Architecture, Building and Planning - Research Publications
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 10 of 172
-
ItemStreetlife Rhythms(Routledge, 2017)Lefebvre's call for a 'rhythmanalysis' of the city has long inspired urban thinking, but like most texts on space it lacks any specific spatiality. This chapter is an empirical approach to urban rhythms through a comparative study of nine selected street intersections in London, New York and Melbourne. It explores the links between the daily and weekly rhythms of pedestrian flows and the detailed morphology and functional mix of the urban context. Such mapping is a means of revealing the synergies between morphology and streetlife that produce emergent and place specific polyrhythms.
-
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.
-
ItemHousing Prototypes, Timber Tectonic Culture and the Digital Age(SpringerLink, 2019)Arguably the balloon frame exemplifies the commencement of the embedment of structural performance within timber construction standardisation and a system innovation responding to socio-technical issues in domestic construction. Three recent residential architecture prototypes which embrace digital design to fabrication are discussed as continuing this tradition. Held as exemplars of the capacity potential of digital design to file-to-factory these projects offer an opportunity to reflect on questions related to material culture, the social networks of construction and the boundaries between architecture, structure, materials, and construction. This chapter raises a series of discussion points centred around the role of timber-based products, in a digitally enabled domestic construction industry.
-
ItemNo Preview AvailableEnvironmental experience design research spectrum for energy and human well-being(Elsevier, 2022-01-01)Handbook of Energy and Environmental Security educates the reader about the wider dimensions of the distinctive yet intertwined subjects of ‘energy security and ‘environmental security’. The book uniquely addresses these two increasingly important topics in a comprehensive and composite manner, describing the concepts and wider dimensions of energy- and environmental security in technological, economic, social and geopolitical perspectives. Divided into three main parts, the book deals with the subject of energy security in terms of its concepts, broader dimensions and allied issues, focuses on environmental security, and covers subjects in a cohesive manner, discussing their important interfaces and commonalities. Providing valuable scholarship for academics, researchers and analysts in the fields of energy and the environment, and using case studies to illustrate national and international levels, this is a valuable resource for energy- and environmental security challenges, especially in the areas of sustainable development and climate change.
-
ItemSketches of Thought: Inside the Black Box of AI(University of Melbourne- Melbourne School of Design, 2020)‘Sketches of Thought’ is a human-machine collaborative design system based on Artificial Intelligence (AI). The first aim of ‘Sketches of Thought’ is illustrating an approach to AI-integration within the designer’s creative workflow. The system translates a hand-drawn architecture sketch into a photorealistic image that suggests a possible evolution of the design idea. The dialogue with the system happens through a visual interface whereby the designer communicates by sketching directly on a drawing monitor, while the system responds by showing the results of the image translation process on a second monitor. Interaction with the system does not end after a first iteration. Instead, the designer is encouraged to adjust the initial sketch – or even make new sketches – for several times to explore, with the aid of the machine’s feedback, different elaborations of an idea. This system does not require particular drawing skills, and therefore anyone can experience a proficient ‘exchange of ideas’ with the AI model. The second aim of ‘Sketches of Thought’ is helping the designer familiarise with AI technology. This is achieved by unveiling the black box of the AI model functioning, that is, through a representation of its internal processes. Moreover, as the AI model simulates some aspects of human cognition, a look inside the black box of AI also means visualising a simplified version of the human mental processes. Therefore, learning about AI is an opportunity for humans to learn more about themselves. The relevance of this virtual prototype is twofold. First, it promotes the view of AI as a means to augment rather than replace the human cognitive capabilities. Second, it challenges the current beliefs and prejudices on AI-technology by making the AI internal processes explicit through a visual representation.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.