Veil of Isis: Sustainable cultures of Place and Architecture

Abstract Architectural academic Robin Evans, reviewing Daniel Libeskind’s Micromega drawings in 1984, described the role of the critic: ‘it is the critics job to delve into, uncover, disclose, reveal, divulge, discover, unfold and show to the reader what lies hidden or unseen … The critic is in search of origins, essences, intentions motives, causes, for these are the things that lie behind appearances…’ This paper will draw on the practice of Richard Black and Anna Johnson and asks what happens when that generative space of architectural criticism co-joins with the act of design itself. We speculate that design knowledge is made and held within both expressions of the architectural discipline and that our practice – which operates reciprocally and interchangeably between these modes – creates a unique platform from which to make significant engagement and impact with the architectural profession, academy and general public. Our research project - spanning over a decade - explores architectures engagement with context in projects that work from rural and city landscapes and in the cultural and environmental context of climate change and the need for continued and deeper engagement with Australia’s indigenous people. These projects - including several books, built works, design studios, a grant, international exhibitions, journals and an editorship role - aim to make transparent and disseminate design knowledge to the general public, academics and architects and thus generate - at a national scale - architectural advocacy and increase the public knowledge base of what architecture can be and do. In doing so we have explored what cultures of place can be for architecture and what the specific design strategies are. We seek to explore what for example, ‘landscape’ might be for the contemporary practitioner and how much it exceeds the pragmatic and can also be driven by issues, non-metric qualitative concerns. Robin Evans describing the critic. AA Files no 6