Architecture, Building and Planning - Research Publications
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 10 of 112
-
ItemAll that glitters is not gold: the effect of mining activities and royalties on the built environment of remote North East Arnhem Land(Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ), 2016)This paper explores the effects of mining activities and royalties on the Northern Territory’s remote northeast Arnhem Land region, including the mining town of Nhulunbuy (with a 93.8% non-Indigenous population) and surrounding Indigenous communities, and shows that the associated architectures do not provide long-term benefit to local people. In 2014, Rio Tinto Alcan closed their alumina refinery in Nhulunbuy. This resulted in the redundancy or redeployment of 1100 workers and a significant reduction in the town’s 4000 strong population. The closure of the refinery calls into question the role of mining settlements and their surrounding regions beyond the life of a mine. Using the case study of northeast Arnhem Land, the paper describes the genesis of the Nhulunbuy Township in the late 1960s and how it precipitated the Indigenous land rights movement in the Northern Territory and the repatriation to homelands throughout the region. The paper analyses the architecture of Nhulunbuy, whose public, commercial and residential buildings were almost exclusively designed and built by the mining company, in comparison to the architectures that emerged through mining royalty funds distributed to traditional land owner groups such as the Gumatj and Rirratjingu Aboriginal Corporations, the Yirrkala Dhanbul Association and the Arnhem Land Trust. It historicises and critiques their respective contextual response to environmental, social and adaptive economic factors. Nhulunbuy has grown to become a significant resource centre for the northeast Arnhem Land region providing services to surrounding Indigenous communities and homelands. Thus the paper turns to a discussion of the recent history of the alumina refinery closure and the subsequent ramifications for the region’s architecture, both in the mining town and for mining royalty funded structures throughout the region. With the sudden closure of other mines throughout remote Australia, such as the Alinta coal mine at Leigh Creek, South Australia, which also acts as a service centre to the nearby Iga Warta Indigenous community, this paper is both a timely and relevant contribution.
-
ItemThe Adaptation of Tertiary Admissions Practices to Growth and Diversity(La Trobe University, 2016)The expansion of higher education places adaptive pressure on institutional and policy frameworks that were originally designed at times of lower levels of participation. This adaptive pressure is evident in changes to admission and selection practices, and has become more acute with the introduction of demand driven funding for undergraduate Commonwealth supported places. Universities seeking to optimise their market share in line with their values and strategic objectives are increasingly utilising direct admissions rather than historically dominant state centralised admissions processes. Direct entry pathways are also being utilised by some institutions as a means of increasing their share of disadvantaged students in particular. Both centralised and direct admissions pathways are also drawing on contextual data – such as the geo-demographic background of the applicant, school attended, perceived academic potential, or volunteer and community service – in the assessment process (Harvey 2014). The growth and complexity of university admissions practices raises two key questions. First, what impact is rising complexity in admissions practices having on student decision-making, with particular emphasis on students from disadvantaged backgrounds? And, second, how are universities and state-based tertiary admissions centres (TACs) responding to the challenges associated with rising student participation, diversity and mobility, as well as complexity in admissions practice?
-
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.
-
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.
-
ItemA corpus of potentially contradictory research claims from cardiovascular research abstracts(BMC, 2016-06-07)BACKGROUND: Research literature in biomedicine and related fields contains a huge number of claims, such as the effectiveness of treatments. These claims are not always consistent and may even contradict each other. Being able to identify contradictory claims is important for those who rely on the biomedical literature. Automated methods to identify and resolve them are required to cope with the amount of information available. However, research in this area has been hampered by a lack of suitable resources. We describe a methodology to develop a corpus which addresses this gap by providing examples of potentially contradictory claims and demonstrate how it can be applied to identify these claims from Medline abstracts related to the topic of cardiovascular disease. METHODS: A set of systematic reviews concerned with four topics in cardiovascular disease were identified from Medline and analysed to determine whether the abstracts they reviewed contained contradictory research claims. For each review, annotators were asked to analyse these abstracts to identify claims within them that answered the question addressed in the review. The annotators were also asked to indicate how the claim related to that question and the type of the claim. RESULTS: A total of 259 abstracts associated with 24 systematic reviews were used to form the corpus. Agreement between the annotators was high, suggesting that the information they provided is reliable. CONCLUSIONS: The paper describes a methodology for constructing a corpus containing contradictory research claims from the biomedical literature. The corpus is made available to enable further research into this area and support the development of automated approaches to contradiction identification.
-
ItemThe effect of word sense disambiguation accuracy on literature based discovery(BMC, 2016-07-18)BACKGROUND: The volume of research published in the biomedical domain has increasingly lead to researchers focussing on specific areas of interest and connections between findings being missed. Literature based discovery (LBD) attempts to address this problem by searching for previously unnoticed connections between published information (also known as "hidden knowledge"). A common approach is to identify hidden knowledge via shared linking terms. However, biomedical documents are highly ambiguous which can lead LBD systems to over generate hidden knowledge by hypothesising connections through different meanings of linking terms. Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) aims to resolve ambiguities in text by identifying the meaning of ambiguous terms. This study explores the effect of WSD accuracy on LBD performance. METHODS: An existing LBD system is employed and four approaches to WSD of biomedical documents integrated with it. The accuracy of each WSD approach is determined by comparing its output against a standard benchmark. Evaluation of the LBD output is carried out using timeslicing approach, where hidden knowledge is generated from articles published prior to a certain cutoff date and a gold standard extracted from publications after the cutoff date. RESULTS: WSD accuracy varies depending on the approach used. The connection between the performance of the LBD and WSD systems are analysed to reveal a correlation between WSD accuracy and LBD performance. CONCLUSION: This study reveals that LBD performance is sensitive to WSD accuracy. It is therefore concluded that WSD has the potential to improve the output of LBD systems by reducing the amount of spurious hidden knowledge that is generated. It is also suggested that further improvements in WSD accuracy have the potential to improve LBD accuracy.
-
ItemFuture proofing the accuracy of building simulations by addressing climate change projections in modified weather files(The Architectural Science Association and The University of Adelaide, 2016)Complex building simulation is increasingly common in the design process of buildings in Australia. Traditionally, building simulation has been conducted using weather files constructed from typical historical weather data, but in a period of climate change the use of historical data to assess performance has been criticised as inappropriate. Modern buildings need to be efficient and comfortable today, but also into the future. This new design challenge requires adaptability and resilience to be included in building designs from the outset, and necessitates that data used for simulation is as accurate and reflective as possible of the environmental conditions in which buildings are likely to operate. This research utilises the improved imposed offset method proposed by Guan to construct a future hourly weather data file for various Australian locations that can be used in building simulation software. This approach will produce weather time series that incorporates the RCP8.5 climate change scenario while maintaining the local and realistic characteristics of the original weather file. This future weather data can then be used by designers and building engineers to assess off-axis scenarios in the simulation and address the risks of overheating during the lifetime of the building.
-
ItemNo Preview AvailableEvaluating Access and Mobility within a New Model of Supported Housing for People with Neurotrauma: A Pilot Study(CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS, 2016-03)Objectives: (1) Evaluate the features of purpose-built apartment living on access, environmental control, and home and community mobility of people living with neurotrauma and (2) Examine tenant perceptions of those features. Research design: Observational case series pilot study.Setting:Three apartments within a residential development in Melbourne, Australia.Participants:Three males (aged 30–55 years) with traumatic brain and/or spinal cord injury living in the three separate apartments. Method and procedures:Measures:Two-published measures of user experience of built and technology environments, coupled with customised interdisciplinary post-occupancy evaluation (POE) methods and GPS-enabled mobility tracking.Analysis:Measures completed per manual guidelines and data reported descriptively. Customised measured drawings produced to represent tenants’ physical access and mobility. GPS community mobility data plotted on Google Earth. Results: Built design features which enabled access and mobility included linear paths of travel, well-located furnishings, and joinery design that allowed approach from either side using a wheelchair. Personal home furnishing choices posed barriers to physical access. Home automation technologies positively influenced participants’ sense of control and independence, but posed learning challenges. Close proximity of housing to accessible public transport and services enabled community travel options. Conclusion: Findings from this pilot study indicate the combination of housing location, design and technologies used, together with availability of local community services, provides an acceptable level of environmental control, access, mobility and tenant experience. Further research is required to determine validity of the novel measures used, and deliver rigorous research design to evaluate those features most important in achieving optimal outcomes.
-
ItemAgile housing for an ageing Australia(The Architectural Science Association and The University of Adelaide, 2016)By 2055, Australia’s 65+ population will have doubled and, if current strategies are followed, it is likely that the housing available will be inappropriate. Today’s housing stock will still be in use yet few developers and designers are capitalising on the potential of agile housing and, more broadly, the creation of age-friendly neighbourhoods. Current changes in design and prefabrication technology, along with government initiatives for ageing at home in preference to institutional care, have the potential to transform the way we consider housing design to support changing demographics. This research considers agile housing for an ageing population from the perspectives of urban planning, design, prefabrication, sustainability, life-cycle costing and social gerontology. We highlight the need for interdisciplinary perspectives in order to consider how entrenched policy, planning, design and construction practices can be encouraged to change through advocacy, design speculation and scenario testing to deliver right-sized housing. A cradle-to-grave perspective requires the exploration of the social and practical benefits of housing in multigenerational communities. This research links to concurrent work on affordable housing solutions and the potential of an industry, government and academic partnership to present an Australian Housing Exposition, that will highlight the possibilities of a more agile housing approach.
-
ItemDirectionally selective shading control in maritime sub-tropical and temperate climates: Life cycle energy implications for office buildings(Elsevier, 2016)Scheduling directionally selective shading devices to increase or decrease their level of occlusion relative to the total incoming solar radiation has the benefit of controlling solar heat gain during a variety of sky conditions and allowing more constant illuminance levels to be achieved within a building. In this study, hourly sky condition and annual solar angles were used to describe the tilt of the slats of an external directionally selective shading control for an external venetian blind on an office building in Melbourne and Brisbane, Australia. The life cycle energy demand associated with this shading control was compared to a static base case with an external overhang and internal venetians. The analysis was extended to the HVAC system which was sized to account for the effect of the shading on solar gain and the artificial lighting requirement. It was found that the embodied energy of the HVAC and shading components accounted for between 21.7% and 25.5% of the total life cycle energy of these systems over 25 years. There was a reduction in embodied and operational energy requirements over a 25 year life cycle for the external venetian blind control of 24.9% for Melbourne and 24.0% for Brisbane relative to the static base case. Based on the simulation results, office buildings with equator facing facades located in similar climates and latitudes may have the potential for equivalent life cycle energy reductions when external directionally selective shading controls are employed to moderate overheating and daylighting.