Journal Articles by Stuart A King
RMIT Design Archives Journal, 2020
In 1825, the Van Diemen’s Land Company (VDL Co.) was chartered in London and granted the right to... more In 1825, the Van Diemen’s Land Company (VDL Co.) was chartered in London and granted the right to select 250,000 acres for pastoral enterprise in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), ultimately located across the island’s isolated north-west frontier at Circular Head (Stanley), Emu Bay (Burnie) and Woolnorth. The company established its headquarters in a fashionable Regency villa, Highfield, at Circular Head, designed by VDL Co. Surveyor, Henry Hellyer, (c.1835) and built with prefabricated elements imported from England. The company’s subsequent enterprises served remote colonial expansion through the establishment of regional infrastructure and commissioning of architecture extending across the remainder of the nineteenth century. In 1966, the VDL Co. appointed its first Australian Governor, the Victorian Western District pastoralist and the company’s largest single shareholder, Alan Ritchie (1895-1974). Under Ritchie, the company’s operations were consolidated at Woolnorth, with the construction of a large Frank Lloyd Wright cum Sydney School homestead designed by Melbourne architect, Geoffrey Woodfall (1930-2016). Occupying one of Australia’s oldest, continuously-held company land holdings—with a known history of violent dispossession of northwest Tasmania’s Aboriginal people—, the Woolnorth Homestead carries company, family and architectural lineages of colonial origin. For Woodfall, the commission also precipitated a plethora of unexamined commercial, community and residential buildings across north-west Tasmania from the 1970s into the early 2000s, effectively reconstituting the dynamics of the VDL Co.’s earlier regional influence. This article is based on research across three archives, those of: the VDL Co. (Tasmanian Heritage and Archives Office); former VDL Co. Governor, Alan Ritchie (University of Melbourne Archive), and crucially the architect, Geoffrey Woodfall (RMIT Design Archive). It seeks to understand the intersecting histories and identities at stake in the architecture of Woolnorth.
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Fabircations: journal of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand, 2019
Van Diemen’s Land timber-getting enterprises, one of the colony’s early nineteenth-century commod... more Van Diemen’s Land timber-getting enterprises, one of the colony’s early nineteenth-century commodity-based industries, provided a crucial infrastructure for colonial architecture, generating material, components, and revenue for building. Its own architecture was dispersed and disparate, with places of material production and consumption interlinked by tracks, rivers, and coastal and oceanic shipping routes. To date, its sites have been the territory of archaeologists and historians rather than architectural historians. Yet, physically intertwined and instrumental in the construction of the colony’s early landmark buildings, and intersecting with other networks of constructional, engineering, and architectural expertise, they offer a subject for architectural history-making grounded in the geo-political, socio-economic, and material realities of the region’s early colonial period. This article describes this infrastructure and its products, comprising sites, spaces, and structures locally, regionally, and inter-regionally, considering their implications for a re-framing of Australian colonial architecture.
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ABE Journal Architecture Beyond Europe, 2019
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arq: Architectural Research Quarterly, 2019
Australia’s laid-back, sun-drenched beach lifestyle has been a celebrated and prominent part of i... more Australia’s laid-back, sun-drenched beach lifestyle has been a celebrated and prominent part of its official popular culture for nigh on a century, and the images and motifs associated with this culture have become hallmarks of the country’s collective identity. Though these representations tend towards stereotype, for many Australians the idea of a summer holiday at the beach is one that is intensely personal and romanticised – its image is not at all urbanised. As Douglas Booth observed, for Australians the beach has become a ‘sanctuary at which to abandon cares – a place to let down one’s hair, remove one’s clothes […] a paradise where one could laze in peace, free from guilt, drifting between the hot sand and the warm sea, and seek romance’.1 Beach holidays became popular in the interwar years of the twentieth century, but the most intense burst of activity – both in touristic promotion and in the development of tourism infrastructure – accompanied the postwar economic boom, when family incomes were able to meet the cost of a car and, increasingly, a cheap block of land by the beach upon which a holiday home could be erected with thrift and haste. In subtropical southeast Queensland, the postwar beach holiday became the hallmark of the state’s burgeoning tourism industry; the state’s southeast coastline in particular benefiting from its warm climate and proximity to the capital, Brisbane. It was here – along the evocatively named Gold Coast (to Brisbane’s south) and Sunshine Coast (to its north) [1] – that many families experienced their first taste of what is now widely celebrated as the beach lifestyle [2]. ...
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Fabrications: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, 2018
Recent scholarship on pedagogical experimentation in the 1960s and 1970s has identified a diverse... more Recent scholarship on pedagogical experimentation in the 1960s and 1970s has identified a diverse field of practices brought to bear on architectural education and their influence on architectural discourse. A new Environmental Design programme in Hobart, Tasmania, led by Barry McNeill (1937–2014) from 1969 to 1979, sits among these projects. It was the first Environmental Design programme in Australia and the most complete and radical transformation of an architecture and planning curriculum in Australia at the time, proactively embracing the educational ideals sought by student activists regionally and globally. Employing records from McNeill’s private archive and related archives alongside interviews with former staff and students, this article examines and places McNeill’s critical social approach to architectural education within the wider field of experimental architectural educational practices of the era. It explores the specific constellation of conditions that enabled McNeill’s radical transformation of curriculum in Hobart, as well as its subsequent circulation and influence beyond Tasmania, highlighting the circuitous flows of ideas during the period. The article proposes McNeill’s Environmental Design programme as a space where international models from the USA, UK, and beyond were channelled, tested, contextualised, and transformed.
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Dissertation Abstract.
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Book Chapters by Stuart A King
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Talks by Stuart A King
Keynote Lecture at Australasian Urban History / Planning History Conference, 5-7 Feb. 2020, Launceston., 2020
In 1957, Clinton Hartley Grattan, one of Australia’s most important foreign observers, argued tha... more In 1957, Clinton Hartley Grattan, one of Australia’s most important foreign observers, argued that the early European frontiers of Australian settlement were frontiers of men with private capital, or entrepreneurs, and they thus carried more elements of the urban than is commonly realised. Such early colonial enterprises around Australia’s south and southeastern coasts and across the Tasman included sealing, whaling, timber-getting and pastoralism, as well as missionary, trading and finance ventures. In advance of official settlements in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, entrepreneurs mapped coastlines, pioneered trade routes and colonised lands. Backed by private capital they established infrastructural architecture exploiting resources, dispossessing indigenous peoples and effecting urban expansion in the Australian colonies, New Zealand and beyond. Yet this architecture is rarely a subject of architectural histories.
In this presentation we will discuss our research on re-thinking the early colonial architecture of the Tasman World, a regional concept encompassing Australia and New Zealand linked by sea and traffic. We describe our project as ‘oceanic’ since the sea—its estuaries, coasts and oceans—is a prominent character as a conveyor of enterprise and ships, which were agents in global networks across oceans. It employs the insights offered by recent historians of the region and adopts a ‘ground-up’ approach that understands architecture to be the outcome of industry and building activity that shaped and brought into being the colonial world. We will focus on two intertwined industries: whaling, which encroached into the South Pacific in the 1770s and is rarely associated with architecture, and timber-getting. Together they provided trade staples and raw materials that made colonisation possible.
Our overarching questions concern the relations between early global industries in the region (sealing, whaling, wool, timber) and colonial architecture. How can a research focus on the Tasman World and colonial regionalism disrupt normative centre/periphery models of architectural history?
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Guest Edited Journals by Stuart A King
Architect Victoria, 2019
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ABE Journal Architecture Beyond Europe, 2019
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Conference Proceedings by Stuart A King
The nineteenth-century architectural history of what Philippa
Mein Smith (among others) has calle... more The nineteenth-century architectural history of what Philippa
Mein Smith (among others) has called the ‘Tasman world’
has long been shaped by the nationalist historiographies of
twentieth-century Australia and New Zealand. Developments in
the region’s colonial architecture from the 1780s onwards have
thus fed later narratives of national foundations. The call for
this session invited scholars to work against the grain of that
problematic nationalism by addressing the architecture and
infrastructure of those colonial industries operating across the
early colonies of New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land and New
Zealand, and connecting that ‘world’ to the economies of the
British Empire, the ‘Anglosphere’, and architectural geographies
defined by trade. These papers thus return to the colonial era
of the South Pacific informed by the gains of post-colonial
history, four-nations British historiography, studies of global
colonial networks and systems, and an appreciation for ‘minor’
forms of historical evidence and architectural practice. Armed
thus, the papers in this session consider the architecture of
the Tasman world from the 1780s to the 1840s in its historical
circumstances, exploring architecture across three different
registers: intentioned works definitively cast as Architecture;
the ‘grey’ architecture (after Bremner) of industries,
transhipping and colonial infrastructure; and as an analogy for
the relationships, systems and structures of the colonial project
and its economic underpinnings. Papers move around and
across the Tasman Sea.
Philippa Mein Smith begins the session by exploring how the
concept of the Tasman World and trans-colonial historiography
activates the industrial architecture of sealing. Stuart King
then homes in on the timber industry of Van Diemen’s Land
and its import for a geography spanning from the Swan River
Colony to California. Harriet Edquist considers the role of the
Vandemonian Henty brothers in the settlement of Western
Victoria, tempering a celebration of their pastoralism by
recalling the displacements and disruptions wrought by their
arrival. Bill Taylor attends to the informal ‘industry’ of pilfering
and looks through the lens it offers on the Australian ports
and their relationships with Britain. In the final paper, Robin
Skinner pursues the matter of representation in his treatment
of Burford’s dioramas of the three colonial ‘capitals’ of this
period. Together, the papers in this session contribute to a postnationalist
architectural history of the Tasman colonies that
figures the place of this region in the nineteenth-century British
world and beyond.
Abstracts on pp 77-81 of the published programme.
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In 1957, Clinton Hartley Grattan, one of Australia’s most important foreign observers, wrote of t... more In 1957, Clinton Hartley Grattan, one of Australia’s most important foreign observers, wrote of the shadow of the “urban” in legends of the Australian “bush”.1 He argued that the early frontiers of Australian settlement were frontiers of men with private capital, or entrepreneurs, and those frontiers thus carried more elements of the urban than is commonly realised. Such early colonial enterprises around Australia’s south and southeastern coasts, and across the Tasman included sealing, whaling, milling and pastoralism, as well as missionary, trading and finance ventures. In advance of official settlements in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, entrepreneurs mapped coastlines, pioneered trade routes and colonised lands. Backed by private capital they established colonial infrastructural architecture effecting urban expansion in the Australian colonies, New Zealand and beyond. Yet this architecture is rarely a subject of architectural histories. [...]
Tasmanian College of the Arts, organised by Harriet Edquist (RMIT) and Stuart King (UTas), October 17-18, 2016
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6) Anuradha Chatterjee, Stuart King, and Stephen Loo, eds. Proceedings of Fabulation: Myth Nature... more 6) Anuradha Chatterjee, Stuart King, and Stephen Loo, eds. Proceedings of Fabulation: Myth Nature and Heritage: The 29th Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ). Launceston: University of Tasmania, 2012, ISBN: 978-1-86295-658-2.
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Papers by Stuart A King
a corbelled vault, for example – the cultural knowledge (theology, architectural theories, etc.) ... more a corbelled vault, for example – the cultural knowledge (theology, architectural theories, etc.) that gives theory and meaning to such techniques is never transferable as such. It can only be “translated”, they argue, with cautious reference to the postcolonial theory and criticism of Homi Bhabha, and translation is (always) also creative. Elsewhere, these authors have entertained less cautious and more overtly passionate and speculative propositions about the poetics of cross-cultural architectural invention, and the “calculus of ornament” by which the beguiling geometries and formalisms of these far-flung temples could also have been produced. Alas, the latter is only invoked indirectly in an endnote reference to Datta’s primary research in design computation and the mathematics of architecture, which is evidently deemed to be of only marginal relevance or interest to the particular expert readership at which the present tome is aimed. Whilst the rigour and focus with which this architectural contribution to the arthistorical field of Indian temple studies has been undertaken and delivered is to be commended, a regret therefore niggles that the authors’ own disciplinary propensities to speculate creatively – as architects – on the poetics of these intriguingly enigmatic structures were not given greater leash.
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Architectural Theory Review, 2021
An architectural history that foregrounds materials over the intentions of architects and other a... more An architectural history that foregrounds materials over the intentions of architects and other agents of procurement and design places works and the means of their production into fields that do not map neatly on to established geographies. Drawing on a recent body of work concerned with those architectural histories of the Tasman world and the interplay of extractive industries and “grey” architecture, this paper reflects on the conceptual stakes of prioritising specific industries over habitual historiographical frames. Timber’s dual standing as an extracted resource subject to the vicissitudes of trade, and as a building material deployed in settings immediately adjacent to forests and at significant distances from its point of origin, exposes the complexity of a form of architectural history attentive to historical events and the images history necessarily draws from them. The paper responds to a proposal by Mark Crinson intended to address this complexity, suggesting that an architectural history of timber in the specific setting of the colonial Tasman world may offer a useful test.
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The idea of a ‘Boom Style’ is now accepted within the lexicon of Australian architectural histori... more The idea of a ‘Boom Style’ is now accepted within the lexicon of Australian architectural historians, typically used to describe the exuberant and individualistic architectural expression of the 1880s and early 1890s, especially in ‘Marvellous Melbourne’, and to lesser degrees in Sydney and Brisbane. These Boom Style buildings, originally describing domestic buildings, but latterly extended to include large commercial structures, are characterised by eclecticism and the enrichment of facades developed through multiple overlays of represented structure and ornament, exemplified in the likes of the Olderfleet Building, Melbourne (1889). For such works, ‘Boom Style’, as a stylistic label, refers not so much to a particular elemental vocabulary (elements could be combined from any variants of Classical or Gothic languages), rather a common compositional approach to the design. It was composition that enabled architects to negotiate the wealth and expectations of clients and an urbane populace, as well as an equally rich architectural milieu.
This paper examines the coining of the term ‘Boom Style’ as it is used specifically to describe architecture in Melbourne in the late 1880s and early 1890s, and generically elsewhere. It argues that if a contextually responsive compositional method prevails over an elemental language in a robust ‘Boom Style’, then the style should be identifiable against the
backdrop of boom conditions in other places. Indeed, localised late-nineteenth-century boom styles can be observed elsewhere in Australia and New Zealand typically associated with sudden influxes of wealth from mining, for example, in, Western Australia in the 1890s, northern Tasmania in late 1890s and early 1900s, and, earlier, across the Tasman in Dunedin in the 1860s. This paper examines these apparent boom styles to better understand the phenomenon and its triggers.
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Books by Stuart A King
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Journal Articles by Stuart A King
Book Chapters by Stuart A King
Talks by Stuart A King
In this presentation we will discuss our research on re-thinking the early colonial architecture of the Tasman World, a regional concept encompassing Australia and New Zealand linked by sea and traffic. We describe our project as ‘oceanic’ since the sea—its estuaries, coasts and oceans—is a prominent character as a conveyor of enterprise and ships, which were agents in global networks across oceans. It employs the insights offered by recent historians of the region and adopts a ‘ground-up’ approach that understands architecture to be the outcome of industry and building activity that shaped and brought into being the colonial world. We will focus on two intertwined industries: whaling, which encroached into the South Pacific in the 1770s and is rarely associated with architecture, and timber-getting. Together they provided trade staples and raw materials that made colonisation possible.
Our overarching questions concern the relations between early global industries in the region (sealing, whaling, wool, timber) and colonial architecture. How can a research focus on the Tasman World and colonial regionalism disrupt normative centre/periphery models of architectural history?
Guest Edited Journals by Stuart A King
Conference Proceedings by Stuart A King
Mein Smith (among others) has called the ‘Tasman world’
has long been shaped by the nationalist historiographies of
twentieth-century Australia and New Zealand. Developments in
the region’s colonial architecture from the 1780s onwards have
thus fed later narratives of national foundations. The call for
this session invited scholars to work against the grain of that
problematic nationalism by addressing the architecture and
infrastructure of those colonial industries operating across the
early colonies of New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land and New
Zealand, and connecting that ‘world’ to the economies of the
British Empire, the ‘Anglosphere’, and architectural geographies
defined by trade. These papers thus return to the colonial era
of the South Pacific informed by the gains of post-colonial
history, four-nations British historiography, studies of global
colonial networks and systems, and an appreciation for ‘minor’
forms of historical evidence and architectural practice. Armed
thus, the papers in this session consider the architecture of
the Tasman world from the 1780s to the 1840s in its historical
circumstances, exploring architecture across three different
registers: intentioned works definitively cast as Architecture;
the ‘grey’ architecture (after Bremner) of industries,
transhipping and colonial infrastructure; and as an analogy for
the relationships, systems and structures of the colonial project
and its economic underpinnings. Papers move around and
across the Tasman Sea.
Philippa Mein Smith begins the session by exploring how the
concept of the Tasman World and trans-colonial historiography
activates the industrial architecture of sealing. Stuart King
then homes in on the timber industry of Van Diemen’s Land
and its import for a geography spanning from the Swan River
Colony to California. Harriet Edquist considers the role of the
Vandemonian Henty brothers in the settlement of Western
Victoria, tempering a celebration of their pastoralism by
recalling the displacements and disruptions wrought by their
arrival. Bill Taylor attends to the informal ‘industry’ of pilfering
and looks through the lens it offers on the Australian ports
and their relationships with Britain. In the final paper, Robin
Skinner pursues the matter of representation in his treatment
of Burford’s dioramas of the three colonial ‘capitals’ of this
period. Together, the papers in this session contribute to a postnationalist
architectural history of the Tasman colonies that
figures the place of this region in the nineteenth-century British
world and beyond.
Abstracts on pp 77-81 of the published programme.
Tasmanian College of the Arts, organised by Harriet Edquist (RMIT) and Stuart King (UTas), October 17-18, 2016
Papers by Stuart A King
This paper examines the coining of the term ‘Boom Style’ as it is used specifically to describe architecture in Melbourne in the late 1880s and early 1890s, and generically elsewhere. It argues that if a contextually responsive compositional method prevails over an elemental language in a robust ‘Boom Style’, then the style should be identifiable against the
backdrop of boom conditions in other places. Indeed, localised late-nineteenth-century boom styles can be observed elsewhere in Australia and New Zealand typically associated with sudden influxes of wealth from mining, for example, in, Western Australia in the 1890s, northern Tasmania in late 1890s and early 1900s, and, earlier, across the Tasman in Dunedin in the 1860s. This paper examines these apparent boom styles to better understand the phenomenon and its triggers.
Books by Stuart A King
In this presentation we will discuss our research on re-thinking the early colonial architecture of the Tasman World, a regional concept encompassing Australia and New Zealand linked by sea and traffic. We describe our project as ‘oceanic’ since the sea—its estuaries, coasts and oceans—is a prominent character as a conveyor of enterprise and ships, which were agents in global networks across oceans. It employs the insights offered by recent historians of the region and adopts a ‘ground-up’ approach that understands architecture to be the outcome of industry and building activity that shaped and brought into being the colonial world. We will focus on two intertwined industries: whaling, which encroached into the South Pacific in the 1770s and is rarely associated with architecture, and timber-getting. Together they provided trade staples and raw materials that made colonisation possible.
Our overarching questions concern the relations between early global industries in the region (sealing, whaling, wool, timber) and colonial architecture. How can a research focus on the Tasman World and colonial regionalism disrupt normative centre/periphery models of architectural history?
Mein Smith (among others) has called the ‘Tasman world’
has long been shaped by the nationalist historiographies of
twentieth-century Australia and New Zealand. Developments in
the region’s colonial architecture from the 1780s onwards have
thus fed later narratives of national foundations. The call for
this session invited scholars to work against the grain of that
problematic nationalism by addressing the architecture and
infrastructure of those colonial industries operating across the
early colonies of New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land and New
Zealand, and connecting that ‘world’ to the economies of the
British Empire, the ‘Anglosphere’, and architectural geographies
defined by trade. These papers thus return to the colonial era
of the South Pacific informed by the gains of post-colonial
history, four-nations British historiography, studies of global
colonial networks and systems, and an appreciation for ‘minor’
forms of historical evidence and architectural practice. Armed
thus, the papers in this session consider the architecture of
the Tasman world from the 1780s to the 1840s in its historical
circumstances, exploring architecture across three different
registers: intentioned works definitively cast as Architecture;
the ‘grey’ architecture (after Bremner) of industries,
transhipping and colonial infrastructure; and as an analogy for
the relationships, systems and structures of the colonial project
and its economic underpinnings. Papers move around and
across the Tasman Sea.
Philippa Mein Smith begins the session by exploring how the
concept of the Tasman World and trans-colonial historiography
activates the industrial architecture of sealing. Stuart King
then homes in on the timber industry of Van Diemen’s Land
and its import for a geography spanning from the Swan River
Colony to California. Harriet Edquist considers the role of the
Vandemonian Henty brothers in the settlement of Western
Victoria, tempering a celebration of their pastoralism by
recalling the displacements and disruptions wrought by their
arrival. Bill Taylor attends to the informal ‘industry’ of pilfering
and looks through the lens it offers on the Australian ports
and their relationships with Britain. In the final paper, Robin
Skinner pursues the matter of representation in his treatment
of Burford’s dioramas of the three colonial ‘capitals’ of this
period. Together, the papers in this session contribute to a postnationalist
architectural history of the Tasman colonies that
figures the place of this region in the nineteenth-century British
world and beyond.
Abstracts on pp 77-81 of the published programme.
Tasmanian College of the Arts, organised by Harriet Edquist (RMIT) and Stuart King (UTas), October 17-18, 2016
This paper examines the coining of the term ‘Boom Style’ as it is used specifically to describe architecture in Melbourne in the late 1880s and early 1890s, and generically elsewhere. It argues that if a contextually responsive compositional method prevails over an elemental language in a robust ‘Boom Style’, then the style should be identifiable against the
backdrop of boom conditions in other places. Indeed, localised late-nineteenth-century boom styles can be observed elsewhere in Australia and New Zealand typically associated with sudden influxes of wealth from mining, for example, in, Western Australia in the 1890s, northern Tasmania in late 1890s and early 1900s, and, earlier, across the Tasman in Dunedin in the 1860s. This paper examines these apparent boom styles to better understand the phenomenon and its triggers.
In the era before motels and resorts, a holiday at the Gold and Sunshine coasts usually meant either pitching a tent and camping by the beach or staying in a simple cottage owned by family or friends […] Simplicity, informality, individuality […] were the hallmarks of these humble places.