Peter Scriver

Routine production or symbolic analysis? India and the globalisation of architectural services

Developments in information technology have reduced the need for spatial proximity in the geography of architectural employment: computer-based drafting allows for better standardisation and more efficient production of project information, whilst electronic communication links make the immediate transfer of this information possible across long distances. The ability to compress time and space may be paving the way to the relocation of architectural production facilities from higher-wage to lower-wage regions: numerous examples already exist of firms that have adopted this strategy to reduce their overheads. Thus far, discussion of the viability and desirability of this emerging trend has been hampered by its close focus on the type of work carried out, and a consequently narrow view of its costs and benefits. Remote drafting is seen as a cheap form of professional north-south exploitation in architecture’s intellectual circles that should be ignored if not deplored. By stressing the connection between the task and the culture in which it is developed, this paper seeks to produce a broader, alternative perspective, which identifies the several limitations of current off-shore collaborations but also points out possible future strengths, development strategies, and necessary environmental conditions. The Indian context provides an opportunity to highlight analogies and differences between the recent growth of the export-oriented IT industry and the construction of a colonial professional practice at the turn of the twentieth century. If properly acknowledged by the domestic profession and considered by policy-makers, the development of a framework for distant architectural collaborations could be used not only to support the local design sector and bring the contested components of its post-colonial tradition in sharper focus and possibly closer together, but also to respond to the many challenges posed by the country’s economic policies, growth, and infrastructural conditions.

Mosques, Ghantowns and Cameleers in the Settlement History of Colonial Australia

This article explores a surprisingly little known and only scantily documented facet of modern Australia’s cultural history. This was the instrumental role played by Afghan and Indian camel drivers in the settlement history of the arid interior. While the camel was to thrive in this new land once introduced, the expert camel handlers who began to arrive in the 1860s with the first substantial importations of domesticated pack-animals were to remain a marginal group in the colonial social field, and had all but vanished by the mid-twentieth century.

Placing In-between: Thinking through Architecture in the Construction of Colonial-Modern Identities

This article addresses the topical notions of hybridity and ‘in-between-ness’ as salient points of intersection between critical architectural inquiry and postcolonial studies. Focusing on domestic architecture in colonial-modern India, it examines the problematical role of the built environment in the construction and re-production of identities in nation-building processes. In the light of the equally problematical engagement of architectural form and symbolism in the increasingly reductive and reactionary identity politics of postcolonial India, the article discerns an alternative function that architecture may perform as an ‘in-between’ space enabling cultural intersection and innovation. Through a comparative interpretation of architectural references to the conundrums of hybridity in two historically and stylistically distinct novels about the awakening of colonial-modern India into postcolonial consciousness—John Masters’ Bhowani Junction (1954), and Salman Rushdies The Moors Last Sigh (1996)—literary fiction is engaged as an apposite representation of the ‘place’ of the built environment in the emerging conceptual and cultural landscapes of a new nation. Buildings are not merely ‘backdrops’ to the historical dramas enacted within and between them, the author argues, but cognitive constructions in which identities (national, communal and individual) can be negotiated creatively across cultural boundaries. In addition to aesthetic form and operative function, Architecture, like Literature, also has an ethical function as a heuristic framework for thinking.

The Space of Citizenship: Drifting and Dwelling in “Imperial” Australia

Abstract Though rarely acknowledged, cheap labour sourced through inter-colonial networks originating in British India was instrumental to the “European” exploration and development of colonial Australia in the decades that followed the initial convict-transportation era. Among others, so-called “Afghan” cameleers left their most permanent legacy in Australia’s networks of transcontinental communication and transport, which they first charted and then instrumentally assisted in building between the 1860s and 1920s. Arguably, it was these same networks that ultimately enabled the Australian nation-state to be formed. Beyond those indelible infrastructural traces, however, this paper focuses in particular on the more enigmatic built evidence of these Muslim pioneers and their attempt to establish a foothold in Australia’s burgeoning towns and cities in the early twentieth century. We consider how this humble architectural fabric – built and projected – supported their comparatively vast commercial and communal networks, and how it also asserted the cameleer’s presumed right to citizenship within the emerging Australian Commonwealth. To build was both a practical and a political statement of the intention to dwell, we argue, in a space of opportunity and potential citizenship that was – from the cameleers’ purview as subjects of the greater British world-system – truly “imperial” in scale as well as scope for cultural diversity.

Rules of Engagement: Testing the Attributes of Distant Outsourcing Marriages

Abstract In the space of a few years, the provision of architectural services that rely on the digital outsourcing of documentation responsibilities to other firms—often located offshore in areas of the world with lower labour costs—has come to the forefront of the restructuring debate of the architectural sector. Today, the discussion about digital outsourcing cannot be reduced to the simple exploitation of rent differentials between distinct socio-economic and professional worlds. It must also reflect and examine the objective extension of the transactional market of architectural practices, where firms can reorganize their production strategically across a vast territory to remain sustainable or competitive. Even though the distant collaborations that underlie this arrangement are drawing more public attention than in the past, it is still difficult for nonanecdotal evaluations to take place, since the parameters currently employed in the analysis of this phenomenon have not yet been sufficiently developed theoretically. As a result, it is arduous for industrial scholars, or for those firms that have not directly taken part in such ventures, to assess the perils and possibilities of this emerging mode of service delivery in a balanced way. Building on work carried out for a research programme sponsored by the Australian Research Council, this article establishes a set of criteria and protocols to gauge, more systematically, the potential and viability of distant alliances. By adopting such criteria, it becomes clear that the evaluation of digital collaborations cannot be done in the abstract or solely through the use of office spreadsheets. It requires a thorough consideration of the socio-technical characteristics of the firms involved, and an in-depth analysis of their cultural routines.

Thriving in the slums: progressive development and empowerment of the urban poor to achieve secure tenure in the Philippines

ABSTRACT Thriving cities are characterized by vigorous growth and associated with concepts and the existence of flourishing, healthy communities. However, such concepts are not immediately connected with the living conditions in squatter settlements in developing countries. With a rapidly increasing urban population, slum dwellers in developing countries continue to occupy vulnerable positions, functions and appearances in urban areas, leaving their residents exposed to the fear of eviction and displacement from their livelihoods, lifestyles and homes. While acknowledging a range of different approaches to the housing of slum dwellers, including the experience of problematic efforts to relocate inhabitants from a squatter settlement into a regular housing market in a single step, this paper examines a different case study. It describes the circumstances which have enabled squatter settlers in Davao City, in the Philippines, to achieve legal tenure and to build homes, incrementally, that are eventually compliant with the local building codes. Based on a detailed physical analysis of individual homes in combination with interviews with householders, this paper presents the findings of a comprehensive study of slum settlements in which the progressive development of urban settlements was analysed in the context of Filipino pro-people policies. These have prioritized the rights of the urban poor and empowered them to build low-income housing, enabling them to develop sustainable, secure, thriving urban settlements within cities which provide a credible and hopeful role model for the foundation of better communities and cities for the future.

Architecture as Method: A Report on the Adelaide Congress 2017

In July 2017, the Centre for Asian and Middle Eastern Architecture (CAMEA) at the University of Adelaide marked two decades since it was formally established in an inaugural symposium immediately p...

Digital Archetypes: Adaptations of Early Temple Architecture in South and Southeast Asia

What is the relationship between the templebuilding traditions of India and Southeast Asia? Ostensibly, the links are obvious. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)-protected world heritage sites at Borobudur, Prambanan, in central Java and Angkor Wat in present-day Cambodia, for example, aremonumental temple complexes of extraordinary scale and architectural character, in which the fullflowering of rich and powerful regimes of manifest Buddhist and/or Hindu belief is writ large. Moreover, though largely surrendered to neglect and slow decay over the past millennium with the successive cultural and political taking-over of Southeast Asia by Islamic and Christian colonial hegemonies, the mouldering ruins of countless minor temples, stupas and shrines attest to a profound historical and cultural substrate of “Indic” origin across the vast archipelago and subcontinental peninsula that defines the region. Yet, as Sambit Datta and David Beynon elucidate in their innovative contribution to the long and highly specialised tradition of scholarship on the Indian temple, historical evidence for the putative pan-Asian imperialism of Indian civilisation in an earlier golden age is surprisingly scarce and inconsistent. If the surviving monuments and traces of the preIslamic building world of Southeast Asia offer a substantive body of alternative evidence that might redress the gaps and absences in the written record however, their study reveals that this is a more enigmatic and consequently intriguing corpus, upon closer examination, than one might have assumed. In short, the analysis and interpretation of the evidence explored in this book suggests that there was a much less prescriptive, more elective, contingent and ultimately inventive relationship between rules and design practices than has previously been supposed, which was rarely, if ever, coerced by direct colonial contact. Explanation therefore resides in a better appreciation of the multilateral modes of reception, diffusion and exchange that evidently occurred across the region over a number of centuries. The idea that buildings are both the products and the mute witnesses of cultural histories that can be read like a text-in-stone was an early and abiding notion of Orientalist scholarship about India. But it was James Fergusson’s ideologically conflicted effort in the midnineteenth century to pioneer the study of what he called the “stone book” of Indian architecture – in which a rationalist theory of architectural history was conflated with a racist theory of cultural development – that was to be particularly influential in propagating this view. It was only logical, from Fergusson’s purview, to extend this project to the architecture of “Further India” when he published his encyclopaedic History of Indian and Eastern Architecture in 1876. Unfortunately, subsequent posthumous editions were dutifully extended and edited by others, who took little pause to reconsider its problematic original premises. Whilst the critical problems with the ideological underpinnings of Fergusson’s foundational scholarship on Indian architecture and subsequent discourse, not least the history and theory of the Brahmanic/Hindu temple, have attracted considerable scrutiny by previous scholars, Datta and Beynon remind us that Fergusson’s pioneering research – which was developed with, and furthered by, the Archaeological Survey of India well into the early twentieth century – was equally significant for the methodological innovation and impact of his almost exclusively object-based visual method of comparative description and analysis, using what was then the new medium of photography. Returning in the present study to the question of how we can visualise these artefacts to understand them better, the scholarship displayed in this compact and understated volume is striking for both its methodical discipline and its admirably un-Fergusson-like humility. Targeted at expert temple scholars, and published within a book series focusing on “Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities”, the authors write confidently, but with evident self-consciousness as architectural inquirers in

Understanding qualitative drivers in distance collaboration for architectural services

Enhanced global connectivity, networks’ capacity to carry data, and increases in transmission speed already affect the way architectural practices work. With computer-assisted drafting (CAD) equipment now used by the overwhelming majority of architectural offices globally, electronic transfer of drawings is on the rise, followed by opportunities to benefit from the economic advantage of digital technologies by setting up remote links. Researchers in areas such as the media, software engineering, accounting, and light manufacturing have examined the industrial, cultural and regional development underpinnings of such phenomena. By contrast, very few analyses exist in architecture that link technological opportunities to social transformations, and technical skills to market development. Our research responds to this challenge by investigating qualitative differences in the performance of distant actors, and aims to determine whether these differences can be related to environmental characteristics.