Naomi Stead

Architecture and “the act of receiving, or the fact of being received”: introduction to a special issue on reception

This special issue of Architectural Theory Review seeks to explore the implications of reception theory, and the concept of reception, for architecture. The Macquarie English Dictionary defines the complex tenses and senses of this term: equally the action of receiving, the fact of being received, and the manner in which something is received. A reception is both a place (that is, a desk or room or designated space for receiving) and an event (that is, a function or formal occasion, in the manner of a wedding reception). In the specific context of radio and TV, reception refers to the ability to receive a signal at all and the “quality or fidelity attained in receiving under given circumstances”.

A “New Institutional” Perspective on Women's Position in Architecture: Considering the Cases of Australia and Sweden

Surprisingly little research on the position of women in architecture has attended to how the regulatory framing and governance of the architecture profession, through institutional and professional bodies, serves to construct and constrain professional identity in gendered ways.1 This article attempts such an analysis, applying a “new institutional” approach to understanding the continuing under-representation of women in architecture. Focusing primarily on the Australian architecture profession, we draw a contrast with features of the profession in Sweden. Our focus is on the legal rational institutions that legitimise and consequently shape the profession, and we attempt to show how credentials and registration processes, along with professional associations, act as legitimising frames for professional practice.

If on a winter's day a tourist: Writing the phenomenological experience of Stockholm

The urban tourist has a quite particular sensibility, mode of behaviour, and way of sensing the city. This is the result of negotiation between tourist media, specifically the tourist map, and the actual lived terrain. This paper uses experimental writing practices to attempt a new mode of representing and narrativizing urban experience, between map and territory. Using both the writerly form and scholarly content of Eeva Jokinen and Soile Veijolas seminal essay, “The Body in Tourism”, as a point of departure, the paper attempts to bridge the discipline of critical tourism studies, and recent innovations in writing space and experience.

Writing the City, or, The Story of a Sydney Walk

To have lived in a place, left it, and returned as a visitor. What is this position, this “place”, this state of being no longer at home. Not a resident, with all the easy everyday intimacy and banality of that, nor yet a tourist, adrift in glittering strangeness. This semi-estrangement, this state of being a semi-stranger, is one thing I will explore in this paper. Another thing is walking. I will attempt to evoke and unwind the experience of walking, across the course of a whole day, in Sydney. In this I will reflect upon and extend an earlier body of research work that attempted to write urban space and experience in Stockholm, through the story of a long walk undertaken on a winters day. The intent there was to explore the deliberately constructed subjectivity of feminist place-writing and where it intersects with that thread of critical tourism studies that focuses on embodiment, sensuality, and phenomenology. Framed as an explicit homage to Soile Veijola and Eeva Jokinens essay “The Body in Tourism”, using both the form and content of that essay as a point of departure, the essay employed experimental writing practices to attempt a new mode of representing and narrativizing urban experience. Through the manipulation of writerly form, it attempted to render the scholarly text opaque and explicitly constructed, attempted to write both theory and practice into place and time, to incorporate the experiential and observational into scholarly work.

Performing Objecthood; Museums, architecture and the play of artefactuality

This paper seeks to unfurl some of the broad implications of the object, in and of the museum, in and of its architecture, within the context of questions of performance, and thus to discuss the status of the museum object within the institution’s increasingly theatricalized spatial and temporal staging of experience.

The semblance of populism: National Museum of Australia

Looks into the controversy behind the construction of the National Museum of Australia (NMA) which was won in a competitive process by architects Ashton Raggatt MacDougal and Robert Peck von Hartel Trethowan, with a design team led by Howar Raggart. Complexity of the physical and conceptual terms of NMA; Argumentation of the author about the architecture of the NMA that refuses a simple or uncritical representation of popularity; Differences of the significant between theme park and mausoleum which corresponds with a parallel scale of popular appeal.

Celebrating the Collective: Reflections on Gender, Diversity, the Visual, and an Attempt to Capture a Communal Portrait of the Architecture Profession in Australia

Abstract This paper reflects upon an attempt to challenge dominant perceptions of what an architect “looks like,” and to debunk clichés about who architects are, through the visual documentation of a collective portrait of the profession. The project documented the participants at a specific architectural event at a particular historic moment – in Sydney, Australia. Rather than emphasizing the particularity of individual architectural “authors,” the photographic series displayed a cross-section of the Australian architectural community – anonymously and without hierarchy – incorporating its “behind-the-scenes” participants on the same plane as its “stars.” This paper examines the motivations behind the original photographic documentation, and reflects upon the subsequent reframing and exhibition of the work as part of an advocacy project, addressing gender equity in architecture. Despite the longstanding and significant contributions of women in Australian architecture, and given that high-profile, authorial positions in architecture are more likely to be occupied by men, the paper conjectures that the category of the “behind-the-scenes worker’ in architecture is, itself, gendered.

Architectural Affections: On Some Modes of Conversation in Architecture, Towards a Disciplinary Theorisation of Oral History

This paper explores the significance of subjectivity, and intersubjective relations, in oral history interviews in architecture. Building upon literature from feminist theory, cultural studies and the methodology of oral history itself, the paper examines how questions of identity and gender bear upon what is said and what can be said, by whom and in what way in the performance and performativity of the interview. Speculating on the affects that spin between the interviewer and the interviewed, and their socially coded behaviours and relationships to one another, the paper attends to the significance of professional, disciplinary and identity positions, as they bear upon the speaking position. Touching upon the affective turn, the theoretical valorisation of embodiment and the poetics of intersubjectivity, the paper attempts to contribute to the theory and methodology of oral histories in architecture and feminist practices both in and on architecture.

Edward Bell and the interdisciplinarity of engineering and architecture in Victorian Sydney

Edward Bell, Sydneys City Engineer and Surveyor from 1856 to 1870, challenges our current-day view of the disciplinary framing of architecture and its allied fields. In Victorian Sydney, the boundaries of these disciplines were more fluid than they are today, and Bell viewed architectural projects such as the Botany Pumping Station, Sydneys first Exhibition Hall and even the Sydney Town Hall as not beyond his skills or area of responsibility. At the same time, his influence on the design and construction of much of the citys Victorian infrastructure, including his role in the development of the citys sewerage and water systems, has been under-acknowledged. Works such as the Paddington Reservoir, Thorntons Obelisk and numerous public stairways are some of the urban elements designed by Bell that still exist in Sydney today. Integrated into the urban life of the city, these overlooked elements have become monuments not to their largely unknown designer, but to the mayors and aldermen of his era, after whom they are named. This paper will review some of these projects, exploring the architectural implications of Bells work in his own time and its ongoing contribution to the urban and architectural heritage of the city of Sydney. Many of Bells works extended beyond what today would be seen as the jurisdiction of the civil engineer or surveyor and well into the territory of the urban designer and architect. What later were to become distinct specialisations were at the time overlapped, meaning that Bells work has important implications for concepts of authorship in architecture, the status and appreciation of designed objects and the identity and sociology of the professions.

“Resigned Accommodation” and “Usurpatory Strategies”: Introduction to a Special Issue on Women in Architecture

The papers collected in this double-length special issue each touch upon the keynote essay republished here, Bridget Fowler and Fiona M. Wilson’s ‘‘Women Architects and Their Discontents’’, first published in 2004 in Sociology. Each thematic issue of Architectural Theory Review focuses on a specific compelling object— whether a text, a drawing, a building, or otherwise—the implications of which are ‘‘reviewed’’ by the contributors to that issue. This issue invited submissions reflecting on Fowler and Wilson’s essay, which, co-authored by a sociologist and a specialist in organisational behaviour, is provocative in its approach to the architecture profession from an outsider’s point of view. In selecting the keynote paper, I was mindful of how its authors had themselves settled upon the architecture profession as an object of study. They take architecture as an anomaly within a general trend towards the end of patriarchalism—‘‘since the practice of creating large-scale buildings is still virtually monopolized by men’’—and also as an indicative case study of a ‘‘typical masculine dominated profession’’. In between these two extremes, of a profession that is both an anomaly and an exemplar, lies a world of complexity.