2018 UQ Architecture Lecture Series

Presentation

- Held on 8 May, 2018

Presentation

2018 UQ Architecture Lecture Series

Held on 8 May, 2018

by:

Adam Jefford

Manager APDL

Janina Gosseye

Research Fellow

Sandra Kaji-O’Grady

Professor and Head of School

Speaker

Amalie Wright

Architect

Keynote Speaker

Fiona Gardiner

Adjunct Associate Professor

Panellist

Adam Jefford:

Good evening. Welcome. Thank you for joining us on this wet Tuesday night. My name is Adam, and I’m the lead of the Asia Pacific Design Library. To begin, I’d like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land, and pay respects to past, present and emerging.

Tonight we have a slight change of program at the front with an additional speaker, which I think you’ll all enjoy a lot. I know I will. But just a little bit of housekeeping before we get there. CPD points, again. I’ve got the slides in order tonight. Thank you for your contributions. We are publishing and we will continue to publish them, so please keep sending them in.

Of course, Slido for your questions. The event code tonight is J253. You can just open it up on your browser on your phone, slido.com, and enter that, and we’ll put that number up again at the back of tonight’s lecture. But to begin, could I welcome Professor Sandra Kaji-O’Grady, Head of School of Architecture to the microphone. Thank you.

Sandra Kaji-O’Grady:

Extra speaker is a bit of an exaggeration. I won’t keep you that long. The UQ Architecture Lecture Series is literally a gift to the city and its design community from the State Library of Queensland and the University of Queensland. More alumni than students attend these lectures. Am I correct? How many students do we have in the audience tonight? Probably about ten percent are students. I think this is because few students understand that architecture extends beyond the assessments they are working on right now. Many are yet to be brought into the design community or to see the agency of the architect over and above the project brief.

We want them to learn that being an architect is also about giving back to the profession, being part of the profession and their communities to make the world a better place. For this reason, UQ architecture has a long history of getting students engaged with questions of social inequity, and we are working hard to continue that tradition. We have a program of field trips to work with struggling communities in the region who might benefit from student engagement and vice versa. We call it the Social Outreach Studio, and I want to show you a two minute video about last year’s iteration of SOS.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

Female 1:

The Social Outreach Studio is a new project for us, in that what we’re trying to do is get our students to be able to go out to needy communities, rural communities mostly in Queensland.

Female 2:

So, 16 students travelled to Cairns. We met with Shaneen, the Director of People Oriented Design, and we worked with the Alluna Land Trust of Cairns which is made up of two different Indigenous groups of people. Over the week we exchanged knowledge with them and shared, and it was a very intense week. It was very emotional. I think for some students it was quite overwhelming, but in a very positive way. A very positive experience of really understanding the challenges that face these communities.

Female 3:

The Social Outreach Studio was an opportunity to bring the expertise and ideas of a whole lot of fabulous Masters students to the site to help the Alluna Land Trust work through what was possible on the site. The Land Trust embraced the students. They were so professional and so welcoming and so inclusive, and both parts of the Land Trust took the students out on their country. The gave them a kind of cultural induction on the land. They were taken by senior Elders and walked across country, looking at plants, looking at places, and being shown around the local are and what it means to be Yirrganydji and what it means to be Gimuy-walubarra Yidinji.

The Land Trust explained to the students that they really wanted to make this a financially viable development proposal for not only themselves as a Land Trust, but for the future of all of their beneficiaries and all of their families.

Female 2:

I think for students it’s the opportunity to travel out of the local context of architecture and sort of reach other groups that you wouldn’t necessarily have access to here. It doesn’t really matter whether you’re working with Indigenous people or whether you’re working with the Legal Society or whoever your client is, they’re going to have sort of, I guess, a personality and a character and a culture, and it’s about how you can apply that to a project.

Female 3:

So, for me I know that the Studio has been successful, because on about day three or four a number of students were overwhelmed with emotion associated with understanding the history for Aboriginal people in Australia, and when I know that people feel the project that they’re working on, I’ve done my job and they get it.

Female 2:

This is a really unique opportunity that’s only offered by the University of Queensland School of Architecture, and I think through this if you’re a student or a person who’s really passionate about getting involved with people and making change and being active and actually engaging with real issues and real people, this is the place to do it.

[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]

Sandra Kaji-O’Grady:

So, we’ve been very deliberate in our Social Outreach Studio not to go to regions outside of Queensland yet. We don’t want to promote poverty tourism. We’re very clear that what we want to do is have students aware of the issues in our region and working with our people.

In 2018 we hope to work again with Shaneen and Belinda from POD, but this time with the Kunawarra clan at Bana Yarralji Bubu, their homeland at Shipton’s Flat in the Daintree. Marilyn and Peter Wallace, the Elders there, have spent years healing and educating people on their country in the deep rainforest. They host cultural visits, and they’re not ready to explore opportunities to create bespoke accommodation to support cultural visits to country and to grow their local economy.

So, these programs – and we’re really hoping this will happen this semester – these programs cost much more to deliver than classroom-based teaching. Participating in them costs students more too, and we are really hoping that you will support us in this endeavour in return for the gift of the Lecture Series. There’s always a price to be paid for gifts isn’t there? Thank you.

Janina Gosseye:

Good evening. I would also like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we meet tonight, and pay respect to their Elders past, present and emerging.

Welcome everyone. Tonight is the second to last lecture in this year’s UQ Architecture Lecture Series. This means that after tonight you will only have to listen to me introduce the theme of the series once more, and that’s next week when we have John Hardwick-Smith, a Director of the renowned New Zealand practice Athfield Architects who will be speaking.

I would also like this opportunity to let you know that John Hardwick-Smith won’t be the only man named John giving a lecture on architecture at the State Library next week, because next Thursday evening John Macarthur who’s a Professor at UQ School of Architecture will be giving a lecture on liberalism in architecture discourse in Auditorium 2, which is just across the corridor.

Like next week’s lecture by John Hardwick-Smith, the lecture by John Macarthur is a free event but you do need to register, and for more information on how to do so, I would like to refer you to the UQ School of Architecture website.

But now to tonight’s event. As you can see on the slide behind me, the theme of this year’s UQ Architecture Lecture Series is ‘In-terre-vention’. As curator of this year’s Lecture Series, I have chosen to invited practices whose projects I believe are highly sensitive to the context that surrounds them. This is the reason why I’ve changed the middle syllable of the word intervention to ‘terre’, the French word for earth. In doing so, emphasis in this year’s Lecture Series is also placed on the invention component that goes hand in hand with each intervention as the projects and practices that are featured in the series demonstrate.

Of all the speakers that are part of this year’s line-up, the work of our guest tonight undoubtedly most explicitly and literally addresses this theme. Registered as both an architect and a landscape architect, Amalie Wright’s projects are all about working with the earth and the natural environment. Her work ranges from private gardens to the updated master plan for the Maroochy Regional Bushland Botanic Gardens and the multi-award winning Big Plans for Small Creek project, which is a 1.6 kilometre channel naturalisation in Ipswich.

Amalie is the Director of the Brisbane based design studio Landscapology, and in addition to running this studio she is also a teacher in landscape and architecture design at QUT. She regularly mentors candidates and sits on the assessment panels for landscape architectural registration in Queensland, and Amalie is currently also Queensland’s President of the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects. Her talk tonight is entitled ‘Big Plans for Small Creek: Confidently doubting towards the tuture’.

But before I give the work to Amalie, I would also briefly like to introduce my co-questioner for tonight, Fiona Gardiner. Fiona, like Amalie, is probably known to many of you. She is the Director of Heritage at the Queensland Department of Environment and Science, and when I invited her last week to co-host tonight’s question round she was immediately as enthusiastic as myself about Amalie’s lecture. So, without further ado, please join me in welcoming Amalie to the stage.

Amalie Wright:

Thanks Janina. Wasn’t it great to see Shaneen just before. I studied with Shaneen, so it was amazing to see the depth and the richness of the work that she and Belinda are doing at POD. It’s also great to see so many other friendly and familiar faces in the audience tonight. Some of you know nothing about me, and some of you know a little about me. Many of you know that I grew up in Mackay, but what not many of you know is that when I was a kid I used to go to piano lessons with Mrs Brock.

So, Mrs Brock lived around the corner from our place. The piano was in the living room, where the curtains were always drawn very tightly shut. In the middle of the regular furniture, the armchairs and the sofas and so on, was a fold out plastic banana lounge. When I arrived for classes I would start by playing the pieces I’d been practicing during the week, and whilst this happened Mrs Brock would stretch out on the banana lounge and slowly smoke a cigarette. I thought she was impossibly glamorous.

This all made a huge impact on me as a child. I remember it clearly, and I remember being very aware that I was having an experience, or at least a reaction to an experience, that was very different from my other piano playing peers.

Luckily for the music world though I didn’t become a chain smoking big bang pianist, so it’s probably fair to say that this had no discernible impact on my career. But three other things definitely did.

Number one. The house I grew up in was called Solar 2. Can you tell it was designed by an architect? It was next door to the Sugar Research Institute in Mackay, and it backed on to cane fields. Right beside us there was a dip in the ground that would fill up with water whenever it rained. It’s known in our family as the lake, and it’s still the standard unit of measure our family uses in describing how much rain has fallen. We lived on the main road into town, and across the road from us was a lagoon system and next to that was the water treatment plant.

Number two. As well as Solar 2 we had a beach shack. It was made from tree trunks and fibro sheets. The floor inside was a whole series of triangular panels that had come from old cane train bins. The floor had once been painted yellow. The people who owned it before us had then painted it green, but they hadn’t bothered to move any of their furniture. So, the triangular panels were overlaid with this strange mixture of random green and yellow shapes.

There was no town water. The kitchen sink was fed by a rainwater tank. To have a shower you had to go outside and prime the pump, which was a complicated rigmarole with spanners and bottles of oil and a lot of shouting, to draw the water from the bore into a header tank. From there it went across to the bathroom where it was heated by a simple but very potentially lethal electrical current system, and then you could have your shower.

The bathroom was a bit of an old concrete slab that was wrapped in corrugated iron, and in the corner there were generations of cane toads the size of rottweilers clustered around the drain. Across the road though was the beautiful expansive beach.

Number three. My dad was a draftsman, and I remember being told a lot – that the first town plan for Mackay, which incidentally was prepared by Carl Langer, designated a whole swathe of land as unsuitable for housing because it was low lying and flood prone. Despite the recommendations of Langer’s plan, the land was indeed developed, and as sure as day follows night, it was regularly inundated.

At the time I took all of these things for granted. It’s just the way it was. It wasn’t until many, many years later – and maybe I’m a bit thick – that I realised just how much water had formed a constantly changing backdrop to my life.

So, while we’re on this trip down memory lane, who remembers the 80s? It was crazy right? How else do you explain something like this, or whatever the hell it is that’s happening here? This was one of our top grossing movies. It was about blokes in big planes going at big speeds. This is what we watched on the telly. Big shoulder pads, bit teeth, big hair. What about music? It was big everything. This bloke was the Prime Minister of our country. He was in the Guinness Book of Records for being a big drinker.

Down the road from us in Ipswich big things were also afoot, but rather than big hair, this involved big concrete. Ipswich had big plans for Small Creek, a meandering chain of ponds flowing through degraded pasture land. This is it pictured in 1946. In the early 80s, that creek was straightened and neatened into an efficient concrete drain.

Nearly two years ago the council began a project to turn the drain back into a functioning waterway. Landscapology and our project partners Bligh Tanner have been working with council on the latest Big Plans for Small Creek. 1.6 kilometres of drain will be naturalised over the next four years. Stage one is nearly finished on site. This is a career highlight for everyone on the team. It’s absolutely what we’ve signed up for. We reckon we’re doing a really good thing, and yet…

As Janina’s introduced, the title of this year’s Lecture Series is ‘In-terre-vention’. Thirty years ago everyone involved in commissioning, designing and building that concrete drain thought their intervention was a really good thing for future Ipswich. But like Goose’s moustache, were they totally wrong? Will people look at our project in 30 years’ time and think ‘What on earth were they thinking?’

Intervention. Maybe that approach isn’t helping. So, what else do we make of this little puzzle? What if we disregard that middle bit for a minute and see what we’re left with? Invention. So, for my sins I’m also an architect, as you’ve heard, and like you I go to architecture talks and conferences every year. Each year speakers talk passionately about the next big thing, the next big invention, the invention that will save the world, that will finally demonstrate that architectural invention can save the world. The last few years it’s been 3D printing. According to some of the presentations I’ve seen, 3D printing holds the key to everything from resource scarcity to housing affordability and emergency shelter.

Another architectural invention that can save the world has been parametric design. Let’s not forget shipping containers. We all believe that our thing is the right invention. Well, what about my tribe? I’m always hearing landscape architects prescribing more nodes, whatever they are, more engagement with stakeholders, whoever they are, more activation. If that’s the answer, I’ll seriously consider being deactivated now. We love to be certain don’t we? We love to think that our invention will have the answers to what’s necessary.