Designers in government

While 22.5% of the work architects do is for the government, only a small percentage of the industry work within government itself (AACA: Industry Profile, 2018). For those of us working in architecture and other built environment professions within the government, it can feel like you’re an alien in a foreign land. More often than not, you are one of few designers in your workplace, and, perhaps more significantly, a minority within your profession.

Rammed Earth Revival

Simply put, rammed earth is an ancient technique for constructing foundations, floors and walls using raw materials such as earth, chalk, lime or gravel. It has been used to create buildings around the world whose beauty and robustness are still visible today, like the Alhambra in Spain and the Great Wall of China, both built more than 1000 years ago.

The Anganwadi Project

A participatory approach to architecture has the capacity to foster community and the role of the architect can be central to this process.

Cultivating community for vital times

Being engaged in a community requires certain conditions to be present, and often requires a catalyst of sorts.

Reframing a disaster: Rebuilding community on the NSW south coast

Personal connections to the south coast, coupled with an overwhelming desire to help where possible, Takt studio has been involved in a number of community recovery projects.

Schools at the heart of our neighbourhoods

“It’s a luxury to have land space taking up different building functions”, and notes BVN principal architect Ali Bounds “no longer prudent to simply have workplaces or schools that operate between certain hours leaving building stock empty outside of these programmed times.”

Making space for community

When we think about community today in our local NSW context, our varied lived experience can obscure its common meaning. This is exacerbated by our highly privatised built environment, developed by European colonisation through the physical demarcation and division of land, and systematic allocation of individual property rights. Our context seen through this lens, holds more affinity with the condition of immunity, understood as exemption from obligation to share (land) with others.

Place, people, materials

While preparing the works of architect Paul Pholeros for archiving in the State Library of New South Wales, a lecture outline for architecture students in Papua New Guinea, circa 1995, was unearthed.

A creative bushfire recovery project for the communities of the Snowy Valleys

Communities are dealing with the impact of the loss of their landscape. Solastalgia is a modern term used to describe the distress some people experience that is caused by changes to the environment, both built and natural, more often than not brought on by climate change.

Our voices. Our ways. Our time. Our spaces.

Samantha Rich and Danièle Hromek on First Nations women working in spatial disciplines.