Sahanz Program Updated FV

Convened by Andrew Leach and Lee Stickells
Distance Looks Back 2019 / 1

10 - 13 July
Program
Unless indicated otherwise, all events will take place in the Wilkinson Building of
the University of Sydney (148 City Road, Darlington 2008).
Wednesday 10 July
Registration will open in the foyer of Wilkinson from 5pm.
A selection of local architectural tours will run in the morning and evening (full
program online). Opening event from 6pm, including a Welcome to Country, and welcomes
from the convenors, Dean Robyn Dowling, EAHN Vice-President Jorge Correia, SAHANZ
President Naomi Stead, and an opening address by Professor Jakelin Troy (Director of
Indigenous Research at the University of Sydney).
Thursday 11 July
A full schedule of sessions will run from 9am to 6pm.
The evening program (6pm for 6:30pm start) is called Fast Distance and will feature a
series of interventions on the conference theme, followed by a gallery and book launch
event, marking the release of Australian Modern (edited by Philip Goad and Hannah
Lewi) and the opening of Designed in Italy, Made in Australia: The Australian Work
of Pier Luigi Nervi (curated by Paolo Stracchi) and Fusions of Horizons: Australian
Architects in Asia, 1950s-80s (curated by Amit Srivastava and Cole Roskam).
Lunchtime roundtables (1-2:30pm) will address environmental histories of architecture

and the teaching of architectural history in a global frame (paper-bag lunches
supplied!).
Friday 12 July
A full schedule of sessions will run from 9am to 6pm.
The evening program will include a lecture by Caroline Ford—Peter Reill Chair in
Modern History at the University of California Los Angeles—on the history of housing
in European cities.
Lunchtime programming will include the AGM of the Society of Architectural Historians,
Australia and New Zealand (1-2:30pm).
Saturday 13 July
A full schedule of sessions will run from 9am to 3:30pm.
Including a final shared lunch (bbq, of course).
2 / Distance Looks Back 2019 10 - 13 July

Program - Thursday (11/07)
Track A Track B Track C
Room: ALT1 Room: ALT2 Room: ALT3
08:30
Registrations with coffee & tea 8:30-9:00am
09:00
Lynda Mulvin Jasper Ludewig Marie Durand
Neoclassical Artists and ‘Imitation’ From ‘Mapoon’ to Mapoon and Concrete Time: Material
of the Antique: Robert Wood (1717- Back Again: Architecture Temporalities and Contemporary
1771) and Approaches to the Ruins and Transnationalism on a Mobilities in the Vernacular
of Palmyra and Baalbek as Journeys German Mission in Far North Architecture of Northern Vanuatu,
Through Space and Time Queensland Melanesia
09:30
John Montague Lisa Marie Daunt Louis Lagarde
‘Un Étranger Deux Fois’: John Communities of Faith: Transformations in New
Rocque’s ‘Outsider’ Maps of Regional Queensland’s Caledonian Architecture,
London and Dublin Innovative Modern Post-War 1853-1980: An Overview
Church Architecture
10:00
Matthew Mindrup Sven Sterken and Lisa Timothy O’Rourke
Studying Architecture at a Marie Daunt Vernacular Influences on the
Distance With Models From Austria to Australia: Design of Aboriginal Social
Three Lutheran Churches by Housing
Karl Langer
10:30
John Macarthur Vanessa Galvin Min Hall
Architecture ‘In the Service of Bridging Death’s Distance Via Back to Earth: Earth Building
Clouds’: The Picturesque and the Victorian Spiritualist in Aotearoa New Zealand
Aquatint Home 1945-65
11:00
Break 11:00-11:30am
11:30
Andrew J. Manson Ross Anderson John Ting
Mussolini’s Palace and the Adolphe Appia and the Vernacular Prefabrication in
‘Illustrious Cadavers’ of Rome Rhythmic Undertone of Modern the Colonial Context: The 1862
Architecture Bintulu Type Fort in Sarawak
12:00
Aristotle Kallis Macarena de la Vega de León Edson Cabalfin
Mobilities and Recontextualisations Mediating History With Modern Shifting Definitions of the
of Existenzminimum Dwelling: From Architecture Since 1900 Vernacular in 20th-Century
CIAM2 to Israel’s Ex Nihilo Regional Philippine Architecture
Development
12:30
Catherine De Lorenzo Jorge Correia Syed Ahmad Iskandar Syed
Distance Eclipsed in the ‘Big Focusing Beyond Europe: Ariffin
Little Show’: The Australian Islamic Urbanism Decoded Changes and Transformation of
Pavilion at the 1937 Paris Through the Lens of Pioneer Malay Vernacular Houses
Exhibition Photographers
01:00
Packed Lunch 1:00-2:30pm Packed Lunch 1:00-2:30pm

Roundtable 1: Environmental Roundtable 2: Teaching
Histories of Architecture: Architecture History Globally
Decolonizing Effort, or
Obligation?
02:30
Philip Goad Nelson Mota Ayano Toki and Mamiko
‘Across Twelve Thousand Miles Architectural Agonism: The Miyahara
Some Fifteen Years Ago’: The Distancing Effect in Álvaro Approaches to the Bungalow Beyond
Boyd-Gropius Letters, 1954-1969 Siza’s Architecture of Time and Distance: Notes of
Dwelling Comparison Between India, United
Kingdom, and Australia
03:00
Andrew Wilson Milica Madanovic and Marcel Vellinga
The Tecton Group and the Renata Jadresin-Milic Re-imagining Vernacularity in
Architects’ Group: Residues of Distance and the Balkans: Southeast Asia and Oceania
Collective Practice Critical Regionalism Between
the World Wars in the Work of
Alexander Deroko
03:30
Antony Moulis Irina Davidovici Gabriele Weichart
Reinterpreting Urban Housing in ‘Icons of Compensation’: The Panel Discussion
Post-War Australia Through Le Swiss Alps as Intercultural
Corbusier’s ‘Murondins’ Boundary
04:00
Break 4:00-4:30pm
04:30
Fast Distance 4:30-6:00pm
Room: ALT1
06:00
Hannah Lewi and Philip Goad Paolo Stracchi Amit Srivastava & Cole Roskam
Reception and launch of Opening of Designed in Italy, Fusion of Horizons:
Australia Modern Made in Australia Australian Architects in
Asia, 1950s-80s
10 - 13 July Distance Looks Back 2019 / 3

Program - Friday (12/07)
08:30
09:00 Luke Tipene
Preeti Chopra Ashley Paine
Looking Back in Time: The Theatricality and the Representing Colonial
Charitable Entanglements of Reconstruction of Frank Lloyd Estrangement: Depictions of
Unreal Architecture in the
Bombay’s Royal Alfred Sailors’ Wright’s Imperial Hotel Painting a Direct North General
Home & its Neighbours View of Sydney Cove 1794
09:30
Susan Holden and Jacky Bowring and Bindy
Anoma Pieris Rosemary Willink Barclay
The Featherston Incident: Exhibiting Destruction: Looking Collecting, Classifying
Uncovering New Zealand-Asia Back From Robin Hood Gardens: and Designing: What Three
Relations through a POW Camp A Ruin in Reverse, 2018 to the Gisborne Gardens Tell Us
Destruction of the Country House, About Distance
1974
10:00
Nan Ye and Jiawen Han Beth George and Sally Robin Skinner
Convergence and Dissimilation: The Farrah Mataatua: The Missing Years
‘Dialogue’ of Individualism and Trajectories of Axonometry
Collectivism in Architectural Practice Through Distances and
Between China and Yugoslavia, 1949 – Disciplines
1958
10:30
Yinrui Xie and Paul Walker
Negotiation Across Cultural
Distance: The Creation and
Interpretation of a ‘Chinese-
Style’ Christian Campus
11:00
Break 11:00-11:30am
11:30
Mehbuba Tune Uzra and Peter William M (Bill) Taylor Rowan Gower
Scriver Putting Down ‘Roots’ En Exporting Australian
Going the Distance: Residential Route: Lewis Mumford’s Architectural ‘Expertise’ as
Design and Culture Change in Post- Distanced View Of American a Matter of Policy
Independence Dhaka (1950-2000) Design
12:00
Prajakta Sane Francesco Marullo Bram De Maeyer
Research Laboratory in India’s Post- A Project of Distance: Conceptualizing Belgian Diplomatic
independence Nation-building: Closing Bertolt Brecht’s Chicago Representation on an Architectural
the Distance and the Past Level: The Purpose-Built Embassy as
12:30 Architectural Typology?
Kah-Wee Lee Isabel Rousset Peyman Akhgar

Casino as Genealogy: Reflections The Image of the American The Ecole des Beaux-Arts and
on the Criticality of Historical City in German Ethnography Construction of Iranian National
Distance Identity of the Interwar Era:
Architecture of André Godard
01:00
Packed Lunch 1:00-2:30pm
SAHANZ AGM (Room: ALT2)
02:30
Katti Williams Irène Vogel Chevroulet Lori Smithey
Learning to Fly: Distance and the Paths of the Gods and The Distance of Lateness:
Wartime Experience of Australian Architects: From Japan to the Charles Moore’s Domestic
Architect Stanley George Garrett Acropolis Fabrications
03:00
Elizabeth Musgrave Federico Deambrosis Zehra Ahmed
Between Myth and Reality: Constructing Transatlantic Proximities / Ambiguous Charles Moore, Designer of
a Modern Architectural Identity in Opportunities: The Multiple Paths of Practice
Rural Queensland Italian Designers in Argentina, 1948-
1958
03:30
Catherine Lassen Denise Costanzo Léa-Catherine Szacka
All About Eva Too Close to Home: Critical British Television and
Distance and Venturi’s the ‘Abolition of Every
Columbus Monument Possibility of Remoteness’
04:00
Break 4:00-4:30pm Book Club
Panel Discussion
04:30
Julia Gatley Pablo Arza Garaloces Carmen Popescu
Back to the South: Cyril Knight and the Shortening Distances: span3ish Distance as Space: Casting
Modernisation of the Auckland School of Architectural Modernity in Marginality Out
Architecture International Architecture Journals
05:00
Elke Couchez Ana Esteban-Maluenda Gevork Hartoonian
Decorating Distance: Civic When Distance Matters: Australian Towards a Retrospective
Dispositions in Non-professional Modern Architecture Seen Through Criticism: How Not to
Environmental Education European Journals (1945-1975) Historicize!
05:30
Daniel A. Barber Glenn Harper Mirjana Lozanovsk a
Emergency Exit: Looking Back on the Compressed Distances and Photographic Ambivalence and Neo-Colonial
Distance to 1.5 Degrees
Imagery: The Communication of New Historiography
Brutalism Within the Professional
Journal Architecture in Australia,
1965-1967
06:00
Caroline Ford
The New Dwelling”: Social Activism and Architectural Innovation in Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s and Juliette
Tréant-Mathé’s Design of Social Housing in Interwar Europe
07:30

Program - Saturday (13/07)
08:30
09:00
Kirsty Volz Lilian Chee Luke Morgan
Architecture as an Act of Service: The Archipelagic Distance: Wölfflin and Landscape History:
The Sea and its Dialectical ‘Painterly’, ‘Linear’ and the
Reframing the Careers of Women Mannerist Garden
Architects Working For the Queensland Image
Public Service in the Interwar Period
09:30
Nicole Sully Céline Bodart Matthew Critchley
Hiding in Plain Sight: The Apathy Practices of Translation as a Way Mannerism and Method: Class
of Distance and the Civil Defense to Look Back on Derridean Years and Artistic Agency in the
of Western Australia during WWII of Architecture Writing of Anthony Blunt
(1934-1949)
10:00
Nicola Pullan and Robert Rebecca McLaughlan and Tiffany Lynn Hunt
Freestone Cristina Garduño Freeman The Critical Model in
‘Enthusiasm, Energy and Originality’: ‘You Can’t Say That Bruno Zevi’s Renaissance
The Influence of Harry Rembert’s at SAHANZ’: Critical Architecture
European Architectural Investigations Nearness and the Role
on Australian Post-War University of Autoethnography in
Design Architectural History
10:30
Lloyd Jones Denise Costanzo and
Roots in the Most Unlikely Michael Hill
of Places: Reconsidering the Response and Discussion
Queensland Art Gallery
11:00
Break 11:00-11:30am
11:30
Nathan Etherington Janina Gosseye and
ICOMOS Burra Charter Donald Watson
40th Anniversary Panel Canal to Nowhere? Landscape
Discussion as Infrastructure, From Architects on the Verge: Distance
Sanitation to Transportation in Proximity at ‘The Pleasures of
Architecture’
12:00 A panel discussion to reflect on the
Burra Charter’s success and evolution,
and to consider its capacity to Michael Kahn Paul Dielemans
respond to changing cultural Around the World in Eight ‘Moderately Modern’: The Long Distance
assumptions, environmental conditions Kilometres: Tracking Sydney’s Reading of Modern Dutch Architecture by
and professional practices. ‘City Circle’ International a Queensland Architect

Railway Ties
12:30 Panelists:
Tim Greer, TZG
Sheridan Burke, Scientific Council Maryam Shafiei Catherine Molloy
Officer, ICOMOS The Influence of City- A Tale of Two Buildings and
Cristina Garduño-Freeman, University Village Distance on the Their Contingent Pedagogies;
of Melbourne Separated Only by the
David Burdon, Purcell Transformation of Remote
Villages in Tehran Region, Distance of Time

Iran
01:00
BBQ Lunch 1:00-2:30pm
02:30
Tin Sheds Gallery Session

Accommodating Distance: Tourism,
Architecture and Asia, 1950s-80s
03:30

Abstracts
Ana Esteban-Maluenda
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
When Distance Matters: Australian Modern Architecture Seen Through European Journals (1945-1975)
If we look at an Antipodes World Map, Europe and Australasia are relatively close, so much so, that New Zealand and Spain share a virtual territory.
Thinking about antipodes, remoteness implies coincidence and distance brings countries closer together. This paper aims to track the spread
that modern Australian architecture reached in some of the main European nodes of reception and emission of news: France, Great Britain,
Italy, Switzerland and Spain. Based on the articles published in the architectural periodicals of the moment, it will be able to be established
which aspects of Australian architecture mattered in these countries. More importantly, these cases will be able to be compared with each other
and, as a whole, with the interest that other closer continents aroused in Europe. Did distance play the same role in all cases? Or had any other
circumstances, such as politics or economics, more weight in the rapprochement between countries? Is the presence of Australian architecture in
modern canonical historiography the direct result of these exchanges of information? In short, does historiography have a debt to distance?
Andrew J. Manson
University of Kentucky
Mussolini’s Palace and the ‘Illustrious Cadavers’ of Rome
The Fascist regime’s interest in establishing its historical rootedness in Imperial Rome made the association of Roman ruins with modern buildings
one of the most determined tropes of Fascist planning. The most audacious example of this tactic was the 1934 competition to build among
the ruins of the Imperial Fora the seat of the National Fascist Party, the Palazzo del Littorio. Each competition entrant attempted to mould a
transcendent and everlasting “Fascist” monument from the paradoxical combination of revolutionary and historical rupture with allusions to
Classical glory. The building, set among the “cadavers” of antiquity, was required to make visible the continuity between Fascist present and Latin
past, provide a rostrum from which Mussolini could harangue ardent crowds, and house the mundane aspects of the party apparatus. This paper
explores the ways in which the concept of distance, conceived in three mutually reinforcing ways, elucidates the constraints within which the
competitors worked. The first considers distance spatially, through the location of the proposed Palazzo amidst and atop the ancient ruins; the
second considers distance “historically,” in terms of the selective emulation of forms used to reinscribe the past in the present; and the third
considers distance “personally” or physically, through the mediated relationship between the Duce and the crowd that the building encouraged. An
examination of the competition entry by the Gruppo Milanese reveals the architects’ attempts to represent a political system that demanded to be
both rooted in the eternal myth of Rome and in the modern world.
Andrew Wilson
University of Queensland
The Tecton Group and the Architects’ Group: Residues of Collective Practice
The Architect’s Group was a collective announced in Brisbane in 1946, contemporaneous with the establishment of the Architectural Group, the
student collective formed in Auckland that same year, later known as Group Architects. It was inspired by the Tecton Group, formed in the United
Kingdom in 1932, described as an “opportunistic collaboration”, initially between Berthold Lubetkin, and six recent graduates of the Architectural
Association (AA), precursor to other collective endeavours in the inter-war period in the United Kingdom, and The Architects’ Collaborative (TAC)
formed in 1945 by Walter Gropius in the United States. Brisbane’s attempt at collective practice brought together Ron and Rod Voller (Voller
and Voller), a partnership formed between cousins, an architect and an engineer earlier in the year, two university lecturers F Bruce Lucas and
Robert Cummings, who had attended the AA in the 1920s, Colin Trapp, a local recent graduate, and the Polish born architect Heimann (Heinz)
Jacobsohn, who worked as an architect for Brisbane City Council. The collective aimed to “pool knowledge and experience”, and ran for five
years, thanks largely to the efforts of architect Ronald Voller, and Jacobsohn. This paper will examine this moment of transfer of ideas and ethos,
other equivalences, close relationships with educational institutions, modes of practice, and projects produced by the Architect’s Group, to
consider the consequences of this approach read in the context of Australasian architectural culture, as a rehearsal for later corporate practice
structures, in the shift from public to private practice. Andrew Wilson is a Senior Lecturer affiliated with the ATCH Research Centre at the University
of Queensland. He writes on architectural history and criticism with a focus on Queensland’s architectural history in the twentieth century and
contemporary architectural practice in an international context. Edited publications include James Birrell: Work from the Office of James Birrell
(2001) with John Macarthur, Hayes and Scott: Post-war Houses (2005) and Hot Modernism (2015) edited with John Macarthur, Janina Gosseye, and
Deborah van der Plaat.

Anoma Pieris
University of Melbourne
The Featherston Incident: Uncovering New Zealand-Asia Relations through a POW Camp
The violent confrontation between Japanese captives and their military guards at the Featherston Prisoner of War (POW) Camp in New Zealand,
in September 1943, has been recounted differently over the years. During the war, the culpability of the guards in shooting at unarmed prisoners
was masked in the language of mutiny. From the 1970s onwards, efforts of concerned citizens and visiting ex-POWs excavated a tragic story of
needless violence. A new history has been recovered by smoothening out incongruities and misrepresentations that fed on wartime prejudice.
Today a memorial, a peace garden and a museum exhibit commemorates this tragic event, annually bringing Asian visitors to this small rural town.
The physical history of the camp site predates the Incident, chronicling its use as a World War One, military training camp, between 1915 and 1927,
preparing troops for the Western Front. The Second World War, POW Camp at Featherston was designed to hold Japanese captured by US troops,
and was one of three in the region, including two internment camps, first at Pahiatua and later at Matiu/Somes Island. The Featherston Incident
appears as a sharply focused event that uncovers these several spaces connected to global catastrophes. This paper seeks to place the Incident
in its broader wartime context, as a phase in a longer history of global warfare and as a feature of the military and carceral architectures that grew
from that history.
Antony Moulis
Reinterpreting Urban Housing in Post-War Australia Through Le Corbusier’s ‘Murondins’
In Australia, as elsewhere, Le Corbusier’s ideas for urban housing are often called up as influencing post-war approaches. Locally, the extent of that
influence has become a matter for argument based on how such ideas are seen to translate in their travel across the vast distance from Europe
to the antipodes. This is particularly the case for Australia, as translation is seen to happen indirectly through local architects acting as agents, who
promote Le Corbusier’s ideas. This paper shows that this is not exclusively the case. Despite never visiting Australia, Le Corbusier did have occasion
to tackle the issue of urban housing for post war Australia directly. In March, 1950, the architect’s Paris atelier took a request for ‘standard houses’
for Australia from a client named Petrovitch, interested in the possibilities of prefabrication. Personal notes by Le Corbusier reveal his immediate
reaction: an approach encompassing a global scenario incorporating complete design and manufacture involving individuals and organizations
either in France or the United States. The prototype on offer to his Australian client was “Les Murondins”, a scheme invented in 1940 by the
architect and his cousin, Pierre Jeanneret, to satisfy housing needs for refugee populations in France and Belgium displaced by the onset of war.
Redeployed in 1950, the “Murondins” strategy is projected as operative on an international scale – beyond the borders of Europe and the specific
regional issues it was set up to address. The paper will describe the circumstances surrounding Le Corbusier’s “Murondins” project for Australia,
revealed for the first time, using it to reflect back upon the broader reception of the architect’s ideas in the antipodes. Local interpretations of Le
Corbusier’s housing and urban proposals in the post-war period often emphasized its visionary and aesthetic qualities, which became conspicuous
aspects of its reception – for good or ill. Meanwhile, the operational side of the architect’s housing proposals, momentarily witnessed in the failed
“Murondins” project, received less of an airing, pointing to aspects of a social and cultural context that constrained their uptake.
Aristotle Kallis
Keele University

Mobilities and Recontextualisations of Existenzminimum Dwelling: From CIAM2 to Israel’s Ex Nihilo
Regional Development

When in 1951 Arieh Sharon presented his plan for the territorial reorganisation of Israel, he described it as a vast territorial “tabula rasa” to be
moulded through a singular vision by the new state. For Sharon, the critical building block of the new Israeli state and society was the provision of
dwelling to all citizens. The central importance placed on ‘minimal dwelling’ underlined how the very idea of housing as the irreducible building
block of modern rational architecture and planning had travelled from its originary European interwar context to Palestine, becoming the nexus
of an unprecedented project of state-building putatively ex nihilo. I argue that the original programme for the Existenzminimum dwelling (CIAM2)
found its unlikely, fullest, and most ambitious application in post-1948 Israel, charting a distinct path that led to the parabola of the ‘development
towns’ in the 1950s-1970s. Reflexive spatial and temporal distance from the original discussion of the ‘minimal dwelling’ at CIAM2 allowed for a set of
unique recontextualised hybridisations - between city, periphery, and countryside; crisis/emergency and utopia; residential architecture and large-
scale spatial planning; social integration and biopolitical security. Nevertheless, at a time when the architectural orthodoxies of interwar CIAM were
coming under pressure to accommodate historical contextualism and more bottom-up perspectives, the post-1948 Israeli experience reaffirmed
the earlier core beliefs (i) in the universal, deliberately non-localised ‘minimum dwelling’ and (ii) in the power of centralised, large-scale planning as
a total device of state- and society-building.
Ashley Paine
Theatricality and the Reconstruction of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel
“There are two lives of Frank Lloyd Wright: the one he created and the one he lived.”1 So writes Ada Louise Huxtable in her biography of the
iconic American architect. But the double existence she identifies—one real, the other a fabrication—equally applies to the multiple lives of those
Wright-designed buildings that have been collected, moved, and rebuilt by museums. Critically, the relocation and remaking of such buildings
creates an inherent distance: a spatio-temporal gap between the “original” building and its new life as an exhibition—an ostensible stage set on

display. Nowhere in Wright’s work is this distance more palpable than at Wright’s reconstructed Imperial Hotel. Opened in 1923, the Imperial Hotel
maintains an almost mythical presence in Wright’s oeuvre. The design is a unique hybrid of Japanese and Mesoamerican references, bridging the
cultural distance between East and West, ancient and modern. Yet, despite its fame, the hotel succumbed to the pressures of redevelopment and
was demolished in 1968. Nearly a decade later, a reconstruction of the hotel’s lobby and reflecting pool was opened at the Meiji Mura architecture
museum: a much-diminished relic that blurs original salvage with extensive new construction. Through a close formal examination of the building,
this paper re-thinks the architectural value of this aberrant structure, alongside those questions of authenticity that plague the distance between
originals and their reconstructions. In particular, it examines the theatre-like staging of the Imperial Hotel reconstruction which, it is argued,
attempts to collapse the spatio-temporal distance introduced by its relocation, allowing visitors to suspend disbelief, and immerse themselves in
the fictional life of this most famous of Wright’s designs.
Ayano Toki and Mamiko Miyahara

Tohoku University and Saga University
Approaches to the Bungalow Beyond Time and Distance: Notes of Comparison Between India, United Kingdom,
and Australia
The British colonial house type ‘Bungalow’ is a global phenomenon. The term ‘bungalow’ means ‘of or belonging to Bengal’, is said to have come
about when features of a local peasant house type were incorporated into British colonial housing in India as an adaptation to local climatic
conditions. After the colonial appropriation of the type, a single-storied building with central hall, surrounded by a verandah, it was subsequently
adapted to local circumstances in each new location and integrated with the local construction methods, to elicit specific outcomes in each
country. The type has persisted through a process of subtle transformation, according to the architectural culture, climate, natural features and
trends in each country. Measurement of early extant examples was undertaken in each country; as either houses for expatriates in Hill Stations, or
Tea Gardens in India, as holiday houses in British suburbs, a consequence of rapid urbanization that occurred during the industrial revolution, or as
urban or rural houses for settlers in Australia. This paper identifies commonalities and differences that were a consequence of temporal and spatial
distance in the uptake of the bungalow type. The bungalows have not only a global element but also many local elements in ideas, technologies,
construction methods, and materials. The balance of where regionality was emphasized depends on the time and place it was built. A bungalow can
be recognized as a house type that has survived beyond time and distance by changing its balance.
Beth George and Sally Farrah

University of Newcastle and University of Western Australia
Trajectories of Axonometry Through Distances and Disciplines

Unique in its power to interrelate multiple planes with minimal distortion, the axonometric negotiates, as Alan Colquhoun notes, between the
archaic and the modern. In this paper, we evidence this notion, as well as positing other spectra that the drawing type spans: from the strategic
to the poetic, the primitive to the acutely detailed, from urban to conceptual space, from the bird’s eye to the mind’s eye. There are numerous
trajectories possible in a reading of history through the lens of the axonometric, but the path herein collects instances from the medieval, via
Massimo Scolari, to Le Corbusier, Kazimir Malevich, and Ivan Leonidov. By studying different types of axonometrics and the motives for their
employment, as well as their nature as operative, we uncover connections that are driven by warfare, politics, and theoretical shifts. We observe
how qualities such as points of view, orientation, and promiscuity of the rules of projection can be inextricably bound to the author’s conceptual
and critical locale. We explore Le Corbusier’s oeuvre, uncovering how a launch into the aerial vantage through a roof-centric axonometric view
may have been instrumental to the development of his ‘five points’ of architecture. We pursue a connection that sees the axonometric extend
from figural to cognitive space in the hands of Leonidov. Where others identify the post-modern era as the critical locus for the axonometric, these
explorations indicate an earlier genesis. Lastly, we suggest that inheritances from Le Corbusier and Leonidov can be traced into the last pre-digital
moment of architectural drawing in the 1970s and 80s.
Bram De Maeyer
KU Leuven
Conceptualizing Belgian Diplomatic Representation on an Architectural Level: The Purpose-Built Embassy as

Architectural Typology?
In recent years purpose-built embassies have increasingly drawn attention from researchers. Conceived as the architectural flagship of the state
abroad, purpose-built embassies have been studied to unravel the building policies and practices of different state actors. While this case-study
based research has enriched our knowledge on representational strategies, a conceptual discussion approaching purpose-built embassies on a
typological level is less pronounced in architectural research. This paper aims at opening up this discussion using the example of less discussed
Belgian purpose-built embassies – a case which involves a wide variety of typological variations and is very much influenced by the extensive use
of cultural diplomacy deployed by this middle power state. Appearing on a larger scale in the streetscape of capitals since the twentieth century,
purpose-built embassies are the result of a unique building assignment located on foreign soil. They often house a hybrid environment, shaped
by bureaucratic, housing and representational requirements relatable to offices, residences and national pavilions on world’s fairs. So what exactly
constitutes the purpose-built embassy and to what extent can we speak of an architectural typology? In order to address these questions, the
paper is divided into two parts. The first section aims to shed light on the evolutions within Western and in particular Belgian diplomatic patrimony.
The second part touches upon the different spheres within Belgian purpose-built embassies and compares them with established typologies.

Carmen Popescu
École Nationale Supérieure d’architecture de Bretagne/Rennes
Distance as Space: Casting Marginality Out
If the first histories of architecture did not address space by naming it as such, the concept operated under cover – suggested by terms like order,
rationality, proportion, rhythm, harmony –, being turned into a powerful epistemological tool. Not only it distinguished the ‘good’ from the ‘bad’, but
it came to differentiate between architecture and non-architecture. From Seroux d’Agincourt (1783/ 1823) to the 1901 edition of Banister Fletcher’s
A History of architecture, its referentiality had been progressively refined, associated with the norms and principles of architecture. Meanwhile,
its misconception, deriving by a defective use of its substitutive terms, came to be associated with non-canonical architecture. For describing
‘Gothic’ and ‘Arab’ architecture, unconsidered until then, Seroux referred to their ‘bizarre and monstrous particularities’, while Fletcher defined
the non-Western styles by stressing their appeal for decoration. For Fletcher, these were ‘non-historic’ architectures, an exclusion that designated
them as incapable of dealing with Reason (as remarked Gülsüm Baydar; 1998) – and, I will add, as unclassifiable as architecture. The paper examines
how architectural historiography casted its peripheral territories even further away by assessing their production in terms of space. By doing that,
it tackles the notion of ‘distance’ both as the gap between two points (one being perceived as central) and connected to the idea of measure.
By deriving marginality from the conceptualization of space, I question the notions of order and rationalization (defining space) as conveyors of
(implicit) violence, expressed by the very act of exclusion (see Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, 1754).
Caroline Ford (Keynote lecture)

University of California, Los Angeles
Distance as Space: Casting Marginality Out
This lecture focuses on two women architects who were professionally trained prior to the First World War--Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and
Juliette Tréant-Mathé-- whose work, in contrast to most of their female counterparts, focused on social housing in central Europe, the Soviet
Union and France, and who made significant contributions to the development of modern architecture in the interwar period. It explores how
and why their careers converged, while diverging so markedly from other women architects of the period (Lilly Reich, Eileen Gray, and Charlotte
Perriand, who never received formal architectural training). It also considers the relationship between their architectural designs and their social
activism--a phenomenon that has been more effectively explored with respect to male architects in interwar Europe (for example, Bruno Taut).
A central issue is the experience of exile, which explores the theme of “distance looks back,” especially in the case of Schütte-Lihotzky, who was
forced to leave Germany with the rise of Nazism, sending her first to Russia with the Ernst May brigade, then to Paris, and later to Istanbul, at
the invitation of Bruno Taut. The lecture is broadly framed in terms of the relationship between new hygienic as well as environmental concerns
associated with the so-called “new dwelling (neue wohnung)” and architectural modernism in the 1920s and 1930s.
Catherine De Lorenzo
Monash University

Distance Eclipsed in the ‘Big Little Show’: The Australian Pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exhibition

If the Australian government’s tardy response to the invitation to exhibit at the 1937 Paris exhibition showed ‘indifference’, the same cannot be
said of the lively Advisory Committee that in less than three months devised a thoughtful exhibition in Australia’s first modernist pavilion. In late
November 1936 the Committee invited Stephenson, Meldrum & Turner’s Sydney office to design a small (200 sqm) Australian pavilion ‘of the
simplest character’. Ten days later their circular design was approved and sent to Paris for construction. SM&T continued to work with the Advisory
Committee, overseeing the design of the interior fitout and adjacent landscaping. Unlike earlier exhibitions that prioritised primary produce, this
pavilion would exemplify artistic merit, simplicity and ‘the impression of spaciousness’. On entering, the visitor was offered ‘a cycloramic impression
of a new nation’s significance in the world of art and industry’. A composite photographic mural, contemporary paintings, Aboriginal art, Australian
wool products, opals, timbers and books were carefully selected yet displayed so that the whole was greater than the parts. The decision to fuse art
and design paid off, with the visitors’ book showing numerous testimonials to the intelligence and imagination of the whole. The architectural team
and Advisory Committee worked together to ensure the pavilion, whether seen from afar or within its intimate space, would present a coherent and
lively sense of contemporary Australian culture to people from distant lands. The paper draws on archival research in Paris and Australia.
Catherine Lassen
University of Sydney
All About Eva

German Australian architect and critic Eva Buhrich (1915-1976) trained in Munich, the TU Berlin under Hans Poelzig and at the ETH Zurich then led
by Otto Salvisberg. Displaced by war, she and fellow architect husband Hugh Buhrich, arrived via England in Sydney in 1939. Settling in Castlecrag,
an unconventional suburb established by Frank Lloyd Wright associates Walter Burley and Marion Mahony Griffin, the couple built for themselves
two dwellings. The second, designed by Hugh and completed in the 1970s, is today recognized as one of Australia’s finest modern houses. Until
her premature death in April 1976, Eva offered informed reflections within many popular and professional publications in Australia and abroad,
establishing a substantial yet under-described career as an architectural writer. In a number of articles published during the 1960s in the Sydney

Morning Herald, Walkabout and the Berlin based architecture magazine Bauwelt, she closely examined Utzon’s designs for the Sydney Opera House.
From 1957 to the late 1960s she was the Sydney Morning Herald’s respected architecture critic, reviewing for example in 1967, Le Corbusier’s chapel
at Ronchamp. This paper considers Eva Buhrich’s oeuvre through the lens of critical distance. Examining a key selection of her writings, particularly
those suggesting connections between European or American architectural developments and local works, it looks to recover Eva’s critical
perspective. Drawing on previous archival research including a collection of private letters and a scrapbook she kept of her published articles, it will
trace a to date largely undocumented contribution to modern architecture in Australia.
Catherine Molloy
University College Cork
A Tale of Two Buildings and Their Contingent Pedagogies; Separated Only by the Distance of Time

In 1850, after designing the Gothic Quadrangle for Queen’s College Cork, Sir Thomas Deane designed a new medical building (the Clarendon
Building) on an adjoining site which included a museum, lecture theatre, and demonstration rooms. This building has since undergone many
alterations and additions resulting from social, economic and pedagogical needs. O’Donnell and Tuomey’s (OD+T) new scheme incorporates
adaptive reuse of this building and a contemporary extension to form University College Cork’s (UCC) Student Hub which will open in 2019. The
building will house a number of previously dispersed student amenities, including flexible learning spaces, clubs and societies, students union and
campus radio station. This paper narrates the evolution and transformation of the Clarendon Building into the Student Hub while comparing the
works of these two acclaimed Irish architects. This longitudinal study of the building seeks to relay and compare a perspective of society through its
lifespan. The paper focuses specifically on the relationship between architecture and pedagogy and attempts to ascertain how changes in different
learning theories and paradigms have affected the built environment. The historical study benefits from original drawings held at UCC’s archive as
well as campus masterplans, conservation reports and historical photographs. While the study of the contemporary works is supported by many
project documents and drawings, visits to the construction site and interviews with the design team and proposed end users. Although it is easier
to differentiate their style and approach to architecture, commonalities exist between the work of Deane and OD+T and it can be argued that
the contemporary works have been influenced by the former. Given that the adaptive reuse of buildings is strongly advocated, particularly in the
higher education sector, this study provides valuable insights on how we can learn from our built heritage. This study is part of doctoral research
supported by UCC Student Charges and Fees Forum, which aims to investigate the features of the built environment that foster the best learning
experiences.
Céline Bodart
University of Liège; Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris-La-Villette
Practices of Translation as a Way to Look Back on Derridean Years of Architecture

In 2015, Ginette Michaud and Joana Maso published a book that, for the first time, gathered most of Jacques Derrida’s discourses on architecture
translated into French. Presenting such a body of works as “inédit” more than three decades after his arranged encounter with some of these
architects, this belated publication highlights how the architectural reception of Derrida’s philosophy is marked by very different theoretical
interests and pursuits on both sides of the Atlantic. While the Anglo-American architectural historiography describes the presence and influence
of Derrida as crucial for what has been a “gilded age of theory” (Mallgrave, Goodman, 2011), the French-speaking part of architectural debate has
long regarded this particular moment of recent history as a rather trivial issue. From one linguistic milieu to another, what the Derridean years
of architecture have produced has no equivalence. There are divergences between different versions of the same history; there is a speculative
distance between its cultural and institutional effects. This paper proposes a reconsideration of the practices of translation as a way to recompose
history with its differences – an approach developed from the works of Antoine Berman and especially Barbara Cassin. Considering that what is at
stake here goes beyond the mere passage between languages, the history-in-translation can act as a reflexive distance through different historical,
cultural, and generational milieus. This point will be argued from the proposal of two experimental cases: a first translation into French of Derrida’s
Haunt (Wigley, 1993) and an (un-)translation of Chora L Works (Kipnis, Leeser, 1996).
Daniel A. Barber
University of Pennsylvania
Emergency Exit: Looking Back on the Distance to 1.5 Degrees

In Amitav Ghosh’s recent text, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, he describes a scene in the near future: when
“museum goers turn to the art and literature of our time,” Ghosh asks, “will they not look, first and most urgently, for traces and portents of
the altered world of their inheritance?” The museum patron, looking back, will search the walls of museum and the building itself for clues that
knowledge of climate instability impacted the cultural and professional discourses of the period. Will they find them? The recent report from the
International Panel on Climate Change, with its unequivocal indication of urgency, further disrupts the historical discussion of architecture and
environment. I will present a schematic outline of the history of 20th century architecture from the perspective of 2070 – when carbon emissions
have disrupted the social milieu beyond recognition. Familiar buildings will be reinterpreted, new themes and icons emerge. By looking back on
the architectural history of the 20thcentury, new historical threads emerge. Looking back, architecture’s potential is seen to be as much mediatic
as built. Eliding the essential question of the present – how, or why, to build amidst carbon accumulation - focusing on media also allows for an
architectural history to be seen as simultaneously symbolic and material: a screen on which to watch cultural change; and a medium, a substance,
from which to produce it. And yet – how to write an urgent history? In this architectural history of the near future, new methods and disciplinary
adjacencies will also come to light – challenges archival and institutional, and, in particular, attempts to integrate architectural narratives with those
of the environmental humanities and the ambition towards a just energy transition.

Denise Costanzo
Pennsylvania State University
Too Close to Home: Critical Distance and Venturi’s Columbus Monument

After his mother’s house, Robert Venturi’s most personal work was built for his own ethnic community of Italian-Americans in Philadelphia: the
Columbus Monument (1988–92). Although Venturi’s name is indelibly inscribed on its granite base among the project’s supporters, histories of
his career pass over this project quickly, for excellent reasons. Scholars might understandably keep a safe distance from an undeniably unlovely
monument, credibly christened “the ugliest obelisk in the history of civilization.” Its cartoonish form also commemorates a historic figure whose
stature was already in free-fall when the project began. Relegating this project to the margins of Venturian scholarship distances the historically
significant architect from a proximate, problematic work. Yet the architect already accomplished this task, by a designing a compact, conceptually
condensed object that exploits and collapses problems of remoteness and contiguity. Venturi cultivated an intimate detachment with his own
context throughout his career. He built a global reputation on physical journeys and intellectual meanderings that framed his familiar yet aloof
relationships with modernism and architectural history, Italy and America, even his own family. These literal and figurative distances gave Venturi the
cultural authority to design works worthy of history¾except when they are not, because they lie far from the narratives we hope to construct. How
much distance do we need to assess Venturi’s most disturbing architectural self-portrait, which binds his home city to Rome, modernist ethics to
ethnic grudges, critical practice to historiographic critique? A quarter-century should suffice.
Edson Cabalfin
University of Cincinnati
Shifting Definitions of the Vernacular in 20th-Century Philippine Architecture

The concept of what is considered ‘vernacular’ in the architecture of the Philippines have continually shifted throughout the twentieth century.
The paper interrogates the definition of vernacular architecture in the Philippines by comparing the various perspectives promoted during the
American-colonial period in the first half of the twentieth century and the post-independence period after World War II. These comparisons are
analyzed in terms of how the varying interpretations of the vernacular were deployed to argue for modernization and nation-building efforts during
the colonial and postcolonial periods. In most cases, modern architecture intersected with ideas of the vernacular as a way to simultaneously
indigenize colonization and domesticate modernization programs. The research inspects a range of projects including public and private buildings,
commercial and institutional architecture, as well as design competitions and publications. Through a historical-interpretative analysis, this
research also focuses on the mode of production of vernacularization as a process in modern architecture in the Philippines, by inspecting the key
agents, institutions, and modes of disseminating an idea of ‘vernacular’. By interrogating the architectural intent and manifestation of colonial and
postcolonial architecture, the paper argues that the conception and construction of what is considered ‘vernacular’ in Philippine architecture was
not necessarily static and consistent throughout the 20th century but was dynamic and at times contradictory.
Elizabeth Musgrave
Between Myth and Reality: Constructing a Modern Architectural Identity in Rural Queensland


From the 1960s, the projection of an Australian architecture identity nationally and internationally drew from myths surrounding white settlement
and centred on the settler homestead in its rural setting, notwithstanding the facts of a highly urbanised population and a pluralist architectural
setting. This paper reflects on the distance that opens up for the architect between architectural intentions linked to faithfully reconstructing
images of identity and the reality of facts conditioning the individual architecture project. It will address these issues through discussion primarily
of one project, “Morocco” (1963) by John Dalton Architect and Associates for Stan and Noela Whippel, and located on the western Darling Downs
between Roma and St George. By 1963, Dalton had built a series of homestead “style” houses in the dry sclerophyll forested suburbs of west
Brisbane. Black and white images of these houses, taken before manicured gardens replaced eucalypt saplings and native grasses, are convincing
of the settler homestead idea. However, the “Morocco” project required negotiation of the homestead “style” with the reality of station life. This
paper will compare “Morocco” with other contemporaneous architect designed homesteads, and the O’Dwyer homestead completed some 20
years later by the same practice. It will address literal and figurative distance; the distance between the ideal image and particular circumstance,
between myth and fact and the problems brought about by remoteness and the glamorisation of the bush myth.
Elke Couchez
Decorating Distance: Civic Dispositions in Non-professional Environmental Education
In the 1970s, the Jewish émigré architect and writer Paul Ritter (1925-2010) initiated a series of experiments with modelled concrete in Western
Australia. Paul Ritter taught at the Nottingham School of Architecture from 1952 to 1964 and became the first city planner of Perth, WA in 1965. After
his very own Planned Environment and Educreation Research Institute (P.E.E.R) licensed a machine to model concrete by using polystyrene moulds,
Ritter was asked to design a series of seven pedestrian underpasses in Rockingham Park in Perth. These walkways formed a footpath system in a
pioneering Radburn-style housing scheme often used by children on their way to school. By decorating the distance between home and school
with animals and inserting games on the concrete surface, Ritter wanted to make the ‘anxiety-ridden’ walkway from home to school into an
‘attractive playspace’ or a ‘clubroom for children’. This paper takes Ritter’s experimental so-called ‘sculp-crete’ designs and his collaborations with
school children as a starting point to reflect on the architect’s position in the civic realm and in non-professional education.

Federico Deambrosis
Politecnico di Milano
Transatlantic Proximities / Ambiguous Opportunities: The Multiple Paths of Italian Designers in

Argentina, 1948-1958
It is very well known that Italian emigration strongly contributed to increase Argentine population. The high amount of hybridizations provoked by
such a transfer in almost every sphere of life is known as well. Architecture offers an effective perspective on this kind of relationships. Actually,
since the end of the 19th Century Italian architects found great opportunities on the Rio de la Plata banks, giving a recognisable contribution to
the shaping of Argentine cities. The paper observes the Argentine experiences of some Italian designers between 1948 and 1958, a decade in which
the postwar wave of architectural migrations started and developed. But those were also the years in which Argentine architecture, after CIAM
6 (Bridgwater 1947), started to attract the attention of international observers. At the same time, Italian culture was engaged in redefining itself,
overlapping on the die inherited from the Fascist years new issues and values, most of which would have concurred to define the then emerging
category of “made in Italy”. Therefore, the paths of some Italian designers who had the opportunity to work in Argentina in the considered period
can offer effective perspectives to observe the ambiguous outcome produced by the interaction of cultural proximity with physical (but also
political) distance and professional opportunities.
Francesco Marullo
University of Illinois
A Project of Distance: Bertolt Brecht’s Chicago

Despite having never set foot in the city, Bertolt Brecht was obsessed with Chicago. A jumble of mud and steel, elevated trains, towers, grain
elevators, slaughterhouses, jazzmen and boxers, brokers and gangsters, Chicago embodied the most advanced traits of a modern capitalist
metropolis. For Brecht — who believed that to stimulate the attention of an audience it was necessary to make the world (or everyday reality)
strange, distant, and foreign — Chicago was remote enough to become a laboratory for analyzing the forces ruling life in the immediate present: an
“analogous” Berlin. Brecht utilizes distance as a method to generate images for understanding rather than to be seen, words for questioning more
than persuading, concepts for dissecting more than representing. To look at the world from an estranged point of view was a way to rediscover and
reinvent it. This process of estrangement interrupts the automatic association between subjects and objects, thereby de-alienating the self from
all-encompassing social frames of production and opening up new possibilities to critically interrogate reality. From the stockyards to the grain silos,
from the lumberyards to the boards of exchange, from the masses of workers on strike to the railway monopolies, from the volatile abstraction of
finance to the gravity of real-estate speculation, Brecht unveiled the violence of industrial capitalism at work. By aligning three of his early works
as a montage of scenes — bodies, wheat, and meat — the paper reconstructs Brecht’s project of distance, delving into the political economy of
Chicago and its architecture of production at the onset of the 20th century.
Gevork Hartoonian
University of Canberra
Towards a Retrospective Criticism: How Not to Historicize!

Historical distance is a modernist mental construct whether it “looks” backward or forward. Its visibility was first noted in the rhetoric of the French
literary quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns. This debate also introduced a temporal understanding of past and present in conjunction
with an understanding of history that most often looks backward to underline the Neue Zeit, the new and timely. Central to the objectives of this
paper is to explore the crisis that the concept of distance injected into the uniform horizon of the pre-Enlightenment discourses on time and
history, establishing a linear rapport between the past, present, and future. One consequence of this disposition was to conceive the present as
the fulcrum of past and future. Another was to plant the seeds of a totality, which, contrary to the Humanist perceived unity between narrative
and image highlighted the Marxian notion of social class (subject of history?) as Modernity collided with the emerging production and consumption
system of capitalism. Drawing from Ernst Bloch’s discourse on “non-contemporaneity,” this paper will discuss the problematic involved in the
Humanist notion of historical distance (historicism). It will posit the concept of “retrospective criticism” as a constructive project to critique
contemporary architecture. To this extent the paper will argue that the digital acceleration of time is central to the contemporary problematic
visibility of the notion of distance. It will claim that distance is not literally there in the distance, but is rather woven into the now-time, and that it’s
the task of the historian to present its difference.
Glenn Harper
Compressed Distances and Photographic Imagery: The Communication of New Brutalism Within the Professional
Journal Architecture in Australia, 1965-1967
In 1965 the professional journal of the RAIA, “Architecture in Australia”, commenced publishing a series of photographic covers as compelling
black and white images by concentrating on unpainted brickwork, undressed timber and elementary steelwork. Taken separately by Max Dupain,
David Moore and Harry Sowden, these commissioned images were then cropped by the journal’s editor Colin Brewer to not only emphasise the
materiality of various Australian architectural projects through a foreshortening of architectonic space but to also demonstrate a growing awareness
of a distant European derived architectural discourse, known as New Brutalism. This paper examines how such photographic “close-ups” were used

to support a line of editorial inquiry being considered by the journal at the time. Conveying an agenda that materials should be used “as found”,
such an attitude for New Brutalism, while not always described, was certainly familiar to a professional Australian readership especially through the
writings by Robin Boyd, including “The Australian Ugliness” (1960). Portraying a range of uses, for example, a library and even a residential complex
for the elderly, these images sought to reframe significant international development by acknowledging Boyd’s interpretation of New Brutalism and
his approach to building. Assuming that modern Australian architectural photography is part documentary and part artistry, it was the creative
endeavour of the editor and his ‘eye’ for the formatting of these photographic covers with their noir aesthetics which importantly announced the
arrival of New Brutalism and its subsequent endurance in mainstream Australian architecture.
Irène Vogel Chevroulet

EPFL College of Humanities & Architecture School
Paths of the Gods and Architects: From Japan to the Acropolis
This paper questions the circulation of Japanese culture through European intellectual networks since the opening of the archipelago in 1853.
We argue firstly that the archipelago’s self-imposed political distance from the Asian Continent is one of the reasons for the crystallization
of Japanese specificities and that secondly, geographical distance enhances the impact of these mysterious specificities on the creativity of
European architects. Finally, we show that despite these political and geographical distances, the common quests of both European and Japanese
culturesfound at each historical period are at the core of these cultural exchanges. These encounters around common roots stimulate the
efficiency and inspiration resulting from these intellectual networks. 20th c. Western interest focuses among other thing on Shinto, — the path of
the gods — and naturality on the arts. We will question how these two specificities found a resonance in Dimitris Pikionis’s work. Among his sources
of information were newspaper clippings, his own books on Japanese art, Hideto Kishida’s Japanese Architecture (1948), Tetsuro Yoshida’s Das
Japanische Wohnhaus (1935) and The Japanese House and Garden (1955). Here, we consider his Acropolis paths landscaping in Athens from 1954
to 1958 by comparing descriptions of paths leading to Japanese temples and gardens in books that were at his disposal. Our findings are grounded
firstly on our previous study of Japanese architecture and landscape gardening texts, secondly by bibliographic research, thirdly on the analysis of
Pikionis’s notes and collection of drawings archived at Benaki Museum and of his collaboration with his daughter Agni Pikioni.
Irina Davidovici
ETH Zurich
‘Icons of Compensation’: The Swiss Alps as Intercultural Boundary

“Distance is as characteristic of Australia as the mountains are of Switzerland.”1 The comparison with which Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey
began his book The Tyranny of Distance was intended to communicate the centrality of distance for Australian geography, history, and culture.
As the more commonplace term of comparison, Switzerland’s relation to the Alps was the default cultural datum against which the notion of
distance would more easily be grasped. To be sure, Blainey’s implication was grounded in a history of some hundred years, over which Switzerland’s
national and international identity was inextricably linked to its mountainous topography. The firm connection in the popular imagination between
Switzerland and the Alps has been driven by two functions, symbolic and pragmatic, targeting visitors and locals alike. As an instrument of political
propaganda and touristic advertisement, the Alps have forged a definitive topos in the Swiss social and cultural psyche, interpreted alternatively
as an obstacle to political unity and as symbol of national resistance. Starting from the premise of the Swiss Alps as a spatial boundary between

Italian and Germanic cultures, this paper is organised into a sequence of three historical chapters, each exploring different strategies for bridging
this distance. The first examines the Alps’ instrumentalisation in forging a mythical national identity to support the fledgling confederation. The
second, focusing on the Gotthard Pass, considers the impact of transit infrastructures on the alpine territory. Through the device of ‘crossings’,
the third chapter traces a number of significant professional exchanges between Italian, Italian-Swiss and German-Swiss architectural cultures, as
mediated in the 1960s and 1970s across the barrier of the Alps. In conclusion, by discussing the architectural implications of the Alps as “icons of
compensation” (Marcel Meili) this paper asks how the historical convention of mountains as archetypal “wilderness” confronts the actuality of their
domestication.
Isabel Rousset
The Image of the American City in German Ethnography

The 1893 Chicago World’s Fair is usually taken to be the departure point in tracing the beginnings of European interest in the American urban
environment. Soon after this event, city planners such as Werner Hegemann began to actively promote transatlantic exchange in the field of
urbanism. The study of American urban culture was, however, widespread within German ethnography in the nineteenth century as a whole field
of American studies (Amerikakunde) emerged in order to ground German fascination with the distant continent in appropriate scientific rigor. This
paper examines how the American city was perceived in German ethnographic literature and gives particular consideration to the geographer
Friedrich Ratzel’s 1876 book Cities and Cultures of North America. In describing the urban form of cities including New York, Boston, Philadelphia,
and New Orleans, and speculating on the nature of their growth, Ratzel’s study helped progress key theories of cultural progress that would
become essential to his contribution to the field of geography. The paper examines the ways in which Ratzel imagined new knowledge of a culturally
and geographically conditioned architecture to have the capacity to describe the historical character of modern cities, and in turn, to provide the
tools to reform them. While Ratzel’s text on American urban culture has been relatively ignored, it was nonetheless important in making the subject
of the modern city open to a more rigorous type of reflective effort that would later characterize classic studies of urban sociology in the early
twentieth century.

Jacky Bowring and Bindy Barclay
Lincoln University and Independent Researcher
Collecting, Classifying and Designing: What Three Gisborne Gardens Tell Us About Distance

Two hundred and fifty years ago, in 1769, HMS Endeavour voyaged through the South Pacific, an envoy of Europe. This paper focuses on a critical
aspect of Endeavour’s voyage: the collecting of plants. With their first landfall, in Gisborne, botanists Banks and Solander set about collecting
and classifying specimens, amidst the chaos of first encounters, and the death of a number of local Maori. Looking back at this moment from
the perspective of three contemporary gardens reveals three distances. First, scientific taxonomy imposes the distance of classification into a
European system. Second, the collecting and classification of 40 plants distances them from the numerous remaining flora in the area. And third, an
apparent distance between ‘native’ and ‘exotic’ begins to open up. These three distances are explored through three recent gardens developed in
Gisborne. While each garden in some way references the arrival of the Endeavour and the collecting of plants, they develop different framings and
narratives. First, the Banks Garden was created by the Department of Conservation at the Cook Landing site. Supported by interpretation panels,
this garden is a conventional ‘exhibition’ of specimens. Second, the Endeavour Garden, is a private garden owned by an American couple, with a
perennial garden based directly on the plant list. Finally, the 1769 Garden is being developed by Dame Anne and Jeremy Salmond, including not only
those plants on the list, but also those that made up the ‘impression’ that the native flora would have made on the visitors from Europe.
Janina Gosseye and Donald Watson

ETH Zürich and University of Queensland
Architects on the Verge: Distance in Proximity at ‘The Pleasures of Architecture’
Between 23 and 26 May 1980, the New South Wales chapter of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects held a conference in Sydney, entitled ‘The
Pleasures of Architecture’. International guests invited to speak at this conference were Michael Graves, George Baird and Rem Koolhaas. To feed
the discussion, the conference organisers invited twenty prominent Australian architects to submit a design to fictionally complete Engehurst, an
1830s villa in Paddington (Sydney) originally designed by architect John Verge, which was never completed and of which only a fragment still existed.
All schemes were presented in an exhibition that took place in parallel with the conference and all entries were also published in full in the April/
May 1980 issue of Architecture Australia. Recent scholarship has pinpointed ‘The Pleasures of Architecture’ conference as a watershed moment in
Australian architectural history – although, sadly, not a very ‘pleasurable’ one. The considerable conceptual distance that manifested itself between
Australia’s modern masters and proponents of post-modernism resulted in an acrimonious atmosphere, which was felt both at the conference
and in the discourse that erupted in its wake. Examining some of the entries that were submitted for the Engehurst design competition, this paper
argues that the all too black-and-white discourse that emerged in the aftermath of this conference failed to appreciate the alternative (non-
modernist, non-postmodernist), critical approaches that were formulated in response to the task of completing Verge’s design; approaches that
sought transcended binary oppositions and sought to forge a way forward, out of the crisis of modernity.
Jasper Ludewig
From ‘Mapoon’ to Mapoon and Back Again: Architecture and Transnationalism on a German Mission in Far
North Queensland

This paper considers two places, both named Mapoon. The first, a California bungalow, built in 1919 and located in the suburbs of Sydney; the
second, a German Moravian mission station, established in 1891 and located in Far North Queensland. The distance that separates these two
Mapoons traces the arc of the paper’s discussion, wherein mission stations are explored as strategically important sites in the governance of an
emergent Australian nation. In its conception, the Mapoon mission would serve as a mechanism in the wider regulation of Queensland’s colonial
frontier, working to segregate the colony’s Aboriginal population from settler-colonial expansion. The architecture of the mission station formed
the material basis of this project and was modelled on German-Moravian Pietist settlements established throughout the globe since the eighteenth
century. The paper argues that the history it describes is one of transnational connection, in which organisational structures, spheres of activity and
individual agents traversed porous imperial, colonial and national borders. It examines this mobility – of ideas, expertise, and institutional projects
– in order to complicate the status of the Mapoon mission as an object of an Australian architectural history. It seeks to question the notional limits
of these categories – of what can meaningfully be called “Australian” in this historical moment, and of what is deemed permissible as an example of
historical “Architecture” – in order to consider how the two Mapoons mediated a variety of trajectories and intentions that collapsed the distance
between a tropical periphery, and the metropolitan concerns of an emergent Australian nation.
John Macarthur
Architecture ‘In the Service of Clouds’: The Picturesque and Aquatint

The introduction of aquatint printing to Britain in the mid eighteenth century played a crucial role in the dissemination of the picturesque, and
with that a fundamental change in the representation and indeed conception of architecture. The technical innovation of tonal images in which
buildings could be better represented with skies and foliage, occurred at the same time as the conceptual development of the picturesque and

the value it put on empirical understanding of viewpoint. I argue that on one side of this watershed is the long history of architectural drawings as
descriptions of objects made present; and, on the other, a concept of representation of the building across the distance introduced by subjective
experience. In terms of architectural technique such images are crucially about viewpoint and how to conceptualise the form of a building when its
plan is irregular and fitted to site and program. These fundamental principles of modern architecture took many decades to be fully conceptualised,
but they were indicated in aquatint’s ability to express the contingency of skies, foliage and the weathering of building materials. The paper
discusses the prints of architects Thomas and James Malton in relation to the development of water-colour painting and aquatint by Paul Sandby.
The argument is framed in relation to Hubert Damisch’s theory of the relation of perspective drawing and painting.
John Montague
American University of Sharjah

‘Un Étranger Deux Fois’: John Rocque’s ‘Outsider’ Maps of London and Dublin
This paper explores the contingent nature of Huguenot mapmaker John Rocque’s eighteenth-century representations of architecture and the city.
Best known for his seminal 1746 map of London, its 24-sheet plan remains a somewhat fraudulent example of his representational style, the control
of which he lost before publication. His Dublin map, made a decade later, is his under-celebrated master work. Its depth and range of observed
detail was an opportunistic rebuttal to competition from the resident, and openly protectionist, city surveyor, but was also compromised by errors
of recording and a brazen fudging of vital topographical information. In the face of the relative paucity of biographical documentation for Rocque,
or for other refugees in his professional hinterland – city mapmakers, engravers, printers, image makers, designers – Rocque’s surviving maps
present opportunities for deciphering not only the city, but the immigrant experience of ‘city making’ as well. At the same time, the map is itself a
mode of distancing, a delimited encryption of the material and spatial substance of the city to an abstraction made by marks on a two-dimensional
surface. Just as Panofsky showed the art of perspective to be both window to another world, and itself a symbolic form, Louis Marin deconstructed
the map image as both text – representing the city – and figure – artefact in its own realm. In this regard, I will briefly survey the socio-historical
values encased in Rocque’s map texts, and re-attend to the maps in themselves with all their distance from the disappeared cities they looked to
represent.
John Ting
University of Canberra

Vernacular Prefabrication in the Colonial Context: The 1862 Bintulu Type Fort in Sarawak
The design, procurement and implementation of the Sarawak government’s 1862 fort in Bintulu (on the northwest coast of Borneo) represented
modern approaches. It was a standard design that appeared to contrast with vernacular and indigenous typologies. Its primary structure was
prefabricated in the capital, Kuching, before being shipped out for erection. While defensive, it also introduced modern institutions to newly
acquired areas. The Bintulu Type fort was also implemented at Sibu (1862), Mukah (1863), and Baleh (1875). Unlike most colonial jurisdictions,
Sarawak’s government explicitly relied on the dynamic maintenance of political relationships with locals, and negotiations and collaborations
with indigenous, regional migrant and colonial groups to maintain authority. Its governance was a hybrid of vernacular and modern systems, and
its European leaders indigenised their rule. This hybridity and indigenisation extended to fort architecture. Second-generation British colonial
buildings in Southeast Asia emulated metropolitan designs while masking local involvement. However, the vernacular materials and construction

of Bintulu Type fort clearly show the involvement of regional migrant and indigenous actors. While prefabrication and remote manufacture can
be considered modern, the vernacular carpentry traditions adopted for the forts were demountable and therefore appropriate for remote
reconstruction. Using historical ethnography methods and fieldwork at the last extant Bintulu Type fort at Kapit, this paper explores how vernacular
and modern approaches were brought together in the procurement and implementation of the Bintulu Type forts.
Jorge Correia
University of Minho
Focusing Beyond Europe: Islamic Urbanism Decoded Through the Lens of Pioneer Photographers

During the 1800s, looking east represented the realm of exoticism and mystery from a European perspective. Literature and painting provided
perfect canvases for fertile explorations of the unknown and unlimited boundaries for imagination. By the mid-century, several pioneer Western
photographers travelled to the Middle East, homing in images which encapsulated such imagery. The reception of these shots was imbued with
Orientalist impressions. At a time when Western powers were looking to a decaying Ottoman Empire with increasing colonial appetite, images
helped conveying notions of chaos and disorder, insalubrity or lack of self-governance. Yet, through the very same pictures, the perception of a
different reality was already available, challenging lens and representations. This paper wishes to abandon stereotypes and interpret the codes of
the traditional Islamic city as they were being offered to those who dared to break the frame of Orientalism. In the 19th century, the negotiation
between physical and political distances prevented an already reluctant international community from reading architecture and cities, showing
how levels of resilience to evidence blocked the conscience of the other and the different. Decoding the traditional Islamic built environment
requires a visual scrutiny of degrees of halal, the public sphere, and haram, considered private, forbidden or sacred. Thus, critical distance offers
a morphological turn, allowing us to reflect on the construction of identities beyond Europe and to question veils of isolation and canals of
communication. From panoramic to ground views, streets or buildings, examining these photographs means acknowledging their contemporaneity
and timeliness.

Julia Gatley
University of Auckland

Back to the South: Cyril Knight and the Modernisation of the Auckland School of Architecture
Like many schools of architecture, that at Auckland University College (now the University of Auckland) modernised in the 1950s and early 1960s,
dispensing with the last of its Beaux-Arts practices and giving increased attention to town planning, building science and research. It was often
newly appointed academic leaders who realised such modernising initiatives, but at the Auckland School of Architecture, modernisation was led
by a long-serving Chair and Dean, and indeed someone who was not known as a modernist. Cyril Roy Knight (1893-1972) was a Sydneysider and a
graduate of the University of Liverpool. He served as New Zealand’s first Chair and Dean of Architecture from 1925 until his retirement in 1958. This
paper focuses on Knight’s ideas about modernism and the modernisation of the Auckland School. It shows that while Knight was not a committed
modernist, he was interested in international modernism. Underscoring his initiatives to modernise the School, however, was his concern that it was
vulnerable to becoming out of date because New Zealand was geographically isolated and had only one architecture school. In an effort to keep
the Auckland School up to date, Knight worked hard to understand international developments in architectural education and took his lead from
the overseas trends. His approach can be described as considered gradualism. Post-war growth meant he was able to appoint multiple new staff
in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This had unexpected effects for the School, as new staff gravitated around those teaching and practising regional
modernism.
Kah-Wee Lee
Institution National University of Singapore

Casino as Genealogy: Reflections on the Criticality of Historical Distance
When the controversial casino, Marina Bay Sands, opened in Singapore in 2006, it signalled more than just a reversal of a 40-year ban on casino
development. What was once a vice that threatened the moral fabric of a nation had transformed into a legitimate business and global icon. How
can history open up critical distance that pierces this camouflage, and where is architecture in the critical potential of history? These questions led
me to investigate the history of legal interventions that criminalized gambling selectively, and how that has allowed the nation-state to monopolize
gambling through a lottery since the 1970s. Throughout this period, the contradiction of criminalizing and legalizing gambling simultaneously was
justified by directing lottery revenue toward nation-building projects, such as the construction of the National Stadium (1973). I show how this
transformation from “bad money” to “good money” was reflected in the design of the stadium as well as the ritual of the public lottery draw.
While many scholars have studied sporting structures as emblems of nation-building, few recognised the inverse relationship these had with the
control of vice. I argue that this relationship became significant only because of a particular reading of the present. In this sense, historical distance
becomes effective as critique because it never leaves the present. The stadium, the lottery draw and Marina Bay Sands collapse onto the same
plane and reveal similar strategies of camouflage that shape what is socially acceptable at a given moment in time.
Katti Williams

Learning to Fly: Distance and the Wartime Experience of Australian Architect Stanley George Garrett
This paper explores the influence of distance on the work of the Australian architect Stanley George Garrett. Garrett was part of a generation
of young architects whose horizons were broadened by their experience of service during the First World War. But Garrett’s own experience of
distance was twofold: as a pilot in the Australian Flying Corps, he was not only geographically distant from home, but also aerially distant from
the earth. His was a rare and privileged view of the urban environment and the wider landscape. For Garrett, this paper speculates, aerial and
geographical distance provided freedom from constraint: from his role within a family building business, from the suburbs of Melbourne, and—most
strikingly—from a conventional view, allowing him to see the world in a different way. The physical nature of flying, the witnessing of the destruction
of war, and his immediate post-war architectural training in London, all facilitated a conceptual and visual distance from the status quo. This paper
explores how these experiences influenced Garrett’s design for the Australian Flying Corps Memorial at Point Cook, which was dedicated in 1938.
His own letters home from the front form the basis for interrogating the influence of this experience on his architectural practice
Kirsty Volz
Architecture as an Act of Service: Reframing the Careers of Women Architects Working For the Queensland
Public Service in the Interwar Period

Renewed interest in the work of public service architects has been spurred on by the demise of Public Works departments and the high-profile
demolition of post-war public housing projects, both in Australia and internationally. To mark this shift there have been several attempts to record
the works of civil servant architects. Most notably was the exhibition Public Works – Architecture by Civil Servants curated by Reinier de Graaf for
the 2012 Venice Biennale. This recent work has re-positioned civil service architects as utopian visionaries who traded in recognition for a social
agenda. Using this lens to analyse the work of public service architects, this paper looks further back to the interwar period to reframe the work
of three women working for the Queensland Department Public Works. Investigating the work of public service architects has also broadened
discussions about the problems of authorship in documenting the histories of architects. It has also highlighted the agency of architects working
for the greater good, performing architecture as a service, instead of personal acclaim. This paper elaborates on these themes through the work of
three of the women working for the Queensland Government in the interwar period, Eunice Slaughter, Ursual Jones and Nell McCredie.

Léa-Catherine Szacka
University of Manchester and Harvard GSD, Rotterdam
British Television and the ‘Abolition of Every Possibility of Remoteness’
In his 1951 essay “The Thing”, philosopher Martin Heidegger warns us: “all distances in time and space are shirking. Man now reaches overnight,
by plane, places which formerly took weeks and months of travel.” He continues: “the peak of this abolition of every possibility of remoteness
is reached by television, which will soon pervade and dominate the whole machinery of communication.” As rightfully observed by Heidegger,
television, more than any other medium before, would change the way we perceive time and space, as well as our understanding of distance, both
physical and conceptual. In Britain, the television act of 1954 ushered in the creation of the first commercial television network in the country,
while breaking the monopoly of the BBC and allowing for a decentralised geography of broadcasting. As a consequence, theatre owners Cecil
and Sidney Bernstein created Granada television, the station for the North that went on-air on 3 May 1956. Located in the hearth of the city of
Manchester, Granada television was the first purpose-built television studio production centre. By its location, it reduced the distance between
television production and its consumption. But the mid 1950s also saw the arrival of a technological invention that was to radically changed
television’s modes on consumption: the first television wireless remote controls, the Flash-matic (1955) and the Zenith Space Command (1956) were
invented and allowed to operate the device from a distance. Based on historical material and visual analysis of popular sources, this paper looks
at British television and the “abolition of every possibility of remoteness”. On the one hand, it investigates the evolution, from the mid 1950s to the
mid 1980s, of Grenada television and its relation to the city of Manchester and the territory of Britain. On the other hand, it links the macro to the
micro, connecting this chapter of the history of British television to the rise of the remote control as a device that redefined television’s role within
domesticity.
Lilian Chee
National University of Singapore

The Archipelagic Distance: The Sea and its Dialectical Image
This paper re-examines Walter Benjamin’s notion of the dialectical image through Singapore’s seascape, as depicted in SEA STATE (2004- present),
a multimedia, ongoing visual art project by Singapore-based artist Charles Lim. In the midst of Singapore’s alienation from its own sense of
islandness, and the accelerated nature of coastal transformation by industry and territorial expansion, SEA STATE probes for cultural and affective
ways of looking at, and talking about, the sea. Marine infrastructure is read allegorically, and their SEA STATE portraits call to mind the fluidity and
associative processes of vision and perception. In the dialectical image – necessarily residing in a fragment often inconsequential in normative
historical terms – Benjamin proposes the embedding of contradictory perspectives, and the interpellation of past into present time. The dialectical
image is critical in reconceptualizing a new materialist historiography wherein time is nonlinear but relational, repetitive and cyclical. Through this
image, a critical perspective may be gained in an otherwise unassailable milieu. Working through the dialectical images of the sea in SEA STATE, the
paper concludes by projecting an inventory of the sea which is simultaneously allegorical and historical.
Lisa Marie Daunt


Communities of Faith: Regional Queensland’s Innovative Modern Post-War Church Architecture

The tyranny of distance delayed the construction of permanent ecclesiastical buildings in most townships in regional Queensland. While Brisbane,
the State’s capital had made significant strides in church construction by the mid-twentieth century, Queensland’s regional areas remained
remarkably, even deplorably underserviced. From the 1950s, Queensland’s Christian denominations embarked on church building campaigns and
engaged local architects to create some of the most daring and expressive modern churches in the state. These include ‘maverick architect’ Edwin
Oribin’s Mareeba Methodist church (1960) and St Andrew’s Presbyterian in Innisfail (1961); Neville Willis’ St Andrew’s Church of England in Longreach
(1960); and Lund Hutton Newell Black and Paulsen’s St Alban’s Church of England in Cunnamulla (1963). These buildings are beacons within their
regional townships. Today, more post-war ecclesiastical buildings are protected by state heritage listings in Queensland’s remote regional areas,
than in Brisbane proper – a staggering ratio of four to one. It appears that despite their remoteness, international architectural ideas penetrated
deep into Queensland’s regional townships. What’s more, their remoteness seems to have created freedom to experiment. This paper examines
the tyrannies and felicities of geographical distance. Based on interviews, archival research and fieldwork, it traces how international and national
ideas regarding modern church architecture circulated in Australia and reached Queensland’s remote regional areas, where they inspired some of
Queensland’s most exciting ecclesiastical experiments.
Lloyd Jones
Roots in the Most Unlikely of Places: Reconsidering the Queensland Art Gallery

In 1973, Queensland architect Robin Gibson was awarded the commission for the Queensland Art Gallery (QAG), after winning a limited design
competition. Shortly after, Gibson travelled overseas on a government funded tour of major international art galleries including, the North
Jutland Art Museum, Aalborg (Alvar & Elissa Aalto with Jean-Jacques Baruël, 1972) and the Oakland Museum, California (Roche-Dinkeloo, 1969).
The purpose of the tour was to more accurately define the requirements of a modern art gallery. The resulting QAG, developed in response
to Gibson’s findings, is a highly considered gallery building, incorporating generous natural light and a suite of exhibition spaces of varying
dimensions and architectural qualities. When opened in 1982, it received considerable national acclaim and was later awarded the RAIA Zelman
Cowen Award for Public Architecture. However, despite this national recognition, the project received little exposure internationally. In the only
known criticism of the QAG published internationally, critic Boris Kazanski, suggests that the ‘international’ design language of the gallery failed to
communicate with the surrounding context. This paper proposes that Kazanski’s response was prejudiced by global discussions of post-modern

concepts, such as Frampton’s ‘Critical Regionalism’ which were being enthusiastically discussed in local and international publications during the
period the QAG opened. Kazanski, like other international journals, appeared to favour Australian projects that engaged with these debates often
through architectural responses to climate and comfort. Consequently, the QAG’s response to place through careful layering of light, surrounding
environments and historical precedent has not yet been considered
Lori Smithey
University of Michigan

The Distance of Lateness: Charles Moore’s Domestic Fabrications
In the transition from nineteenth-century categorizations of late-style to twentieth-century theorizations of late capital, the concept of lateness
underwent a sea change in regards to distance. In the first instance, stylistic categories were predicated on historical distanciation while the
vagaries of late-style were additionally held at a remove from the present through the ideology of progress. Conversely, cultural theories of
late capital identify a collapse of historical distance replaced by ever-present pastiche. This paper examines three domestic projects by the
postmodernist architect Charles Moore (1925-1993) that shuttle between stylistic and economic lateness. Beginning with Moore’s house in Orinda,
CA, and ending with his home in Essex, CT, this paper traces the architect’s interest in temple-like interiors that culminates in an oversized plywood
pyramid painted to look like both a watermelon and a symbol of US currency. In this piece the absolute distance that underwrites both historical
account and logics of display is interjected into the intimacy of the architect’s personal boudoir. Drawing on Theodor Adorno’s discussions of
lateness as dynamic rather than degenerative, this paper ultimately argues that Moore’s pyramid constitutes an operative form of lateness and that
its self-reflective calibration of distance is critical to its dynamics.
Louis Lagarde
University of New Caledonia

Transformations in New Caledonian Architecture, 1853-1980: An Overview
The French penal colony of New Caledonia was founded in 1853 on the Australian model. This unique situation within the Pacific, coupled with
a thriving nickel-mining industry, led to the emergence of a contemporary multicultural society. In New Caledonia, one can still witness the
testimonies of an architecture based on French colonial military standards, with the use of a French version of the colonial bungalow, as seen
in other areas of influence, such as the Indian ocean and the Caribbean. Also, the proximity of Australia, as well as our similar histories, played a
not-so-minor role in New Caledonia’s architectural heritage. Later, from the 1920s on, the advent of regionalist and modernist trends in French
architecture led to local upgradings in houses and buildings, which account for a rich, mainly Art Deco, architectural legacy. Lastly, the emergence
of a first generation of local architects in the 1950s, as well as a mining boom, triggered both the first large-scale development and urban plannings
and the construction of an array of modernist, “international style” structures. We will therefore focus our presentation on the antipodean
influence of French architecture throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but also on how the colonial francosphere, albeit distant,
influenced local innovations and architectural transplants
Luke Morgan
Monash University

Wölfflin and Landscape History: ‘Painterly’, ‘Linear’ and the Mannerist Garden
This paper examines Heinrich Wölfflin’s discussion of sixteenth-century Italian landscape design in Renaissance and Baroque (1888). It argues that
Wölfflin’s interpretation influenced twentieth-century accounts of the Mannerist garden, from Luigi Dami’s Il giardino italiano (1924) and the Fascist-
era Mostra del giardino italiano (1931), to later Anglo-American scholarship. Close attention is paid to a curious paradox at the heart of Wölfflin’s
account of gardens, namely that, as he himself acknowledges: ‘It must seem strange that landscape, the most painterly of all subjects, should be the
most rigorously subordinated to architectural rules in the period of the “painterly” style.’ The paper proposes that Wölfflin’s categories of ‘painterly’
and ‘linear’ should be understood as constitutive of an interdependent or dialectical relationship, and that this premise implies an alternative
history of the early modern garden.
Luke Tipene
University of Technology Sydney
Representing Colonial Estrangement: Depictions of Unreal Architecture in the Painting a Direct North
General View of Sydney Cove 1794

This essay examines depictions of unreal architecture in the painting A Direct North General View of Sydney Cove 1794 (1793-5) (Sydney Cove
1794) contestably authored by the convict artist Thomas Watling. By comparing the painting to three of Watling’s topographic drawings, this
essay demonstrates the repeated use of familiar architectural objects across these works and suggests the painting fragments an accurate
representation of place—by assembling discontinuous visual information—to fulfil picturesque aesthetic principles. By considering various claims
on the accuracy of topographic drawings—widely accepted as the authentic other to picturesque depictions—this essay challenges assumptions of
their compositional neutrality. It argues that the same process of addition and omission of visual information is apparent in both picturesque and
topographic depictions of architecture at Sydney Cove. Further, it claims that both types of image production depart from concerns of accuracy
to satisfy familiar, although unreal, illusions of architectural civility, in an attempt to culturally assimilate a completely unknown reality. By linking
these practices of image production to the emergent eighteenth-century culture of imitation, the painting is described as the consequence of an
attempt to meaningfully represent unfamiliar land by using ideas of space and methods of depiction at a distance from their context. The result is
the collapse of distance between depictions from metropole and antipode accompanied by an equivalent collapse between the mediums of image
production and concepts of space. Sydney Cove 1794 portrays the experience of colonial estrangement by representing a space neither familiar
nor foreign but dispelled from its centre through the endeavour of colonisation.
Lynda Mulvin
University College Dublin

Neoclassical Artists and ‘Imitation’ of the Antique: Robert Wood (1717-1771) and Approaches to the Ruins
of Palmyra and Baalbek as Journeys Through Space and Time
Neoclassical pictorial representations of the ancient world, provided access to antiquity and continuity with the past, with travel to remote sites
as a major achievement. This paper focuses on artists who spanned great distances to rediscover and capture images of ancient ruins. The
fabled Palmyrene colonnades were lost until seventeenth century Cornelius De Bruin (1652-1726), revealed their glory to the western world in a
panorama, recalling Zenobia’s legendary city. Depictions of the ‘Bride of the Desert’, ranged from a fish-eye view by Johann Bernhard Fischer Von
Erlach’s (1656-1723), to Denis Diderot’s (1713-1784) flat reconstructions of the Temple of Bel. The Society of Dilettanti expeditions led by Robert
Wood (1717-1771), presented sweeping perspectives of the Roman colonnades alongside architectural detail and ornament from Palmyra. Wood’s
unpublished notes are presented here, as this first scientific expedition to the Levant, resulted in Ruins of Palmyra Otherwise Tedmor, in the desert
(1753). The impact of these architectural drawings is measured by their translation into French and German, as knowledge of the ruins of Roman
cities of Palmyra and Baalbek gained a reputation architecturally as jewels in the Mediterranean constellation. This paper questions Neoclassical
representations and impact, created new art historical models for modernity from Levantine imagery, opening up new vistas. Horace Walpole (1717-
1798) proclaimed “the pomp of the buildings has not a nobler air than the simplicity of the narration”. Gavin Hamilton (1757) captured the moment
of discovery of Palmyra, forefronting the colonnaded street, as a great capriccio and window on the ancient world.
Macarena de la Vega de León


Mediating History With Modern Architecture Since 1900
Historical distance, though commonly understood to refer to the passage of time, is being reconsidered in relation to a wide range of media,
of mediatory purposes, in the writing of history, itself a mediatory practice. In his 2013 book On Historical Distance, Mark Phillips argues that
the aim of intelligibility and understanding, among other forms of engagement, gives distance a new complexity that was missing from older
formulations. Precisely, issues of method and literary style are raised by the writing of surveys of architectural history, commonly disregarded as
lacking sound scholarship. Among the canonical architectural surveys written in the 1980s, there is one for which not only readability, but also
first-hand experience is crucial. William Curtis travelled extensively through Europe, Asia, Australia and Africa between 1977 and 1981, experiencing
architecture and meeting local architects, in preparation for the first edition of Modern Architecture Since 1900 (1982). Moreover, it was illustrated
with at least 50 photographs taken by Curtis himself. He had a privileged, at times dangerous, unmediated experience of architecture at a time
when global travelling was yet to become frictionless and photographs ubiquitous. This paper uses Curtis’s book to reconsider certain mediatory
means between the writing of history, its audience and subject matter –deeply grounded in the disciplinary tradition. Thus, it attempts to bridge
the distance between the beginnings and the more contemporary developments of the survey as a genre.
Marcel Vellinga
Oxford Brookes University

Re-imagining Vernacularity in Southeast Asia and Oceania

Australasia and Oceania have a long tradition of outstanding scholarship that studies the rich and diverse vernacular architectural heritage of
the region. Up until the early twenty-first century, this work tended to focus on traditional forms of vernacular architecture, emphasising their
regional distinctiveness and analysing the ways in which they were intricately related to social and cultural structures. However, recent decades
have seen rapid and fundamental social, economic and environmental changes in the region that require new perspectives on the design, use
and meaning of vernacular architecture. Population growth, urbanisation, globalisation, climate change, migration, natural disasters, conflicts
and the internationalisation of architectural practice have exerted increasing pressures that on the one hand have resulted in the abandonment,
replacement or destruction of distinctive vernacular traditions, and on the other in conscious attempts to conserve, safeguard or revive them,
orinvent new ones. As a result, more dynamic and active approaches to the study of vernacular architecture have emerged that attempt to
challenge the dichotomies inherent in earlier definitions and representations of the vernacular. Paying more attention to the impact of human
agency and practice on architecture, they explore the ways in which vernacular traditions actively transform, overlap, combine and amalgamate
as a result of processes of development and consumption. The paper will discuss the merits of those new approaches to the study of vernacular
architecture in Southeast Asia and Oceania, drawing on a number of examples from across the region.
Marie Durand
Centre de Recherche et de Documentation sur l’Océanie

Concrete Time: Material Temporalities and Contemporary Mobilities in the Vernacular Architecture of
Northern Vanuatu, Melanesia
In the Melanesian archipelago of Vanuatu, during the last decades, the development of Recognized Seasonal Employers schemes signed with
New Zealand and Australia has largely increased people’s mobilities. While, previously, the migrations occurred mainly between the rural islands
and the urban centres of the archipelago, it is now frequent for ni-Vanuatu men and women to spend several months of the year working abroad.
On the other way, asserting one’s continuous presence on one’s land is also a crucial matter in terms of social and spatial sense of belonging. On
some rural islands, like Mere Lava in the northern part of the archipelago, these contingencies are importantly negotiated through architecture.

Material and social investments towards place are then a matter of choice as much as of available resources for people: should they invest in semi-
permanent concrete and corrugated-iron houses or rather rely upon local materials and customary technical processes? These interrogations are
entangled with complex ideological understandings of the diverse buildings and grounded in the specific socio-histories of the places concerned.
This paper explores these issues through a comparative analysis of diverse choices made by people with respect to imported and local materials
such as concrete, leaves, vines and wood. It will interrogate more specifically the conceptions of technical mastery and the temporalities of houses
and building materials. The aim is to contribute to an analysis of the role of vernacular architecture in the way people deal with the multiple and
sometimes conflicting temporalities of contemporary lives and mobilities in Vanuatu.
Maryam Shafiei

The Influence of City-Village Distance on the Transformation of Remote Villages in Tehran Region, Iran
In urban scholarship, the ‘centre-periphery’ model has frequently been employed to interpret the explosive growth of cities and their contiguous
satellites, mostly highlighting ‘distance’ in physical terms while leaving little room for the cultural interpretations. Within this framework, this paper
revisits the ‘centre-periphery’ model to interpret the impact of ‘distance’ on tangible and intangible structures of the remote villages surrounding
Tehran. City and village in the Tehran region are historically outlined as spatially confined entities, separated by physical distances that poses
barriers to their connectivity. Paradoxically, the two have become entirely connected in recent decades, catalysed through modernisation,
infrastructural development and policy changes. In fact, ‘distance’ no longer remains a ‘barrier’ to physical accessibility. Rather, it expresses a
‘desire’ that highlights their cultural and environmental differences, leading to temporary migrations from the city towards peripheral villages with
their healthier and more relaxed lifestyle. Meanwhile, Tehran metropolis itself has been profoundly influenced by western culture, as well as by
ethnic-based cultural patterns brought by rural migrants arriving since the 1950s. Therefore, through the ‘reverse migration’ of Tehran’s residents to
the agrarian periphery, the city’s lifestyle, expertise and culture are gradually supplanting what had once constituted village life. This paper argues
that such a process has transformed these villages into hybrid entities whereby cumulative economic, architectural and cultural structures are
emitted by the centre, imposing tangible and intangible implications on these peripheral communities. Informed by direct observation of remote
villages in the Tehran region, this paper also elaborates on the architectural and socio-cultural consequences of this process in one of these
villages, discussing the impacts of distance beyond its physical meaning.
Matthew Critchley
ETH Zurich

Mannerism and Method: Class and Artistic Agency in the Writing of Anthony Blunt (1934-1949)
In 1946 Nikolaus Pevsner noted in his essay The Architecture of Mannerism1 that while little had been published on Mannerism in England crucial
contributions had come from the English art historian Anthony Blunt. While comparatively brief when set beside his work on the Baroque, Blunt’s
engagement with Mannerism has particular historiographic significance because of the contingency of its methods. Blunt’s studies in Mannerism
encompassed a period of experimentation with social methods in the history of art. The social method Blunt employed saw Mannerism in direct
connection to changes in class structure, an approach which followed the Hungarian art historian Frederick Antal. However this method quickly
came under criticism, embodied by Millard Meiss’ review of Antal’s Florentine Painting and its Social Background and Ernst Gombrich’s review of
Arnold Hauser’s Social History of Art, both reviews having either implicitly or explicitly called for a renewed focus on artistic agency. Blunt’s lecture
‘Mannerism in Architecture’ (1949), which marks an end point in his engagement with Mannerism also marks a partial denouement of the social
method within Blunt’s work. It prefigures both Meiss and Gombrich’s criticism and employs a renewal of artistic agency. The shift in method seen in
Blunt’s work during this period was tied to the unique conditions of Blunt’s circumstances, firstly his commitment to Communism in the 1930s, then
the influence of Frederick Antal and finally the counter influence of figures such as Rudolf Wittkower. This paper will investigate the employments
of, and arguments around, these methods in relation to Mannerism and extend its theses to the constellation of colleagues and papers that Blunt’s
writing was nested within
Matthew Mindrup

Studying Architecture at a Distance With Models
For over 500 years, architects have continued to extoll the utility of scale architectural models for visualizing “the entire work in miniature right
before their eyes.” Yet, when the 37-year-old Johann Wolfgang von Goethe arrived in Rome in 1786, he was immediately surprised to find that
the antique ruins he came to know from cork models at home had become “familiar objects in an unfamiliar world.” The models which Goethe
recalls were popular eighteenth and nineteenth century souvenirs of the European Grand Tour. Initially used as table settings to encourage erudite
discussion about antiquity, these objects inevitably found their way into academic, private, and museum collections alongside full size plaster
casts, actual building fragments and scale reconstructions. For the study of architecture however, using these models were not unlike trying to
read a book with missing pages and one had to imaginatively fill-in the spaces between fragments. When the authority of classical antiquity was
challenged by a new generation of modern German architects at the beginning of the twentieth century, the use of fragments and models of
antique structures to inspire new designs did not completely disappear. Young architects were encouraged to find inspiration for new designs
in the assemblage of broken objects and building blocks representing identifiable structures. As Hermann Finsterlin explained, the aim of these
approaches is to seize the impartiality of the child to rid the architect of their cultural inhibitions. This paper explores how the ambiguity of scale,
materiality and context in models creates a space where the imagination to wander.

Mehbuba Tune Uzra and Peter Scriver
University of Adelaide

Going the Distance: Residential Design and Culture Change in Post-Independence Dhaka (1950-2000)
In the architectural historiography of decolonisation, the distance from ‘tradition’ to ‘modernity’ is often portrayed as a short leap to new forms
of built expression in the first flush of new nationhood. But how has architecture been engaged in the longue duree of actual social and cultural
change? This paper examines the reception of new norms and patterns of residential architecture by the evolving middle class of East Pakistan
(1947-1971) and the independent successor state of Bangladesh (1972-). In the context of this distinctive two-fold struggle for emancipation
from the colonial development agendas of British India and post-Partition Pakistan, respectively, we observe how modernist, regionalist, and
religious affinities became increasingly conscious if not concordant factors of cultural identity reflected in everyday dwelling design and behavior.
Methodologically, the paper draws from the archival and ethnographic investigations of an ongoing PhD study that is exploring intimate dialogical
relationships between culture change and architectural design in the context of an imminent crisis of unsustainable urban development and the
contributing political and socio-economic factors that transformed Dhaka from a regional capital to a national metropolis over the second half
of the twentieth century. Considering how closely-observed architectural micro-histories can be a measure of distance, the paper examines
how the domestic cultural practices and expectations of this evolving middle class were altered to adapt to successive changes in the normative
architectural template of modern residential commodity, and vice versa – a process that was gradually distancing them from previous ostensibly
more environmentally-attuned and sustainable lifestyles.
Michael Kahn
University of Technology Sydney

Around the World in Eight Kilometres: Tracking Sydney’s ‘City Circle’ International Railway Ties
While many factors shape the urban experience of Sydney today, few projects have had wholesale impact like the City Circle railway. To this day,
movement to and through the city is fundamentally shaped by design decisions orchestrated by the project’s chief engineer—J.J.C. Bradfield—a
century ago. Much has been written about Bradfield, but little has examined the global influences on Sydney’s City Circle and, in turn, its impact on
the urban form of Sydney. Bradfield understood the railway not merely as infrastructure, but as a catalyst for city-making, with both architectural
and urban impacts. As such, he looked to distant transport systems to help shape Sydney’s urban railway, and ultimately the city. A journey on the
City Circle traverses six stations and eight kilometres, but easily overlooked on the trip are those global antecedents Bradfield leveraged: models
that brought international planning principles and aspirations to Sydney in the inter-war era as post-Federation Australia turned toward eclectic
global precedents. As Australia’s first urban rail system, the City Railway laid its tracks upon European and American influences—influences that, in
turn, came to shape Australian urban transport planning, policy, and design more generally. This paper explores unexamined concepts imported
across physical and temporal distance, drawing upon archival research of the papers and manuscripts produced by Bradfield following international
research trips in 1914 and 1922. As such, the paper provides context and new insights into the influence of global technologies, planning principles,
and aesthetic ideas which are still discernible in Sydney’s city-serving railway.
Milica Madanovic and Renata Jadresin-Milic

University of Auckland and Unitec Institute of Technology


Distance and the Balkans: Critical Regionalism Between the World Wars in the Work of Alexander Deroko
The concept of distance identifies the modern history of the Balkan Peninsula. Geographically, the Balkans is an area in Southeast Europe
prevalently populated by Indo-European ethnic groups. Economically, politically and culturally, however, the region traditionally fluctuates between
two different spheres of influences – the West (i.e. Central and Western Europe) and the East (i.e. Eastern Europe and Asia Minor). Distant from
both, yet, unavoidably inextricable, the Balkans set the stage for unique interpretations, translations, and criticism of the imported creative
impulses. In response to the conference thematic strand asking “What is Europe”, this paper presents the unchartered territories of the Balkans’
architectural history. The paper examines an interwar criticism of the Modern Movement. Contemporary of Lewis Mumford, Yugoslav architect
Aleksandar Deroko also had a unique reaction to the stifling uniformity of Modernism. Deroko developed his design theory learning from the
vernacular. According to him, these highly functional structures, shaped for region-specific conditions and devoid of excess architecturalornament,
should serve as architectural textbooks. The distance of the Balkans in a European context resulted in the anonymity of his theory in the
international historiographies of architecture. How did the distance of the Balkans from the European cultural centres – and, at the opposite end
of the spectrum: the connections of the shared heritage – influence the shaping of Deroko’s unique architectural theory? Analysing Deroko’s ideas
within the context of critical regionalism, this paper will demonstrate that Europe is even more diverse than typically assumed.
Min Hall
Unitec Institute of Technology

Back to Earth: Earth Building in Aotearoa New Zealand 1945-65
It was earth, as much as timber, that transformed the built landscape of Aotearoa New Zealand in the nineteenth century. Settlers brought
European earthen technologies which they adapted to suit the new locale, and earth buildings became an integral part of vernacular architecture.
Although earth construction fell out of favour – by 1925 it was all but non-existent, except in Central Otago – it re-emerged after World War II. In
the postwar housing crisis, new developments in earth building offered a plausible solution for affordable housing, attracting commercial activity
and government backing. By the late 1960s, however, the promise of a new earthen vernacular had crumbled away. This paper uses the framework

of distance to think about the story of earth in Aotearoa 1945-1965. Far from its origins in Europe, earth building nevertheless had a shared heritage
that manifested itself in an international community of practice. Information circulated between Europe, North America and Australasia, producing
local outcomes, and contributing to the development of earth construction as a modern technology. While the distance of time might cast the
practice of earth building in an old-fashioned light, the attitudes of practitioners in Aotearoa were rarely backward-looking: in Central Otago it
remained a contemporary practice, and elsewhere the re-emergence of earth was via engagement with the modern technique of soil cement. It
was the distance the government would go to solve the postwar housing crisis that offered the greatest potential for Aotearoa’s mid-century earth
movement; in the end, it was not far enough.
Mirjana Lozanovska
Deakin University

Ambivalence and Neo-Colonial Historiography
Distance has two meanings. One is to be at variance, and is related to discord, dispute and debate, and the other is a spatial condition of
remoteness. A discussion of the ambivalence in the terminology ‘Europe/European’ and ‘migration/migrant’ used in Australian contexts brings
the first meaning to bear on the second. I argue that the slippages of this terminology normalises a neo colonial positioning and raises questions
about a systemic ‘sleight-of-hand’ ambivalence in historiography. The term ‘European’ is persistently displaced. In Patrick Troy’s anthology
European Housing in Australia the term ‘European’ does not refer to Europe as continent, but specifically to Britain and Ireland. This is an important
publication by foremost experts and a sociological study on housing. Despite contemporaneous scholarship on post-war migration from Europe,
the term ‘European’ is also distanced from the Italian, Greek, Macedonian, and the Dutch or other ‘European’ migrants. Migration, it is argued
is a central force shaping that housing, but the studies only examine the housing linked to migration from Britain and Ireland. This leaves a void
about studies of the housing of those other European migrants. In contrast, a stylist historiography, Apperley et al’s Pictorial Guide is one of only
a very few studies to discuss migrant architecture. Yet a division between ‘immigrants nostalgic’ and ‘Australian nostalgic’ reveals that Anglo-Celtic
migrants determine Australian identity while others are immigrants against that Australian identity. This paper discusses the difference within
‘Europe/European’ and ‘migration/migrant’ and how they intersect an Anglo-Celtic hegemony in Australian (architectural) historiography
Nan Ye and Jiawen Han

University of Liverpool and Xi’an Jiao-tong Liverpool University

Convergence and Dissimilation: The ‘Dialogue’ of Individualism and Collectivism in Architectural Practice
Between China and Yugoslavia, 1949 – 1958
After the Second World War, China (the People’s Republic of China, 1949 to now) and Yugoslavia (the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, 1945-
1992) – two newly established socialist countries- both saw a burst of new constructions to cope with the devastation of the war, and the state
control over the design sectors and national projects. Although located respectively in Asia and Europe, they both shared a connection to the
Soviet Union (the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, abbreviated as USSR was the first socialist state in the world and existed from December 30th
1922 to December 26th 1991) as well as a socialist agenda which led to the nationalisation of the construction industry in the 1950s and the 1960s.
Given the collectivist ideology of the time, the Chinese government made a series of policy changes regarding private architects, who gradually
stepped down from their leading role from 1949 to 1958, while Yugoslavia allowed some degree of private initiative in commerce, industry and
liberal professions. This paper reviews the transformation of Chinese architectural practices in that period and explores the places of freedom and
restrictions for architects in practice. By comparing the situations in China and Yugoslavia, this paper sheds light on the differences in architects’
positions and their professional works as a result of the localised manifestations of socialism, while examining how Soviet ideology aimed to span
the geographic distance.
Nathan Etherington

Canal to Nowhere? Landscape as Infrastructure, From Sanitation to Transportation
In 1886 dredging began on the lower reaches of the Cooks River in Sydney, the tentative first steps in a project that would stretch for more than
a decade and result in the construction of the Alexandra Canal, one of only two navigable canals in New South Wales. Far from being the result of
a well planned and executed “heroic” modern infrastructural project, the canal’s origins are murky and its construction was slow and conflicted.
Motivated in equal parts by sanitary concerns, local business interests and the provision of labour for the unemployed, ambitions for the canal’s
extent and purpose expanded with its construction. While the canal never reached the intended destination at the Eveleigh rail yards let alone
the dream of connecting Botany Bay with Sydney Harbour, its construction transformed the swampy landscape of the Botany Bay estuary into a
drained and orderly terrain primed for development. Ultimately the canal would drift into obscurity but in the century following its completion the
surrounding territory would see the construction of a freight rail line, airport and container port among other infrastructural technologies. The
canal’s history is a study in distance and proximity: connections that would never be made but also radical local transformations that contributed
to a series of larger terraforming works in the region, ultimately forging new national and transnational connections. This paper will locate the
construction of the canal as an important pivot in the infrastructural priorities and landscape of the Botany region from the largely metropolitan
concerns of water supply, sewage and sanitation in the nineteenth-century to greater global ambitions for transport and trade in the twentieth.

Nelson Mota
Delft University of Technology

Architectural Agonism: The Distancing Effect in Álvaro Siza’s Architecture of Dwelling 1933
Álvaro Siza was born in the north of Portugal (Matosinhos, 1933) and lived under the rule of a fascist regime until it was toppled down in 1974.
Soon after this paramount event, from 1977 through 1984, he was commissioned to design social housing complexes in three distant worlds: Évora
(Malagueira, 1977), West Berlin (Schlesische Straße, 1980), and The Hague (Schilderswijk West, 1984). In these projects, Siza was exposed to social,
political, economic, and geographical contexts clearly distinct from his own. Siza’s ability to adapt to different contexts and create dialogues with
local actors has been widely praised in architectural historiography, notably as a prime example of “critical regionalism”. However, these projects
were all but consensual. In fact, from the outset many of Siza’s design decisions circumvented the desires expressed by the clients and future
residents. Rather than attempting to create consensus, Siza’s approach accommodated conflicts as part of the creative process. In this paper, I
will examine Siza’s projects for social housing complexes built in Évora, Berlin and The Hague during the 1970s and 1980s, to discuss the extent to
which his position as a “stranger” influenced his agonistic approach, and what role did distance (real and imagined) played in his architecture of
dwelling. I will show how Siza’s account of foreign realities, registered in his notes, site sketches, and drawings echoes Simmel’s “objectivity of the
stranger”, while his use of participatory observation in the design decision-making process resonates with Berthold Brecht’s “distancing effect”
(Verfremdungseffekt).
Nicola Pullan and Robert Freestone

UNSW Sydney

‘Enthusiasm, Energy and Originality’: The Influence of Harry Rembert’s European Architectural
Investigations on Australian Post-War University Design
Tertiary expansion during the 1950s and 1960s in Australia was unprecedented. With a growing student population and the need for Australia’s
emerging industries to take part in the global technological revolution came the demand for modern scientific educational and research facilities.
This paper examines the design of university campus buildings during the post-war decades through the lens and the mobility of European
influences both physical and cultural. In NSW, the state government charged its Government Architect with the design and construction of the
new educational buildings required. To meet the design needs of this challenging program, in 1955 Harry Rembert, the office’s Senior Designing
Architect, embarked on an extended architectural study tour overseas, visiting North America, the UK and Europe. Already a practitioner of
Dudokian Modernism experienced at a distance through architectural journals, Rembert was enlightened and excited by his first-hand encounters
with the ‘inherent good taste’ of the best modern European architecture. In the only substantive report of his career, he documented the
‘enthusiasm, energy and originality’ of European exemplars of community facilities, administrative buildings and housing, as well as laboratories,
schools and other structures, and returned to direct, give responsibility to, and then support a group of younger architects striving to make their
mark with innovative modernist designs whilst still acknowledging the country’s distinctive character and traditions. Drawing on Rembert’s report,
archival research and interviews, our paper addresses the question ‘What is Europe?’ by examining the concept of Europe and the European
through the eyes of an Australian architect charged with the oversight of major state government projects, and explores the influence of his and his
colleagues’ appreciation and understanding of European Modernism on the design of buildings constructed from the mid-1950s at the University of
Sydney and the new University of New South Wales.

Nicole Sully

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Apathy of Distance and the Civil Defense of Western Australia during WWII
While Australia had been involved in WWII since 1939, its geographical isolation from the distant battles of the Allied forces, made the threat of an
attack on Australian soil seem unlikely. However, the Japanese attacks on Darwin and Broom in 1942, were followed by a growing sense of alarm
regarding the potential threats for citizens on Australian soil. Paramount among the strategies implemented in this new stage of Australia’s war
effort, was the escalation of civil defense throughout the country. This included, among other tactics, the construction of civil air-raid shelters
as well as research into, and the implementation of, military camouflage. The latter, as demonstrated by Ann Elias’s 2011 monograph Camouflage
Australia, facilitated the intersection of civilian and military expertise, drawing on the skills of artists, architects and scientists, as well as military
personnel. While the activities of the artists and architects involved in east coast camouflage groups, particularly the Sydney unit, have been
the focus of a number of works by Ann Elias, to date the story and activities of Western Australia’s camoufleurs have been largely overlooked.
Drawing on the work of Elias, and utilising archival materials located in Western Australia, this paper will begin to make a first effort to trace some
of the history and activities associated with the civil defense of Western Australia during WWII, with a particular focus on the Western Australian
camouflage group. It will consider how ideas of distance, and in particular the what the paper terms ‘the apathy of distance’ influence the civil
defence activities of the state

Pablo Arza Garaloces
University of Navarra

Shortening Distances: span3ish Architectural Modernity in International Architecture Journals
At the end of the 1930s, Spain suffered a Civil War which led to the establishment of a dictatorship that lasted about forty years and whose
ideology separated it from the main powers in the West. At the same time, the war had devastated the country’s economy and culture, thus further
widening the gap between Spain and other developed countries. In the realm of architecture, the Civil War extinguished the budding modernity
that had begun to develop in Spain in the 1920s. In spite of this complex situation, during the 1950s a new generation of young Spanish architects,
aware of their estrangement from European culture, embarked on a search for the modernity that had been denied to them. The results of
their efforts started to be manifest even beyond national boundaries, as various international journals began to cover Spanish architecture. For
instance, in 1959 L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui applauded “the praiseworthy effort of various architects in the country to reach for an architecture
with a contemporary spirit.” Spain’s presence in the international architecture media continued to grow into the 1960s, with special issues in such
journals as Zodiac, Baumeister, Werk, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, Architectural Review, etc. And by the 1980s, architecture criticism was enthralled
by contemporary Spanish architecture. The initial gap appeared to have been bridged. Furthermore, it is important to highlight the role played
in this process by some Spanish architects, who, desiring to build bridges and to show Spanish architecture to the world, served as critics or
commentators for a variety of international publications. The goal of this paper is to analyze the role played by architecture journals as a means
of disseminating and bringing closer together architectural realities that were distant or peripheral, as documented by the Spanish experience
between de 1950s and 80s.
Paul Dielemans

Moderately Modern’: The Long Distance Reading of Modern Dutch Architecture by a Queensland Architect
This paper examines the reception and understanding of the architectural work of Willem Dudok (1884 - 1974) and modern architecture by
Australian architect, Frank Cullen (1909-91). It is argued that his understanding of Dudok’s architecture was mediated by text and the work of other
Australian architects, including Queenslanders Robert Cummings (1900-89), Charles Fulton (1905-81), and Eric Trewern (1895 – 1959). It is contended
that Cullen’s interest in Dudok, and that of his contemporaries, was motivated by a desire to identify an architectural practice that was ‘moderately
modern’. This modernism eschewed ornament, was functional, efficient and a-historical. It walked, however, a middle path between the hard
abstraction and the rigid functionalism associated with European architects such as Le Corbusier and Gropius and the psychological comfort and
stability that was linked to a continuing use of traditional materials and forms. In this paper, it will be demonstrated that Cullen accessed the later
via an English reading of Dutch modernism conveyed to Queensland by lectures, writings and architects coming out of the Architecture Association
(London) in the 1920s-30s. In this instance, distance (Queensland) looked back (to Dutch modernism), but the image received was tempered and
modified by sources that were both geographically and temporally displaced from the original. Ultimately, a softer modernism that was compatible
with Queensland tastes was produced by successfully blending new materials and technologies with that of the traditional.
Peyman Akhgar

The Ecole des Beaux-Arts and Construction of Iranian National Identity of the Interwar Era: Architecture
of André Godard
The story of new Iran started in 1921 when after a dark period of socio-political denigration, strong nationalist sentiments resulted in a coup d’état
by a charismatic military leader, Reza Shah, who became the new Iranian ruler in 1926. When Reza Shah seized power, motivated by the elite, he
immediately embarked on constructing Iran’s national identity and called for intensive programs of reforms. For achieving his nationalistic goals,
however, media of expression was needed. One of the most significant of those was indeed architecture. As a result, Western-educated architects
started travelling to Iran and were officially employed by the Iranian government for construction purposes. They replaced the Iranian traditional
architect (me’mar) and became agents of change in charge of modernizing the appearance of the country and instilling it with a desired national
identity. Due to the long-lasting Franco-Iranian cultural relationship, Beaux-Arts diplômés became significant architects of the state, among whom
André Godard was the first Beaux-Arts architect who worked for the Iranian government for years and critically contributed to the revitalization
of Iranian national identity through architecture. This article, by referring to the interwar architecture of André Godard, will unveil the critical
contribution of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, its architecture and architectural education, in the construction of Iranian national identity during the
interwar era through architecture
Philip Goad

‘Across Twelve Thousand Miles Some Fifteen Years Ago’: The Boyd-Gropius Letters, 1954-1969
In 1954, Australian architect Robin Boyd began corresponding with recently retired director of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and Bauhaus
founder, Walter Gropius: Boyd was 35, Gropius was 71-years old. It was the beginning of an unlikely long-distance friendship that would be sustained
for more than fifteen years until Gropius’s death in 1969. Intrinsic to that friendship was Ise Gropius, who not only put into words her husband’s
thoughts but also added her own distinctive voice. The letters between the three are revealing. For Walter and Ise Gropius, it was an opportunity
to express their thoughts on contemporary architecture to an apparently neutral and receptive reader. For Boyd, it was an opportunity to gauge

and test arguments he was putting forward in international journals like Architectural Record and popular US magazines like Harper’s Bazaar. It was
also through this connection that Boyd gained the commission to write the first monograph on Kenzo Tange. Using this body of correspondence,
drawn from collections at the Bauhaus Archiv, Berlin, Houghton Library, Harvard University, State Library of Victoria and Robin Boyd Foundation in
Melbourne, this paper traces a little known story. For Gropius in his twilight years, it could be argued that Boyd was a bright new mind ready to be
moulded to carry on the hopes of the modern project. For Boyd, the connection to Gropius represented affirmation by an elder statesman of his
theoretical musings. But equally, it could also be argued that this long-distance friendship was key to Boyd’s theoretical undoing.
Prajakta Sane
Independent Historian

Research Laboratory in India’s Post-independence Nation-building: Closing the Distance and the Past
On 10th April 1954, India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, attended the opening ceremony of Ahmedabad Textile Industry’s Research
Association in Ahmedabad (ATIRA) – a textile laboratory designed by architect Achyut Kanvinde (1916-2002). In his address, Nehru commended
the building as an exemplary architectural work that had made a profound impression on him, finding it in alignment with his own political vision.
Underlying this rhetoric was Nehru’s teleologically defined project of social and material modernization in which science, technology and industrial
progress held a central place. Repeatedly hailed as a powerful marker of modernity, the research laboratory - a building type with explicit
associations to the universal scientific spirit, received unprecedented state patronage in the first decade after Independence. In the history of
post‐independence Indian architecture, Kanvinde’s ATIRA laboratory is accorded a prominent position. It is seen to exemplify one of the earliest
importations of Bauhaus modernism to India. Implied in this reception is a radical departure from existing disciplinary norms. This paper revisits the
positioning through an examination of the triangulated relationship between Kanvinde’s explorations of early modernist themes as acquired during
his Harvard training under Walter Gropius, Nehru’s post-colonial project of modernisation, and the laboratory as an emerging building type in post‐
independence India. The lens of distance overlaid on an ideologically potent building type, allows an enriched understanding of the cross-cultural
transfer of ideas, their subtle and nuanced localisations in a politically charged context, while also bringing to light the pre-existing disciplinary
paradigms that enabled a smooth transition.
Preeti Chopra
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Looking Back in Time: The Charitable Entanglements of Bombay’s Royal Alfred Sailors’ Home & its
Neighbours
The palatial Royal Alfred Sailors’ Home (1872-76) was constructed in the port of Bombay (now Mumbai) to house European sailors and convert them
to sobriety and respectability. A Gothic Revival building, designed by Frederick William Stevens (1848-1900), it was paid for by a native Hindu prince
and the colonial government of Bombay. This building exemplified what I call the “joint enterprise of charity.” Why was this institution founded for
European sailors in Bombay? How did this charitable building fit into the emerging joint public realm of Bombay that included institutions built
in the Gothic Revival style, many of which were paid for by Indian philanthropists and the colonial government? Focusing on the foundation of
the Sailors’ Home and looking to its neighbors, my paper seeks to answer these questions. I show that the Sailors’ Home was the first of a set of
buildings housing European charitable institutions, and an elite European club, that formed an emerging border of European control, south of,
and in some cases facing off the arena of the joint public realm. Yet, the distance between elite and non-elite Europeans was never bridged. The
Sailors’ Home now houses the State Police Headquarters in Mumbai. Thus, this also paper looks back across the distance of time to key moments

in the building’s history. In doing so, it will briefly excavate who the subsequent occupants of this building were during different periods after its
foundation, and thus the multiple recipients of this instance of the joint enterprise of charity.
Robin Skinner
Victoria University of Wellington

Mataatua: The Missing Years
In 1875 Mataatua, the Ngāti Awa wharenui (Māori meeting house), was opened at Whakatāne in the Bay of Plenty, New Zealand. In controversial
circumstances, the carved house was uplifted by the government to be displayed at the Sydney International Exhibition of 1879. To reduce costs,
the interior carvings and tukutuku panels were crudely installed on the building’s exterior for leisurely viewing by passers-by. Subsequently, parts
of the house were exhibited at the Melbourne International Exhibition of 1880-81. It was then gifted to the British government and was installed at
the South Kensington Museum. About 1886 Mataatua was put into long-term storage before being rehabilitated at the 1924 British Empire Exhibition
at Wembley. Afterwards, continuing its expositionary journey, the house was returned to New Zealand where it was erected at the 1925-26 South
Seas Exhibition in Dunedin, before long-term installation in the Otago Museum. Now, after a successful claim to the Treaty of Waitangi Tribunal, the
house has been returned to Ngāti Awa to stand in its original locale. Mataatua is known to have suffered many indignities across these distances,
although the troubling events of the 1880s remain largely unknown. The carved building must have appeared incongruous sitting outside the
museum’s main entrance on the Brompton Road. Perhaps suffering its greatest insult, there the wharenui was used as an industrial store. This
drew some criticism. With limited land available at South Kensington and despite offers to display Mataatua at alternate sites, the wharenui was
dismantled and stored. This account of the house’s missing years, through a period when Māori leaders journeyed to London to have grievances
under the Treaty of Waitangi heard, sheds light on colonial and imperial attitudes towards the material culture and status of the indigenous people
of New Zealand through this period.

Ross Anderson

Adolphe Appia and the Rhythmic Undertone of Modern Architecture
This paper—Adolphe Appia and the rhythmic undertone of modern architecture—provides an account of the important yet undervalued role
that the modern Swiss scenographer Adolphe Appia (1862-1928) played in the development of twentieth-century architecture and aesthetics,
particularly through his austere yet mysteriously atmospheric drawings—his Espaces rythmiques. The drawings frame a series of monumental yet
minimal scenes taking in stairs, landings, platforms and terraces offering a reading of modernity’s simultaneous desire for absolute newness and a
nostalgia for a primordial past. Part hopeful and part melancholic, they are caught somewhere between the primordial and the dreamily futuristic.
And it was in the luminous futuristic setting of the Festsaal (festival theatre) at Hellerau that Appia came alive for soon-to-be heroic modern
architects Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, both of whom witnessed performances there and pocketed ideas for later. It is the modalities of
temporal distance that are invoked in this paper: the time elapsed between antiquity and modernity, and its simultaneous collapse and renewal in
the ecstatic time-out-of-time of theatrical performance. And it is also the time of the archive and its role in caring for and making available all of
that which is part of the architectural endeavour but is not building. Appia’s Espaces rythmiques that now nestle in a modest archive in Bern are
generally described as monochrome, which is partly true, but the colour of the Canson & Montgolfier paper imbues each drawing with a distinctive
ambient undertone. The scenographer himself might be thought of the same way—delivering to modern architecture an ambient and rhythmic
undertone.
Rowan Gower
UNSW Sydney
Exporting Australian Architectural ‘Expertise’ as a Matter of Policy
As highlighted by Jennifer Taylor and James Connor in Architecture in the South Pacific: The Ocean of Islands (2014) and subsequently discussed by
Philip Goad in “Importing Expertise: Australian-US Architects and the Large Scale 1945-1990,” the exportation of Australian architectural “expertise”
across the second half of the twentieth century was primarily driven by individual practices gaining private and institutional commissions in the
Asia-Pacific region. Devised under the Gorton administration the “Australian Policy” however, would, for the first time, prioritise the appointment
of Australian architects for overseas work at a government level, opening the doors for Australian architects to design diplomatic buildings for
the government’s extensive construction programme announced by Gough Whitlam in 1973. The employment of Australian architects to design
government buildings abroad came to the fore in 1965 when the Royal Australian Institute of Architects and Robin Boyd lobbied for an Australian
architect to replace the Brazilian architect, Henrique Mindlin, to design the new Australian Embassy in Brasilia. This paper will examine this episode
of institutional exchange and its significance for the local architectural profession and its future involvement in the foreign building program of
the Federal Government. It will link this activity to the formation of the “Australian Policy” and posit that while this internal government policy was
significant in encouraging the exportation of Australian design it was also wielded as a political weapon by the Department of External Affairs to
diminish the role of the Commonwealth Department of Works which also had the skills to successfully “export” Australian expertise to the world.
Susan Holden and Rosemary Willink


Exhibiting Destruction: Looking Back From Robin Hood Gardens: A Ruin in Reverse, 2018 to the Destruction
of the Country House, 1974
In 2017 the Victoria and Albert Museum acquired a section of the Robin Hood Gardens housing estate (Alison and Peter Smithson, 1972) in the
wake of a failed heritage campaign and its subsequent demolition. To some extent, the acquisition mitigates its loss as urban heritage. However, it
also changes the frameworks through which its cultural value is articulated: from in-situ heritage to collected artefact of the museum. In 2018, the
acquisition was the catalyst for the V&A’s exhibition at the Venice Architecture Biennale Robin Hood Gardens: A Ruin in Reverse, which presented
documentary material and commentary on the heritage campaign, alongside a full-scale mocked-up section of the building made with debris from
its demolition. This was not the first time that the V&A has exhibited destruction. In 1974, the museum mounted Destruction of the Country House,
which highlighted properties across England that were at risk of being demolished. The exhibition dramatised this potential loss in the “Hall of Lost
Houses”, an immersive scenography that placed photographs of the houses on a full-scale crumbling portico. The exhibition had a real impact in
foregrounding architectural heritage as part of arts policy in Britain in the decades to come. This paper looks back at the Destruction exhibition
to gain a perspective on the Robin Hood Gardens acquisition and exhibition, and on ‘destruction’ as both a harbinger of heritage, and curatorial
contrivance of museums. The difference between the two cases says much about the failure of heritage to safeguard late twentieth-century
architecture, particularly housing estates. Beyond this, the exhibitions are revealing of the complex interrelationship between destruction and
conservation in heritage discourse, and the changing role of the museum in defining the cultural value of architecture.
Sven Sterken and Lisa Marie Daunt

KU Leuven and University of Queensland

From Austria to Australia: Three Lutheran Churches by Karl Langer
In 1939, the young architect Karl Langer fled his native Vienna and installed himself in Brisbane, soon to become a central figure in the local
architectural scene. Amongst his many architectural accomplishments, are several church buildings he designed for the Lutheran Church: St
John’s in Bundaberg (1960), St John’s in Ipswich (1961) and St Peter’s College Chapel (1968) in Brisbane. These strikingly modern buildings supported

the post-war ‘reinvention’ of the Lutheran Church in Queensland, where architecture played an instrumental role in fostering its self-image as
a progressive and outward looking faith. This paper argues that a double interpretation of the notion of ‘distance’ gives insight in how Langer
overcame the straightforwardness of most church architecture in post-war Queensland. In a chronological sense, he relied on personal
experiences from the past, developing further the stripped classicism he inherited from working in Peter Behrens’ Viennese studio during the
1930s. Closely related to this, the expression of civic culture he admired in ancient Greek architecture and town planning lived on in the urban
qualities of his church designs. In geographical terms, Langer was acutely aware of what was happening overseas, collecting (predominantly
American) journals and tearing out pages which he classified for later reference. Relying on this extensive repertoire and adapting it to the
particular climate of his adoptive homeland, Langer developed a highly personal architectural idiom. Thus, the modernity of the three churches
discussed here derives from a transfer of ideas and forms, and their transformation across time and continents.
Syed Ahmad Iskandar Syed Ariffin

Universiti Teknologi Malaysia

Changes and Transformation of Malay Vernacular Houses
House buildings have passed through many phases of history. During insular period Malay houses were basically built of vegetal materials forming
genuinely local idea of vernacular architecture, a dwelling place fits for a traditional Malay living. Houses were built on stilts with 3 principle spaces
namely rumah ibu (main house), serambi (reception area) and dapur (kitchen). Changes and transformation of dwelling architecture gradually
took place throughout the colonial, post-independence, and modern periods of Malaysian history. This paper aims to uncover the continuity as
well as the convergence of tradition and modernity and the way it is being manifested in houses across the periods. The study focuses on single
houseunit designed originally for a family from more or less comparable economic status starting from the early until contemporary period.
A group of fair sample houses carefully selected to also represent the year as well as the era from various location and region are used in the
observation. Generally, house buildings can be divided into 3 distinct periods of architectural development, namely: i) insular – where house
architecture remains intact in its original characteristic; ii) colonial – various forms of influences caused houses to adopt and adapt intra-regional
and foreign inspiration which led to many interesting innovations; and, iii) post-independence – acceptance of modernity yet having the desire
to continue to embrace the tradition raising new hope as well as conflicts. Of the periods, the era of post-independence to the present posed
utmost challenges to architects in their effort to design within the spirit of the present without losing significant values of the tradition. The arrival
of new materials and technology coupled with changing of context and landscape contributes greatly to the emergence of neo-vernacularism
in modern dwelling. Cultural heritage intensely manifested in houses seems to remain as one of the primary references for modern Malay house
design.
Tiffany Lynn Hunt

Temple University

The Critical Model in Bruno Zevi’s Renaissance Architecture
In 1964 the Italian architects, historians, professors, and public intellectuals, Bruno Zevi and Paolo Portoghesi, launched one of the most ambitious
retrospectives of Michelangelo’s oeuvre to commemorate the fourth centenary of his death. Held at Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, the
exhibition titled, Mostra Critica delle Opere Michelangiolesche, offered a comprehensive experience of Michelangelo’s paintings, drawings,
sculptures, and architecture entirely through replicas and reproductions. Plaster casts, slide projections of monumental paintings, and in the
case of architecture, the juxtaposition of photographs by Oscar Savio and critical models made by Zevi’s students at the Istituto Universitario di
Architettura di Venezia in collaboration with the Spatialist painter, Mario Deluigi, offered a novel perspective towards Michelangelo’s work. The

models operated as a touchstone for Zevi’s larger investigation into the representational possibilities for architectural history, becoming a series
of student photographs that were published in a special edition of Zevi’s periodical, L’architettura: cronache e storia. This paper analyzes the
various layers of distance—physical, historical, and epistemological—that are reconfigured and represented through the mediated photographs. By
examining the unique indexicality constructed through the real object, the model, and the photograph, this paper locates the “modern key” used
by Zevi to approach Renaissance architecture at mid-century. Working through the photographic archive of the Fondazione Bruno Zevi and the
personal archive of Paolo Portoghesi, this paper argues that the lens(es) used to frame Michelangelo’s architectural theory attempted to collapse
all of these various distances through a triangulation of knowledge between intentionally mediated modes of representation.
Timothy O’Rourke

Vernacular Influences on the Design of Aboriginal Social Housing
The disjunction between British and Aboriginal patterns of settlement was used by the English colonists as a rationale for the displacement of
First Nations people. By the mid-twentieth century, architecture and planning were well established as tools of assimilation that would distance
Indigenous people from their lands, culture and social structures. Adaptation to the new forms of settlement required a radical adjustment of
Aboriginal living patterns that tested cultural continuity. Established in 1972 by the Royal Australian Institute of Architects, the Aboriginal Housing
Panel explored architectural solutions to this growing housing crisis. A major challenge for the Panel was the extent of the Indigenous housing
deficit, but, additionally, what was an appropriate house for people with diverse cultural, social and backgrounds? In one novel approach, the
Panel’s director Michael Heppell documented the reconstruction of Wik people’s traditional dwellings on Cape York Peninsula. Heppell, along with
a small group of architects and researchers, recognised that the study of Indigenous building traditions, which included self-built dwellings and
town camps, provided an insight into domestic spatial practices and preferences. This paper examines the relationship between the design of
Indigenous housing in the 1970s and the re-evaluation of vernacular buildings and settlements. Using archival evidence from the period, the paper
analyses the influence of the Indigenous vernacular on housing design and architectural research. The use of ethnographic methods and data to
inform the design and evaluation of new housing types helped to establish a distinctive approach to cross-cultural design.

Vanessa Galvin
University of Western Australia

Bridging Death’s Distance Via the Victorian Spiritualist Home
In Victorian Britain and America spiritualists privileged domestic architecture as a medium for the diminution of distance between two worlds: one
material the other immaterial. These formerly divided worlds were populated respectively by living inhabitants and the ‘spirits of the dead.’ This
paper describes how domestic architecture – specifically the home interior, its furniture, and contents – brought family members and the spirits
of their deceased loved ones into intimate communication and contact in séance. The spiritualist home bridged the distance between heavenly
and earthly life as disembodied souls inhabited and animated the domestic interior to bring solace and comfort to the bereaved.
William M (Bill) Taylor

University of Western Australia

Putting Down ‘Roots’ En Route: Lewis Mumford’s Distanced View Of American Design
In Roots of Contemporary American Architecture (1952) Lewis Mumford conceived of a functional design aesthetic, imagining a uniquely American
way of making things like colonial era farmhouses, sailing ships, clocks and axes. Mumford’s admiration for New England-built clipper ships calls to
mind Le Corbusier’s absorption with the “rational assemblies” of transatlantic ocean liners, the RMS Aquitania appearing on the cover of Vers une
Architecture (1923). Both texts responded to a century of rapid technological change which introduced their authors to industrialised
travel among other uniquely ‘modern’ experiences. Both texts contributed variants on functionalist design theory to the architectural canon,
the received internationalism of Le Corbusier’s contrasting the explicit nationalism of Mumford’s. Le Corbusier let his preference for mass-
produced automobiles, electric dynamos, and ocean liners speak for itself. Mumford garnered support for his theory by co-opting two nineteenth
century compatriots who also led peripatetic lives, the 19th century art critics Horatio Greenough and James Jackson Jarves. This paper
explores representations of a functional design style by Mumford, Greenough and Jarves by means of their idealisation of American sailing
ships. It contextualises their thinking by reference to biographical circumstances and particularities of ocean-going travel in their respective
lifetimes, specifically, their voyages abroad and periods spent abroad which background their writing. It shows how all three critics and their essay
contributions to Roots respond to new modes of industrialised transportation and experiences of long distance travel. They all invoke a uniquely
American innovation culture positioned unevenly between parochial and cosmopolitan worldviews.
Yinrui Xie and Paul Walker


Negotiation Across Cultural Distance: The Creation and Interpretation of a ‘Chinese-Style’ Christian
Campus
For Europeans, China has been long in the imagination of remote fantasies. The seventeenth century and the following eras of colonialism
witnessed a lasting interest among Western architects in designing Chinese-style buildings. These either represented historical and geographical
“distance” or – if built for Chinese audiences – a putative “familiarity.” The campus of West China Union University (Chengdu, China) was among
the Chinese-style projects designed by Western architects in the early twentieth century. To facilitate local acceptance of this institution, British
architect Fred Rowntree took great pains combining Chinese architectural elements with Western principles and technology, with meanings
encoded in the buildings. The meaning of the buildings was then interpreted in various ways by people from different socio-cultural backgrounds.
Some enthusiastic Western donors claimed the buildings as beautiful monuments of the “remote” Chinese culture, while interpretations by
Chinese people varied from elegant hybrids of the two architectures to crystallised symbols of cultural imperialism. The discordant interpretations
not only challenged the original purposes and intentions of the architect, but also raised the question as to how architectural meanings are
perceived in cross-cultural contexts. This paper discusses the architecture of West China Union University and the cultural distance reflected
through its design and interpretation. Informed by semiotic theories, this paper proposes the construction of architectural meaning as a
negotiation where the diverse interpretations competed with each other (and with the architect’s intention) before reaching a dynamic balance. A
dynamic framework is thus adopted to unfold the complexity and contradiction in architectural meaning across cultural distance.
Zehra Ahmed
Princeton University

Charles Moore, Designer of Practice
The emergence in the sixties of what architect Charles Moore, citing Marshall McLuhan, called the condition of “instant anywhere” enabled
by electronic technology and commercial travel, transformed not only architectural form and the experience of space, but generated new
possibilities for the shape of architectural practice and the lifestyle of the architect as well. More than itinerant, Moore was a serial practitioner in
an unprecedented way, collapsing distance across geography, between roles, and through mediums, in part to counter the rational positivism of
the modernists. From 1950 to 1993, he taught at six different institutions; each new job and city also entailed the incorporation of a new practice
with new associates, and the design or renovation of a house for himself. Deploying McLuhan’s distinction between “hot” and “cold” media as a
frame, this essay argues that for Moore, practice itself was a technology through which his preoccupations—dwelling, mobility, and the creation
of “place”—might be pursued, and its successive redesign from city to city set the stage for dynamic interactions to occur between architects,
clients, consultants, members of the public, and others. The paper constructs a homology between Moore’s unstable practices and the design
of his projects to showcase a new kind of roving postmodern architectural subject. To this end, three case studies were selected: first, the Sea
Ranch Condominium (1963–65) for the transient second-home owner; second, Riverdesign Dayton (1977), which imagines the public as temporary
co-designers of their public spaces; and third, the Piazza d’Italia Fountain (1978), a neon-lit, postcard-ready “place” for the networked, plugged-in
tourist.

Acknowledgements
This event would have been impossible without the generosity of the University of
Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning and the support of Dean Robyn
Dowling and School General Manager Jonathan Hulme. We owe particular thanks to the
External and Professional Engagement team, namely Steven Burns, Christina Rita and
Matilda McGahey, as well as web master Rob Dongas.
A combined meeting of two distinct organisations, we have enjoyed the encouragement

and aid of the executives of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and
New Zealand (SAHANZ) and the European Architectural History Network (EAHN).
We have, furthermore, been able to stage discrete sessions hosted by the Society of
Architectural and Urban Historians (SAUH)—Asia and the Lila Wallace Readers Digest
Lecture Program of the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Villa I
Tatti, as well as roundtables supported by the Sydney Environmental Institute at the
University of Sydney and the Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative (in
cooperation with the City Road Podcast).
Two exhibitions have been mounted in the University’s Tin Sheds Gallery to coincide
with this event. Thanks are due its manager, Iakovos Amperidis, and the gallery staff
for their efforts to meet the timelines set by this conference.
We wish to note the support given to the exhibition “Designed in Italy, Made in
Australia: Discovering the Australian Work of Pier Luigi Nervi” (curated by Paolo
Stracchi) by the Seidler Architectural Foundation, Harry Seidler & Associates, Cement
Concrete & Aggregates Australia, Dexus, the GPT Group, the Italian Cultural Institute
in Sydney, and Arturo Tedeschi Computational Design.
Thanks, too, to the organisations who have given their support to the exhibition
“Fusions of Horizons: Australian Architects in Asia, 1950s-80s” (curated by Amit
Srivastava and Cole Roskam): the School of Architecture and Built Environment and the
Centre for Asian and Middle Eastern Architecture at the University of Adelaide, Hong

Kong University, Art Atrium, and Vastav.
Our tour partners have worked hard to offer new insights on the architecture of Sydney
and Canberra: Sydney Architecture Walks, Paolo Stracchi and Tin Sheds Gallery, Cameron
Logan, Janina Gosseye, and Michael Kahn, as well as Ann Cleary and the University of
Canberra.
Thanks to the many scholars who generously reviewed papers, colleagues who answered
the call to action at various moments in the last few months, those students who
volunteered to help run the event itself, and members of the academic committee: Tom
Avermaete, Petra Brouwer, Mark Crinson, Hilde Heynen, Naomi Stead, Paul Walker. The
review processed was directed and managed by Proceedings co-editor Victoria Jackson
Wyatt (University of South Australia), who undertook this massive task with the
assistance of Amelia Kelly in the School Research Office.
Thank you to all.
Andrew Leach and Lee Stickells

Co-convenors

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Convened by Andrew Leach and Lee Stickells

Distance Looks Back 2019 / 1

Registration will open in the foyer of Wilkinson from 5pm.

A full schedule of sessions will run from 9am to 6pm.

Lunchtime roundtables (1-2:30pm) will address environmental histories of architecture

A full schedule of sessions will run from 9am to 6pm.

A full schedule of sessions will run from 9am to 3:30pm.

Including a final shared lunch (bbq, of course).

2 / Distance Looks Back 2019 10 - 13 July

Convened by Andrew Leach and Lee Stickells

10 - 13 July Distance Looks Back 2019 / 3

Kah-Wee Lee Isabel Rousset Peyman Akhgar

4 / Distance Looks Back 2019 10 - 13 July

and professional practices. ‘City Circle’ International a Queensland Architect

Convened by Andrew Leach and Lee Stickells

BBQ Lunch 1:00-2:30pm

Tin Sheds Gallery Session

10 - 13 July Distance Looks Back 2019 / 5

Mussolini’s Palace and the ‘Illustrious Cadavers’ of Rome

6 / Distance Looks Back 2019 10 - 13 July

Reinterpreting Urban Housing in Post-War Australia Through Le Corbusier’s ‘Murondins’

Convened by Andrew Leach and Lee Stickells

Theatricality and the Reconstruction of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel

10 - 13 July Distance Looks Back 2019 / 7

Ayano Toki and Mamiko Miyahara

Beth George and Sally Farrah

Trajectories of Axonometry Through Distances and Disciplines

Conceptualizing Belgian Diplomatic Representation on an Architectural Level: The Purpose-Built Embassy as

8 / Distance Looks Back 2019 10 - 13 July

Distance as Space: Casting Marginality Out

Caroline Ford (Keynote lecture)

Distance as Space: Casting Marginality Out

Convened by Andrew Leach and Lee Stickells

All About Eva

10 - 13 July Distance Looks Back 2019 / 9

Practices of Translation as a Way to Look Back on Derridean Years of Architecture

Emergency Exit: Looking Back on the Distance to 1.5 Degrees

10 / Distance Looks Back 2019 10 - 13 July

Too Close to Home: Critical Distance and Venturi’s Columbus Monument

Shifting Definitions of the Vernacular in 20th-Century Philippine Architecture

Convened by Andrew Leach and Lee Stickells

Decorating Distance: Civic Dispositions in Non-professional Environmental Education

10 - 13 July Distance Looks Back 2019 / 11

Transatlantic Proximities / Ambiguous Opportunities: The Multiple Paths of Italian Designers in

A Project of Distance: Bertolt Brecht’s Chicago

Towards a Retrospective Criticism: How Not to Historicize!

12 / Distance Looks Back 2019 10 - 13 July

Irène Vogel Chevroulet

Paths of the Gods and Architects: From Japan to the Acropolis

‘Icons of Compensation’: The Swiss Alps as Intercultural Boundary

Convened by Andrew Leach and Lee Stickells

The Image of the American City in German Ethnography

10 - 13 July Distance Looks Back 2019 / 13

Janina Gosseye and Donald Watson

Architects on the Verge: Distance in Proximity at ‘The Pleasures of Architecture’

Architecture ‘In the Service of Clouds’: The Picturesque and Aquatint

14 / Distance Looks Back 2019 10 - 13 July

Convened by Andrew Leach and Lee Stickells

10 - 13 July Distance Looks Back 2019 / 15

16 / Distance Looks Back 2019 10 - 13 July

British Television and the ‘Abolition of Every Possibility of Remoteness’

Lisa Marie Daunt

Convened by Andrew Leach and Lee Stickells