Architecture, Building and Planning - Theses
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ItemUrban narratives : museums + the city( 2013)Cities provide the backdrop for contemporary life, with more than half the population of the world now living in urban areas. Cities provide the armature for both the everyday and for ceremony and ritual, establishing routines of movement, spectacle and meaning that are inherent to the conception, perception and lived urban experience. This study investigates the relationships between individual buildings and the 'site' in which they are located, highlighting the experience of the city as a series of related spaces, rather than merely as a set of individual objects. Contemporary theoretical conceptions of 'site' as a constructed concept are central to the argument, which contests that the relationships between buildings and context can be established through the orchestration of traversable (physical), visual, or conceptual connections. Three case studies - the British Museum in London, the Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh and the Jewish Museum Berlin, all recent extensions to existing institutions - provide an exploration of the experience, spectacle and meaning of the museum within the 'site' of the city. This study examines the institutional narratives of museums and cities, both the rhetorical narratives that underpin conceptual meaning and associations, and the spatial narratives that are derived from the. orchestration of movement, spectacle and the perception of meaning through experience. This study proposes that through physical paths or traversable spaces; vistas or visual connections; and conceptual associations or theoretical ideas, the relationship between buildings and sites cans be understood as a constructed 'terrain of engagement'. This provides ways to consider the agency of architecture to assist in orchestrating connections between the museum and the physical and conceptual context of the contemporary city.
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ItemArchitectural design studio and the real world out there : an investigation of content in Architectural Design Studio at three faculties of Architecture in Australia from years 1-5 (2003-2007)( 2011)In Anglophone countries, architects appear disengaged from the public realm despite professional bodies' policies. Critics frequently blame architectural education's core pedagogy, design studio. This research examined studio handouts from Australian universities against professional design brief criteria, and by discourse analysis, seeing how studios might contribute. Few studios aimed to solve problems, most focusing on form-making and aesthetics, under-stressing social, environmental and financial issues, sometimes unintentionally. But rare, conceptually 'thicker' proposals often targeted social housing and engagements with the 'real world.'
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ItemThinking through the space of the body : a performance account of the body and architecture( 2008)In the last few decades, there has been a shift within the humanities: may from text, may from objects, away from monuments, and from this the process of reading cultural objects as representations of cultural production. What has been highlighted instead is the dynamic processes of culture - the performative. This shift in emphasis is also shaping the discipline of architecture. Central to this shift in perspective is the focus on the body as a site and medium for understanding processual relations, which augments representational thinking, where architecture is framed, contemplated and mastered by man-as-subject through distance and objectivity. The analysis in this thesis investigates the ways in which the body is thought about in the explicitly theoretical works of both Judith Butler and Deleuze and Guattari, which emphasise a performative understanding of the space of the body. In turn, this thesis then looks at how the 'spacing of the body' is physically and conceptually realised through the performative spatial practices of Arakawa and Gins, Bernard Tschumi and Grundei Kaindl Teckert. Chapter Seven integrates theoretical and practical investigations through Learning-by-Making as a representative case study. The crucial point of this project is to suggest that the constraints and the restrictions that are imposed on the body are not just symbolic and discursive but also impact on the 'lived body.' This thesis also focuses on how the spacing of the body, through a performative rhetoric, becomes a site of utopian possibilities and dissolution, where neither mind, body nor space is privileged. In this framework the agency of the material is understood as an affective force in the construction of meaning. Thus the 'spacing of the body' is explored in this thesis as a composition of the two terms performance and performativity as a way to understand how the spacing of the body is both constrained by normative relations and also produced through bodily experience which privileges the concept of affect.
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ItemHousing and neighbourhood change : a study of attitudes and behaviour of middle-class householders in Yogyakarta, Indonesia( 1998)An improvement in public housing development in Indonesia in recent time has coincided with national development towards modernisation. Modernisation occurs in all aspects of Indonesia's everyday life, including improved education. The context for the changing role of women - in part as a result of improving education - as well as for new trends in house and neighbourhood design, is first the rapid economic modernisation pursued in Indonesian society in recent decades, and second a seemingly related cultural westernisation. The design of both house and local neighbourhood accordingly faces dilemmas relating to new economic imperatives, cultural tensions, and tensions in values relating to gender differences and the role of women. Additionally, there are changes in the context of the family and its roles and tasks, as economic modernisation interacts with the pressure of safeguarding traditional values and cultural differences. The aim of this study is to examine the question whether, in the face of economic modernisation and cultural westernisation, the persistence of traditional values and local culture is manifest in present dilemmas concerning the planning and use of the house and its neighbourhood. This question will be explored within the specific context of middle-class housing. In pursuing this aim we turn to the theory of modernisation advanced by Jurgen Habermas, and then to Nancy Fraser's critique of this theory on the grounds that it ignores issues of gender. Yogyakarta is selected as a case study, and the intention is to obtain information on behaviour and attitudes of educated middle-class people residing in the study area. Households are selected from recently developed neighbourhoods characterised by KPR-BTN housing which is typically purchased by the educated middle-class. Households interviews are employed, with a focus on examining the relations between different aspects of attitudes and behaviour. Data are obtained from 67 households, in four neighbourhoods of Yogyakarta. It is an exploratory case study where the intention is not to obtain generalisable results, nor to rigorously test hypotheses, but rather to explore the relationships between phenomena. This is achieved by reducing a mass of different variables measuring attitudes and behaviour down to a simpler set of "summary" measures, employing multivariate statistical techniques - mainly factor analysis. The analyses are accordingly more directed towards description and explanation than towards generalisation to the broader population, or towards prediction. Stated briefly, it is found that for the surveyed group there is a strong correspondence between men's and women's attitudes to issues of work, home, children and culture. There is however also a fair degree of independence between these attitudes on the one hand, and on the other hand the levels of satisfaction with aspects of the dwelling, and levels of satisfaction with aspects of neighbourhood. These findings suggest that there is an interplay of three sets of processes: (1) the persistence of local culture, most notably in the orientation to family, in ideas of respect and deference, and in a conservatism in gender relations and attitudes; (2) there is the excitement of rapid economic growth; (3) there is of course also a negative side to economic growth and "progress", as older values and culture are eroded by new, global influences. While it is not possible to extrapolate from this group to Yogyakarta society generally, nevertheless the complexities of the responses tell us a great amount about the interweaving of attitudes and behaviour affecting use of the house and neighbourhood. Furthermore, it is necessary to reinterpret Habermas's theory of modernisation for a non-western society.
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ItemThe valuation of road safety for public decision making : with application to Australia( 1982)This study investigates the proper valuation of the social and economic consequences of road accidents in guiding public decision-making and policy on accident research and road safety. The work is in three stages: (i) a review and assessment of road accident cost studies; (ii) the estimation, presentation and appraisal of comprehensive social costs of road accidents for Australia in a recent year; and (iii) a critique of the theoretical and empirical economic literature on the 'value of life', and its implications for the valuation of road safety. The theme of the study is the conflict between the two approaches to the valuation of safety: the practice of treating road accidents as social costs and the alternative concept of direct economic valuation of life and the avoidance of risk. Neither approach has yet produced definitive empirical results and there remain unresolved valuation problems affecting public sector assessments of safety. 1978 Australian accident costs are estimated in a modified 'societal' cost framework which is proposed as a compromise between the two valuation approaches. The composition of this framework Is examined, especially the valuation of fatalities in terms of foregone income. Problems identified include the income concept chosen, the treatment of those not earning, the effects of the age distribution of the accident sample, and the role of the discount rate. The study gives particular attention to the skewed distributions of average accident costs which renders them misleading in use. A method is proposed to simulate accident cost distributions according to injury severity by fitting probability distributions. Finally a critique of the extensive recent literature on the economics of the value of life and safety is undertaken to assess the relevance of this approach to public sector decision making, and its relationship to accident cost studies. This approach, proposes willingness to pay for reduction in risk of death as the correct safety valuation concept, with suggested application in road safety, public health, and environmental pollution policy. Recent empirical studies using this valuation concept are examined, and appear to produce plausible results. A useful but controversial suggested elasticity relationship between willingness-to-pay valuation of life and the foregone income method is also discussed. Some preliminary conclusions are presented about the conceptual and empirical feasibility of valuing road safety, and about the limitations of the 1978 Australian estimates as parameters to guide public policy on road safety.