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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ItemDisplacement, Labor and Incarceration: A Mid-Twentieth-Century Genealogy of Camps(Routledge, 2018)This chapter examines two contrasting responses to the accommodation of mass human displacements that occurred before and during the Second World War in the United States. It examines them in a comparative and visually discursive spatial genealogy that highlights the instrumental role of spatial planning. The chapter argues that the meanings and associations of the 'camp' as a phenomenon underwent a transformation from a model environment for rehabilitation to a punitive alternative across a range of functions for different groups of subjects. These include American citizens, Japanese citizens, 'enemy aliens' and enemy prisoners of war. The College of Environmental Design archive holds the collections of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) architects Vernon DeMars and Garrett Eckbo. The Ethnic Studies Library at UC Berkeley has much of the secondary literature on the Japanese American incarceration. The FSA team designed rural labor camps for Arizona, Texas and in particular California's Central Valley.
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ItemDisplacement, Labor and Incarceration: A Mid-Twentieth-Century Genealogy of Camps(Routledge, 2018)This chapter examines two contrasting responses to the accommodation of mass human displacements that occurred before and during the Second World War in the United States. It examines them in a comparative and visually discursive spatial genealogy that highlights the instrumental role of spatial planning. The chapter argues that the meanings and associations of the 'camp' as a phenomenon underwent a transformation from a model environment for rehabilitation to a punitive alternative across a range of functions for different groups of subjects. These include American citizens, Japanese citizens, 'enemy aliens' and enemy prisoners of war. The College of Environmental Design archive holds the collections of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) architects Vernon DeMars and Garrett Eckbo. The Ethnic Studies Library at UC Berkeley has much of the secondary literature on the Japanese American incarceration. The FSA team designed rural labor camps for Arizona, Texas and in particular California's Central Valley.
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ItemThe remembered village between Europe and Asia-Minor: Nea Magnisia at Bonegilla(Routledge, 2019-06-25)The resilience of multiple troubled histories as constituent features of Australia’s immigrant heritage draws attention to processes outside recognised nation-building narratives, not necessarily captured at commemorative sites. Immigrant and refugee lives gain dignity and value through empathetic recognition of the ontological connections that shaped their natal subjectivity prior to displacement, but representing them proves challenging. A village modelled from memory by a former European immigrant and exhibited at Victoria’s Bonegilla heritage site inserts new knowledge of an early twentieth-century conflict into Australian border space. This chapter examines the commemorative practices around the refugee village of Nea Magnisia exhibited at the ‘Bonegilla Migrant Experience’, the national heritage-listed former border camp, as illuminating how displacement is recollected and historicised. It explores the meaning and value of nostalgic reconstructions and their resonance for the reception of contemporary refugees. The chapter crosses multiple historical geographies: Greece, Turkey (Asia-Minor) and Australia following a single immigrant’s story.
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ItemIntroduction: Architecture on the Borderline(Routledge, 2019-07-12)This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines the military exclusion zone defensively created by North American governments—against the threat of Japanese invasion during the war—as a border space. It explains the controlled opacity of government-supported offshore detention at Manus Island, Papua New Guinea and Nauru. The book illustrates expansionist ambitions, whether by border crossing, exclusion or media proliferation, highlighting different manifestations of territorial sovereignty. It focuses on a number of counter-monuments erected, removed, transported and recreated in a dynamic political practice where histories of the Berlin Wall are mobilised and multiplied for protesting EU border policies. The book discusses the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea is an opaque, resilient barrier of Cold War hostilities in Asia. It explores the evolving cultural politics surrounding the redevelopment of this site and its neighbourhood as responding to a utopian postcolonial urban vision advanced by the state.
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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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ItemThe remembered village between Europe and Asia-Minor: Nea Magnisia at Bonegilla(Routledge, 2019-06-25)The resilience of multiple troubled histories as constituent features of Australia’s immigrant heritage draws attention to processes outside recognised nation-building narratives, not necessarily captured at commemorative sites. Immigrant and refugee lives gain dignity and value through empathetic recognition of the ontological connections that shaped their natal subjectivity prior to displacement, but representing them proves challenging. A village modelled from memory by a former European immigrant and exhibited at Victoria’s Bonegilla heritage site inserts new knowledge of an early twentieth-century conflict into Australian border space. This chapter examines the commemorative practices around the refugee village of Nea Magnisia exhibited at the ‘Bonegilla Migrant Experience’, the national heritage-listed former border camp, as illuminating how displacement is recollected and historicised. It explores the meaning and value of nostalgic reconstructions and their resonance for the reception of contemporary refugees. The chapter crosses multiple historical geographies: Greece, Turkey (Asia-Minor) and Australia following a single immigrant’s story.
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ItemDivided Histories of the Pacific War: Revisiting Changi's (post) colonial heritage(Routledge, 2019-10-07)This chapter explores how, during the Pacific War, when Singapore was occupied by the Japanese Imperial Army, the colonial model of the racially divided city was inverted and reproduced through a new carceral geography of internment and prisoner-of-war camps. In these camp environments, which were distributed throughout the island, former colonisers became captives. Racial segregation and imprisonment were instrumentalised in a new territorial conflict between European and Asian imperialists. These camps and their histories have not been included in national representations of wartime heritage. Although their material traces are embedded in place names and associations, very little is known of these segregated environments. The chapter examines the postcolonial significance of these affective materialities for understanding the contested heritage of imperialism through the politics of the divided city.
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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.
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ItemIntersecting sovereignties: Border camps and border villages in wartime North America(Routledge, 2019)The forced removal of civilians of Japanese ancestry from homes along the sensitive West Coast of North America, and their incarceration in detention centres and remote concentration camps, remains a particularly troubling episode within Second World War histories. State sovereignty, imposed in this manner, created an internal border condition where a group of minority citizens was disenfranchised. The denial of civil liberties was further spatialised in the camp facilities erected for their accommodation; barrack cities in the USA and repurposed or rebuilt work camps in Canada. This chapter compares the facilities at Manzanar, California, with those at New Denver, British Columbia, examining how social oppression was conveyed through two very different types of camp architecture, and how incarcerated populations responded to them. The chapter’s additional focus on an orphanage and a sanatorium uncovers internal generational vulnerabilities.