still demands more than ten hours of air travel to traverse.
The theme of this issue was initially explored in a session supported by SAHANZ at the sixty-eighth annual conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, held April 2015 in Chicago, asking the question of whether we could yet speak of “an architectural history of the Pacific Basin”, encouraging a particular focus on the post-World War II. That session included work by five speakers, including Philip Goad, Jeffrey Ochsner and Christoph Schnoor, whose papers appear here in extended and revised form. It included, too, a contribution by James Weirick, who offered a pre-history to the session’s problem by studying the diffusion of the Chicago School across the Pacific in the early decades of the twentieth century that predicated relationships of a kind explored here by Song and Zhu and Goad. The session also included a paper by Arief Setiawan, on the Hawaiian houses of Vladimir Ossipoff.
The articles that follow—together with Bill McKay’s review of the recently published Cook Islands Art and Architecture—advance the project of positioning the Pacific in architectural history. They advance, too, the task of working through the complexity of the Pacific as a subject that resists synthesis. In this, we still have much to do.
Note: this is the pre-production text of the editorial for this issue.
Contents:
Anoma Pieris / Architectures of the Pacific Carceral Archipelago: Second World War Internment and Prisoner of War Camps
Christoph Schnoor / Images of Principles of the Pacific? An Investigation into Architecture in Samoa
Jeffrey Karl Ochsner / Seattle, the Pacific Basin, and the Sources of Regional Modernism
Ke Song & Jianfei Zhu / The Architectural Influences of the United States in Mao's China (1949-76)
Philip Goad / Importing Expertise: Australian-US Architects and the Large-Scale, 1945-90
*
The community of scholars served by SAHANZ is quite naturally preoccupied with the Pacific. So many islands are surrounded by it. It is the edge of so many continents. The Pacific presents historians of architecture—defined in the most generous terms—with an incalculable number of subjects of study in its own right, even as it serves as a setting that shapes the kind of scholarship and the kinds of problems towards which scholars who are one way or another defined by the Pacific are drawn. It determines, to varying degrees, the outlook of the architectural history that happens in and around it, be it the study of contemporary South Pacific architecture by Jennifer Taylor and James Connor (reviewed in volume 25 of this journal); or the Mike Austin’s decades’ worth of scholarship on the “Pacific” worldview; or, further afield, Reyner Banham’s reflections (in Los Angeles) on the relationship between maritime settlement and westward expansion in shaping the Pacific’s import to the cities of the American West Coast.
Naturally, then, almost every issue of this journal contributes to a growing body of research on the Pacific as a setting, theme or problem: the architecture and planning of islands and continents; the soft architecture of the complex geopolitical and trade relationships that nations with a stake in the Pacific at once foster and challenge; and the question of the relationship of this semi-global territory to the world as a whole.
The papers that appear in this issue of Fabrications therefore amplify attention to a geography that is rarely overlooked in the pages of this journal, but which is here posed a little more forcibly. What, for architectural history, is the Pacific Basin, encompassing the Pacific Ocean, its borders across the Americas, Australasia and Eastern Asia, and the many dozens of its islands? What does it offer—as a subject, or a territory—to a disciplinary field that has become preoccupied with the global? A field that has absorbed the lessons of postcolonialism? And that has grasped as well as any field might grasp the importance of studying works of architecture alongside modes of intellectual and technical exchange? What is the Pacific as an idea? And how has the idea of the Pacific interacted with the various “realities” toward which it leads? How does the significance of the Pacific change for architecture’s various agents in Russia, Peru or Taiwan? In Norfolk Island, Kiribati or Canada? To what extent is the Pacific a complex field, unified by water, and to what extent a series of discrete cultural settings made complex at the edges?
In asking if we can speak of an architectural history of the Pacific Basin, this issue of Fabrications invokes three ways in which the Pacific already figures in architectural history. The first is as an idea, bound to the tradition (Romantic, imperial, colonial) of imagining the Pacific outside of experience. The second: as a setting, in which buildings are needed, architects put to work, technologies developed or applied, or events occur that result in historically noteworthy works of architecture and urbanism. The third of this is in its absence, as a condition to be overcome, an obstacle removed by thinking about the relationship between one part of the world and another in different ways. This latter Pacific embodies distance as a dimension of architectural work that allows for a kind of practical simultaneity that eliminates altogether the obstacle of the ocean, while at the same time invoking it as a precondition of the relationships prevented by the problems of time and navigation.
It was not always as easy to overcome the Pacific as it is now, and the papers that follow demonstrate the different ways in which the Pacific is brought into play. Anoma Pieris recalls a period when the Pacific was a battleground, prompting a new cartographic layer of prison “islands” demarcated along lines of aggression and allegiance and interacting with a global network of islands on one side or another of the Second World War. Christoph Schnoor takes a single island as his setting, testing the conditions of architectural production on Samoa across different phases of its modern colonisation and independence against the images of a Pacific architecture that occupy the minds of writers, artists and architects alike; and that assume importance, therefore, for their political potency. An article by Jeffrey Ochsner then tests the import of the Pacific for the architecture of Seattle in the American North-West, and in particular the mechanisms by which knowledge of Japanese architecture was invoked in the modernism of this region. Ke Song and Jianfei Zhu present a series of instances whereby an image of American modernity was invoked in a Chinese architecture making overtures to the western world from within the depths of the Cold War. This timing coincides, too, with the trajectory of Philip Goad’s study on the evolving relationship between Australian and American architectural practices that shaped the nature of Australia’s import for Asia and the South Pacific in the second half of the twentieth century—but a relationship predicated on the mobility of culture and personnel across a distance that still demands more than ten hours of air travel to traverse.
The theme of this issue was initially explored in a session supported by SAHANZ at the sixty-eighth annual conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, held April 2015 in Chicago, asking the question of whether we could yet speak of “an architectural history of the Pacific Basin”, encouraging a particular focus on the post-World War II. That session included work by five speakers, including Philip Goad, Jeffrey Ochsner and Christoph Schnoor, whose papers appear here in extended and revised form. It included, too, a contribution by James Weirick, who offered a pre-history to the session’s problem by studying the diffusion of the Chicago School across the Pacific in the early decades of the twentieth century that predicated relationships of a kind explored here by Song and Zhu and Goad. The session also included a paper by Arief Setiawan, on the Hawaiian houses of Vladimir Ossipoff.
The articles that follow—together with Bill McKay’s review of the recently published Cook Islands Art and Architecture—advance the project of positioning the Pacific in architectural history. They advance, too, the task of working through the complexity of the Pacific as a subject that resists synthesis. In this, we still have much to do.
Note: this is the pre-production text of the editorial for this issue.
Contents:
Anoma Pieris / Architectures of the Pacific Carceral Archipelago: Second World War Internment and Prisoner of War Camps
Christoph Schnoor / Images of Principles of the Pacific? An Investigation into Architecture in Samoa
Jeffrey Karl Ochsner / Seattle, the Pacific Basin, and the Sources of Regional Modernism
Ke Song & Jianfei Zhu / The Architectural Influences of the United States in Mao's China (1949-76)
Philip Goad / Importing Expertise: Australian-US Architects and the Large-Scale, 1945-90
Research Interests: Architecture, Pacific Island Studies, Architectural History, Asia Pacific Region, Global History, and 10 moreModern Architecture, Architectural Heritage, Pacific History, History and Theory of Modern Architecture, Australian architecture, Pacific Studies, Samoan Culture, Architectural Profession, Modernism and Postmodernism In Architecture, and Global History of Architecture
A dossier of essays drawn from recent contributions to conferences of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand. With an introduction by Andrew Leach, it contains writing by Alex Bremner ("Colonial Architecture... more
A dossier of essays drawn from recent contributions to conferences of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand. With an introduction by Andrew Leach, it contains writing by Alex Bremner ("Colonial Architecture and its Global Contexts"), Wendy Roberts ("Company Transfer"), Daniel Ryan ("Kissing Point Huts"), Anoma Pieris ("Australian Architectures of Internment") and Susan Holden and Jared Bird ("Bush Civics").
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A special issue of ATR edited by William M. Taylor, Andrew Leach & Lee Stickells, with contributions by Greg Castillo, Robin Wilson, Ben Campkin, Nigel Westbrook & Rene Vam Meeuwen, Karen Burns, and Anoma Pieris.
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A special issue of the Journal of Architecture on the modernist historiography of mannerist and baroque architecture, with contributions by Dirk De Meyer, Maarten Delbeke, John Macarthur, Andrew Leach, and Bart Verschaffel—based on a... more
A special issue of the Journal of Architecture on the modernist historiography of mannerist and baroque architecture, with contributions by Dirk De Meyer, Maarten Delbeke, John Macarthur, Andrew Leach, and Bart Verschaffel—based on a session of the 2009 meeting of the European Network of Avant-guard and Modern Studies at Ghent, Belgium.
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An open issue of the journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, with papers by Tristan Guilloux, Gevork Hartoonian, Harriet Edquist, David Nichols, and Erik Ghenoiu; and reviews by Deidre Brown, Deborah... more
An open issue of the journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, with papers by Tristan Guilloux, Gevork Hartoonian, Harriet Edquist, David Nichols, and Erik Ghenoiu; and reviews by Deidre Brown, Deborah van der Plaat, and Gevork Hartoonian.
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A thematic issue of the journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, drawing on papers delivered in a session (chaired by Deidre Brown and Andrew Leach) of the Society of Architectural Historians in... more
A thematic issue of the journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, drawing on papers delivered in a session (chaired by Deidre Brown and Andrew Leach) of the Society of Architectural Historians in Cincinnati, April 2008—by Julie Willis and Philip Goad, Leonie Matthews, Paul Walker, Robin Skinner, and Paul Memmott and James Davidson, with an obituaty for George Tibbets by Goad and Willis, and Reviews by John Stacpoole, Antony Moulis, Jan Smitheram, Sarah Treadwell, Susan Holden, Joanna Cys, and Julia Gatley. Edited by Andrew Leach and Paul Walker.
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A special issue "On Style," with articles by Stephen Frith, Paul Walker and Stuart King, Helen Hills, Gevork Hartoonian, and Luka Skansi; and reviews by Robert Riddel, Ian Lochhead, Julia Gatley, Geoffrey London, Kate Linzey, Gill... more
A special issue "On Style," with articles by Stephen Frith, Paul Walker and Stuart King, Helen Hills, Gevork Hartoonian, and Luka Skansi; and reviews by Robert Riddel, Ian Lochhead, Julia Gatley, Geoffrey London, Kate Linzey, Gill Matthewson, Douglas Neale, and Nicole Sully.
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An open issue of the journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, with papers by Antony Moulis, Julia Gatley, Kirsten Orr, Michael Linzey, and Johan Lagae, and reviews by Philip Goad, Bill Taylor, Naomi... more
An open issue of the journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, with papers by Antony Moulis, Julia Gatley, Kirsten Orr, Michael Linzey, and Johan Lagae, and reviews by Philip Goad, Bill Taylor, Naomi Stead, Stuart King, and Nicole Sully. Edited by Deidre Brown and Andrew Leach
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An open issue of the journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, with papers by Julie Collins, Igea Troiani, Carl Douglas, Christine McCarthu, Andrew Hutson, Pedro Guedes, and Gevork Hartoonian; and... more
An open issue of the journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, with papers by Julie Collins, Igea Troiani, Carl Douglas, Christine McCarthu, Andrew Hutson, Pedro Guedes, and Gevork Hartoonian; and reviews by Harry Margalit, Ann McEwan, Jacky Bowring, and Mark Taylor. Edited by Deidre Brown and Andrew Leach.
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An open issue, with contributions by Kate Gregory, Wouter Davidts, Nigel Westbrook, Ellen van Impe, and Paul Williams. Edited by Deidre Brown and Andrew Leach.
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In recent years, both architectural historiography and architectural design practice have been characterized by significant shifts. These new perspectives and methodologies did not merely bring about internal changes, but also called into... more
In recent years, both architectural historiography and architectural design practice have been characterized by significant shifts. These new perspectives and methodologies did not merely bring about internal changes, but also called into question the boundaries and relations between the two disciplines. This issue of OASE investigates the impact of these changes for both disciplines in a series of dialogues between historians, architects, designers and photographers, exploring themes such as the everyday, the landscape, heritage and visual culture. Articles and interventions by Andrew Leach, Wim Cuyvers, Johan Lagae, Tom Avermaete, Marc Schoonderbeek, Arni Haraldsson, and John Macarthur and Naomi Stead.
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Review of a ME-designed house in the Gold Coast suburb of Currumbin.
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A retrospective review of the R.N. Johnson House, by Peter Johnson (Chatswood, NSW), in the "Houses" series "revisited". Photographs by Brett Boardman.
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A pair of reflections on Jean-Louis Cohen, by myself and Christoph Schnoor, written shortly after his death, but published some months later.
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Reporting on a new invitational programme at the University of Sydney.
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In the third stage of a two-decade vision for a sustainable mixed-use village, DFJ Architects has combined an industrial material palette, the subtropical landscape and shared facilities to create a hub with characteristics bound to Byron... more
In the third stage of a two-decade vision for a sustainable mixed-use village, DFJ Architects has combined an industrial material palette, the subtropical landscape and shared facilities to create a hub with characteristics bound to Byron Bay.
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The first months of this year have witnessed a disturbance to the way we conduct intellectual work. In some respects, this disturbance has signalled a return to writing as a primary mode of communicating ideas. Or, at least, of speaking... more
The first months of this year have witnessed a disturbance to the way we conduct intellectual work. In some respects, this disturbance has signalled a return to writing as a primary mode of communicating ideas. Or, at least, of speaking online in the mode of writing. It has done so, however, under the shadow of a crisis that invites thinking—both reflective and projective—framed by the various realms most overtly touched by the advent of Covid-19 (health, economy, environment, society). Lectures, concerts, exhibitions and conferences have also proceeded through an insistence on life as usual, but only through the intercession of online platforms that also, for many, ring hollow. Initial expectations that the nature of our work would remain unchanged—merely conducted under different technological conditions—have been replaced by the realisation that the ability to work (at all) has become a rarefied possibility. [...]
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The centenary of the birth of Bruno Zevi (1918–2000) has given rise to a wide-ranging evaluation of his legacy as a critic and historian of architecture and as a cultural presence in and beyond post-war Italy. This programme has included... more
The centenary of the birth of Bruno Zevi (1918–2000) has given rise to a wide-ranging evaluation of his legacy as a critic and historian of architecture and as a cultural presence in and beyond post-war Italy. This programme has included a major conference in Haifa (May 2018), events at the Kunsthistorisches Institut and Villa I Tatti in Florence (March 2018), and Zevi’s Architects: History and Counter-History of Italian Architecture, 1944–2000 at the Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo in Rome, which may well be one of the largest-ever treatments of an architecture critic at a major museum.
Zevi’s Architects serves to remind its audience of Zevi’s importance in his own time as a cultural figure in Italy (especially in Rome): historian, urbanist, curator, teacher, publisher, and, of course, architect; an unapologetic advocate for a form of modern architecture that fully grasped its place in history; and a major popularizer of those architectural principles, derived from history, that he thought should remain in play in the present. In books, magazines, articles, and exhibitions, and on television and radio, his intellectual life was staged for a public that spilled from the lecture hall and the studio out into the city. [...]
Zevi’s Architects serves to remind its audience of Zevi’s importance in his own time as a cultural figure in Italy (especially in Rome): historian, urbanist, curator, teacher, publisher, and, of course, architect; an unapologetic advocate for a form of modern architecture that fully grasped its place in history; and a major popularizer of those architectural principles, derived from history, that he thought should remain in play in the present. In books, magazines, articles, and exhibitions, and on television and radio, his intellectual life was staged for a public that spilled from the lecture hall and the studio out into the city. [...]
Research Interests:
In "The Conversation": One of the most prominent images of the Commonwealth Games host city is of the bank of high-rise apartment buildings and hotels that loom over the beach of Surfers Paradise. Although the Games are taking place... more
In "The Conversation":
One of the most prominent images of the Commonwealth Games host city is of the bank of high-rise apartment buildings and hotels that loom over the beach of Surfers Paradise. Although the Games are taking place across the city, from its dense edge, past sprawling suburbs to its quasi-rural hinterland, one can be forgiven for conflating Surfers with the entire Gold Coast. More than anywhere else in Australia the Gold Coast hovers between being a traditional city and an urbanised territory — with all the stuff of a city but its density. [...]
One of the most prominent images of the Commonwealth Games host city is of the bank of high-rise apartment buildings and hotels that loom over the beach of Surfers Paradise. Although the Games are taking place across the city, from its dense edge, past sprawling suburbs to its quasi-rural hinterland, one can be forgiven for conflating Surfers with the entire Gold Coast. More than anywhere else in Australia the Gold Coast hovers between being a traditional city and an urbanised territory — with all the stuff of a city but its density. [...]
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From my forthcoming book, Gold Coast: City and Architecture. Published in the January-February 2018 issue of Architecture Australia.
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Una moschea Australiana ...
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It’s not my favourite structure, not by a long shot, but I have some affection for it as my first long-term encounter with modern architecture. We can credit Bill Alington with the architectural design of the mushroom shaped Bulls Water... more
It’s not my favourite structure, not by a long shot, but I have some affection for it as my first long-term encounter with modern architecture. We can credit Bill Alington with the architectural design of the mushroom shaped Bulls Water Tower—popping above the radar of motorists heading north on SH1 as they cross the Rangitikei River—from his years in the Hydro Design Office of the Ministry of Works. It was a giant structure alongside a water-testing station, which seems not to have lasted the distance. It was, in any case, long out of use before it was demolished. I remember speaking with Bill about fifteen or so years back about the decision to make each angle 17 degrees to the perpendicular. He couldn’t recall, off hand, the logic of this angle, except to say that decisions of this kind were entirely in line with his geometrical preoccupations of the time—or, let’s be fair, in general. I grew up under the shadow of the tower. Not literally, but close to it. My first years were spent in the State-built military housing area that extends to its north and west, and which I would later and better appreciate as part of nation-wide experiment in housing and town planning. The ethos of the HDO was to treat engineering works like architecture, to imbue them with the kind of careful consideration in matters of composition, material finish and contextual resolution that aspired for each work to add to rather than denigrate the landscapes in which these bits of nationally vital infrastructure were placed. It could not be done now, not in a public service enslaved to performance indicators. As a piece of composed engineering, it is a fine work: considered, functional, composed, doing all that it needs to do, but looking good in the process. I can’t resist it: the thing is admir-a-bull.
Image source: Bulls water tower. Alington, William Hildebrand, 1929- :Photographs. Ref: 004.02.01.075. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://natlib.govt.nz/records/22329761
Image source: Bulls water tower. Alington, William Hildebrand, 1929- :Photographs. Ref: 004.02.01.075. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://natlib.govt.nz/records/22329761
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Architecture has lent expression to imperial projects across history, both through the assertion of symbolic authority and in the mechanisms of its upkeep. Although architecture itself is an historically contingent term, buildings have... more
Architecture has lent expression to imperial projects across history, both through the assertion of symbolic authority and in the mechanisms of its upkeep. Although architecture itself is an historically contingent term, buildings have played an enduring role in organizing imperial projects of all kinds and across a diverse geography, especially in those societies and cultures for which the city has been an important unit of social organization. This entry explores the relationship between architectural symbolism and architectural types as a significant relationship in the conceptualization of imperial architecture. It considers the archetypes of this relationship in the ancient world, as well as the model that Rome, in particular, served for subsequent European imperial projects. It suggests a relationship, played out in architectural terms, between architecture and religion, and architecture and nationalism, and concludes with reflections on the analogy architecture offers for understanding the endurance of architecture’s role in the subtle imperialism of global capitalism.
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This diagram reflects on the gestation and afterlife of a selection of books that had a notable presence in architectural culture after 1945. It traces the evolution of a number of book projects as it registers where these books have come... more
This diagram reflects on the gestation and afterlife of a
selection of books that had a notable presence in architectural culture after 1945. It traces the evolution of a number of book projects as it registers where these books have come from, and their timeliness as they arrive and endure on the architect’s bookshelf. It is part of the exhibition Book for Architects (ETH 2016).
selection of books that had a notable presence in architectural culture after 1945. It traces the evolution of a number of book projects as it registers where these books have come from, and their timeliness as they arrive and endure on the architect’s bookshelf. It is part of the exhibition Book for Architects (ETH 2016).
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New Zealand architect and polemicist of Austrian birth. Graduating from the Technische Hochschule in Vienna in 1923, Newman studied in Paris from 1924 to 1927 under Camille Lefèvre (1876–1946). Returning to Vienna in 1927, he joined his... more
New Zealand architect and polemicist of Austrian birth. Graduating from the Technische Hochschule in Vienna in 1923, Newman studied in Paris from 1924 to 1927 under Camille Lefèvre (1876–1946). Returning to Vienna in 1927, he joined his father’s practice where he worked until 1932, when he joined the community of foreign specialists based in the Soviet Union. There he contributed to large-scale projects in several cities. He returned to Vienna briefly in 1937, but left in May 1938 with his wife and daughter, bound ultimately for New Zealand (via London). Ethnically Jewish, he was granted refugee status in New Zealand and found employment as a draughtsman for the Department of Housing Construction. There he contributed to the McLean Flats (Wellington) and Symonds Street Flats (Auckland). At this time he started writing essays and delivering lectures that included reflections on democracy and on the architect’s role in society, a practice that spans his career in New Zealand.
In 1947 Newman was naturalized, anglicizing his name and registering as an architect. He transferred in 1948 to the Office of the Government Architect, appointed by F. Gordon Wilson as Section Head (Hydro) on a long secondment to the newly founded Hydro-Electric Design Office. He was responsible for architectural aspects of hydroelectric power stations and substations, including Maraetai, Roxburgh, Haywards, and Islington. Newman concurrently taught in the Wellington Architectural Centre’s School of Architecture and Planning. He was appointed the Section Head (Housing) in the Government Architect’s Office in 1956, where he developed low and medium density housing models for low-income families, including the idiosyncratic Star Flats.
Unpublished sources
Wellington, NZ, Turnbull Lib., MS-Group-1291
Bibliography
Friedrich Neumann. Architekturlexicon Wien 1770–1945, http://www.architektenlexikon.at/de/746.htm [thorough listing of projects and biographical data, focusing on Newman’s career to 1938], accessed 18 July 2011
A. Leach, ed.: Frederick H. Newman: Lectures on Architecture (Ghent, 2003)
J. Gatley, ed.: Long Live the Modern: New Zealand’s New Architecture, 1904–1984 (Auckland, 2008)
In 1947 Newman was naturalized, anglicizing his name and registering as an architect. He transferred in 1948 to the Office of the Government Architect, appointed by F. Gordon Wilson as Section Head (Hydro) on a long secondment to the newly founded Hydro-Electric Design Office. He was responsible for architectural aspects of hydroelectric power stations and substations, including Maraetai, Roxburgh, Haywards, and Islington. Newman concurrently taught in the Wellington Architectural Centre’s School of Architecture and Planning. He was appointed the Section Head (Housing) in the Government Architect’s Office in 1956, where he developed low and medium density housing models for low-income families, including the idiosyncratic Star Flats.
Unpublished sources
Wellington, NZ, Turnbull Lib., MS-Group-1291
Bibliography
Friedrich Neumann. Architekturlexicon Wien 1770–1945, http://www.architektenlexikon.at/de/746.htm [thorough listing of projects and biographical data, focusing on Newman’s career to 1938], accessed 18 July 2011
A. Leach, ed.: Frederick H. Newman: Lectures on Architecture (Ghent, 2003)
J. Gatley, ed.: Long Live the Modern: New Zealand’s New Architecture, 1904–1984 (Auckland, 2008)
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Manfredo Tafuri, Interpreting the Renaissance: Princes, Cities, Architects, trans. Daniel Sherer, introduced by K. Michael Hays, New Haven: Yale UP, 2006, REVIEWED BY ANDREW LEACH
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On Frederick H Newman (Vienna 1900-Wellington 1964)
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On Helmut Einhorn (Berlin 1911-Wellington 1988).
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Text by Andrew Leach, photographs by Patrick Reynolds.