ABSTRACT
Long regarded, often romantically, as an edge condition both intellectually and geographically, the architectures of Australia and New Zealand have, over the past 50 years, charted theoretical and material practices that have realized a unique place in contemporary architectural production. Two former British settler colonies, highly urbanized and highly modernized, with divided historical, economic and political allegiances to the United Kingdom and the United States but placed within the context of Asia and the Pacic Ocean, possessing natural landscapes of profound beauty and climatic challenge, yet beset by ethical and competing crises of national identity and indigenous reconciliation, the architectures of these two countries are sustained by an archipelago of discrete urban cultures rooted in deeply self-aware local critique and frequent anxiety for participation in a broader global conversation.1 This chapter maps the extrapolations of and inclusivist deviations from modernism since the 1960s: the rediscovery of the vernacular; the embrace of indigenous culture; the modernist shaping and Post-Modernist reshaping of the Antipodean city and the rediscovery of the suburb; the regionalist ‘answer’ of form-determining climate, and most recently, the deployment of digital techniques as part of a search for signicant form. The result, in both countries, is threefold: the perpetuation of and mythologizing of the detached house (as an ‘elegant shed’, to use the clichéd New Zealand term);2 the ongoing conundrum of civic representation; and the need to address the realities and social inequities of intensication in the face of inevitable urban growth. In short, these are two worldly architecture cultures alternately celebrated and riven by artice and ethics.
