Quotation: What does history have in store for architecture today? SAHANZ 2017 Conference Proceedings, 2017
Upon the opening of the 2016 Serpentine Galleries Pavilion, artistic director Hans-Ulrich Obrist ... more Upon the opening of the 2016 Serpentine Galleries Pavilion, artistic director Hans-Ulrich Obrist explained that, "To be with architecture is all we ask", highlighting the current popularity of architecture in the art world, and the relative closeness of art and architecture in the contemporary cultural scene. The international popularity of the commissioned architectural pavilion as a curatorial strategy of art institutions, for which the Serpentine Galleries Pavilion programme has served as a catalyst, deserves further analysis, not least because of the disciplinary questions it raises for architecture. What has it meant for an art institution like the Serpentine to "be with architecture"? And conversely what has it meant for architecture to be with the Serpentine? In order to explore these questions, this paper outlines a genealogy of the Serpentine Pavilion programme, drawing attention to key moments in the exhibition history of the institution since Julia Peyton-Jones took up the directorship in 1991, in which architecture was taken up as a medium for artworks, and a curatorial focus on architecture was developed. It argues that not only is the threshold between art and architecture conceptually at stake in the Serpentine Pavilions, but that it is a structural aspect of the programme that can be shown to have developed historically out of the 1990s exhibition programme of the Gallery. While others have accounted for the contemporary pavilion as one of many interdisciplinary practices in an ever-expanding field, or evidence of a collapse of art and architecture into one another, this paper recognises a persistent tension in its characterisation as both an architectural type and artistic medium. In doing so it aims to reopen a discussion about the ongoing relevance of questions of medium to an understanding of architecture's disciplinary condition.
This paper explores the institutionalisation of university planning as an area of specialist know... more This paper explores the institutionalisation of university planning as an area of specialist knowledge produced through specialist journals, prestigiously funded studies and international symposia during the boom in tertiary education in the 1960s and 1970s. The development of a specialist discourse on campus planning in this period reflected the perception that the modern university constituted a new and complex spatio-temporal planning problem that required strategies for dealing with growth and change, and the design of a planning process as much as a campus plan. This paper takes Macquarie University (1964), one Australia’s first post-war universities, as an example to illustrate this point, and highlights the transnational exchange of planning ideas that influenced it. The campus plan for Macquarie was developed by architect-planner Wally Abraham who was actively involved in the international campus planning discourse, writing for The Australian University, and its American counterpart Planning for Higher Education. This paper discusses Abraham’s theorisation of campus planning in these forums in relation to the linear grid plan he produced for Macquarie, which addressed the problem of uncertainty that arose from short funding cycles and the reform of the university institution, at the scale of both campus and building, and was influenced by John Weeks’s (Llewellyn-Davies Weeks) concept of indeterminate building.
This paper examines how a building can become an ‘institution’ in the colloquial sense of that te... more This paper examines how a building can become an ‘institution’ in the colloquial sense of that term – less as part of an organisational or governmental establishment, and more as a popular institution. Job and Froud’s multi-storey residential tower and slab development Torbreck, completed in Brisbane’s Highgate Hill in 1960, was the first of its kind in Queensland. Its reinforced concrete and patterned brick structure, relieved by coloured fin sunshades and flower boxes, have been described as ‘a new model of comfortable, safe, and gracious living in modern Queensland.’ High on its ridge overlooking Brisbane from the South, visible from much of the city, the heritage and historic significance of this building is well established. Having been listed in 1999, the Queensland Heritage Register describes Torbreck as having ‘aesthetic and social significance as a prominent landmark of inner suburban Brisbane.’ This paper examines the narratives that have elevated Torbreck to this status. Offering an analysis of the sales literature and publicity surrounding the new building, rather than its architectural innovation, coupled with a discussion of a digital story on long term occupation of the building, the paper documents the strategies that positioned the complex as a new model of [family] living in modern Queensland. The paper excavates the story of how a building can become an institution – a place so well known over such a long period, that it has taken on the familiar character of a fixture, whether loved or not – and also begins to explore new methodologies of narrative, memory and social history that will contribute to a deeper understanding of the high-rise apartment typology, its emergence in Queensland, and its occupation.
"The Nathan campus of Griffith University is well known in Australian architectural history ... more "The Nathan campus of Griffith University is well known in Australian architectural history for the architectural significance of its first buildings by prominent Queensland architects. In this paper, we focus on understanding the significance of the design of the campus plan at Nathan in relation to the proliferation of new universities internationally in the 1960s, and the emergence of an accompanying discourse on campus planning. The changes to the conception of the Nathan campus plan during its development between 1966 to 1973—from the original rambling picturesque master plan on the isolated bushland site by James Birrell, to the final plan by Roger Johnson characterised by urban-density and a linear spine—reflect an engagement with the key ideas of this international discourse. One of its most topical and disputed issues was the question of how to manage the unprecedented growth and on-going change expected in the university institution. In 1968 Joseph Rykwert suggested that the new university campuses were archetypal buildings of the age. In situating the Nathan campus design within an international context, this paper aims to reveal not only how ideas about planning from Britain, Europe and America came to have an influence in an Australian context, but also to reflect on Rykwert’s proposition and suggest that the 1960s university campuses materialised how the changed urban scale of the post-war period had become a self-conscious problem for architecture."
Describes a commencing research project on the commissioning of architectural installations and p... more Describes a commencing research project on the commissioning of architectural installations and pavilions in visual arts venues.
Architectural Education Through Materiality. Pedagogies of 20th Century Design, 2021
What kind of architectural knowledge was cultivated through drawings, models, design-build experi... more What kind of architectural knowledge was cultivated through drawings, models, design-build experimental houses and learning environments in the 20th century? And, did new teaching techniques and tools foster pedagogical, institutional and even cultural renewal? Architectural Education Through Materiality: Pedagogies of 20th Century Design brings together a collection of illustrated essays dedicated to exploring the complex processes that transformed architecture’s pedagogies in the 20th century.
The last decade has seen a substantial increase in interest in the history of architectural education. This book widens the geographical scope beyond local school histories and sets out to discover the very distinct materialities and technologies of schooling as active agents in the making of architectural schools. Architectural Education Through Materiality argues that knowledge transmission cannot be reduced to ‘software’, the relatively easily detectable ideas in course notes and handbooks, but also has to be studied in close relation to the ‘hardware’ of, for instance, wall pictures, textiles, campus designs, slide projectors and even bodies.
Presenting illustrated case studies of works by architects, educators and theorists including Dalibor Vesely, Dom Hans van der Laan, the Global Tools group, Heinrich Wölfflin, Alfons Hoppenbrouwers, Joseph Rykwert, Pancho Guedes and Robert Cummings, and focusing on student-led educational initiatives in Europe, the UK, North America and Australia, the book will inspire students, educators and professionals with an interest in the many ways architectural knowledge is produced and taught.
Quotation: What does history have in store for architecture today? SAHANZ 2017 Conference Proceedings, 2017
Upon the opening of the 2016 Serpentine Galleries Pavilion, artistic director Hans-Ulrich Obrist ... more Upon the opening of the 2016 Serpentine Galleries Pavilion, artistic director Hans-Ulrich Obrist explained that, "To be with architecture is all we ask", highlighting the current popularity of architecture in the art world, and the relative closeness of art and architecture in the contemporary cultural scene. The international popularity of the commissioned architectural pavilion as a curatorial strategy of art institutions, for which the Serpentine Galleries Pavilion programme has served as a catalyst, deserves further analysis, not least because of the disciplinary questions it raises for architecture. What has it meant for an art institution like the Serpentine to "be with architecture"? And conversely what has it meant for architecture to be with the Serpentine? In order to explore these questions, this paper outlines a genealogy of the Serpentine Pavilion programme, drawing attention to key moments in the exhibition history of the institution since Julia Peyton-Jones took up the directorship in 1991, in which architecture was taken up as a medium for artworks, and a curatorial focus on architecture was developed. It argues that not only is the threshold between art and architecture conceptually at stake in the Serpentine Pavilions, but that it is a structural aspect of the programme that can be shown to have developed historically out of the 1990s exhibition programme of the Gallery. While others have accounted for the contemporary pavilion as one of many interdisciplinary practices in an ever-expanding field, or evidence of a collapse of art and architecture into one another, this paper recognises a persistent tension in its characterisation as both an architectural type and artistic medium. In doing so it aims to reopen a discussion about the ongoing relevance of questions of medium to an understanding of architecture's disciplinary condition.
This paper explores the institutionalisation of university planning as an area of specialist know... more This paper explores the institutionalisation of university planning as an area of specialist knowledge produced through specialist journals, prestigiously funded studies and international symposia during the boom in tertiary education in the 1960s and 1970s. The development of a specialist discourse on campus planning in this period reflected the perception that the modern university constituted a new and complex spatio-temporal planning problem that required strategies for dealing with growth and change, and the design of a planning process as much as a campus plan. This paper takes Macquarie University (1964), one Australia’s first post-war universities, as an example to illustrate this point, and highlights the transnational exchange of planning ideas that influenced it. The campus plan for Macquarie was developed by architect-planner Wally Abraham who was actively involved in the international campus planning discourse, writing for The Australian University, and its American counterpart Planning for Higher Education. This paper discusses Abraham’s theorisation of campus planning in these forums in relation to the linear grid plan he produced for Macquarie, which addressed the problem of uncertainty that arose from short funding cycles and the reform of the university institution, at the scale of both campus and building, and was influenced by John Weeks’s (Llewellyn-Davies Weeks) concept of indeterminate building.
This paper examines how a building can become an ‘institution’ in the colloquial sense of that te... more This paper examines how a building can become an ‘institution’ in the colloquial sense of that term – less as part of an organisational or governmental establishment, and more as a popular institution. Job and Froud’s multi-storey residential tower and slab development Torbreck, completed in Brisbane’s Highgate Hill in 1960, was the first of its kind in Queensland. Its reinforced concrete and patterned brick structure, relieved by coloured fin sunshades and flower boxes, have been described as ‘a new model of comfortable, safe, and gracious living in modern Queensland.’ High on its ridge overlooking Brisbane from the South, visible from much of the city, the heritage and historic significance of this building is well established. Having been listed in 1999, the Queensland Heritage Register describes Torbreck as having ‘aesthetic and social significance as a prominent landmark of inner suburban Brisbane.’ This paper examines the narratives that have elevated Torbreck to this status. Offering an analysis of the sales literature and publicity surrounding the new building, rather than its architectural innovation, coupled with a discussion of a digital story on long term occupation of the building, the paper documents the strategies that positioned the complex as a new model of [family] living in modern Queensland. The paper excavates the story of how a building can become an institution – a place so well known over such a long period, that it has taken on the familiar character of a fixture, whether loved or not – and also begins to explore new methodologies of narrative, memory and social history that will contribute to a deeper understanding of the high-rise apartment typology, its emergence in Queensland, and its occupation.
"The Nathan campus of Griffith University is well known in Australian architectural history ... more "The Nathan campus of Griffith University is well known in Australian architectural history for the architectural significance of its first buildings by prominent Queensland architects. In this paper, we focus on understanding the significance of the design of the campus plan at Nathan in relation to the proliferation of new universities internationally in the 1960s, and the emergence of an accompanying discourse on campus planning. The changes to the conception of the Nathan campus plan during its development between 1966 to 1973—from the original rambling picturesque master plan on the isolated bushland site by James Birrell, to the final plan by Roger Johnson characterised by urban-density and a linear spine—reflect an engagement with the key ideas of this international discourse. One of its most topical and disputed issues was the question of how to manage the unprecedented growth and on-going change expected in the university institution. In 1968 Joseph Rykwert suggested that the new university campuses were archetypal buildings of the age. In situating the Nathan campus design within an international context, this paper aims to reveal not only how ideas about planning from Britain, Europe and America came to have an influence in an Australian context, but also to reflect on Rykwert’s proposition and suggest that the 1960s university campuses materialised how the changed urban scale of the post-war period had become a self-conscious problem for architecture."
Describes a commencing research project on the commissioning of architectural installations and p... more Describes a commencing research project on the commissioning of architectural installations and pavilions in visual arts venues.
Architectural Education Through Materiality. Pedagogies of 20th Century Design, 2021
What kind of architectural knowledge was cultivated through drawings, models, design-build experi... more What kind of architectural knowledge was cultivated through drawings, models, design-build experimental houses and learning environments in the 20th century? And, did new teaching techniques and tools foster pedagogical, institutional and even cultural renewal? Architectural Education Through Materiality: Pedagogies of 20th Century Design brings together a collection of illustrated essays dedicated to exploring the complex processes that transformed architecture’s pedagogies in the 20th century.
The last decade has seen a substantial increase in interest in the history of architectural education. This book widens the geographical scope beyond local school histories and sets out to discover the very distinct materialities and technologies of schooling as active agents in the making of architectural schools. Architectural Education Through Materiality argues that knowledge transmission cannot be reduced to ‘software’, the relatively easily detectable ideas in course notes and handbooks, but also has to be studied in close relation to the ‘hardware’ of, for instance, wall pictures, textiles, campus designs, slide projectors and even bodies.
Presenting illustrated case studies of works by architects, educators and theorists including Dalibor Vesely, Dom Hans van der Laan, the Global Tools group, Heinrich Wölfflin, Alfons Hoppenbrouwers, Joseph Rykwert, Pancho Guedes and Robert Cummings, and focusing on student-led educational initiatives in Europe, the UK, North America and Australia, the book will inspire students, educators and professionals with an interest in the many ways architectural knowledge is produced and taught.
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Books by Susan Holden
The last decade has seen a substantial increase in interest in the history of architectural education. This book widens the geographical scope beyond local school histories and sets out to discover the very distinct materialities and technologies of schooling as active agents in the making of architectural schools. Architectural Education Through Materiality argues that knowledge transmission cannot be reduced to ‘software’, the relatively easily detectable ideas in course notes and handbooks, but also has to be studied in close relation to the ‘hardware’ of, for instance, wall pictures, textiles, campus designs, slide projectors and even bodies.
Presenting illustrated case studies of works by architects, educators and theorists including Dalibor Vesely, Dom Hans van der Laan, the Global Tools group, Heinrich Wölfflin, Alfons Hoppenbrouwers, Joseph Rykwert, Pancho Guedes and Robert Cummings, and focusing on student-led educational initiatives in Europe, the UK, North America and Australia, the book will inspire students, educators and professionals with an interest in the many ways architectural knowledge is produced and taught.
The last decade has seen a substantial increase in interest in the history of architectural education. This book widens the geographical scope beyond local school histories and sets out to discover the very distinct materialities and technologies of schooling as active agents in the making of architectural schools. Architectural Education Through Materiality argues that knowledge transmission cannot be reduced to ‘software’, the relatively easily detectable ideas in course notes and handbooks, but also has to be studied in close relation to the ‘hardware’ of, for instance, wall pictures, textiles, campus designs, slide projectors and even bodies.
Presenting illustrated case studies of works by architects, educators and theorists including Dalibor Vesely, Dom Hans van der Laan, the Global Tools group, Heinrich Wölfflin, Alfons Hoppenbrouwers, Joseph Rykwert, Pancho Guedes and Robert Cummings, and focusing on student-led educational initiatives in Europe, the UK, North America and Australia, the book will inspire students, educators and professionals with an interest in the many ways architectural knowledge is produced and taught.