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A Quiet Revolution: Robert Percy Cummings’ unpublished talks (1930-1970)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.
Robert Percy Cummings Radio Talks
Architectural Education Through Materiality
Extracting Relationships from an Online Digital Archive about Post-War Queensland Architecture
ABE Journal: architecture beyond Europe, 2021
In 1922, the Commonwealth Bank opened in Cairns, North Queensland, on the corner of Abbott and ... more In 1922, the Commonwealth Bank opened in Cairns, North Queensland, on the corner of Abbott and Spence Street, not far from the Esplanade and the waters of the Trinity Inlet. A single-story timber building, “bolted together” and pinned to the ground by sunken concrete piers, the structure was described in the local press as “cyclone proof” and the strongest timber building in Australia. Cooled by fifty exhaust vents and simplex windows, the banking chamber also met the requirements of its tropical context and was described as an “ideal office interior” in which the “health and fitness of the staff have been considered in all essentials from first class sanitation to an up-to-date ventilation system.”
In this paper the entanglement of comfort—the health and fitness of the bank’s workers, both physical and psychological—with the bank’s design—both tropical and cyclone proof—will be examined. I will argue that the Commonwealth Bank was an early example of a commercial building designed to respond to tropical cyclones, a common occurrence in Northern Australia, but one which had little impact on the planning and construction of buildings at this time. While the bank was built to replace an earlier, smaller building inadequate to the institution’s needs, it was also a direct response to a catastrophic cyclone—the strongest on record—which hit Cairns and surrounding districts on February 2, 1920. Devastating the city and neighboring towns, the cyclone produced a significant storm surge, described in the press as a “tidal wave,” that inundated the city’s central business district, including Abbott Street, where the bank building was located. The structural properties and technical innovations of the new building effectively addressed the anxieties that this event, and subsequent cyclone seasons, would continue to evoke.
It will also be argued that the bank building and its widely publicized innovations were part of a larger campaign by the institution (and other northern businesses) to attract staff from the cooler southern parts of Australia (Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne), and particularly men (managers and accountants) with wives and children. Promising both safety and comfort for its workers and their families, the bank, it will be argued, also sought to counter the popular conviction that Northern Australia was not suitable for settlement and must remain empty and unproductive. This was achieved by the banking corporation through the national promotion of the lifestyles (and especially sporting activities) of the bank workers, the climatic suitability of the bank buildings, and the technical innovations that ensured it was “cyclone proof.”
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.
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Papers by Deborah van der Plaat
In this paper the entanglement of comfort—the health and fitness of the bank’s workers, both physical and psychological—with the bank’s design—both tropical and cyclone proof—will be examined. I will argue that the Commonwealth Bank was an early example of a commercial building designed to respond to tropical cyclones, a common occurrence in Northern Australia, but one which had little impact on the planning and construction of buildings at this time. While the bank was built to replace an earlier, smaller building inadequate to the institution’s needs, it was also a direct response to a catastrophic cyclone—the strongest on record—which hit Cairns and surrounding districts on February 2, 1920. Devastating the city and neighboring towns, the cyclone produced a significant storm surge, described in the press as a “tidal wave,” that inundated the city’s central business district, including Abbott Street, where the bank building was located. The structural properties and technical innovations of the new building effectively addressed the anxieties that this event, and subsequent cyclone seasons, would continue to evoke.
It will also be argued that the bank building and its widely publicized innovations were part of a larger campaign by the institution (and other northern businesses) to attract staff from the cooler southern parts of Australia (Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne), and particularly men (managers and accountants) with wives and children. Promising both safety and comfort for its workers and their families, the bank, it will be argued, also sought to counter the popular conviction that Northern Australia was not suitable for settlement and must remain empty and unproductive. This was achieved by the banking corporation through the national promotion of the lifestyles (and especially sporting activities) of the bank workers, the climatic suitability of the bank buildings, and the technical innovations that ensured it was “cyclone proof.”