The Fibro Frontier


Book Description

Fibro has long been in the shadows, but today cutting-edge architects around the world are returning to fibro - now asbestos-free - as a cheap and versatile building material. At last fibro is being recognised as a part of our architectural heritage. The Fibro Frontier looks at fibro in all its glory, from the holiday shacks, genteel bungalows and fun fairs of the past, to the international airports and award-winning houses of today.




The Fibro Fix


Book Description

Chronic pain affects nearly 100 million Americans. Ongoing fatigue affects even more. The combination of fatigue and body-wide chronic pain, often called "fibromyalgia," remains mysterious and confusing, and an alarming 66 percent of sufferers are misdiagnosed. Now, leading naturopathic medical doctor and nutritionist David Brady is here with the answer in his comprehensive book The Fibro Fix. For more than 23 years, Dr. Brady has treated many thousands of patients seeking relief from fibromyalgia. In The Fibro Fix he distills his life-changing prescription into an integrative 21-day program to help you determine if, in fact, you're suffering from fibromyalgia or from one of the conditions commonly misdiagnosed as the fibromyalgia. The plan begins with three simple steps--detox, diet, and movement--to start relieving those symptoms for good and then offers deeper long-term solutions specific to the real cause in each person. The Fibro Fix is your groundbreaking guide to resolving fibromyalgia, and uncovering the mystery behind chronic pain and fatigue.




A Portrait of the Artist as Australian


Book Description

A Portrait of the Artist as Australian offers the first critical assessment of Barry Humphries' entire career - as a daring postmodern deconstructionist on stage, film, and television, with sixty-seven stage shows, twenty-four film and thirty-four video appearances, thirty-four television series and seventy-one television appearances, and seventy-two audio recordings, but especially what he calls his "second career" as author of twenty-nine books. With an oeuvre that includes novels, biographies, autobiographies, editions, compilations, comic books, poetry, dramatic monologues, sketches, film scripts, and several unclassified works, Humphries is a literary and dramatic artist of considerable significance. Arguing that Humphries is one of Australia's greatest writers, Paul Matthew St Pierre reveals a multi-faceted artist whose success is rooted in music halls, Dadaism, and his identity as an Australian.




It was Another Skin


Book Description

"This study examines the meanings of the kitchen to women who were wives, mothers, housewives and homemakers in the 1950s in Western Australia. It uses qualitative data collected from oral history interviews with migrant and Australian born women. The book provides insight to women's everyday lives and analyses practices, such as cooking, ironing, budgeting, shopping, dishwashing and decorating which provide women with power. Central themes of this study explore the meaning of home and kitchen design and analyses how practices of the kitchen inform women's multiple identities. It also shows how dominant discourses, such as domesticity, femininity and efficiency reinforce gendered notions of women's work in the kitchen. Moreover, the book examines points of resistance, it shows that women perform their everyday practices, design their kitchens and decorate them in ways that perhaps were not always intended by domestic science experts, designers, architects and manufacturers."--GoogleBooks.




Detached America


Book Description

During the quarter century between 1945 and 1970, Americans crafted a new manner of living that shaped and reshaped how residential builders designed and marketed millions of detached single-family suburban houses. The modest two- and three-bedroom houses built immediately following the war gave way to larger and more sophisticated houses shaped by casual living, which stressed a family's easy sociability and material comfort and were a major element in the cohesion of a greatly expanded middle class. These dwellings became the basic building blocks of explosive suburban growth during the postwar period, luring families to the metropolitan periphery from both crowded urban centers and the rural hinterlands. Detached America is the first book with a national scope to explore the design and marketing of postwar houses. James A. Jacobs shows how these houses physically document national trends in domestic space and record a remarkably uniform spatial evolution that can be traced throughout the country. Favorable government policies, along with such widely available print media as trade journals, home design magazines, and newspapers, permitted builders to establish a strong national presence and to make a more standardized product available to prospective buyers everywhere. This vast and long-lived collaboration between government and business—fueled by millions of homeowners—established the financial mechanisms, consumer framework, domestic ideologies, and architectural precedents that permanently altered the geographic and demographic landscape of the nation.




Finding a Common Interest


Book Description

This book tells the story of Australia's most admired blue-chip corporation and its founder.




Queenslanders


Book Description

In a single timely tome, Rod Fisher packs a lot of what’s known about the history of the timbered house in Qld – the sum of research, writing and practice over 4 decades. While breaking new ground on its origin and development, the first 4 chapters concern several key themes: 1. the evolution of a Vernacular class of housing in the north of Australia: from aboriginal to modern day, comprising a series of styles and the means of identifying each one by era and attribute 2. the historical context to traditional housing: using census data and contemporary testimony to amplify its configuration which reflects cyclical condition, personal choice and social acceptance 3. the human dimension to the main varieties of habitat and its environment: specifically the pros and cons of observers and occupants of the day followed by resolution of their discrepancies 4 whether Brisbane was in any way different from the rest of the state: examining which varieties made the greatest imprint, from elite and multiple types to the predominant gabled, hipped, pyramidal and later multi-gabled dwellings of the Vernacular tradition The next couple of chapters are casestudies illustrating those aspects, particularly the evolution of traditional housing and the impact of historical change. Though set in Brisbane they reflect larger issues: 5. the early inner suburb of Petrie Terrace: which exhibits not only changes in timbered housing over time, but also the effect of road improvement, shopping centre diversion, stadium development, building renovation and gentrification more generally 6. a timbered dwelling of nearby Bowen Hills: which, being modified several times in its lifetime and finally removed elsewhere, demonstrates change, as well as the influence of the locale and the impact of transportation improvements on housing and community At the same time, this volume serves as a guide and reference, partly by information, advice and example, but more specifically by means of the handy classification of Vernacular styles in the 1st chapter, and ultimately by instructions for researching any house in Qld: 7. a step-by-step guide to historical investigation and exposition: using a dwelling in Annerley/Tarragindi as the example That practical purpose is reinforced in the final 3 chapters by a Supplement of related material, Glossary of requisite terms and Bibliography of relevant sources on both the history and heritage of timbered housing – plus plentiful illustrations of course. As there hasn’t been a work on this intriguing subject for a long time – nor anything ever like this one – it will serve general readers, professionals, researchers, writers and academics on the one hand, and owners, occupants, renovators, restorers and vendors on the other, whether in Brisbane, Qld or elsewhere in Australia. To all and sundry, its core message is conveyed by one of Joni Mitchell’s bygone ballads: Don’t it always seem to go That you don’t know what you’ve got ‘Till it’s gone They paved paradise And put up a parking lot




Research in Urban Sociology


Book Description

Presents contributions in comparative suburban studies for urban regions, not just in Europe and the United States but also metropolitan regions in China, India and other areas of the world. This title examines the patterns of suburban development in metropolitan regions around the globe.




The Australian Ugliness


Book Description

Fifty years after its first publication, Robin Boyd's bestselling The Australian Ugliness remains the definitive statement on how we live and think in the environments we create for ourselves. In it Boyd rallied against Australia's promotion of ornament, decorative approach to design and slavish imitation of all things American. 'The basis of the Australian ugliness,' he wrote, 'is an unwillingness to be committed on the level of ideas. In all the arts of living, in the shaping of all her artefacts, as in politics, Australia shuffles about vigorously in the middle - as she estimates the middle - of the road, picking up disconnected ideas wherever she finds them.' Boyd was a fierce critic, and an advocate of good design. He understood the significance of the connection between people and their dwellings, and argued passionately for a national architecture forged from a genuine Australian identity. His concerns are as important now, in an era of suburban sprawl and inner-city redevelopment, as they were half a century ago. Caustic and brilliant, The Australian Ugliness is a masterpiece that enables us to see our surroundings with fresh eyes. This handsome anniversary edition is complemented by Robin Boyd's original sketches for the book and a new afterword by major contemporary architects.




Designer Suburbs


Book Description

In the 1950s, 60s and 70s architects like Harry Seidler, Robin Boyd, Ken Woolley, Michael Dysart and Graeme Gunn applied their talents to project homes, bringing high-end design to the suburbs. Backed by Pettit & Sevitt, Merchant Builders and other project builders, architects created small, deceptively simple houses which transformed the look of suburbia. Today, the distance between the architectural profession and suburban housing has never been greater, with Australia’s super-sized, energy-guzzling project homes the biggest in the world. With photographs by Max Dupain, David Moore, Wolfgang Sievers and Eric Sierins alongside original plans, Designer Suburbs explores the relationship between architects, builders and affordable housing since 1900 and the lessons we can learn from twentieth-century designer suburbs.