ACAHUCH

Other Digital Heritage Resources

• A Cinematic Vision: The architecture of Howard Lawson

  As part of Melbourne Design Week 2021, Public Record Office Victoria presents a talk by Virginia Blue (a recent MUCH graduate) on Melbourne architect Howard Lawson. Virginia’s extensive archival research, undertaken as part of her MUCH subjects including Representing and Remembering Place and MUCH Minor Thesis, has uncovered fascinating new information about the man who turned South Yarra into the Hollywood Hills with his iconic apartment complexes.  The talk also highlights key architecture and planning concepts in the breadth of his work.

• ACAHUCH x Open House Melbourne : Reconnecting with the past through architectural objects

  The Miles Lewis Heritage Building collection is a digital resource made available via the Architectural Building and Planning Library here. The website, currently under construction, will be available soon through the Australian Centre for Architectural History, Urban and Cultural Heritage homepage.

  A team of architects have been involved in this project, they are

  • Professor Miles Lewis AM FAHA , Collection creator
  • Professor Hannah Lewi, ACAHUCH /MSD custodian of the digital repository
  • Ben Waters (S-I Projects), 3d Scanning
  • Meher Bahl (Restore Conservation Services ) Metadata and Digital Curator
  • Naomi Mullumby,  Architecture Building and Planning Librarian, University of Melbourne

  Architecture typically uses 3D technologies to capture site and structure. The project to digitise the Miles Lewis Building Heritage collection created over 300 3D scans of historic building materials and objects. The collection tells a story of the evolution of the design, manufacturing and use of construction materials and techniques within Australian and offers insights into global influences on Australian architectural methods.

• Macgeorge Fellow - Murray Fraser (Bartlett, UCL): A World of Architectural History

  
  
  Public lecture: A World of Architectural History

  This lecture will discuss the preparations and outcomes of the 21st Edition of Sir Banister Fletcher’s Global History of Architecture, in what are two entirely re-written volumes, also available online. It constitutes the most ambitious attempt to provide an overall account of architectural history in all parts of the world across the past 5,500 years. Three scholars from the University of Melbourne (Dr Amanda Achmadi, Prof Philip Goad, Prof Paul Walker) wrote chapters on Australian/Southeast Asian architectural history, and hence in part this public lecture will also be a celebration of their roles within the task.

  Murray Fraser joined ACAHUCH for April of 2022, supported by the Macgeorge Bequest at the University of Melbourne.

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  Murray Fraser is Professor of Architecture and Global Culture at UCL’s Bartlett School of Architecture, and Chair of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain. In 2008 his book Architecture and the 'Special Relationship' won the RIBA Research Award and CICA Bruno Zevi Book Prize. He is General Editor for the 21st Edition of Sir Banister Fletcher’s Global History of Architecture (2020), awarded the SAHGB’s Colvin Prize. He received the 2018 RIBA Annie Spink Award for Excellence in Education.

• ACAHUCH International | Eva Branscome (Bartlett, UCL) on Hans Hollein's 'Austrienalle'

  ACAHUCH International | Eva Branscome (Bartlett, UCL) on Hans Hollein's 'Austrienalle' | 26.04.22

  This lecture will discuss the curation of the 1968 Milan Triennale Austrian Pavillion by Austrian Architect and Artist, Hans Hollein. Looking at ‘The Great Number’ through Austrian glasses: Hans Hollein’s Exhibition at the 1968 Milan Triennale In 1968 the Austrian architect and artist, Hans Hollein, was asked to curate the Austrian Pavilion for the 14th Triennale in Milan.

  The exhibition’s theme, ‘The Great Number’, was intended to address a growing disenchantment within modernity manifesting itself through global issues such as overpopulation, overproduction, mass waste, increased mobility, as well as social and psychological alienation: topics that had become increasingly urgent. Hollein’s response was to create an action-environment. Titled the ‘Austriennale’ it consisted of a Freudian and Kafkaesque experience of parallel corridors titled ‘supermarket’, ‘waste’, ‘snowstorm’, ‘overcrowding’, ‘frustration’, ‘population increase’, ‘dead-end’, and finally ‘isolation/individualisation’. Hollein’s idea was to address the problems arising in the post-war globalised world within a specifically local Austrian context.

  The end of WWII had created a deep sense of cultural dislocation for Austria. Rediscovering the nation’s cultural and historical specificity beyond a Nazi agenda, or the commercial imperative of mass tourism, was crucial to artistic production for Hollein and others. Culturally Catholic, the influx of colonizing influences which arrived in Austrian via post-war American re-education initiatives created during the 1960s unexpected artistic mutations of pop, communication, commodification, Cold War science, and the spectre of the apocalypse, while some contributors were also seduced by the extreme escapist option of simply living in a bubble on the moon. These concepts were fused within a typically Austrian attitude which combined cynicism, sex, and the abandoning of limits by an avant-garde that, along with Hollein, was preoccupied with the human body.

  Ironically, the Milan Triennale was closed down and occupied during the 1968 student uprisings as a manifestation of the global problems it was seeking to address. Additionally, and intended as a provocation culturally specific to the Austrian situation, the Vienna Aktionist Rudolf Schwarzkogler proposed his own alternative action-environment as a retort to Hollein's pavilion. The ‘Austriennale’ installation can thus be read as a fertile cauldron for art, architecture and exhibition design encapsulating the aspirations and fears of the European avant-garde against the backdrop of US hegemony and Cold War anxiety. Chaired by Professor Alan Pert (Deputy Dean of Melbourne School of Design).

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  Dr Eva Branscome has been working at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London since 2012. Originally trained as an interior architect, Eva studied for her PhD at the Bartlett. Her research and teaching work has two main strands: the first engages with the links between built heritage and cultural practices in contemporary Western cities, whether expressed through cultural institutions or counter-cultural and street art; the second is in the 19th- and 20th-century architectural history of Central Europe, focussing particularly upon Austria and other regions in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire.

  Eva’s work concentrates particularly on the intersections of architecture and media, such as exhibitions, publications, and photography, as well as museum architecture as a cultural and urban hinge. These topics intersect with her extensive experience in British architectural heritage having spent a decade as a caseworker for the Twentieth Century Society. Eva has published extensively – including Hans Hollein and Postmodernism (Routledge, 2019), the first major monograph on that architect-artist. She has co-curated exhibitions at the MAK Gallery in Vienna, ICA in London and Museum Abteiberg in Germany, and has previously taught architectural history at Queen Mary University, Oxford Brookes University and the University of Westminster.