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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Item'Persistent' Migrant Kitchens: Spatial Analogies and the Politics of Sharing(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2022-04-03)Using the spatial analogy of the migrant kitchen this article makes an argument for diversifying Australian feminist architectural practice and disciplinary inquiry to anticipate other culturally plural framings and experiences of the built environment. Its parallel focus on four ethnographic vignettes offers insights into the ways in which migrants mobilise familial culinary traditions for building ontological security in new environments, examining how constituent parts of kitchen spaces migrate and are adapted by Lankan-Australians in Melbourne and Canberra. It argues that the ‘transmigration’ of kitchens and their hybrid reincarnation uncovers nuanced, temporal, socio-political dimensions of migrant origin and experience indecipherable to host communities that frequently reduce them to ethno-cultural traits. We discuss the assimilatory practices that migrant women of colour daily navigate as revealing the unavoidable complexities within normative constructions of the Australian home. We posit the migrant kitchen as a site of adaptation and persistence in the face of diffused processes of assimilation.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableSummit Urbanism: The Anticipatory Modernism of Non-Alignment in Sri Lanka(Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, 2022)Focusing on the Non-aligned nations’ summit in Colombo in 1975, this paper follows the delegate’s motorcade route to discuss how the introduction of particular types of architecture prefigures global south events.
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ItemBorders in Focus: IPCS Seminar and Symposium(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2015)
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ItemIn-between: Spaces for Border-thinking(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2015)
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ItemTemporal Cities: Commemoration at Manzanar, California and Cowra, Australia(Brill Academic Publishers, 2017)This article compares two former Pacific War incarceration histories in the us and Australia, inquiring how their narratives of confinement and redress might be interpreted spatially and materially, and how these sensibilities are incorporated into contemporary heritage strategies including, in these examples, through Japanese garden designs. At the Manzanar Historic Site in California, the efforts of several generations advocating for civil rights and preservation of the Manzanar Relocation Center have overlapped with the National Park Service’s efforts to fulfil its federal mandates to preserve and restore the historic site. Conversely at Cowra, New South Wales, these histories are interwoven with post-war commemorative spaces, aimed at drawing visitors to former incarceration sites and encouraging contemplation of these difficult histories. This article analyses their complex creative processes and interpretive strategies as useful for drawing these isolated national stories into broader global interrogations of their significance.
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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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ItemArchitectures of the Pacific Carceral Archipelago: Second World War Internment and Prisoner of War Camps(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2016)Characterisations of the Pacific Basin as a tropical archipelago essentialise its geocultural diversity as an alternative way of envisioning the region and its politics. This paper offers a darker projection of this archipelagic imagination as one forged by imperial competition and wartime violence. It traces its genesis across the history of the Second World War internment and prisoner of war camps. Their spatial proliferation as a carceral geography produces a variety of temporary environments where civil and legal rights are suspended. The roles adopted by captors in their treatment of prisoners reflect the social prejudices of the period, the politics of imperialism and the specific responses of warring nations during various stages of the conflict. This paper asks how architectural scholarship might address this imperial history. It draws together diverse models of incarceration related to the Pacific War, acknowledging the different treatment of racially different colonial and national subjects and tracing their passage through multiple spatial configurations of camps. The camps in Australia are contextualised in their wider Pacific geography with special attention to Victoria’s Tatura Group.
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ItemChangi: A Penal Genealogy across the Pacific War(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2016-01-02)Anglophone scholarship on the Pacific War in Singapore is largely focused on records and memoirs of captive allied forces, extending imperial histories of that period. The punitive environments that incarcerated soldiers and civilians are examined through that lens. This essay approaches the Pacific War as an interregnum in a longer penal genealogy and a historical border to political decolonisation. It reviews this literature as significant for understanding the evolution of the colonial prison and its wartime transformation into a Prisoner of War (POW) camp environment posing questions about incarceration, citizenship and penal labour. It asks how residential carceral facilities such as the prison, the POW camp and the home are adapted and transformed. The main foci of this paper and its genealogy are the Changi Prison and the Changi POW Camp.
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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.