The Handbook of Contemporary Indigenous Architecture


Book Description

​This Handbook provides the first comprehensive international overview of significant contemporary Indigenous architecture, practice, and discourse, showcasing established and emerging Indigenous authors and practitioners from Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, the Pacific Islands, Canada, USA and other countries. It captures the breadth and depth of contemporary work in the field, establishes the historical and present context of the work, and highlights important future directions for research and practice. The topics covered include Indigenous placemaking, identity, cultural regeneration and Indigenous knowledges. The book brings together eminent and emerging scholars and practitioners to discuss and compare major projects and design approaches, to reflect on the main issues and debates, while enhancing theoretical understandings of contemporary Indigenous architecture.The book is an indispensable resource for scholars, students, policy makers, and other professionals seeking to understand the ways in which Indigenous people have a built tradition or aspire to translate their cultures into the built environment. It is also an essential reference for academics and practitioners working in the field of the built environment, who need up-to-date knowledge of current practices and discourse on Indigenous peoples and their architecture.




Courthouse Architecture, Design and Social Justice


Book Description

This collection interrogates relationships between court architecture and social justice, from consultation and design to the impact of material (and immaterial) forms on court users, through the lenses of architecture, law, socio-legal studies, criminology, anthropology, and a former senior federal judge. International multidisciplinary collaborations and single-author contributions traverse a range of methodological approaches to present new insights into the relationship between architecture, design, and justice. These include praxis, photography, reflections on process and decolonising practice, postcolonial, feminist, and poststructural analysis, and theory from critical legal scholarship, political science, criminology, literature, sociology, and architecture. While the opening contributions reflect on establishing design principles and architectural methodologies for ethical consultation and collaboration with communities historically marginalised and exploited by law, the central chapters explore the textures and affects of built forms and the spaces between; examining the disjuncture between design intention and use; and investigating the impact of architecture and the design of space. The collection finishes with contemplations of the very real significance of material presence or absence in courtroom spaces and what this might mean for justice. Courthouse Architecture, Design and Social Justice provides tools for those engaged in creating, and reflecting on, ethical design and building use, and deepens the dialogue across disciplinary boundaries towards further collaborative work in the field. It also exists as a new resource for research and teaching, facilitating undergraduate critical thought about the ways in which design enhances and restricts access to justice.




Architecture for Aboriginal Children and Families


Book Description

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures are proud, living cultures. The survival and revival of cultures relies on cultural identity being an integral part of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children's educational environment and providing environments that respect the ancestral ways, family, cultural and community traditions. Family is at the core of Aboriginal society and well-being. Complex kinship systems are central to how the culture is passed on and society is organised with families having the primary responsibility for the upbringing, protection and development of their children. Providing a safe communal setting of loving and caring with opportunities for a child's growth, development and self-empowerment has dramatic impacts on the overall welfare of the child and is pivotal in addressing the disadvantages experienced by the Aboriginal children. This report reviews the development, outcomes and responses of users to three Children and Family Centres constructed in South Australia. The projects are recognised as Australian exemplars in the design of facilities for Aboriginal children and families. Critical to the success of the projects were the concepts of placemaking and the creation of Aboriginal 'places'. To achieve this, the design process included developing understandings of the behavioural and cultural norms and health requirements of potential users so that spaces were designed that were easy and pleasurable to use. In collaboration with communities, the centres were layered Indigenous meanings through the use of signs, symbols and representations. The Taikurrendi, Gabmididi Manoo and Ngura Yadurirn Children and Family Centres are precedents for the future, where facilities will be designed for Aboriginal children and families that reflect preferred Indigenous lifestyles and child rearing practices and respond to the cultural identity and spirituality of Aboriginal people with respect.




All-Inclusive Engagement in Architecture


Book Description

Should all-inclusive engagement be the major task of architecture? All-Inclusive Engagement in Architecture: Towards the Future of Social Change presents the case that the answer is yes. Through original contributions and case studies, this volume shows that socially engaged architecture is both a theoretical construct and a professional practice navigating the global politics of poverty, charity, health, technology, neoliberal urbanism, and the discipline's exclusionary basis. The scholarly ideas and design projects of 58 thought leaders demonstrate the architect's role as a revolutionary social agent. Exemplary works are included from the United States, Mexico, Canada, Africa, Asia, and Europe. This book offers a comprehensive overview and in-depth analysis of all-inclusive engagement in public interest design for instructors, students, and professionals alike, showing how this approach to architecture can bring forth a radical reformation of the profession and its relationship to society.




Assembling the Centre: Architecture for Indigenous Cultures


Book Description

Metropolitan Indigenous Cultural Centres have become a focal point for making Indigenous histories and contemporary cultures public in settler-colonial societies over the past three decades. While there are extraordinary success stories, there are equally stories that cause concern: award-winning architecturally designed Indigenous cultural centres that have been abandoned; centres that serve the interests of tourists but fail to nourish the cultural interests of Indigenous stakeholders; and places for vibrant community gathering that fail to garner the economic and politic support to remain viable. Indigenous cultural centres are rarely static. They are places of ‘emergence’, assembled and re-assembled along a range of vectors that usually lie beyond the gaze of architecture. How might the traditional concerns of architecture – site, space, form, function, materialities, tectonics – be reconfigured to express the complex and varied social identities of contemporary Indigenous peoples in colonised nations? This book, documents a range of Indigenous Cultural Centres across the globe and the processes that led to their development. It explores the possibilities for the social and political project of the Cultural Centre that architecture both inhibits and affords. Whose idea of architecture counts when designing Indigenous Cultural Centres? How does architectural history and contemporary practice territorialise spaces of Indigenous occupation? What is architecture for Indigenous cultures and how is it recognised? This ambitious and provocative study pursues a new architecture for colonised Indigenous cultures that takes the politics of recognition to its heart. It advocates an ethics of mutual engagement as a crucial condition for architectural projects that design across cultural difference. The book’s structure, method, and arguments are dialogically assembled around narratives told by Indigenous people of their pursuit of public recognition, spatial justice, and architectural presence in settler dominated societies. Possibilities for decolonising architecture emerge through these accounts.




Local Architecture


Book Description

In architecture, as in food, local is an idea whose time has come. Of course, the idea of an architecture that responds to site; draws on local building traditions, materials, and crafts; and strives to create a sense of community is not recent. Yet, the way it has evolved in the past few years in the hands of some of the world's most accomplished architects is indeed defining a new movement. From the rammed-earth houses of Rick Joy and Pacific Northwest timber houses of Tom Kundig, to the community-built structures of Rural Studio and Francis Kéré, designers everywhere are championing an architecture that exists from, in, and for a specific place. The stunning projects, presented here in the first book to examine this global shift, were featured at the thirteenth and final Ghost conference held in 2011, organized by Nova Scotia architect, educator, and local practitioner Brian MacKay-Lyons. The result is the most complete collection of contemporary regionalist architecture available, with essays by early proponents of the movement, including Kenneth Frampton, Juhani Pallasmaa, and Pritzker Prize–winning architect Glenn Murcutt.




The Business of Research


Book Description

Architectural research is being redefined in practice. Whereas once the value of a piece of research was solely measured by the number of citations it received by fellow academics, shifting funding models and new societal concerns are forcing academia to question its structure and this mode of evaluation. At the same time a wave of practitioners and new types of institutions, such as RMIT in Melbourne and the London School of Architecture (LSA), have been recasting architectural education and theoretical speculation within practice, turning the traditional architectural studio into a learning environment that adopts and adapts academic models, and starts to use architectural research as a potential source of business intelligence, as a means for self-generating future commissions and speculative opportunities that sometimes even shift the terrain of practice. This new focus on research in practice is indicative of a profession redefining its relevance and scope. This is destabilising the traditional roles of academia and practice by questioning their deep-rooted separation and demanding a new definition of the term ‘research’ with one that is relevant to both parties. This issue features contributions from architectural thinkers, researchers and a number of practitioners who are recasting academic speculation within their own studios. This not only redefines what is meant by research and what forms it takes, but also how it creates value for them, their clients, for the discipline as a whole and for the ultimate users of their designs. This helps us to understand how research might be deemed valuable beyond a purely academic context. Moreover, it raises significant questions in terms of opportunities and risks that arise when research is recast into the less regimented realm of practice. Contributors: Daniel Davis, Lionel Devlieger, David Green, Harriet Harris, Rory Hyde, Lara Kinneir, James Soane, Ziona Strelitz, Leon van Schaik, John Zhang Featured architects: Assemble, DSDHA, Foster + Partners, Iredale Pedersen Hook, OMA, Public Practice and Superflux.




Children and the Environment in an Australian Indigenous Community


Book Description

Aboriginal children represent one of the fastest growing population segments in Australia, yet the lives of Aboriginal children in their environment has rarely been subjected to systematic and in-depth study. In this book, Angela Kreutz considers the relationship between the environment, attachment and development in indigenous children, examining theoretical constructs and conceptual models by empirically road testing these ideas within a distinct cultural community. The book presents the first empirical study on Australian Aboriginal children’s lives from within the field of child-environment studies, employing an environmental psychology perspective, combined with architectural and anthropological understandings. Chapters offer valuable insights into participatory planning and design solutions concerning Aboriginal children in their distinct community environment, and the cross-cultural character of the case study illuminates the commonalities of child development, as well as recognising the uniqueness that stems from specific histories in specific places. Children and the Environment in an Australian Indigenous Community makes significant theoretical, methodological and practical contributions to the international cross disciplinary field of child-environment studies. It will be of key interest to researchers from the fields of environmental, ecological, developmental and social psychology, as well as anthropologists, sociologists, and those studying the environment and planning.




Representing Aboriginal Childhood


Book Description

This book critically investigates the ways in which Aboriginal children and childhood figure in Australia’s cultural life to mediate Australians’ ambivalence about the colonial origins of the nation, as well as its possible post-colonial futures. Engaging with representations in literature, film, governmental discourse, and news and infotainment media, it shows how ways of representing Aboriginal children and childhood serve a national project of representing settler-Australian values, through the forgetting of colonial violence. Analysing the ways in which certain negative aspects of Australian nationhood are concealed, rendered invisible, and repressed through practices of representing Aboriginal children and childhood, it challenges accepted ‘shared understandings’ regarding Australian-ness and settler-colonial sovereignty. Through an innovative interdisciplinary approach that engages critical theory, post-colonial theory, literary studies, history, psychoanalysis, and philosophy, Representing Aboriginal Childhood responds to urgent questions that pivot on the role of the Indigenous child within settler nation-state formations. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology and social geography, collective memory, politics and cultural studies.




New Narratives


Book Description

Just as the explosive growth of digital media has led to ever-expanding narrative possibilities and practices, so these new electronic modes of storytelling have, in their own turn, demanded a rapid and radical rethinking of narrative theory. This timely volume takes up the challenge, deeply and broadly considering the relationship between digital technology and narrative theory in the face of the changing landscape of computer-mediated communication. New Narratives reflects the diversity of its subject by bringing together some of the foremost practitioners and theorists of digital narratives. It extends the range of digital subgenres examined by narrative theorists to include forms that have become increasingly prominent, new examples of experimental hypertext, and contemporary video games. The collection also explicitly draws connections between the development of narrative theory, technological innovation, and the use of narratives in particular social and cultural contexts. Finally, New Narratives focuses on how the tools provided by new technologies may be harnessed to provide new ways of both producing and theorizing narrative. Truly interdisciplinary, the book offers broad coverage of contemporary narrative theory, including frameworks that draw from classical and postclassical narratology, linguistics, and media studies.