With the commencement of oil extraction from the Naftun oilfields in 1908, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company designated Abadan Island in the southwestern province of Khuzestan, Iran, as the pivotal locus for refining and exporting Iranian oil. This decision transformed the island into a company town while embedding it within the broader geopolitical and economic framework of British imperialism. From its inception, the oil company town of Abadan was conceived as a strategic hub in the British Empire rather than an isolated settlement. Its architecture and infrastructure were designed to standardise spaces, ensuring Abadan's integration into imperial circuits, in preparation for imperial expansion, powered by oil's strategic mobility. Two central elements of the project were the reconfiguration of property rights and the cultivation of a spatial imagination that reinforced colonial hierarchies. The result was a racially segregated "island within an island," where expatriates enjoyed privileged environments while local and non-European labourers were confined to inferior living and working conditions. Drawing on archival materials, including maps, correspondence, and contractual records from British governmental and corporate sources, this paper examines the political, legal, and spatial strategies that shaped Abadan Island and its oil company town between 1908 and the 1930s. It argues that Abadan's early urban form was a calculated imperial construct, rather than a conventional company town, and thus intended to materially situate a local oil site onto the British imperial map.
Tunisia's pavilion at the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition was more than just an Orientalist set piece on the Seine. Its components, by French architect and archaeologist Henri Saladin, incorporated recognisable elements drawn from several Tunisian monuments, while its functional market (souk) staffed by Tunisian merchants and craftsmen attracted considerable attention. Transcending the spectacle, the complex also had didactic aims. Its main building housed three distinct sections that featured exhibitions on agriculture, industry, and art and archaeology, reflecting the priorities of the relatively new French colonial administration (1881-1956). The pavilion's evocation of Tunisia's noteworthy Roman history in its central space celebrated ancient productivity while substantiating contemporary narratives that claimed the Roman Empire as precedent for France's North African interventions. This article situates Saladin's pavilion within the context of late nineteenth-century agricultural settlement policies in Tunisia and parses components of the pavilion's structure and displays in light of developing colonialist rhetoric that was both retrospective and opportunistic in its support of emigration at a time of intense demographic competition with Italy in occupied Tunisia.
On the occasion of the 15th anniversary of the ATCH (architecture, theory, culture and history) Research Centre at the University of Queensland, Macarthur asked the panel to respond to the following provocation: The historiography of architecture has for several decades been partly structured by a critique of instrumental history. The first generation historians of the 20th century have been faulted for narrativising the past as a process that would necessarily end in the triumph of modernism. Much meta-history since, going beyond this critique, has shown when and how historical writing has been symbiotic in the wider development of the profession. But now a different kind of instrumentalism is becoming common in architectural history. We have politically progressive work with the explicit aim of de-colonising and de-masculinising the university curriculum as a path to an ethical profession. In parallel the emphasis of governments and universities on the utility of research means that increasingly history is becoming an aspect of Heritage popular meaning and social cohesion. As the profession itself undergoes transformation how should we reflect on the uses of history in the past, today and into the future?
The compositional function of the horizon line in defining space in Western art and culture is absent in some aspects of traditional Japanese arts and cultural worldview. From early Japanese cosmologies the horizon line has been reconsidered in Zen Sansui-style landscape paintings, in the philosophy of Kitaro Nishida, and in some contemporary architectures. The manifestations of horizonless-ness explored here contrast with the notion of the horizon as a dividing line, predominant in Western thought. The notion of the horizon as a separating boundary can be associated with the dualistic worldview that considers nature and culture as irreconcilable opposites; a fundemental characteristic of a world where the subject is separated from the environment. This paper explores how such a dualistic worldview is absent in certain Japanese traditions and artistic expressions, shedding new light on the familiar trope that proposes a harmonious relationship between Japanese culture and nature. In doing so, it examines a horizonless worldview and its implications for aesthetics and the built environment. To these ends, this paper explores two contemporary art museums on islands in the Setouchi region of Japan: Tadao Ando's Chichu Art Museum on Naoshima Island and Ryue Nishizawa and Rei Naito's toponymic Teshima Art Museum on Teshima Island. By exploring the horizonless architectural strategies of these two museums, they can be linked to the principles of Sansui-style painting and to Nishida's ideas of both absence and nothingness.
This paper contextualises inhumation and commemoration practices in the short-lived British military settlement of Fort Dundas (Punata) on Melville Island (Yermalner) in remote northern Australia during the 1820s. Death significantly impacted colonial life and traces of inhumation and commemoration practices resonate to the present. Settlers conveyed cultural meaning, ownership, and social status through the inground interment of bodies, employing funerary practices imported from Britain - and filtered through new laws and conventions established in emerging New South Wales society. The isolated burials on this remote island thus reveal much about societal values, intercultural interactions, and spatial approaches to death in the early nineteenth century. We examine early formal colonial sepulchral practices at Fort Dundas between 1824 and 1829, alongside ongoing care by Indigenous peoples, to highlight the intercultural and transient nature of sepulchral traditions. In doing so, we show that an examination of the architectural and landscape traces of colonial burials in remote settlements can reveal much about the cultural meaning and significance of human life and death. Aboriginal people's respect for the site continues, so where tangible colonial traces have mostly been lost, Aboriginal communities have overlaid a continuum of remembrance and have inscribed new post-colonial hybrid meanings.
In 1967, Michel Foucault put forth the notion of heterotopias: "other" spaces which do not politely fit into the city, instead figuratively or literally existing as islands within the urban fabric. In New York City, a complex urban archipelago, smaller islands historically serve as islands of exile. Like Venice, New York utilised water as a barrier before its bridges and tunnels existed. In the nineteenth century, Randalls and Wards Islands in the New York archipelago began housing asylums, almshouses, hospitals, reformatories, and potter's fields, which officials imagined would help protect society and contribute towards reformation. Now contested spaces, these non-public functions compete with public parks and other infrastructure on the islands. The City recently erected temporary shelters there to house migrants, reaffirming Randalls and Wards Islands as places for exiles. This history reflects urban growth, class separation, and social tensions, particularly as the population of Manhattan grew rapidly northwards. Over time, the City excised undesirable populations from developed areas into new heterotopias remote from most residents. Engaging Foucault's thesis on heterotopias allows new interpretations of the spatial and power dynamics that govern Randalls and Wards Islands in the New York archipelago.
This report reflects on the SAHANZ 2025 PhD Colloquium, which explored the shifting landscape of architectural humanities in the digital age. As the first SAHANZ academic meeting hosted outside Australasia by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the online forum brought together doctoral researchers from thirteen universities across six countries. Organized around the central theme, "Where do we draw the line?", the colloquium examined the growing tension between digital methods, mainly AI, and the core values of humanistic inquiry. Across four thematic sessions, participants scrutinized the cognitive boundaries and ethics of digital technology, ranging from spatial mapping to algorithmic governance. A key consensus emerged regarding the need for "prudent optimism": leveraging digital tools to alleviate foundational labour while safeguarding intellectual agency and historical authenticity. The report concludes that digital tools should be viewed not as replacements for traditional research, but as extensions of cognitive capacity.
This article focuses on the experience of Maria Em & iacute;lia Caria, a Portuguese architect who worked for more than a decade in the archipelago of Cape Verde, one of Portugal's five African colonies, until 1975. The study is based on archival documents, oral histories, and fieldwork, to address the scarcity of sources often characteristic of research on professional women. The article discusses how gender influenced Caria's performance as an architect, and how the confinement of her work to a marginal territory in the Portuguese colonial context ultimately allowed her to play an influential and autonomous role. Caria's main period of activity coincided with Colonial or Liberation Wars (1961-74), which, although not directly affecting Cape Verde, would influence both so-called "welfare programmes" and access to public and private investment. The state of extreme deprivation and precariousness of these islands would ultimately affect Caria's urban planning proposals and, consequently, their eventual failure.
In 1908, the Siamese monarchy undertook the renovation of the ordination hall or ubosot of Wat Rachathiwat, a forest monastery then on the outskirts of Bangkok. Months before, the monarchy ratified a treaty that compelled Siam to recognise France's territorial claims to Angkor Wat and its Khmer-majority provinces. Under the auspices of the designer and former Minister of War, Prince Naris, the hall's new design integrated historicist idioms from medieval Angkor and the European Baroque to produce a spatial narrative about the possibility of Buddhist kingship in the modern era of nation-states. In the twentieth century, theoretical claims about the authority of the monarchy over its subjects in Siam and its political relationships with neighbouring polities like Kampuchea were no longer solely based on the Theravada Buddhist concept of barami or "perfection" but came to rely increasingly on delimited territorial claims. This article connects the renovation of the sacred space of the ubosot with the delineation of territorial borders between Siam and the French protectorate of Cambodge. It frames the renovated hall and its revivalist architecture as a network of historical crossings that commemorated the "perfections" of Buddhist kingship and sovereign space in a modern era of territorially-bounded nation-states.
In Australia, Eurocentric values have historically been projected onto Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander housing designs. This has led to a significant disjoint between the function of the house and the needs of Indigenous tenants. Access to Indigenous housing in Australia has decreased over the past few decades, and the public administrations responsible for housing provision, are yet to respond to the problem on any sufficient scale. These inadequate housing conditions have been attributed to failed design approaches, poor construction and materials, a misunderstanding of site constraints, a lack of understanding of tenants needs, and increased wear and tear due to overcrowding and limited maintenance. Building upon Paul Memmott's 2004 commentary within "Aboriginal Housing: Has the State of the Art Improved?" this research examines the legacy of challenges in delivering housing for Indigenous Australians, carried out through the analysis of interviews conducted with architects, builders, government officials, and Aboriginal Community Housing Providers working in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander housing sector. By examining Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander housing design, procurement and construction processes within an Australian regional context, this research seeks to understand the challenges of delivering Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander housing in regional New South Wales.
In the early twentieth century, Bombay (now Mumbai) emerged as the largest and commercially most important city in what was then British India. With its rapid urban development offering opportunities for professional architects, the city produced the country's first school of architecture, instituted in 1913 and, in terms of student numbers, soon among the largest such institutions in the British world. The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) meanwhile claimed to promote and coordinate the training of architects across the British Empire. Using a broad range of archival records, government reports, and contemporary periodicals, this article traces the relations between the Bombay School of Architecture and the RIBA, which began during the First World War and ended following India's independence. It argues that throughout this period the school was driven by its efforts to attain the RIBA's "recognition," which ultimately foundered on the RIBA's intransigence. In contrast to its handling of schools in the settler colonies, the RIBA insisted on unrealistic metropolitan standards from the Bombay School. I therefore contend that the RIBA did not in fact pursue a coherent imperial policy; its lofty rhetoric notwithstanding, the RIBA's role in coordinating architectural education beyond Great Britain remained limited.
