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.
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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.