34.3 Designing for First Nations Communities
Fabrications The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand invites papers for a special issue (Vol. 34, No. 3) on the theme of Designing for First Nations Communities, edited by Kelly Greenop and Isabel Rousset. The deadline is 1st May 2024.
Histories of architecture for First Nations peoples have been part of Fabrications scholarship since the journal’s inception. The very first issue in 1989 contained a review by Ann McGrath (UNSW) of Helen Ross’s book Just For Living(1987), an analysis of Aboriginal housing in crisis in Australia. The first articles on First Nations built environments featured in the next issue (2-3, 1991), which included Sarah Treadwell’s “Rangiatea: Architecture Between the Colonial and the Indigenous,” and Mike Austin’s “Notes on the Colonial City”. This issue also featured a book review by Peter Bell of John Hockings’ Traditional Architecture in the Gilbert Islands: A Cultural Perspective, (1989). In 2008 Memmott and Davidson’s Fabrications paper examined “Indigenous Culture and Architecture in the South Pacific Region: 25 Years of SAHANZ Research” covering both journal articles and SAHANZ conferences, which discussed some 100 papers.
The scholarship on this topic over the last three decades has nonetheless remained uneven and full of gaps. This editors’ issue seeks to build on and encourage further pursuit of scholarship on architecture and the built environment for First Nations communities and clients, across the Oceania region. We aim to elicit papers that reveal the diverse history of architectural responses to First Nations peoples’ cultures, from the era of initial European contact through to more contemporary developments.
We welcome papers from across our region, including the First Nations of Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Moana Pasifika. Papers might include studies of particular buildings types designed to accommodate First Nations people, including but not limited to culturally-specific places we might be familiar with now, such as community, health or cultural centres, housing for First Nations peoples, and those from colonial and European-contact eras such mission and reserve buildings and precincts. The governance relationships might range from those where First Nations building traditions were maintained or developed through the colonial era, to those which have more recent histories of self-governed, bicultural, or sovereign Nations as clients, collaborators or active agents in procuring architectural outcomes.
We particularly encourage submissions that address the recent past, from the self-determination, bicultural, and independence eras onwards (1980s to today), which have been little examined but offer rich opportunities for discussion of this time of important change within architecture and built environments. The ways in which designs for First Nations people have been envisioned is critical to understanding how societies have seen and valued First Nations people, and can tell us much about the designers and societies from which they emanate.
Deadline for submissions is 1st May 2024. Questions about the issue should be directed to the journal’s co-editors: Kelly Greenop and Isabel Rousset.
34.2 What is ‘shared?” Architectural Heritage in Conflict
Fabrications invites papers for a special issue (Vol. 34, No. 2) guest edited by Savia Palate and Panayiota Pyla (University of Cyprus) on the theme of ‘What is “shared”? Architectural Heritage in Conflict’. Papers are due on February 16, 2024.
Scholars typically describe heritage as intrinsically dissonant or difficult, particularly in conflict territories, highlighting the socio-political differences that ascribe architectural value to buildings and sites. This special issue focuses on the potentiality of architectural heritage in conflict territories to become shared, contemplating whether “sharedness” may be possible at all. It particularly focuses on the intangible value narratives of architectural history can offer to speak of what may be shared in terms of architectural heritage.
What can be considered shared about architectural heritage in conflict territories, in what manner, and why? How can architectural history, and methodological explorations of writing the past, shed light on the complexities that surround the question of who defines modes of sharedness? To what extent can fluidity and uncertainty of meanings challenge the way architecture becomes heritage, dictating what is to be remembered and what it is to be forgotten? Can we speak about sharedness without forging commonalities and homogenisation, but by utilising the lens of architectural history to reveal the multiple frictions, narratives, interpretations, and stories that have remained hidden or paused on a particular time-space agency?
Papers may relate to the contested geopolitical, cultural, and historical constructs of the built environment as heritage in tangible and intangible terms, and across various periods and geographies. We welcome papers that interrogate competing narratives of nationalism and identity; oscillations between remembrance and oblivion; and preservation practices that experiment with potentialities of inclusiveness and alternative collaborations in framing the shared in architectural heritage.
Questions about the special issue can be directed to the guest editors:
Panayiota Pyla For submission instructions and portal, go to: https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/rfab20
33.3 Interiors
Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand invites papers for a special issue (Vol. 33, No. 3) on the theme of ‘Interiors’, edited by Cameron Logan and Kelly Greenop. The new deadline is Monday 15th May 2023, and publication of the issue is scheduled for September 2023.
Writing in Fabrications about design historiography in Australia, the historian of interiors, Catriona Quinn, recently noted that “it is a challenge to name a professional interior designer — Marion Hall Best aside — who has attracted significant scholarship.” This despite the distinguished record of innovative interior design pedagogy and theory in Australia and the now decades long critical and theoretical effort to decentre the heroic, masculine form giver in art and architecture. One might have expected these twin forces to reshape historical scholarship. But as Quinn’s observation makes clear the mere recognition that space-making practices traditionally gendered as ‘feminine’ – especially the design and decoration of interior spaces – had been disparaged and ignored, did not lead automatically to a boom in historical scholarship focused on the interior, to the role of women, queer men, and non-professionals in making the built environment, or to the critical and professional mechanisms by which this encoding of the interior as feminine has persisted. Prior to the recent special issue of Fabrications, Looking Inside Design (32:1), which was a festschrift honouring the career of Prof. Harriet Edquist, it is difficult to identify a concerted effort to highlight the architectural interior in historical scholarship in Australasia.
Wider shifts in architectural culture and thinking in the past 25 years might well have brought the interior more forcefully into view even without the cogent feminist critique that pointed to its historical devaluation. These shifts include Rem Koolhaas’ provocation about the programmatic centrality of the interior to bigness, and Charles Rice and Suzie Attiwill’s related elaboration of ideas about interior urbanism; Penny Sparke and Alice Friedman’s centring of issues of taste and consumption in the creation of architecture and interiors; and the ethical invocation to reuse existing buildings and its corollary focus on remaking buildings from the inside out. More radically, others have sought to deconstruct Western assumptions about the nature of spatial relationships which historically divide architecture and interiors into separate disciplines. These diverse scholarly approaches all put the question of how interior space is conceptualised and designed at the centre of architectural discourse.
With this themed issue, the editors of Fabrications seek papers that help construct a new critical history of interiors in Australasia. Drawing on a broad range of precedents, the issue aims to reveal how the design and fabrication of interior environments has accommodated place and culture-specific activities. To do so we invite papers that address problems and practices in Australia and New Zealand but also in the Asia Pacific region and around the world. This new history shod include approaches to scholarship that attend to the work of individual designers, but also consider clients, finance and the whole life cycle of interior spaces.
Submissions may address one or more of the following:
- the history of professional interior designers in Australasia including organisational histories</>
- interiors created by and for a wider group of social agents and actors (for example, homemakers, traditional craftspeople, and community groups)
- challenges to the Eurocentric canon of interior design history that acknowledge our unique position as a group of multicultural nations shaped by settler colonial ideologies and practices
- the significance of entrepreneurship in interior design by focusing on retail, design schools, and import agencies
- supply chains in the fabrication, production, retailing, import, mediation, promotion and consumption of furnishings for interiors
- interior design through the work of public agency architects and the public facilities designed by them
- histories of workplace design focused on rethinking interior arrangements and spatial character
- governmental power through the design and interior organisation of various public facilities for health, education, and leisure
- transnational exchanges via mechanisms of trade as well as professional networks
curatorial representation of interior design history and the implications of such representations for public conversations about gender and design
Deadline for submissions is April 30, 2023. Questions about the issue should be directed to the journal’s co-editors: Cameron Logan and Kelly Greenop
33.2 Trans-Tasman Trips and Tropes
Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand invites papers for a special issue (Vol. 33, No. 2) on the theme of ‘Trans-Tasman Trips and Tropes’, edited by Julie Willis, Paul Walker & Katti Williams.
The architectural histories of Australia and New Zealand, despite the long establishment of SAHANZ, have remained mostly distinct and separate. Focus for each has been on the understanding of the development of each place, as separate entities. This has usually followed a formulation: from Indigenous beginnings, through colonisation, to emergent modern nations. While there may be parallels to each nation’s designed and built history, they are rarely compared and the role each has played in the development of the other, in architectural terms, has been largely ignored. Yet, travel ‘across the ditch’ is as least as old as British colonisation, and substantial numbers of architects, construction firms, and client groups have made significant contributions to building and architecture in both countries. This Special Issue of Fabrications seeks papers considering and comparing the architectural histories of Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand through moments and sites of connection between the two.
Under the editorship of G A Bremner and Andrew Leach, Fabrications 29:3, ‘The Architecture of the Tasman World, 1788-1850’ examined the shared history of south eastern Australia and New Zealand when the political entities of Van Diemen’s Land and New South Wales were barely minted and modern New Zealand was but a flash in the pan. Bremner and Leach noted that the nineteenth-century architectural history of these places ‘has long been shaped by the nationalist historiographies of twentieth-century Australia and New Zealand’, and sought to elicit a more nuanced history by turning to a period when the region’s modern national identities were still nascent. For this new special issue, we would like to turn attention to a later period – 1850 to the present – and see how history might be written against the grain of the broad nationalist histories of both Australia and New Zealand by looking at the later period when those histories are dominant.
Of particular interest are: the transfer and exchange of architectural knowledge; connections through architectural education; technological influence through labour and materials; the impact of key projects; the transmigration of the architecture profession; the experience and modes of operation of architectural firms operating across both countries; the companies and other clients that commissioned buildings on both sides of the Tasman; comparisons between the architectural historiographies of both nations and of regions within them; comparisons of architectural responses to common challenges (decolonisation, war, economic depression and affluence…); and Māori and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and their evolving architectural manifestations, and resistance to and impact on wider architecture.
33.1 OPEN ISSUE
Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand invites papers for an OPEN issue (Vol.33, no.1) edited by Cameron Logan and Kelly Greenop. The Open Issue of Fabrications welcomes papers on a range of topics related to architectural history. We especially encourage the submission of work in connection with the architecture and landscapes of Australasia and the Asia Pacific, but welcome work focusing on all places and in any period. Papers are due by August 31, 2022.
*Please note that due to some unavoidable delays in settling the guest editorial team and theme for the guest edited issue, originally planned for 33:1, we have revised the order of issues for Volume 33. The special guest edited issue will now be 33:2. A call for papers for that issue will be published soon.
32.3 SPECIAL ISSUE – The Architecture of the State and Statelessness
Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand invites papers for a special issue (Vol. 32, No. 3) on the theme of ‘The Architecture of the State and Statelessness’, edited by Cameron Logan and Kelly Greenop. The deadline for paper submission is 31st March 2022 and publication of the issue is scheduled for September 2022.
One of the abiding roles of architecture historically has been to produce designs for buildings that represent and house state functions. Official residences for heads of state, parliament buildings, courts, diplomatic missions, barracks and armories, as well as the departmental headquarters for treasuries and other governmental functions, enact and enable state power, but they also make the state visible as an entity. Architecture is one of the ways in which states represent themselves to their citizens or political subjects and to other states. The frontispiece for the original edition of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) – perhaps the most explicit figure of the state produced in political philosophy – is an etching by Thomas Bosse and is dominated by a colossal figure bearing a sword and a mitre overlooking an orderly city. When one looks closely at the cover the representative role of architecture in figuring state power is obvious. Beneath the main figure are depictions of civil and ecclesiastical authority, most prominently a castle and a church. Buildings were thus presented by Hobbes and Bosse as clear emblems of the state.
Because state power is so often figured through buildings and urban ensembles, those who dispute the claims of the state have also used architecture to articulate their own relationship to power and political agency. In Australia, for example, First Nations people have created various tent embassies, the most famous being that established in front of the old Parliament House in Canberra/Ngambri from 1972. Its very clear meaning was that the Australian government does not possess legitimate or uncontested sovereign authority in the territory it claims. The putatively stateless Indigenous people of Australia thus rhetorically claimed the status of a distinct state authority by establishing an embassy.
This issue of Fabrications calls for papers that address state authority and architecture by critically examining buildings, projects and architectural conceptions that proclaim the presence of the state or that protest that presence. Recent work in architectural history and theory – including work published in recent issues of this journal – has dedicated significant energy to documenting and analysing the enactment of state power though everything from infrastructural development to prison building programs and highly secretive defence installations. This issue seeks papers that build on that work but that also direct attention more explicitly to the question of representation. How do buildings and infrastructure depict or symbolise state power? And how has state power been disclosed and contested by architectural gestures that seek to counter the claims of the state?
We welcome submissions that address the theme from widely varying perspectives. Papers might focus on the problem of representativeness in multi-national states; raise questions about universality versus regional or national specificity in relation to style; focus on the tactical and provisional modes of architectural communication available to those who protest their statelessness; or raise questions about the extent of state presence in the urban landscape in capital city ensembles. Building on recent work published in the journal, we encourage papers that examine official attempts to depict the architectural expression of newly decolonised nation states in the Asia-Pacific. We also welcome papers about the various architectural competitions and public debates connected with new parliament buildings, state palaces and official residences in our region and around the world.
32.2 OPEN ISSUE
Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand invites papers for the OPEN issue (Vol. 32, No. 2) edited by Cameron Logan and Kelly Greenop. The Open Issue of Fabrications welcomes papers evolving from individual research on a range of topics related to architectural history and theory. Papers are due by 22 November 2021.
32.1 SPECIAL ISSUE – Looking inside design: crossing and connecting the disciplinary boundaries of architecture, design, and exhibition
Histories of architecture, design, exhibiting and curatorship are frequently siloed from each other, ignoring shared and overlapping influences, approaches, practitioners, and indeed their shared disciplinary lineage as Kulturwissenschaft, cultural histories of material objects. In contrast, we seek to foreground the entwined histories and the traversing of professional boundaries (both conceptual and embodied) between the fields of design, architecture, exhibitions and curating. We set out to explore these intersecting worlds, and the possibilities of reciprocal knowledge and methodological exchange between each field. In the spirit of much new architectural history, exemplified by the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative and its interdisciplinary focus on architecture and its relationships, our methodological provocation is one that endeavours to cross yet connect these disciplinary boundaries and unearth richer and more complex cultural histories, in particular those that attempt to establish a broader conceptual framework for the discipline of architectural history.
We call for papers that connect or trade the concepts of architecture, exhibiting, curating and the fields, disciplines and practices that comprise design. We are interested in design across media and disciplines from visual communication and digital design to performance, exhibitions and interiors, and from objects to infrastructure. We emphasise that both tangible and non-tangible design such as systems, services, experiences, interactions, are equally important areas of enquiry for this special issue. We also encourage contributions that consider the embodied practices of designers in the making of architecture, the role of architects producing design, and the labour that each entails. Papers might consider architects, whether migrants or women, who found themselves excluded from the profession of architecture and turned to the design fields out of necessity, and feminist, trans-national or post-colonial readings of these histories. Papers might address the way in which the curation and design of the interior intersect, or the architectonics of exhibition design. Equally of interest is the role of the exhibition or archive as a promoter or voice for design and architecture. We are interested in varying levels of scale, for example architects involved in the design of domestic objects such as Franco Albini’s radio design or the furniture design of Urmila Eulie Chowdhury, Jeet Malhotra and Aditya Prakash; to the larger scale of Nina Aleshin’s Moscow Metro design; up to the cosmic level such as that in Galina Balashova’s design of the Soyuz spacecraft and the Salyut and Mir space stations.
This special issue of Fabrications commemorates Professor Harriet Edquist’s retirement from an academic position at RMIT University, though not scholarship itself. Edquist’s work as historian, editor, commentator, curator, and archivist has animated architectural, design and exhibition scholarship for decades. In this call for papers we seek work that critically re-examines these fields that Edquist not only contributed to but shaped.
31.3 Open
Fabrications invites papers for the OPEN issue (Vol. 31, No. 3) edited by Mirjana Lozanovska and Cameron Logan. The Open Issue of Fabrications welcomes papers evolving from individual research on a range of topics related to architectural history and theory. Papers are due by 28 March 2021.
30.2 Post-War/Cold-War in the Region
Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand invites papers for a special issue on Post-war / Cold-War in the Region (Vol. 31, No. 2) edited by Mirjana Lozanovska and Cameron Logan. Papers are due by 20 November 2020. See below.
World War II transformed the process of production at a global scale and, as a consequence, the period of economic prosperity that followed is often considered a ‘Golden Age’. But the booming postwar decades, frequently referred to in France as the Trente Glorieuses, also occurred in the shadow of the Cold War. Following the defeat of Hitler and Nazi Germany by Stalin’s Red Army in 1945, the world was caught in the grip of a political confrontation between the USA and the USSR, one which dominated the international environment for more than forty years (1948-1990). While the Cold War meant the end of WWII in Europe, wars erupted in the Asia-Pacific region, most obviously in Vietnam and Korea, but also in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Cambodia to name just a few.
The Cold War drew ideological lines. Architectural historian, Juliana Maxim argues the USSR and USA presented competing architectural modernities. Maxim’s work, along with that of Greg Castillo and a handful of others, focuses on a political dialectic, and thus confronts consistent depoliticization in the architectural historiography of modernism, a process left mostly undisturbed by the recent emphasis on difference and plurality. Łukasz Stanek examines the export of architecture and planning from socialist countries to the ‘Third World’ and conceptualises this as Cold War transfer. What of this post-war/Cold War political ideology did émigré architects departing Europe, transport to Australia and New Zealand?
This ideological divide mobilised modernisation and development aid programmes. Educational initiatives from the period such as the Colombo Plan (1951) focused on education and cultural exchange, and were deeply conditioned by Cold War political arrangements as much as by longstanding colonial ties. Even more explicit in its cold war implications for the region was Australia and New Zealand’s strategic pivot to the United States and its formalisation in the ANZUS Treaty (1951). The security alliance was the foundation for a much more visible US footprint in Australasia, expressed in architectural terms not only through embassies but also military bases and other security installations such as the one at Pine Gap near Alice Springs. The US presence in the wider region was also dramatically expanded in the period, with facilities established or expanded up and down the western rim of the Pacific.
This issue of Fabrications seeks to explore the post-war period not as mid-century architectural aesthetics and urbanisation, or through its hero architects, but through the lens of architecture’s participation in the ideological and political divide of the Cold War. We seek papers on a broad range of issues that highlight the political and ideological aspect of architectural history in this period with a focus on Australia and New Zealand and the Asia Pacific region. We encourage contributions that include the following: the ideological/political position of Australia and New Zealand during the Cold War and it impact on architectural discourse and practice; new networks that emerged in Australia and New Zealand in architecture and the visual arts due to Cold War orientations; the involvement of Australian and New Zealand architects in projects linked to Cold War political agendas in the Asia-Pacific; architectural education and the Colombo Plan or equivalent organisations; émigré architects and the effects of anti-communist political narratives in Australia and New Zealand and their alignment with the USA; the architecture and politics of post war refugee camps, military bases, embassies in Australia and New Zealand.
30.1 Writing Automobile Histories
Due to the disruptions many researchers have experienced in their work patterns and daily lives in recent weeks and months, the Fabrications editors, in consultation with guest editor of this special issue, Marianna Charitonidou, have decided to extend the deadline for 31:1, Writing Automobile Histories. The new deadline for the issue is Monday 29 June. See CFP below.
Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand invites papers for a special issue (volume 31, no.1) on Writing Automobile Histories edited by Marianna Charitonidou, ETH Zürich, National Technical University of Athens and Athens School of Fine Arts. Papers are due by 29 June 2020 (EXTENDED).
The point of departure for this special issue is the hypothesis that the view from the car has established a new epistemology of the urban landscape. Focusing on the views from the car produced by architects will help us better understand how this epistemological shift influenced architectural thinking and practice. The automobile reshaped our conceptions of space revolutionizing the way architects perceive the urban environment and contributing significantly to the transformation of the relationship between architecture and the city. Automobiles transformed the ways in which we access and move around in cities, but also the city’s own relation to its territory. No other factor changed the city so drastically during the twentieth century. Many architects and architectural critics and theorists have been attracted to ‘automobile vision’. But in the field of history and theory of urban design many questions concerning the impact of the automobile on our perception of the city and its territory have not been explored in depth.
This issue of Fabrications intends to explore the theories and methods most suitable for understanding how the automobile has transformed our perception of urban conditions. It will investigate which visual means and artefacts are most significant for the way we comprehend the snapshot aesthetics which is related to car travel. Journeys have always been a source of inspiration for architects, playing a significant role in shaping their design strategies. The issue aims to grasp the specificity of car travel as a new episteme. Using the writings of Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch, John Myer, Reyner Banham, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown as a key reference and also considering John Lautner, Alison and Peter Smithson, Denise Scott Brown and Aldo Rossi’s practice of taking photographs from cars, the issue aims to establish a broader conceptual framework for tackling issues related to the impact of the automobile on architectural and urban thought. Papers that treat the different aspects of architects and urban designers’ automobile vision as expressions of the emergence of a new episteme are especially encouraged. Papers might also address, for example, the different ways that photography and film capture the snapshot aesthetics related to the automobile. The issue seeks papers aiming to address issues related to the emergence of the new perceptual regimes that emerged thanks to the automobile, focusing on a wide range of geographical and cultural contexts. To this end the issue, encourages articles that address places and perspectives from beyond the Euro-American context, such as those concerning the feral auto-tectonics of ‘Mad-Max’, or the great road trips and peripatetic architectures of Australasian grey nomads, referring to the phenomenon of retired people who take long – sometimes permanent – road trips.