Celebrating the generation of architectural ideas : tracing the lineage of Southeast Asian temples

From its early beginnings in the fifth century, the Brahmanic/Hindu tradition created a rich body of temples which spread across India and influenced temple building in Southeast Asia. The legacy of this ancient diasporic movement remains celebrated today in the admiration of Southeast Asian monuments such as Angkor Wat and Prambanan. However this architecture evolved over time through a process of long experimentation with philosophies, world-views, and methods. The architectural forms of such monuments have obvious Indian antecedents but the process of their development into distinctive indigenous forms remains difficult to ascertain. This is due both to the lack of textual accounts from the earliest Southeast Asian civilisations and because their architectural remains are fragmented or heavily eroded. This paper draws on a research project that pieces together fragments of evidence from diagrams and canonical descriptions to photogrammetry of temples in India and Southeast Asia. The intention of this is to establish the degree to which Southeast Asian temples are attributable to Brahmanic/Hindu lineage and influence. It will focus on the role of the early Southeast Asian temple site of Sambor Prei Kuk (lsanapura) in Cambodia. Comparing the relationships between cosmology, geometry and physical form in this earlier sites with both Indian and developed Southeast Asian models, it is intended that its generative role within Southeast Asian architectural historiography can be clarified and more fully celebrated

So flat, so cute! Robots, superflatness and asian architectural futures

Many depictions of urban futures have a distinctly Asian flavour. There have been numerous visions of highly technological futures whose environments extrapolate present societies into futures technically, culturally and politically dominated by China or Japan, Such futures are portrayed as both exciting and threatening, to the point that the Japanese academic and cultural critic Toshiya Ueno used the term &lsquo;Techno-Orientalism&rsquo; to describe the phenomenon. Nevertheless, whether Western interest is Orientalist or not, Asian architects are also increasingly looking to their own contemporary and future cultures for inspiration. This paper will discuss two manifestations of this. The first is Thai architect Sumet Jumsai&rsquo;s Bank of Asia. Unlike contemporaneous English hightech buildings, with their coldly mechanistic representation of ducts and struts, Jumsai&rsquo;s Bank of Asia, takes on the anthropomorphic character of Japanese scifi robots. It is endearing, friendly, even cute. The second example is what might be termed superflat architecture, from the term coined by the artist Takashi Murakami to describe an aesthetic of intrinsic flatness, eliminating depth in favour of skin and surface. The emergence of Techno-Cute and Superflat architecture suggest contemporary Asian architectural sensibilities that neither derive their aesthetic qualities solely from tradition nor from Western Modernism or Postmodernism.<br /

Architecture, multiculturalism and cultural sustainability in Australian cities

The way that the built environment represents and accommodates people of different cultures is an important facet of developing a holistically sustainable future. Architecture intervenes, maps and signifies and in doing so it constructs identities. It helps to shape how we know the world by mediating power, social relations and cultural values. Events such as the settlement, inhabitation and establishment of diasporic communities involve the occupation of space. Architecture provides the armature of this space, its form and its image. Building is a potent means by which identity can be formed. A most significant part of people&rsquo;s well-being and capacity is their participation in literally building communities. This paper will illustrate this issue through discussion of contemporary Australian cities. The buildings of a wide variety of immigrants to Australia have since the 1950s contributed greatly to the changing nature of its cities. They are the physical manifestation of the great demographic changes that have occurred across the nation during this period. The combination of people of different backgrounds and cultures lends a unique quality to Australian built environments, and this needs not only be understood but celebrated, as they are contributing to the development of Australian urban culture. Increased knowledge and understanding of the impact of immigration and multiculturalism on our built environment will add substantially to understanding of the diversity of Australia&rsquo;s cultural heritage, and the potential of future planners, architects, and members of the general public to create inclusive and dynamic Australian cities.<br /

Tradition as past is a modernist idea

As outlined in the theme of this conference, the problematisation of the notion of \u27progress\u27 relates to a questioning of the West\u27s teleological aspirations for the future. This critique has allowed for the presence of a multiplicity of ways of perceiving the world, including those from outside the West\u27s intellectual tradition. However, within architectural discourse, conceptual plurality has been largely limited to movements such as critical regionalism or postmodernism, which have tended to question the direction or desirability of progress, rather than its fundamental nature.This paper looks at an example of recent architecture by an Asian diasporic community in Melbourne. This is a building that appears to be \u27traditional\u27 in style, in other words atavistic and antithetical to \u27progressive\u27 architectural ideals. However, looking at it through different philosophical understandings of duration can provide us with alternative interpretations to these assumptions.By this I am not referring to disillusionment with progress, as expressed through postmodernist and neo-traditionalist movements in the West, but ways in which looking at the \u27traditional\u27 architectures of non-Western cultures from their own philosophical positions might provide alternative definitions pf the idea of \u27progress\u27. The increasing presence of non-western \u27traditional\u27 architecture in the West implies that West modernity might not be the only \u27tradition\u27 that has a viable future. Consequently, the idea of \u27the future\u27 as something to aspire to, might be the outcome of a particular dominant historicity rather than a universal condition

Superflat architecture : culture and dimensionality

Takashi Murakami&rsquo;s notion of &lsquo;superflat&rsquo; art has specific roots in the western-influenced woodblock prints of nineteenth-century Edo and contemporary applications in the popular culture media of manga and anime. As applied to architecture, &lsquo;superflatness&rsquo; is suggestive of a sensibility that derives its aesthetic qualities from a mixture of Japanese traditions and western architectural lineages. More intriguingly, the idea of superflat architecture implies a way of perceiving space and dimensionality that is distinctive to contemporary Japanese architects