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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ItemMarine cities 1958 to 1978 : architectural experiments and ocean systems( 2005)This thesis recovers architectural designs for marine cities on and under the seas between the years 1956 and 1978. It comprehensively documents over 50 projects that fall into this distinct category redressing gaps in recent scholarship. The architects of these projects were not merely fantasists but employed overarching notions and methods related to General Systems Theory to engage with the Cold. War political narratives of the period. The thesis tests the hypothesis that in their designs for marine cities - both floating and underwater - architects drew upon diverse narratives circulating in popular culture related to and generated from the prevailing Cold War geopolitical context. The first section of the thesis draws on widely dispersed primary and secondary material, and this establishes a chronological and, contextual history of marine cities. During this Cold War era, popular culture was saturated with images of cities on other planets and under the oceans. At the same time, architects in Japan, England and France produced so called utopian proposals for schemes on and under the seas. In contrast to outer space, architects saw the colonisation of inner space as a more immediate possibility. During the 1960s up to the mid 1970s, marine cities were included in the period's contemporary historical texts as they were developed. The architectural high-point of all this activity was the construction of Kikutake's Aquapolis at the Okinawa Oceanic Expo of 1975. However, by this time these projects had become targets of the increasing criticism of modernist architecture. These critiques tended to exclude and foreclose the engagement of architecture with technology. As a result, marine cities became wrongly associated with the shibboleths of utopia, Science Fiction and megastructure. In the second section of the thesis, the narratives circulating in popular culture which architects drew upon in their designs for these cities are identified and examined. To achieve this, selected marine cities are examined at a number of different spatial scales. This aids an understanding of the way in which these narratives, and their associated technologies, were transmitted to, actively assimilated into, and given status within architectural discourse. This methodology assists in mapping the circulation and uses of technology in the collective architectural imagination. This analysis concludes that the architects of marine cities drew upon a broad systems framework less related to cybernetics and more directly concerned with holistic governance, biological notions of structural organisation, innovations in production, and life support systems.