Kelly Greenop

Affirming and Reaffirming Indigenous Presence: Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Community, Public and Institutional Architecture in Australia

The design of specific buildings to house Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural artefacts, artworks, activities or organisations, has become important in Australian architecture since the 1960s. A growing number of buildings—and new architectural types—have been devised to support, display and safeguard Indigenous cultures and to accommodate Indigenous organisations that have become more prevalent since self-determination. These new public, institutional and community building typologies provide an architecture that often speaks to the both the Indigenous and non-Indigenous population. This chapter examines a number of different types of Indigenous institutional, public and community buildings, surveying architectural precedents within the genres of keeping houses and cultural centres, museums, art centres, educational and health projects. Some of Australia’s leading architects, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, have contributed to these works, seeking to create architecture that better fits the needs of Indigenous users, to participate in the recognition of the unjust treatment of Indigenous Australians, and to dignify contemporary Indigenous cultures through architectural excellence. Public, institutional and community buildings that cater to and purport to represent or make visible Indigenous communities have developed their own typologies during the twentieth century and continue to do so. The need for Indigenous input for buildings to function according to needs and expectations, and to reconcile decades of exclusion and racism still poses challenges for policy makers and architects alike. Evidence-based design that demonstrates improved health and wellbeing and educational outcomes in culturally appropriate buildings is occurring, but integration between research and design is needed, along with greater post-occupancy evaluation, and a commitment to learn from designs and their effect on Indigenous peoples and communities. Architecture and placemaking that celebrates cultural identity, fits with Indigenous socio-spatial and cultural needs, and is devised by or with Indigenous peoples, is an important aspect of making Indigenous cultures visible and demonstrating Indigenous resistance and resilience in contemporary Australia.

Understanding housing precarity: more than access to a shelter, housing is essential for a decent life

This is a reply to:Finnerty, Joe and C. O’Connell. 2017. “Changing precarities in the Irish housing system: supplier-generated changes in security of tenure for domiciled households.” Global Discou...

What’s the Story? Contemporary Indigenous Architecture in Practice in Australia

This chapter is based on conversations between architect Andrew Lane and interior designer Francoise Lane, the founding directors of Indij Design. The firm is one of the few Indigenous-owned and operated architecture Practices in Australia, based in Cairns in the far north of the state of Queensland, Australia.

Before Architecture Comes Place, Before Place Come People: Contemporary Indigenous Places in Urban Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

This chapter examines the importance of place, within a contemporary urban Indigenous community, where in-depth ethnographic research was conducted between 2006 and 2009. Place is used as a concept to explore and examine Indigenous people’s connections to the physical environment and how these have developed through personal, family, social, and cultural means to become contemporary traditions within an Australian suburban setting that of Inala in the Queensland’s capital city Brisbane. The research argues that for Indigenous architecture to be meaningful, Indigenous people’s understandings and connections to place must be better understood and valued by the broader Australian community. The Inala case study is used to demonstrate how then place constructs of meaning, attachment, identity and sovereignty are enacted in everyday settings that will have relevance across cultural groups.

Forum: Reflecting on the Politics of Patrimony

Abstract This Forum evolved from a provocation by the Editors of this special issue of Fabrications that “too often heritage conservation assumes an apolitical stance by neglecting to acknowledge its own unsettling agendas.” The Forums five contributors highlight a range of challenges and trends that architectural heritage professionals – including historians – have begun to identify and engage with in a critical fashion. These pieces demonstrate the need to commit to historical practice that embraces the “critical turn,” and to acknowledge our responsibilities as “gatekeepers” and producers of knowledge. While we cannot control the multitude of interpretations that our work will surely generate across time and space, we can consider whether we are contributing to, or challenging, existing silences, inaccuracies, and regimes of knowledge. This Forum does not claim to provide answers, but instead seeks to foster discussion and identify some of the avenues along which work in the general realm of “Architecture / Heritage / Politics” is – or should be – progressing.