ABSTRACT
The development of concerns about environmental sustainability, robust critiques by poststructural landscape architecture theorists, increasingly sophisticated parametric digital tools and new construction technologies, have together unsettled earlier binary distinctions between the 'figure' and the 'ground'. Recent civic cultural centre designs display evidence of this through morphological and material innovations inspired by landforms. In pre-colonial Indigenous culture, the concept of 'belonging' in relation to land and people was a two way condition of responsibility and sustenance. Civil activism against this overt de-territorialisation emerged as early as the mid-1800s and gained particular momentum in the 1960s. In the Indigenous resistance movement, land was reframed once again, this time through the lens of justice. Each of these ways of understanding and relating to land, belonging, law and rights, are 'exteriorities' for architecture and for non-Indigenous ways of thinking. Those for whom pre-colonial Aboriginal epistemologies remain important, the relationship between the land and spirituality, systems-ecology and traditional protocols will be critical.
