Editorial

I write this, my first editorial for Fabrications, from New York City, happily enjoying Long Service Leave, and quietly incredulous that, after such travel disruptions of the early pandemic, I am here at all. The emerging opportunity to travel once more allows for refreshed observations of places, of both similarities and differences across geographic settings. I notice once again that here in the US their history is taken so incredibly seriously and with a huge depth of interest. While browsing at apparently the world’s largest book shop, Barnes and Noble 5th Avenue, there are tens of metres of shelves filled with histories of every imaginable aspect of the United States. The American belief in the importance of their history is part self-fulfilling prophecy, part reflection of their national scholarly character and interests, but is also a reminder that there are almost infinite aspects of any region or time to explore. In the selection of what is important and where we spend our intellectual contribution, we determine how future scholars and students read these histories, and where they will spring forward from, or push against, in their own scholarly pursuits.

The momentous historical events of recent days, the death of Queen Elizabeth II and the accession of King Charles III to the British throne, also remind us that Australia, New Zealand, and many Pacific and broader South-East Asian nations in our region still have lasting colonial effects, and in some cases connections. These themes of empire and colonisation and their architectural effects regionally and locally are taken up by authors in this issue. This is an open issue which has happily attracted some confluence of topics, with several articles able to act as companions to one another in regional focus, or methodological approach. This issue’s authors all, in some way, examine our geographic region, and the relationships between the local and the global, including local people, colonists, empire, international trade, industry, religion, and architectural movements. Further, the examination of what constitutes the architectural history archive itself continues to be probed within this issue, with the consequences for the individual scholars and the discipline examined.

John Hwa Seng Ting’s article “The Unique Tradition of Timber Shophouses in Sarawak” carefully examines how the vernacular shop houses of the Malay area were influenced by both local and regional governance, and finds that in more remote areas, this building type responded to its unique, local settings and specific material and legal factors at play. Ting’s deep analysis of specific locations and buildings in Sarawak, far from the central areas of Malaya and Singapore, details how empire’s reach was weaker and more contingent in these locations, and proceeded at a different pace. His identification of the timber vernacular tradition and its persistence is an important new contribution.

Paul Walker and Amanda Achmadi’s “For Export: Buildings for Colonial Commerce in Asia Pacific” takes the buildings of the Burns Philp Company as its subject. Their selection of locations was inspired by the World War I roll of honour displayed in Burns Philp headquarters building in Sydney, which lists all the places where the company operated at the time. In tracing the Burns Philp buildings across this region, and the variety of building forms, types and adaptations that took place, Walker and Achmadi invite us to consider the empire’s effects regionally, beyond the drawing of nation-state boundaries around our architectural histories.

Examining a related building type and location, and utilising similar methods to Ting’s paper, Ian Y. H. Tan’s article “Structure, Sanitation, and Surveillance: Iron Markets in late 19th century Singapore” also probes the local factors responding to broader trends in mercantile architecture. The built environment Tan examines reflects the responses to contemporaneous concepts of miasma and aspirations for “a healthy, carefully codified, and disciplined city.” These complementary papers demonstrate the variety of factors acting within a particular regional context. Tan’s examination of market building types, like Ting’s shophouse type analysis, traces the social and political context of the buildings examined, adding to the depth and nuance of understanding of this geographic area at this time.

Paul Hogben, in “Coal, Steel and the Holy Cross: Post-War Churches and Chapels of the Hunter Region, NSW,” examines a period of intense church construction in the burgeoning steel-making region in the mid-20th century, and how the specific effects of both modernism and modernisation of the Church were interpreted and developed there. Hogben’s paper extends the examination of church architecture by others including Lisa Daunt, Hannah Lewi and Phillip Goad and adds to recording and understanding the significance of mid-century buildings, currently so at risk of demolition in many areas.

The final two papers draw in authors currently working from Europe. Miguel José Viana Rodrigues Borges de Araújo, contributing from Portugal, in “Siza in China – China in Siza. Observations and Reflections on ‘The Building on the Water’” writes of Siza and Castanheira’s Shihlien industrial office building (2010–2014). Araújo uses Frampton’s critical regionalist analysis to discuss both the building’s contribution and whether such a framing provides a useful analytic tool.

Macarena de la Vega de León in “Writing in the Margins: Speaking of (Hi)Stories in Australia and New Zealand” delves into the role of oral histories within architectural historiography, and what this method can offer to emerging scholars as well as contributing to a renewal of the constituents of the architectural history archive. De la Vega de León uses her position as an emerging scholar from Spain, though intimately familiar with the Australian architectural academy, to pose methodological questions emanating from a research project taking oral histories from eminent regional architectural history scholars; among these: what can be asked? who asks it? and who does it serve? This paper pre-empts the presentation of the content of the histories recorded by de la Vega de León, and sets up the context for their reception at a later point.

This issue includes a report on the “Diasporic Architectural Histories” Session Held at the 2021 Society of Architectural Historians Annual International Conference, Québec, Montréal by Mirjana Lozanovska and Anoma Pieris. Given the lockdowns at the time this is a valuable contribution for those unable to attend. Paul Hogben reports on a more recent event “Lust for Lifestyle: Modern Adelaide Homes 1950–1965,” at the State Library of South Australia, 3 December 2021–24 July 2022.

In book reviews, our ever-energetic reviews editor Isabel Rousset has sourced a generous serving of reviews. In this issue Gevork Hartoonian reads Modern Architecture: A Critical History, by Kenneth Frampton; David Beynon reads Divine Custody: A History of Singapore’s Oldest Teochew Temple, by Yeo Kang Shua; Christine Casey reads Crafting Enlightenment: Artisanal Histories and Transnational Networks, edited by Lauren R. Cannady and Jennifer Ferng; Catherine Townsend reads Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam, by Christina Schwenkel; and Kate Hislop reads Australia: Modern Architectures in History, by Harry Margalit.

Thanks to my diligent co-editor Cameron Logan for guiding me through this first issue of our co-editorship, and you will hear more from him in the next issue editorial.