Art and the urban plaza: from landscape to environment

The design of the Adelaide Festival Centre Southern Plaza (1973-1977) was conceived as an `environment, neither sculpture nor architecture but the integration of art, architecture, and surroundings. This example offers some insights into shifting and situated understandings of the term environment, and its impact on relationships between art and urban design in the creation of Australian urban spaces. Throughout the `environmental revolution of the 1960s and 70s, a conjunction of concepts and technologies around the term environment can be seen across diverse fields ¿ associated in the visual and new media arts with the emergence of practices of environmental, integrated and site specific art.