In the months that preceded the global spread of COVID-19, a series of airborne events transformed the atmosphere of the Indo-Pacific region; the bushfire smoke on the East coast of Australia, the tear gas used in the Santiago de Chile and Hong Kong protests, the Indian Supreme Court ruling on Delhi’s pollution failures, and activists covering iconic statues with respirators across Johannesburg and Pretoria. All these incidents map the political struggles taking place in the region’s air, triggering a proliferation of masked faces avant la lettre.
The publication Folk Costumes, Indo-Pacific Air is an account of the region’s masked state. It brings together culturally and geographically diverse case studies exploring air’s effects on the body to describe the emergent wearable architectures it produces. Considered as folk costumes, these wearables are socio-technical constructions that mediate our relationship with the environment—they negotiate our daily struggles, emancipatory efforts, and emotional inner-lives. Discussing air as a political matter, the book collects contributions by scientists, writers, historians, architects, photographers, and dilettantes, encouraging readers to fly freely between visual and conceptual affinities to create a map of a region in the making.
Edited by Urtzi Grau and Guillermo Fernández-Abascal with contributions by Dean Cross, Hamish McIntosh, Peter McNeil,Hélène Frichot,La Escuela Nunca y Otros Futuros,Lidia Morawska, Juan Elvira, Matthew Connors, Ricarda Bigolin, Peter Irga and Fraser Torpy, Sharbendu De, Enoch Cheng, Samaneh Moafi, Sumayya Vally,Matteo Dal Vera, and Achille Mbembe.
To understand how architecture is both built and practiced today, we often think of drawings and plans, digital visualisations and 3D models. Or, perhaps the tired 'napkin sketch' and its romantic progenitor, the architect's hand. However, these processes represent only a small portion of the full story.
Better together: 33 documents of contemporary Australian architecture & their associated short stories does just that-examines 33 artefacts surrounding the design and construction of contemporary Australian buildings. The book's definition of architectural documents is expansive, encompassing not just working drawings, but correspondence, mock-ups and contracts, 1:1 models and conceptual sculptures, journalism, photography and other formats that expose the unique processes of contemporary architectural production.Through short stories, authors Guillermo Fernández-Abascal, Kate Finning, Urtzi Grau and Anna Tonkin contextualise documents from practitioners including Andrew Power, Edition Office, panovscott, Parlour, Richard Stampton, Sibling, Studio Bright, Trias, Vokes and Peters to unravel the artefacts' inner lives.
Contributions by Giovanna Borasi, Bruther (Stéphanie Bru), Sarah Hearne, Adam Jasper and Emma Letizia Jones, Erika Nakagawa, and Jesús Vassallo explore the potent conventions of gallery display, the value of big models and mock-ups, the multilayered relationships between photography and architecture, and the theatrics of the architect's studio. Originally presented as an exhibition at Monash University's MADA Gallery, this cross-section of the work of Australian architects highlights the best and most innovative in the field. It also presents a new blueprint for how we structure, document and understand contemporary Australian architecture.
Melbourne, Sydney: References, Reflections and Remarks explores the decades-long architectural controversy between Melbourne and Sydney, inviting the protagonists of each city's architecture to weigh in. It includes texts by AKAS, Baracco+Wright, Andrew Burns, Angelo Candalepas, Scott Colman, Edition Office, Philip Goad, Tristen Hardwood, Mike Hewson, Luisa King, Andrew Leach, Carey Lyon, Desley Luscombe, Ian Moore, Other Architects, panovscott, Andrew Power, Howard Raggatt, Gerard Reinmuth, Sibling Architecture, Richard Stampton, Naomi Stead, Luke Tipene, TRIAS, Leon Van Schaik and John Wardle.
