Introduction - The Shopping Centre 1943-2013: The Rise and Demise of a Ubiquitous Collective Architecture

In his seminal essay ‘Public Spaces, Collective Spaces,’ which was published in 1992, Spanish architect and critic Manuel de Solà-Morales suggested that the civic, architectural, urban and morphological richness of contemporary cities resides in their collective spaces that are not strictly public or private, but both simultaneously.1 De Solà...

Angry young architects: Counterculture and the critique of modernism in Brisbane, 1967-72

By 1967, Brisbane architecture students had had enough. Disenchantment with their “out-dated” architectural education and the rigidity of the Australian architectural establishment opened out onto the wider context of the Moratorium opposing the Vietnam War, and the peculiarly conservative and reactionary Queensland Government of Johannes Bjelke...

In search of the ugliest country in the world: Australia vs. Belgium on Robin Boyd, Renaat Braem, regionalism and post-war modernism

Three decades after Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre first introduced the notion of critical regionalism into architectural theory, the concept remains decisively current. One of its manifold recent attestation is Place Makers, an exhibition sponsored by the Queensland government to promote an idiosyncratic Queensland architecture by...

Campsites as utopias? A socio-spatial reading of the post-war holiday camp in Belgium, 1950s to 1970s

This paper contrasts the objectives that underlie the development of government-funded holiday camps for family vacations in Belgium with the socio-spatial practices of their initial users. Drawing on oral history, archival material, photographs and site plans, we argue that holidaymakers did not just experience the holiday camp as an...

The Holy Trinity of Modernity: Leisure, Suburbia and the Shopping Centre

Writing about leisure in suburbia would be neigh impossible without including shopping centres. Leisure, suburbia and shopping centres might well embody the holy trinity of capitalist modernity. It was the consolidation of capitalism that established our modern sense of work, free time and leisure, and the shopping centre became its temple; a...

Collectivity and the Post-war European Shopping Centre

This paper puts forth the hypothesis that notions such as ‘collectivity’, ‘play’ and ‘community’ – buzz words of the post-war discourse on architecture and urbanism – were often important elements in the design and conceptualization of post-war shopping centres in Western Europe. To investigate this hypothesis, the paper focuses on three...