Architecture, Building and Planning - Theses
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ItemMaking Civic Space: A Comparative Study of Civic Space Design in the Contemporary Settler Societies of Australia and New Zealand( 2019)Designers in settler colonial cities around the world are being asked to respond to the demands of decolonisation as nations increasingly acknowledge their ethical obligations to redress colonialism. This thesis explores the state of decolonising practice in design through the lens of civic space in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, as compared through two exemplary projects - Adelaide’s Victoria Square/Tarndanyangga and Wellington’s Waterfront. The politics of settler nations are intrinsically spatial, as legislative and symbolic processes of sovereignty negotiate territory. Traversing conflicting layers of history in the spatial present is very complex, as physical ecologies and topographies both disrupt and support the legacy of colonialism. This research examines the textual, conceptual, spatial and architectural modes of practice which together collectively ‘make’ civic space. Civic space offers the opportunity to explore shared histories, experiences and practices, between indigenous and settler subjectivities However, the very notion of ‘civic’ is problematic within the settler context, where space and politics are inherently ‘unsettled’. The study considers the approaches to the design of civic space from placemaking and planning through to the scales of landscape architecture and architecture. This study found that despite progress and good-will on the part of design practitioners and stakeholders, the position of designers in Australia continues to be compromised by the arrested development of reconciliation in terms of legislation, governance and the redress of history. In the absence of meaningful change, designers are reliant on creative placemaking practices of acknowledgment, applied through techniques of interpretation and curation. When viewed in contrast, the constructs established by the legislative and policy redress of New Zealand have provided designers with a stronger footing from which to explore finer grade spatial design responses to decolonisation. When viewed together these two spaces offer a revealing collision of design, policy and indigenous reconciliation.
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ItemParticipation in architecture: agonism in practice( 2018)Literature about participation in architecture promised architecture the restoration of a moral dimension, arguing that participation would offer opportunities for empowerment and deliver broad benefits. To its disservice, the field of participation has been dominated by a rational ideology, and a focus on agreement and decision-making – incorporated in the term ‘consensus’. The dominant approach to participation has been at the expense of difference, passions, arguments, resistances and tensions present in the participatory process – incorporated here in the term ‘agonism’. Exacerbating this gap between consensus and agonism, a lack of real-world examples and analysis of everyday participation, has led to a quite limited practical language about participation or descriptions of the concrete process of participation in action, and arguably an avoidance to design and critique participatory processes in architecture and urban design. This Doctor of Philosophy attempts to do participation in architecture through a series of Creative Works in practice, by carefully considering approach, and, designing for difference and bottom-up empowerment of others with social, physical, emotional and psychological benefits specific to each project. The methodology exposed the realities of participation in architectural design practice with communities, highlighting social themes for exploration and multiple modes for practice. This research project demonstrates that agonism is an action-orientated way forward for participation, arguing that the tension between architecture and participation is actually productive. It concludes that difference rather than consensus is crucial to participation, suggesting for architectural and urban design practice that the philosophical role of an architect is to consciously create and maintain opportunities to keep alive the participatory process in the world, by critically designing participation.
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ItemArchitecture and the design of therapeutic environments: the case of self harm( 2017)This thesis finds that specific design interventions in the spaces providing therapy can improve therapeutic outcomes for those who self harm. Therapeutic interventions for this service user group typically involve various forms of talking therapy, and/or medications. However these service users are amongst the most clinically challenging to treat. The physical environments in which therapy takes place have not been thoroughly examined for their contribution to therapeutic outcomes. Despite a large body of literature affirming the links between good design practice and mental wellbeing, there is a paucity of research addressing specific environmental needs of service users who self harm. Further, existing design guidance is often generic in nature, describing broad principles to be achieved through design, but offering little tangible advice for the designer to integrate these principles into a realised built environment. The research involved an exploratory qualitative design that utilised a triangulated strategy; the method of data collection included three data collection methods: systematic literature review, multi-stakeholder interviews and case study observation. Key findings from the scoping review included the paucity of design guidance for therapeutic environments and counselling workspaces specifically, and that there is no published research examining the design of therapeutic spaces for individuals who self harm, specifically. Key findings from the semi-structured multi-stakeholder interviews included a deeper understanding of the perceptions of spatiality of individuals who self harm, aspects of therapeutic environments that are supportive or unsupportive and in what ways this occurs, and potential design strategies to assist therapeutic activities and psychological engagement. Analysing built therapeutic environments found that there is a limited inclusion or implementation of design recommendations uncovered in this research in existing built spaces. Through the analysis undertaken of the literature, interviews with service users, therapists/counsellors, carers, architects and design researchers, together with a case study examination of existing built therapeutic environments, a series of design recommendations were derived. These principles have been developed from environmental aspects which were commented on by those who self harm, and supported by other interview participant groups and observations in the field. The findings from this thesis are indicative that the design recommendations assist therapeutic outcomes. However, as indicated through the exploratory qualitative analysis undertaken, the built environment is a meaningful agent in therapy. What emerged from the study was the notion that for individuals who self harm, the built environment is not merely the housing of therapy, but an active participant in the therapeutic process. The counselling workspace may be a platform for therapy to unfold in a physical sense, providing aspects such as physical privacy and safety features, but offers many more psychological support mechanisms if designed/manifested in a particular way, including psychological safety and relief, negotiation of relationships, non-verbal communication opportunities, increased body awareness, reduced dissociation, increased sensory engagement and perception, and opportunities for the development of the self. The counselling workspace has active roles in therapy, including being a mediator between therapist and service user and helping to clarify and establish boundaries, being a vehicle for communication, and being a testing ground for the problem solving abilities and aspects of the self. When the built environment design initiatives outlined in this thesis are considered carefully and articulated through design and the curation of space, architects/designers may provide a platform of engagement through counselling workspaces, resulting in positive therapeutic effect. If the design recommendations were to be integrated into the built environments delivering mental health services to individuals who self harm, then the misgivings, difficulties or negative psychological interferences reported by the service users would be mollified and/or eliminated. Therefore, therapy and therapeutic outcomes would be assisted. In this situation, counter-productive stimuli are removed or reduced, assisting the service users to maximise the benefits of their therapy.
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ItemImmersed at the water's edge: three imaginings of nature in the modern public pool( 2015)This thesis examines the architecture of modern waterside public swimming pools to ex-plore the nexus between architecture, nature and the body. Prominent architectural historians have largely overlooked the modern public pool, although it records a trajectory of major architectural themes of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Maturing as an architectural type during the 1920s and 1930s it has enjoyed four waves of development since this period, but it also highlights themes of leisure and nature, body and health, gender and class. Furthermore, the architecture of modern public pools located within or adjacent to existing bodies of water, such as the sea or river, is also revealing of how architecture relates to nature. The cultural artifice of the swimming pool that frames and controls a body of water positioned in relation to a natural body of water, brings to the fore a compelling spatial and cultural juxtaposition. In particular, this thesis argues that the architecture of modern waterside pools reveals dif-ferent imaginings of nature that manifest as three distinct design modes. This is demonstrated through an examination of seven case studies constructed between 1934-2004 from Europe and Australia. I describe these design modes as the Hydrophobic Pool: an architecture that contrasts its natural surrounds, the Hydrophilic Pool: an architecture that integrates with its natural surrounds, and the Hydromimetic Pool: an architecture that mimics its natural surrounds. Given the feeling of water against the skin stimulates senses unique to this architectural type, the thesis also employs and develops autoethnographic methods from the field of anthropology in order to explore how these conditions of architecture and nature are experienced. This has been tested using my own body as a public vehicle for research alongside spatial and visual forms of analyses commonly adopted with-in architectural histories. Framing a study of the modern waterside pool around these interrelations of architecture, nature and the body contributes to an alternate reading of this architectural type. In addition, the thesis raises broader questions regarding the formation of architectural history and critique and how might we better consider how architecture is inhabited and experienced.
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ItemMexican vernacular architecture of the Papaloapan River: ritualized architecture( 2015)The Papaloapan River in eastern Mexico is a rich region historically, culturally and naturally. These characteristics are also reflected in the region’s vernacular architecture. This fascination with the built environment led me to carry out research for my PhD on the indigenous houses there, based on the historical, physical and cultural evidence that still exists in most of indigenous communities, which is manifested in the simplicity of the forms of the houses and the construction of the spaces. In 2012 and 2013 I lived with the Mazatec people in several communities in the highlands and lowlands of the Papaloapan for a total of five months, an experience which allowed me to understand how the design and construction of their houses are grounded in many traditions. This thesis undertakes a comprehensive study of the Mazatec indigenous house. The combination of architectural and ethnographical approaches in my research led me to make a number of significant research findings in contributing to a greater cross-cultural understanding of the Mazatec house form; most notably is that the Mazatec house is a physical manifestation of the cultural beliefs and lifestyle of its inhabitants, which are intimately linked to the land, materials and climate of the region. Therefore, this thesis primarily involves: (1) understanding the relationship between the Mazatec people and their dwellings; (2) the physical arrangements of built elements and cultural factors underlying the ordering of spaces; and (3) a holistic cultural explanation, with an emphasis on spatial organisation, recording and observances of ceremonial rituals and their influence on the Mazatec indigenous house form. My study of the Mazatec house is grounded on my fieldwork in the Papaloapan region and the literature review. Methodologically, I will firstly introduce the primary aims and objectives of the research by providing a description of my involvement with the Papaloapan and the theoretical background and methodological approach governing the research project. I will then sketch the research site by providing an insight of the Papaloapan, the Mazatec people, their settlement patterns and the house typologies. Last but not least, I will search for evidence on the material and symbolic aspects that lead the Mazatec people to design, build and modify their dwellings in the course of their lives. Lessons drawn from these three components will support my inquiry into the understanding the Mazatec cultural heritage and its house form in relation to the broader social and cultural context in the Papalopan region.
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ItemPapuan transformations: architectural reflections on colonialism: the modern colony, the Purari, the Orokolo and the Motu cultural and architectural transactions 1884-1975( 2004)The study follows a sequence of transactions between modernity and tradition in three Papuan societies, and in the colony itself. It seeks explanations for surprising transformations in traditional architectural practices over the colonial period from 1884 to 1975. The Purari, the Orokolo, and the Motu, were Papuan societies whose heritages in architecture and material culture were rich with artistic and meaningful forms and expressions. As in many other traditional societies, these productions were holistically bound up in ritual, spiritual cosmologies, and everyday aspects of life that ordinarily ensured their continued reproduction. Colonialism never expected Papuans to, nor did it satisfactorily conceive of them becoming town dwellers, but, by 1975 a majority from all three societies were anonymous members of the modern urban milieu of the capital Port Moresby. Many of the Purari and Orokolo, having left their homelands, were in austere squatter settlements. None of the groups had built their traditional architecture for decades, neither had they performed their elaborate dramas and rituals that involved the production of accompanying spectacular paraphernalia. The case studies reconstruct conditions in three traditional societies, and in the emergent colony, and sequentially reconstruct conditions of transitionary and transforming states through which all groups proceeded as the processes of colonialism and modernisation unfolded. Standardised for objective comparisons, the reconstructions aim to reveal things that were important to both the traditional societies, and to the colonial communities. They enable estimates to be made of the value that was attached through the allocation of resources, and through communal commitments, to the social and cultural production of architecture. Architectural reflections thereafter are used to illuminate many facets of the active, surrounding, and wider contexts of colonialism. The study then examines how architecture at times appears as a modern agent for change, or otherwise as an outcome of already enacted transformations. Further aspects of cultural and social forces that operated on both the traditional and the colonial societies thereby become evident and amenable to analysis. Evidence from colonial sources is examined further using techniques inspired by Foucault but developed by Rabinow to describe the development of modern French society, which he shows was also influenced by colonial experiences. The study examines the characteristics of modernity, and its processes and preoccupations, as these impacted on the transformation of the traditional in Papua. From the interrogation of such material it aims to illuminate attitudes and assumptions that have influenced transactions between the traditional and colonial societies during this period of modernisation. Successes in modernisation, development, and nation building represented considerable colonial achievements culminating in independent nationhood in Papua New Guinea. Rapid widespread development occurred after the Second World War, and democratic national institutions were put in place with little strife, and without bloody struggles. Nevertheless the architectural and other evidence points to some significant cultural oversights, insensitivities, and transgressions that tarnish well-intentioned colonial aims, and the claims and images of success. It is poignant that significant attitudes and assumptions of colonialism uncovered in the study appear once again to threaten other's different traditional cultural productions in parts of the world.
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ItemNegotiating a people’s space: a historical, spatial and social analysis of the People’s Square of Shanghai from the colonial to Mao to post-Mao era( 2014)This research investigates spatial formations of the People's Square of Shanghai from the 1840s to the 2000s against a shifting history of political and ideological backdrops. The research explores how the Square was formed and reformed, how it was used, how it facilitated and restricted certain social uses, and how it both reflected and subverted, to an extent, a predominant political and ideological control. The thesis reveals new layers of spatial politics of the Square and adds new dimensions to our reading of the meaning of the city centre of the Chinese metropolis.
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ItemColony and climate: positioning public architecture in Queensland, 1859-1909( 2010)Since the writing of the first substantive national histories of Australian architecture, the development of architecture in Queensland has been positioned as different from that of the southern Australian states and former British colonies. An essential platform for this difference has been an assumption about the influence of a hot and humid climate contributing to the development of a distinctive, climatically responsive architecture, most notably the traditional Queensland house, or `Queenslander', which developed in the late nineteenth century and has since come to define an image of Queensland architecture,, and indeed Queensland identity. Queensland's nineteenth century civic buildings have received less critical attention in this romantic construction of a historical tradition of climatically attuned Queensland architecture, as historians have grappled to reconcile the representational imperatives of civic structures with the exigencies of a hot place. This thesis examines public architecture in Queensland — Britain's largest nineteenth century settler colony in the tropics — from the separation of the colony in 1859, through to the early years of the twentieth century, subsequent to the Federation of the Australian nation in 1901. The thesis uses a nineteenth century idea of `appropriateness' — defined in terms of design coherence, both within buildings and in relation to their settings — to examine the design choices that impacted the realisation of these buildings. It argues that Queensland's nineteenth century public buildings represent a collective search for appropriate public architecture specific to its colonial context, influenced by colonial aspiration, political and personal ambitions as well as Queensland's position as a settler society in unfamiliar, sub-tropical and tropical surrounds, all which influenced stylistic choice and expression. By locating the issue of climatic response within a broader matrix of concerns, the thesis questions the potentially anachronistic construction of a historical tradition of climatically responsive architecture in the former colony. The thesis contends that it is not possible to understand responses to climate in the public building without first understanding the motivations behind their design.
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ItemPhenomenology and experiential learning as an approach to teaching studio in architecture( 2014)This thesis proposes an approach to teaching design Studio in architecture which is phenomenological in theory, experiential in practice, constructivist in pedagogy, and phenomenographic in method. This is demonstrated in three graduate Studios: Live/Work, Sub Rosa, and Silence. Observations at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Taliesin, the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, Rural Studio, and the University of Melbourne, interviews, student work, and student and academic peer feedback are drawn upon. It is concluded that the proposed approach should be used as a catalyst in the spectrum of conventional university architectural design Studio teaching with particular emphasis on establishing this method of teaching and learning at a Studio in a remote rural location.
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ItemHouses and status: the grand houses of nineteenth century Victoria( 2003-10)The grand houses of nineteenth century Victoria have been given only superficial consideration in the literature on Australian architectural history, and it has been assumed that the colonial houses in Victoria simply copied British models. However houses are always designed to accommodate the values, beliefs and customs of the society for which they are built, and their spaces must be arranged to accommodate a variety of both utilitarian and social functions. It might therefore be expected that the different physical, economic and social conditions in Victoria would result in variations from the British models which more closely reflected their colonial context. This thesis seeks to document, analyse and explain the planning of the grand houses of nineteenth century Victoria. It demonstrates that the form and planning of these grand houses in Victoria did indeed resemble the British models in many ways. This is because both the settlers in Victoria and colonial society were predominantly British, and the settlers could only aspire to respectability, and establish a position in the newly developing social hierarchies, by conformity with British norms. The possession of an appropriate house played an important role in this, and the houses therefore were always based on British models. There was conformity with British practice in the specialization and segregation of functions and spaces in the houses, and in the invariable use of closed corridor planning. However although these British planning conventions were observed, the houses differed in significant ways from those in Britain. This was largely because the colonial upper classes differed significantly from the old upper classes in Britain. A higher proportion of the upper classes in Victoria were new rich, and their houses reflect not only the greater informality of colonial society but also the tendency of the new rich towards ostentation. Their houses were built for maximum effect, even when this at times was in conflict with accepted British attitudes towards ostentation and privacy. This resulted in differences from British norms in the arrangement of the spaces in the houses, which more closely reflected the colonial context. The grand houses in Victoria were not therefore purely British, but were always a colonial hybrid.