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The Gold Coast is Australia’s most rapidly changing city – regularly compared to Miami and Las Vegas for its embrace of bad taste and the good life; and with Dubai for its sudden moments of high-rise assuredness and seeming lack of restraint in either the ambitions of building or their manifestations. Beautifully illustrated throughout, this book offers the first comprehensive history of the city and its architecture, documenting its rise from a series of seaside villages in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the present-day city, set to host the 2018 Commonwealth Games. Considering city plans, architectural works, landscape formations and modes of inhabitation over the time in which the Gold Coast has been peopled, it considers the role of architecture in carrying the city forward. Its main focus is on the contemporary city and the conditions that have given rise to its character - high rise, bad taste and skewed towards the beach edge.
Cities have attempted to differentiate themselves throughout history based on their spatial qualities, inhabitant characteristics, social conditions and historical roots. In the twenty-first century, however, media plays a significantly greater role in shaping the perception of cities than it has previously. City governments are increasingly turning to the tool of branding to differentiate themselves from other cities. This is especially true for tourism-oriented economies such as Queensland's Gold Coast. The local print media, together with local television stations and tourism bodies have historically promoted the image of the Gold Coast as a place that is growing and is desirable to visit, live and work in, and continue to do so. Throughout the city's development, the media have sold the Gold Coast to outsiders by focusing on the trinity of sun, surf and sand, and in the early years of the new century, with references to modernity, sophistication and culture. The Gold Coast is often portrayed as a resort town and Australia's playground in a narrative designed to attract the visitors on which the tourism industry depends. The greater frame of reference for the media focuses on growth by promoting large events, ease of development, functionality of infrastructure and the city's potential for population growth. Underpinning both these tourist and growth narratives is the media's emphasis on the potential for future residents to have a relaxed and prosperous lifestyle. Growth and development of the Gold Coast is a goal supported by the power elites, the service workers, the property industry and its boosters. Print and television media have nurtured their special influence on the Gold Coast by supporting this vision. Media support has led to a large number of interstate and international migrants taking up residence and contributed to large-event opportunities such as the 2018 Commonwealth Games choosing the Gold Coast as home. Molotch (1976) proposes that cities are machines driven by an elite group with a vested interest in the success of the city as fuelled by ongoing economic, social and population growth. This elite group of players includes (but is not limited to) local land and small business owners, politicians, local boosterists and media organisations such as newspapers. They participate actively in organisation, manipulation, structuring and lobbying to influence the growth of the city based on their varied personal and commercial interests. The Gold Coast's progression from a series of small tourist towns to a globalising city with multiple economic drivers has been accompanied by the ongoing reflection and visioning of planners, marketing groups and particularly the media.
One of the distinctive features of Gold Coast urbanisation is its historically ad hoc approach to development with little or no strategic planning to guide it. Many have commented on the lack of planning on the Gold Coast calling it 'an experiment in freedom' or 'free enterprise city'. Following a major restructuring of the Queensland's local councils, the 1990s witnessed a shift from ad hoc decision making to more systematic planning on the Gold Coast. Understanding the past is important for shaping the future. This paper reviews the history of regulatory planning on the Gold Coast, encompassing decisions affecting the form and development of its earliest settlements through to its periods of greatest construction and most streamlined decision–making. It focuses mainly on past planning processes, the problems identified in each planning exercise and the interventions introduced, asking whether these were implemented or not and why. The paper positions the Gold Coast as a physical embodiment of this history of decision making, assessing the effects on the city as a whole of specific measures either affording freedoms or insisting on accountability to various levels of regulation. It examines how the absence of some planning measures influenced the form of the city and its internal arrangements and considers how the shift from ad hoc decision making towards more systematic planning efforts affected the city's urbanisation. The lessons that the Gold Coast example provides will resonate with places elsewhere in Australia and the world, if not always in scale definitely in substance.
2011 •
Fabrications
Australian Architecture: The Misty Metropolis2020 •
Since the nineteenth century a physically distant Metropolis has been invoked to determine the validity of Australian architectural projects and their ideas, and the assumption is this Metropolis sends out resolved principles to a provincial culture. This view assumes that actual immigration to Australia equals cultural erasure. It assumes Australia’s architectural culture is infantile or child-like and must accept a continual and necessarily painful education- the pedagogical focus-to animate local architecture. It is frequently asserted that architects whose capacities do not seem adequately recognised in Australia would always fare better in this Metropolis. The Metropolis proves, on closer inspection, to be nebulous and varied in location. Its constituent countries and cultures, usually associated with “age” and cultural power, have warred with each other constantly, and have consistently driven architects from its perceived membership. Its principles are frequently changing and...
In his Modern Architecture since 1900 (1982 ff.) William J.R. Curtis attempts to present a "balanced, readable overall view of the development of modern architecture from its beginning until the recent past" and to include the architecture of the non-western world, a subject overlooked by previous histories of modern architecture. Curtis places authenticityat the core of his research and uses it as the criterion to assess the historicity of modern architecture. While the second edition (1987) of Curtis's book appeared with just an addendum, for the third edition (1996) he undertook a full revision, expansion and reorganisation of the content. The new edition, it will be posited, does present a more 'authentic' account of the development of modern architecture in other parts of the world, presenting a comprehensive view of Australian architecture. Compared to the additions and modifications of other post-colonial examples, there is scant difference in Curtis' account of Australian modern architecture between the first (1982) and the third (1996) editions. Even in the third edition (1996) the main reference to Australian modern architecture is confined to the Sydney Opera House as well as a brief commentary of the work of Harry Seidler, Peter Muller, Peter Johnson, Rick Leplastrier and Glenn Murcutt. In the years separating the two editions, regionalism in architecture was debated and framed in different ways by Paul Rudolph, Kenneth Frampton and Curtis, among others. In analysing the absence of Australian architecture as a 'golden' example of regionalism, this paper presents a critical overview of Curtis' understanding of the notion of an ‘authentic’ regionalism.
Griffith University-Urban Research Program, …
Histories of placemaking in the Gold Coast City: The neoliberal norm, the State story and the community narrative2011 •
Built, Unbuilt and Imagined Sydney is a humble collection of essays based on built and unbuilt works (residential, commercial, interiors, and so on) of interest in Sydney, inclusive of public art, object or furniture design, key invited or public lectures, studios, current projects in making, competitions, collaborations, exhibitions, installations, and outreach work. The focus is on the innovative and the original not the ordinary and the functional. The purpose of this is to reveal the expanded field of architecture, and that the practice of architecture exceeds the work legally defensible under the title of the architect. The emphasis is placed on practice as an intellectual activity and on contemporary practice of architecture as the meaningful exercise of social, political, and critical knowledge, skills, and mindset in an urban, spatial, and tectonic condition. The book reveals that all or most architects either adopt as their own or have an interest in an(other) field, such as visual art, urbanism and landscape, virtual reality and three dimensional imaging, installation art and lighting design, and so on. The book aims to reveal therefore the multidisciplinary, urban orientations, and fluid forms of practice. The essay format as opposed to a monograph or historical survey on a place or period in Australian architecture is deliberate. The aim is to capture not the formal outcome of the architectural practice but to capture the vitality and intensity of architectural thought behind it all. The collection will pick out the creative DNA of the city, as it represents a snapshot of the intensity that marks the critical and creative culture and enterprise informing the architectural scene in Sydney.
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