Asian Built Environments

There will be a stream on “Asian Built Environments” run by Society of Architectural and Urban Historians – Asia at the biennial Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA) conference, to be held at the University of Sydney on 3–5 July 2018.

Modernisation, urbanisation and globalisation have brought about unprecedented changes across Asia. What new architectural forms and urban spaces are created through the entanglements of new modes of production and historical legacies? How have transnational flows, natural catastrophes and geopolitical shifts shaped the development of built environments? How are notions of class, ethnicity, race, gender and nation negotiated in these charged contexts? And what sorts of social relations, theories and developmental patterns are at stake as a result? The SAUH-Asia stream at the ASAA conference will explore these questions by bringing together papers ranging from empirical studies of built environments to broad concerns about the theorisation of “Asia” as a geographical, cultural, political and economic entity in a global era. The abstract will be reviewed by two readers.

PROGRAM

In 2017 the Centre for Asian and Middle Eastern Architecture (CAMEA) will mark twenty years of distinctive leadership within Australasian academe in Asian and Arab focused scholarship on architecture, culture and intellectual change. In Adelaide in July 2017, as part of a year-long program of associated events, CAMEA will host a unique collaboration between the Society of Architectural & Urban Historians – Asia (SAUH Asia) and the Society of Architectural Historians – Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ) in the format of an intimate congress that will bring together both established and emerging architectural scholars to mark and reflect critically and strategically upon this generational threshold, not only on Asia-focused research, but on architectural scholarship in general.

PROGRAM

The plenary, Rethinking Modern Asia-Pacific Architectures, funded by an International Research and Research Training Fund (IRRTF) workshop grant from the University of Melbourne, brought international collaborators and students from NUS and HKU to the Melbourne School of Design on 5-6 July 2016. The students along with others from Deakin University, the University of Adelaide, University of California, Berkeley and the University of Melbourne had the opportunity to present their respective projects to an expert audience and to network with prominent scholars of Asia. The event began with an evening function on 5 July, to meet and greet supervisors and reviewers who would attend and provide feedback to students at the plenary. The plenary ran all-day on 6 July. The format was of individual presentations followed by feedback and discussion.

The postgraduate student plenary was organised in collaboration with the Hong Kong University (HKU) and the National University of Singapore (NUS) who were partners and collaborators on an IRRTF grant awarded to Anoma Pieris. Pieris with Duanfang Lu (University of Sydney) and Cecilia Chu (University of Hong Kong) conceived the framing and direction of research with a view to combining an academic workshop and student plenary, so that students may benefit through networking with international academics. The plenary was led by John Ting of the University of Canberra, a recent PhD graduate from the University of Melbourne and ECR who coordinated the paper submission and review process.  Collaborating academics included Cecilia Chu and Eunice Seng from HKU and Jiat-Hwee Chang and Lilian Chee from NUS. Organisers included David Beynon (Deakin University) and Sidh Sintusingha (University of Melbourne). The academics involved in the workshop were present at the plenary.

The plenary was organised through a protracted process including paper submissions, blind peer review and feedback to students conducted with the help of the team of organisers and supervisors. Our objective was to encourage and assist students in preparing papers, with a view to finding a venue for their publication. This process was instructive, and exposed the strengths and weaknesses of our pedagogical frameworks and research practices. Topics ranged from formal and textual interpretations of architecture through late Qing dynasty architectural discourse by Sylvia Chan, the politics of Chinese diplomatic buildings by Marta Catalan to the reconstruction of Hong Kong’s movie theatres by Keng Khoon Ng, all three from HKU. Ke Song (University of Melbourne) examined architectural modernism in late-Mao China through two projects in Guangzhou. A number of students explored architecture through indigenous subjectivities.  Nirodha Dissanayake (University of Adelaide) analysed the long term reception of new towns of the Mahaweli Development Unit in Sri Lanka; Rina Priyani (UC Berkeley) explored the architectural inscriptions of ethnic identities in postcolonial Bandung, and Aninda Moezier (University of Melbourne) offered gendered readings of Minangkabau houses in Sumatra. Two of the students ventured into historically difficult spatial analyses of geopolitical sites, such as visitor perceptions of Hiroshima by Kim Roberts (Deakin University) and the Korean Demilitarised Zone by Dongsei Kim (University of Melbourne). Keng Khoon Ng from NUS offered a quite different mobilisation of border territories in a global real estate project, Forest City in Johor. The student plenary was associated with SAUH Asia’s inaugural workshop.

PROGRAM

SAUH Asia’s inaugural workshop hosted on 4-5 July, 2016, at the Melbourne School of Design at the University of Melbourne, was funded by a Strategic Initiative Fund Grant from the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, and was framed as an inter-Asian forum for Australia-based scholarship on Southeast and East Asian topics.

A panel from the Centre for Asian and Middle Eastern Architecture (CAMEA) at the University of Adelaide extended this focus towards other Asian regions. Collaborators from among our membership at Hong Kong University and the National University of Singapore and visitors from North America internationalised the workshop.

Its overarching objective was to offer new, innovative insights on architecture and urbanism in the Asia-Pacific region, using “global modernisms” as a conceptual entry-point; to engage with multiple historical processes such as decolonisation, indigenisation, urbanisation and globalisation within this broader aim; and to encourage critical reflection on the histories, pedagogies and practices of architecture in the Asia-Pacific.

The proposed lines of critical inquiry were anchored in themes of urbanisation, governance, society and heritage and explored how interdisciplinary spatial theories and methodologies interrogated regional change.

The SIF grant application was mentored by Kate-Darian Smith under the Australian Collaboratory for Architectural History, Urban and Cultural Heritage at the University of Melbourne. Amanda Achmadi represented the Indonesia Forum at the University of Melbourne as an additional collaborator on the workshop, by hosting the keynote Abidin Kusno. The workshop included a book presentation by Nihal Perara on his most recent publication, People’s Spaces.

For details of this workshop please see Anoma Pieris and Duanfang Lu, Interrogating Asia: SAUH-Asia research forum in Fabrications, 2016 Nov., v.26, n.3, p.392-398.