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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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.