This paper traces the influence that pioneering Australian architectural historian David Saunders (1928-1986) exerted over the development of the University of Melbourne's Cross Street Co-operative Housing Development in Carlton designed by Earle, Shaw & Partners (1970-1971). Cross Street is one of a number of public-private medium-density housing developments that were constructed on large sites resumed by the Housing Commission of Victoria after World War II. While the Housing Commission was demolishing large areas of inner Melbourne for tabula rasa high-rise modernist development, Saunders argued for the retention, adaptation, and acculturation of urban form, exemplified in the house he and architect wife Doreen designed for themselves in Parkville (1962). Saunders took an active role in commissioning Cross Street and his influence meant that it became the first large-scale urban project in Australia that consciously articulated an understanding of its historic environment. The project demonstrates many of his key urban ideas such as the importance of the nineteenth-century terrace form and shared pedestrianised spaces. This paper argues that the project presaged the so-called rediscovery of the city in Australia, emerged amidst the rise of local architectural history as a discipline, heritage activism, and an institution positioning itself for expansion.

Analysis of the unofficial runner-up in the 1961-62 design competition for Boston City Hall-the scheme by the Philadelphia-based team of Mitchell/Giurgola Architects (MGA) in association with David A. Crane and Thomas R. Vreeland Jr.-reveals not the creation of an isolated monument but a humanist restructuring of a city's urban spaces at the heart of a modernist-inspired post-war government centre. Unusually for the time, this scheme was developed through deep dialogue with an existing urban morphology, historic buildings, and the literal "ground" of the city. This paper highlights the scheme as the first in a series of significant urban design projects undertaken by MGA in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. These projects sought to directly engage with the structure, spaces, and artefacts of the historic American city. Further, MGA's City Hall also crystallised compositional themes that would be pursued and developed by the practice in subsequent decades.

By focusing on the interplay between the fields of design, architecture, exhibitions and curatorial practices, the authors in this special issue of Fabrications have uncovered new historical connections, shed new light on iconic buildings, and furthered new methodologies and theoretical approaches. As guest editors, our methodological provocation for this issue was the critical examination of the shared and overlapping influences, approaches and practitioners within design, architecture, exhibition and curatorial practices. Too frequently these fields are siloed from each other, reciprocal knowledge ignored and methodological exchange eschewed. Yet all share a lineage as Kulturwissenschaft — cultural histories of material objects — and in Australia they have been significantly shaped by the scholarship of Professor Emerita Harriet Edquist. The aims of Looking inside Design are threefold. Firstly, to foreground the entwined histories and the traversing of professional boundaries between the fields of design, architecture, exhibition and curatorial practices. Secondly, by connecting these disciplines, richer and more complex cultural histories can be unearthed, thus broadening the conceptual framework for the discipline of architectural history. In seeking to explore the possibilities of enlarging the scope of architectural history we tap into a rich and well-established agenda in Fabrications’s special issues, and a broader turn in architectural history as epitomised by the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative, active since 2006 and dedicated to fostering innovative scholarship from multidisciplinary perspectives. Finally, this special issue commemorates Professor Edquist’s career as she retires from an academic position at RMIT University and as director of the RMIT Design Archives, though not from scholarship itself. Edquist’s work as historian, editor, commentator, curator, and archivist has animated architectural, design and exhibition studies for decades. She leaves a significant legacy of influence and scholarship which this issue attempts to mark. Dominating many of the papers, such that it constitutes a parallel theme of the issue, are women’s voices and those outside the discipline of architecture. This is entirely fitting in a festschrift for an art historian turned architectural and design historian, and exhibition curator. FABRICATIONS 2022, VOL. 32, NO. 1, 1–5 https://doi.org/10.1080/10331867.2022.2061647

Between 1942 and 1945, Australian architects and engineers within the Allied Works Council and the US Army Corps of Engineers undertook a vast programme of building works to assist the campaign to drive Japanese forces northward through the Southwest Pacific and avoid invasion.1 Huge distances, lack of time and the need to wage a campaign from the air lay behind US General Douglas Macarthur’s phrase that it would be an ‘engineer’s war’. By necessity, buildings such as airfields, hospitals, camps, warehouses, and other structures had to be light weight, constructed quickly, and inevitably dropped in by air as easily handled pre-cut packages. With the lack of American and European softwoods in the Australasian region, an unlikely local material was pressed into war service – unseasoned or ‘green’ Australian hardwood. It was a material choice that would have profound implications for two reasons. First, in the years of conflict, circumstances dictated the unprecedented innovation and experiment in light-weight timber structures. Second, in an echo of Lewis Mumford’s poignant maxim that ‘war is the health of the machine’2, the systematisation and ruthless economy inherent in wartime timber buildings would influence the development and practice of a particular form of modern architecture in Australia in the late 1940s and the 1950s.

Students are a necessary part of the architecture profession. Their training and preparation have long been key to maintaining the business and culture of architecture, and in doing so perpetuating traditional territories that control the institutionalisation of a profession. Students have also created their own associations, often mirroring, and at the instigation of, their parent organizations. More often than not though, in addition to acting as social binders and playing out the role of disciplinary ‘club’, these associations have developed a critical voice, urging change and injecting critique: in short, setting the basis for the framing of a local discourse. Using its publications as primary source material, this paper explores the critical activities of the Victorian Architectural Students Society (VASS), which developed under the auspices of the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects (RVIA). VASS published its annual from 1908, which evolved by 1932 to become Lines and, then additionally in 1939, students Robin Boyd and Roy Simpson expanded VASS’s publishing remit, producing the oft-controversial fold-away pamphlet Smudges that infamously gave ‘blots’ and ‘bouquets’ to new buildings. In 1947, VASS published Victorian Modern, Australia’s first polemical history of modern architecture and in 1952, it was the first publisher of the influential journal, Architecture and Arts. This paper examines the shifting ambitions of VASS, its chief protagonists, the role of graphics and the deft blending of the social, satirical and the critical that eventually framed and shaped Victoria’s architecture culture after World War II.

The Paspaley House (1959) in Darwin designed by Harry Seidler, Australia's best-known modernist architect, illustrates the global exchange of information that links Europe, North America, and Brazil to what was then one of the least developed but most strategically significant cities in Australia. Darwin's remoteness from major population centres in Australia has meant that very little is known about the Paspaley House. Whilst the Commonwealth Environmental Building Station (CEBS) established solar principles, these efforts suppressed local climate difference and failed to account for tropical cyclones, leading to omissions and generalisations in the reception and recording of Australia's tropical modernist architecture. This paper contextualises the Paspaley House by comparing it to 'tropical house' designs by the Commonwealth Department of Works and the only other known contemporaneous modernist house in Darwin, the ES & A Bank Manager's Residence (1957) designed by Stuart McIntosh. It reveals Seidler's response to designing and building in equatorial Darwin against a backdrop of global discourse around modern tropical architecture and the escalation in scientific research in Australia to establish performance standards for housing in tropical zones. It uncovers the extent of Seidler's climate awareness at the moment when the significance of climate to his broader practice was first fully realised.

By 1918, at the end of WWI, it could be said that Australia had already sampled a version of what modernism might mean. 1911 saw the awarding of the design of the nation's new capital, Canberra, to Chicago-based architects Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony. It was to be the 20th century's first modern capital city, a democratic vision of the garden city. That same year also saw the completion of what was for a short time, the world's largest reinforced concreite dome at the Melbourne Public Library, a technological feat that continued the competing embrace of American and British construction and service technologies that had been adopted in Australian cities like Syd1ney, Adelaide and Brisbane since the 1870s. 3 Such developments had grown from a notion of progress associated with the country's evolution, from an emerging series of British colonies since 1788, to the birth of Australia as a nation of federated states in 1901.

ABSTRACT To date, Australia’s architectural histories have been silent on the Cold War politics of post-war modernism. For the most part, historians have documented production without considering the broader geo-political moment in which the nation found itself after World War II. Recent transnational architectural histories focus on relationships that the United States and the former USSR forged between themselves and individually with other countries. In so doing, canonical accounts of post-war modernism have been brought into question and architectural practice implicated in broader global shifts of power, economy, and control. Some historians have concentrated on transatlantic connections, others have drawn peripheral modernisms into relief as a series of successive colonial modernisms. This paper explores aspects of Australia’s post-war architectural production that might be regarded as inconvenient truths and implicated in a larger strategic geo-political and economic project. It suggests that the Cold War drew a net across Australia’s entire landscape – urban and remote, seen and unseen. Australia was a willing collaborator. Under the auspices of post-war recovery and with a new-found purpose in the region, projects of extraction, energy, defence, and diplomacy ‘rebuilt’ the nation with a labour force contingent on migration - and architectural modernism was intrinsic to that project.

In 1948, en-route to Australia from the United States, young Viennese-born architect Harry Seidler spent just over six weeks in Brazil. There, he worked briefly for Oscar Niemeyer and visited numerous examples of Brazilian modernism. Settling in Sydney, Seidler became one of Australia's foremost modernist architects. His output quickly shifted from deference to the work of his mentors Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer to formal experiments determined by the peculiarities of Australia's geography and climate. He increasingly adapted elements that reflected his South American experiences. As his practice gained larger commissions, Seidler's engagement with the Australian city was similarly affected. His urbanism - as it developed - ran counter to the Australian city's Anglo-American trajectory that had shaped its form and character since the 1850s. This paper places Seidler's interests in Brazil within the Australian context, where Iberico-American modernism was known and understood but appeared in isolated examples with little or no urban reference. Seidler, instead, proposed a new vision for the Australian city, one that extended Giedion, Sert and Leger's wartime call for a new monumentality and combined architecture, art and landscape in a unified response: it was his answer to an urbanism for the New World.

What if the ‘new’ could be considered significant in the context of additions and extensions to Heritage buildings?Typically, in the context of Heritage and Preservation, the old is seen as more culturally relevant, significant and valuable than the new or the contemporary. If an evolutionary mandate was implied and expected in a, buildings’ original program and morphology, such as a ‘Growing House’, for instance, then the new could expand and evolve the architectural ‘object’, as well as its place in a wider historical context. This paper explores six significant case study projects to explore whether, through the production of the new, we may uncover an untold history that adds a level of significance through the process of change and adaption.

The international recognition of Jørn Utzon’s professional career is accompanied by a growing interest in the Danish architect’s courtyard housing projects. But previous scholarship had access to limited material from Utzon’s professional career, compared to what is now available in The Utzon Archives. Based on a detailed study of presently accessible archival material and original interviews with Utzon’s family and affiliates, this article shows that the Danish architect’s courtyard housing projects closely reflected both his architectural philosophy in general and his thoughts on modern dwellings in particular. These were in turn cultivated by the ideas and ideals of Lin Yutang, Alvar Aalto, and Osvald Sirén.

After ending his tenure as principal architect of the Sydney Opera House in 1966, the Danish architect Jørn Utzon (1918-2008) embarked upon another important project in his oeuvre, the Bagsværd Church in Copenhagen (1968-76). In contrast to the Sydney Opera House, the scholarship on Utzon’s Bagsværd Church is sporadic and limited, especially as it concerns the role of Utzon’s perception of Chinese and Japanese culture in the church’s design. By investigating The Utzon Archives and the Utzon family collection of the architect’s work, as well as interviewing Utzon’s former staff, this article explores the impacts of received ideas and ideals of Chinese and Japanese architecture upon Utzon’s church design. An assessment of the design of various spaces and forms uncovers the relationships between the Bagsværd Church and Utzon’s other important projects. This suggests how the Bagsværd Church reflected the development of Utzon’s architectural philosophy and design principles, particularly those seen in his Sydney Opera House project and an article entitled ‘Platforms and Plateaus’, which he published in 1962. As such, this paper aims to expand the methodological and theoretical framework for understanding the interrelationship between Utzon’s perception of East Asian architecture and its impact on his career.