Books by Deborah van der Plaat
Francis-Richard Jones, Lawrence Nield, Xing Ruan and Deborah van der Plaat, 2009
In Skyplane, some of architecture's leading thinkers and practitioners examine both the global ph... more In Skyplane, some of architecture's leading thinkers and practitioners examine both the global phenomenon of the tall building and its adaptation to the Asian-Pacific context, addressing the following questions: What effect do towers have on our culture and urbanism, environmental sustainability, building economics, the workplace and historic city centres? Can such giants be humane and made more formally engaging? Can architectural influence go beyond the façade or cope with self-aggrandisement and rampant symbolism?
Janina Gosseye, Noami Stead and Deborah van der Plaat (eds.), 2019
By and large, architectural historians use texts, drawings, and photographs to craft their narrat... more By and large, architectural historians use texts, drawings, and photographs to craft their narratives. Oral testimony from those who actually occupy or construct buildings is rarely taken as seriously. Speaking of Buildings offers a rebuttal, theorizing the radical potential of a methodology that has historically been cast as unreliable. Essays by an international group of scholars look at varied topics, from the role of gossip in undermining masculine narratives in architecture to workers' accounts of building with cement in midcentury London to a sound art piece created by oral testimonies from Los Angeles public housing residents. In sum, the authors call for a renewed form of listening to enrich our understanding of what buildings are, what they do, and what they mean to people.
A thematic study of modernist architecture in the Australian state of Queensland, with visual ess... more A thematic study of modernist architecture in the Australian state of Queensland, with visual essays.
Forthcoming by Deborah van der Plaat
Despite a European training and an early career working with Peter Behrens, a migration from Vien... more Despite a European training and an early career working with Peter Behrens, a migration from Vienna to the Australian state of Queensland positioned the architect Karl Langer (1903-1969) at the very edge of both European and Australian modernism. Confronted by tropical heat and glare, the economics of affordable housing, fiercely proud and regional architectural practices, and a suspicion of the foreign, Langer moulded the European language of international modernism to the unique climatic and social conditions of tropical Australia.
A stream on the historiography of tropical and subtropical architecture to be presented at Urban Tropicality: the 7th International Network of Tropical Architecture Conference, Brisbane, Australia, December 5-8,, 2019
Hurricanes Irma and Maria (2017) have demonstrated the urgent need for architecture in the tropic... more Hurricanes Irma and Maria (2017) have demonstrated the urgent need for architecture in the tropics to be resilient to tropical cyclones, storms, sea surges and floods. Yet, in architectural historiography, tropical architecture has been viewed as a colonial construct acting in response to disease and discomfort – factors that needed to be conquered, overcome, and tackled.
For example: in Triumph in the Tropics: An Historical Sketch of Queensland (1959), the Australian medical practitioner Raphael Cilento (1893–1985) linked the advancement of tropical Australia to the conquest of
disease and attainment of comfort by the European settler, both realized through domestic design and urban planning. Despite a long history and frequent occurrence of flood, tropical storms, and cyclones – causal attributes long identified in colonial discourses as limiting the development potential of tropical regions—floods and hurricanes have begun to
dominate tropical architectural discourses only recently. The correlation between anthropogenic climate change and the increasing intensity of hurricanes and sea level rise has led to the dominance of the trope of disaster in contemporary tropical architectural discourses. In addition, as it became apparent that buildings, as one of the key consumers of fossil
fuels contribute significantly to climate change; the relationship between architecture and climate has gone through a paradigmatic shift—from one in which climate was a determinant of architectural metrics, to
one in which architecture is seen as an active agent in the transformation of global climatic systems. As a consequence, tropical architecture, which began as discourse founded on the relationship between architecture and climate to ensure the well-being of the human body in a localised context, is now seen as a discourse where the production and operation of
architecture have global planetary impact.
Architectural Theory Review, 2018
An open issue, with essays by Courtney Skipton Long, Robert Alexander Gorny, Timothy Hyde, Alexan... more An open issue, with essays by Courtney Skipton Long, Robert Alexander Gorny, Timothy Hyde, Alexander Eisenschmidt, and (jointly) Daniel A. Barber, Lee Stickells, Philip Goad, Deborah van der Plaat, Daniel J Ryan, Cathy Keys, Maren Koehler, Farhan Karim, William Taylor and Andrew Leach; and reviews by Jasper Ludewig, Alexandra Brown and Elizabeth Musgrave.
Papers by Deborah van der Plaat
Towards a nineteenth century architectural history of Australia and New Zealand: A post-national, post-colonial perspective
We wish to position the nineteenth-century architectural and urban planning history of Australia ... more We wish to position the nineteenth-century architectural and urban planning history of Australia and New Zealand as a historical field that exposes the limitations both of a centre-periphery model of historical transmission, assuming a once-direct and subordinate relationship with Great Britain, and a post-colonial model privileging the place of first peoples as the 'other' to the British meta-narrative.
Wireless architecture
Routledge eBooks, Oct 27, 2021
Robert Percy Cummings Radio Talks
A Quiet Revolution: Robert Percy Cummings’ unpublished talks (1930-1970)
Tropical comfort in the unproductive north. Commonwealth Bank Building, Cairns, 1922-1952
Ways to Listen Anew: What next for oral history and architecture?
Harold Desbrowe-Annears: Some Methods of Architectural Criticism
Digital Archive of Queensland Architecture
Bringing together researchers in architectural history and digital humanities from the University... more Bringing together researchers in architectural history and digital humanities from the University of Queensland (Brisbane, Australia), three of Brisbane’s oldest architectural firms, and specialists in digital histories from the State Library of Queensland, the Digital Archive of Queensland Architecture makes explicit the story of Queensland’s post-war architecture. The project’s aims were threefold: to document the oral histories of a generation of architects who studied and worked in Queensland from 1945-1975; to gather these into a single online multimedia archive producing a new knowledgebase of Queensland architecture and design; and to use innovative semantic web technologies to make visible for the first time a history that is currently veiled, dispersed, and tacit. The digital archive examines the value of digital technologies not only to the construction and documentation of the architectural archive but to the ways we interpret, construct and understand architectural history. This is demonstrated by the project’s use of innovative web technologies including semantic text analysis, semantic tagging or annotations, compound object authoring, and semantic inferencing to the study of architectural history.
Extracting Relationships from an Online Digital Archive about Post-War Queensland Architecture
DH, 2014
Climatic Anxieties: Climate and Comfort in the Historiography of Australian Architecture
Architecture, Environment, History: Questions and Consequences
Architectural Theory Review, 2018
There is increasing interest among architectural historians in addressing environmental concerns ... more There is increasing interest among architectural historians in addressing environmental concerns on both historical and theoretical terms. Simultaneously, other fields have been looking to architectural scholarship to understand the historical relationship between the built and the natural environment. For architectural historians, and others, this has also involved correlating the shifting discourse on environment with a history of architectural transformations and disciplinary expansions. These engagements have made clear that the environmental history of architecture does not simply add more objects to the historical database, but also changes the terms of historical analysis, as new matters of concern and new conceptual frameworks come to the fore. This paper gathers together a dialogic set of projections from scholars responding to the question of how we might newly understand the historical relationship between the built and the natural environment, and the opportunities and challenges this new phase presents to scholars, design researchers, and architects.
The New Exhibition Building (1891): Liberalism, Settler Colonialism and Empire in 19th Century Queensland
International Council on Archives Congress, 2012
The "Architectural Practice in PostWar Queensland: Building and Interpreting an Oral History Arch... more The "Architectural Practice in PostWar Queensland: Building and Interpreting an Oral History Archive" project is a collaboration between the University of Queensland, the State Library of Queensland and four of the longest-standing architectural firms in Queensland. The aim of this project is to build a comprehensive multimedia digital archive that documents architectural practice in postwar Queensland (1945-1975)a period of architectural practice that was highly significant but is largely undocumented. Currently most of the knowledge of this period is in individual's memories, in private hands, or highly dispersed across architectural firms and collecting institutions (State Library of Queensland, John Oxley Library and Fryer Library). This paper describes our innovative approach (and the Semantic Web and Web 3.0 technologies that we are adopting) to building a comprehensive online and evolving knowledge-base for research, teaching and practice within the disciplines of history, architecture and design. We also describe the challenges that this project faces including ensuring the archive's sustainability, resolving issues of identity and implementing quality control over the community-generated content.
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Books by Deborah van der Plaat
Forthcoming by Deborah van der Plaat
For example: in Triumph in the Tropics: An Historical Sketch of Queensland (1959), the Australian medical practitioner Raphael Cilento (1893–1985) linked the advancement of tropical Australia to the conquest of
disease and attainment of comfort by the European settler, both realized through domestic design and urban planning. Despite a long history and frequent occurrence of flood, tropical storms, and cyclones – causal attributes long identified in colonial discourses as limiting the development potential of tropical regions—floods and hurricanes have begun to
dominate tropical architectural discourses only recently. The correlation between anthropogenic climate change and the increasing intensity of hurricanes and sea level rise has led to the dominance of the trope of disaster in contemporary tropical architectural discourses. In addition, as it became apparent that buildings, as one of the key consumers of fossil
fuels contribute significantly to climate change; the relationship between architecture and climate has gone through a paradigmatic shift—from one in which climate was a determinant of architectural metrics, to
one in which architecture is seen as an active agent in the transformation of global climatic systems. As a consequence, tropical architecture, which began as discourse founded on the relationship between architecture and climate to ensure the well-being of the human body in a localised context, is now seen as a discourse where the production and operation of
architecture have global planetary impact.
Papers by Deborah van der Plaat