Architecture, Building and Planning - Theses
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ItemTranslation and transfer: the role of the traditional Japanese house in the design of the post-war Australian house( 2008)The Australian house of the early 1960s was a melange of international influences. The role that traditional Japanese architecture played in this mix is the subject of this thesis. The thirty-year period following the end of World War II was one of hardship, shortage, possibility and experimentation. It was a new beginning for Australia, a time of loosening ties with Britain, and turning toward the United States and Asia for inspiration. The houses of the West Coast of the United States were better suited to the Australian climate than those of Britain and Europe, while Asia, being on Australia's doorstep, offered possibilities for the development of a new regional style of architecture. Architects at this time dared to do things unheard of in Australian houses prior to World War II, and new technologies and products made it possible. Whole walls were filled by glass, roofs and balconies cantilevered precariously without visible support, kitchens merged with living rooms, and houses turned their back on the street and embraced the courtyard.
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ItemEffects of state power on daily practice in Vali Asr (Pahlavi) Street( 2007)The relationship between power and urban spaces, more specially streets, is investigated in this project. Although the issue of power has been studied from different viewpoints, this project is dealing with the issue of power and its effects on people's everyday life through investigation of changes in everyday practices in the spaces of the city. The investigation has mainly concentrated on the users' appearances and behaviours, and documented the changes that have happened since the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. The geographical focus of the research is Vali Asr (Pahlavi) street, the historical north-south axis of Tehran, approximately 20 km long, which was built in the Reza Shah Pahlavi reign connecting the railway station at the hot, dusty plateau of the south to his Palace at the north, in the cool foothills of the Alborz mountains. The selected study area of Vali Asr street is its central part, including one of the main squares of Tehran, Vali Asr (Vali ahd) square. The temporal focus of the study is the period since the 1979 Islamic revolution, in which the state's policies concerning the daily practices of people in public spaces has changed radically. The specific concentration is on the current situation. The change in state policies has been underpinned by change in state ideology toward Islamization. The target group in this research is the educated middle-class of Tehranians who are the most frequent users of the study area. The methods of data collection include various secondary sources such as books, together with surveys through distributed questionnaires, informal in-depth interviews, historic photos and the internet. One of the major difficulties of this research has been to balance the pessimistic view of Iranian society particularly held by people who are trawling their memories about the past in relation to the current situation. Therefore it has been necessary to seek different sources from both inside and outside of Iran, to compare different voices and ideas. Moreover, my personal twenty-five years of experience in this society helped me in the process of data collection. Previous generations' experiences remembered from conversations can be added to these, albeit with due caution. The project has tried to map the changes in the spaces of the city through investigation of this group's appearances and behaviour before and after the Islamic revolution. The incomplete observation of Islamic rules in public space by this group, and against that control exercised by the moral police to oblige them to follow Islamic rules, has resulted in spatial contestation between this group and state power. While the moral police control on people's daily practices appropriates the spaces of the city, this group is trying to 'expropriate' them through acts of disobedience. Although some people may not care about the Islamic control, this struggle is seen in the spaces of the city, particularly in central and northern parts of Tehran. In addition, it is highly intertwined with the political climate of the country. The mapping of appearances and behaviour in the study area is mainly based on collecting and analysing photos and statements from various sources of data, collected about the study area and the places that people most remember from it. In order to escape from Islamic controls in the spaces of the city, some public places in the study area have become public refuge-spaces for this group, with a relative freedom from Islamic regulations compared to other places. Those places have been mapped through andarouni and birouni concepts, which relate to private and public realms of Iranian traditional houses in the nineteenth century, and based on Islamic values. Andarouni and birouni concepts have shifted in scale from that of the individual house to the wider spaces of public and private realms for this middle-class group, whereby private homes have become a 'free' place for socializing versus the controlled public places. This shift also could be seen in a dramatic expansion of the internet as a new public realm, particularly among this class, as a new free avenue which connects opposite genders, people inside and outside of Iran, and as a way to discover the world outside from the shrouded world inside Iran. Again, there is the same struggle of appropriation and expropriation of this new public realm by state power through continuous censorship of websites on news, human rights, religion, women as well as weblogs. Internet users are trying to overtake the government by finding new techniques to pass those filtrations. Finally, the autocratic political approach of state power toward public realms has affected Iranian society throughout modern history where one group has been suppressed and others supported. This has always resulted in a contest for the spaces of the city. This dilemma stems from a society which is wandering between tradition and modernity.
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ItemRefutations and conjectures: prolegomena to the study of architectonic themes( 1995)An examination, in two parts, of aspects of contemporary architecture concerned with issues of history, meaning and the practice of architecture as a form of intellectual discipline. The first part investigates the work of Italian born American architect, Romaldo Giurgola, one of the last architects in the lineage of Louis Kahn still abiding by many of the latter architect's architectural philosophy. The range of his works, built and unbuilt, are examined and seen to take up important theoretical and social themes in American architectural culture originating from the Jeffersonian era. Through an analysis of Giurgola's writings and theoretical statements on a range of issues his work is shown to contribute to a continuation of the tradition of modern architecture. The viability of this tradition is questioned, in the light of both theoretical and socio-political deficiences. Four Questions is an ontological interrogation of the meaning of a series of thematic terrains held to be significant for the formulation of a viable contemporary practice of architecture: the Public, The City, The House and Theory. Through an analysis of these themes, the study highlights what is seen to be a major shortcoming in the discourse of contemporary architectural culture- a lack of awareness of its acutely historical situation. Each section theorizes issues of architectural representation and relates these back to a condition of modernity. On this basis, those current trends which aim to locate the meaning of architectural work either in the field of social commitment, in the formulation of new urbanities or in new domestic typologies are criticized for insufficient awareness of the conditional and problematical nature of such pursuits. The last section, an excursus on architectural theory, indicates that an important species of contemporary architectural theory- Deconstruction- is indicative of a general trend that seeks to put aside the difficult conditionality of architectural production in the contemporary situation. Architectural theory which aims to share ground with philosophical discourses is argued to have become too abstract. As an alternative, it is suggested that the responsibility of the architectural theorist and the practitioner alike towards a discursive endeavour is located in a search for an engagement of architecture with reality which does not, however, sacrifice intellectual probity or transgress the limits of an architectonic definition of this reality. The projects included in the folio explore the small margin still allowable within a practice of architecture that seeks to explore the full range of architectural expression whilst maintaining the above described conditions of intellectual probity.
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ItemAn eclectic approach: rational eclecticism( 1997)This thesis was written for the Master of Architecture (By Design) course at the University of Melbourne. The course consisted of a Major and Minor Portfolio. The Minor Portfolio was done on the assumption that a collective architectural project existed. After completing the Minor Portfolio it became clear that such a collective project did not exist. An examination of the Minor Portfolio showed that the designs were eclectic and followed a particular pattern which could be called rational. Therefore rational eclecticism became the topic of investigation of this thesis. The result of this study is a statement of a rational eclectic architectural position in the Major Portfolio design projects and in the conclusions drawn in this written dissertation. The designs for the Master of Architecture (By Design) Major Portfolio (International Visitors' Centre and the Cardigan Street Housing) were produced by selecting ideas and forms as models for each design. In this design process, eclecticism was identified as the means by which forms or ideas are selected, and rationalism was identified as the development of an independent approach to design. The design process was organised as a syncretic project in which ideas and forms are associated by similarities rather than formed into a logically consistent system. An examination of recent examples of eclectic architecture showed that the value of eclecticism is in the insight that it offers to particular architectural questions, rather than in the development of a system of ideas or forms. These ideas were developed in the Major Portfolio designs. In the International Visitors' Centre design (Major Portfolio project 1), form was either the result, and representation of, an abstract idea distilled from an eclectic range of sources. In contrast, the Cardigan Street Housing (Major Portfolio project 2) design solution was free in its direct and literal use of forms based on an eclectic selection of architectural precedents. The rationality of the projects was a result of the way the precedents for the designs were abstracted to separate them from the authority of the systems they derived from. The conclusion of this thesis is that rational eclecticism is a design process suited to times when clear directions are not apparent. The opportunity for an eclectic designer in such times is to find the advantages of this lack of commonly accepted ideas. When an eclectic approach does take these opportunities it is an accepted and natural, though not encouraged or prominent, part of a pluralist architectural culture. Therefore, to have an eclectic position, it could be argued, is to hold a transitional position. However, a rational eclectic position that favours research so that the transition between positions results in a familiarity with, and ability to analyse, a wide range of other positions. It is this familiarity that is the strength of eclecticism since architectural pluralism is accepted as a success, rather than the cause of crisis.