Architecture, Building and Planning - Research Publications
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ItemDecolonizing leisurescapes: Sri Lanka's aesthetically integrated resort designs(Taylor and Francis, 2022-07-29)This essay examines the cultural reinvention and validation of exclusive hotel- and particularly beach-side resort architectures in Sri Lanka during the late 20th century, following the establishment, during the 1960s, of tourism as a national industry catering to foreign visitors from Western nations. It uses a critical architectural history of “leisurescapes” that are spatially and programmatically shaped by economic and political conflicts to highlight trenchant social discrimination within the decades-long decolonizing process. The industry has survived initial economic instability, followed by 26 years of civil conflict to enter an era of economic liberalization as convenors of cultural production for local elites, expatriates, and international tourists. Meanwhile, impoverishment caused by the protracted conflict makes ordinary Lankans more reliant on invasive tourism economies. This essay historicizes the industry’s achievements examining the agency it has afforded architects, arguing that resort architectures’ aesthetic integration conceals social disparities.
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ItemSubaltern-diasporic histories of modernism: working on Australia's “Snowy Scheme”(Routledge, 2021-09-20)In the decades following World War II, Australia partly relaxed its insular White Australia Policy, permitting tens of thousands of non-Anglophone European immigrants to enter the country, including some 170,000 refugees from displaced persons camps across Europe. Many of them worked as compulsory indentured labor on key industrial projects. This ethnically differentiated, impoverished, and gendered work force contributed through industrialization to Australian postwar modernity. The Snowy River hydroelectric scheme, this chapter’s primary case study, employed around 60,000 European workers drawn from 30 different nationalities, domiciled in 121 camps. This chapter aims to understand how the labor of subaltern-diasporic populations, like those who worked on Australia’s “Snowy Scheme,” might be integrated into the broader architectural historiography of “settler societies” and made relevant to global histories of modernism.
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ItemAntipodean Architectures of Displacement(Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)The provisional occupations and ephemeral materialities of human displacement offer limited scope for a discipline focused on formalism and aesthetic value. Consequently, more temporary or abject human spatial experiences have been excluded from the architectural canon in the past. Treating the history of Australia, a settlement colony and postcolonial immigrant nation as a test site, Pieris applies the caveat of displacement to its record of architectural types. The chapter looks beyond the tented encampments of a progressive colonial outpost, built on white Australian immigration, to the repressed spaces that these in turn displace. By linking convict prisons, Aboriginal missions, wartime internment camps, postwar immigrant camps, and contemporary detention centres, the chapter proposes a taxonomy that might politicise the discipline.