Designer Suburbs

by Judith O'Callaghan, Charles Pickett

2012 · NewSouth

In the 1950s, 60s and 70s architects like Harry Seidler, Robin Boyd, Ken Woolley, Michael Dysart and Graeme Gunn applied their talents to project homes, bringing high-end design to the suburbs. Backed by Pettit & Sevitt, Merchant Builders and other project builders, architects created small, deceptively simple houses which transformed the look of suburbia. Today, the distance between the architectural profession and suburban housing has never been greater, with Australia’s super-sized, energy-guzzling project homes the biggest in the world. With photographs by Max Dupain, David Moore, Wolfgang Sievers and Eric Sierins alongside original plans, Designer Suburbs explores the relationship between architects, builders and affordable housing since 1900 and the lessons we can learn from twentieth-century designer suburbs.

When Modern Became Contemporary Art

by Charles Green, Heather Barker

2024 · Taylor & Francis

This book is a portrait of the period when modern art became contemporary art. It explores how and why writers and artists in Australia argued over the idea of a distinctively Australian modern and then postmodern art from 1962, the date of publication of a foundational book, Australian Painting 1788–1960, up to 1988, the year of the Australian Bicentennial. Across nine chapters about art, exhibitions, curators and critics, this book describes the shift from modern art to contemporary art through the successive attempts to define a place in the world for Australian art. But by 1988, Australian art looked less and less like a viable tradition inside which to interpret ‘our’ art. Instead, vast gaps appeared, since mostly male and often older White writers had limited their horizons to White Australia alone. National stories by White men, like borders, had less and less explanatory value. Underneath this, a perplexing subject remained: the absence of Aboriginal art in understanding what Australian art was during the period that established the idea of a distinctive Australian modern and then contemporary art. This book reflects on why the embrace of Aboriginal art was so late in art museums and histories of Australian art, arguing that this was because it was not part of a national story dominated by colonial, then neo-colonial dependency. It is important reading for all scholars of both global and Australian art, and for curators and artists.