Philip Goad

It is more than fifty years since anyone attempted to comprehensively describe the history of Australian architecture. In 1968, Sydney academic J.M. Freeland’s Architecture in Australia: A History was a landmark publication. The timing of its release was intended to celebrate 180 years of building on the continent since formal European invasion, marked by the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788. ... (read more)

Among the diaspora of European-born Jewish artists, architects, academics, and intellectuals who made a life on Australian shores pre- and post-World War II, Harry Seidler (1923–2006) was, arguably, the most successful and at various times during his life, one of the most visible and most controversial. As an architect, he left behind signature office buildings in five state capital cities, a br ... (read more)

Public Sydney: Drawing the City is a large and beautiful book. Its size recalls William Hardy Wilson’s Old Colonial Architecture in New South Wales and Tasmania (1924) and other folio-sized books produced by architect–authors such as Andrea Palladio, James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, and Richard Phené Spiers. Their luxurious size was dictated by the reproduction of drawings at a scale where m ... (read more)

Architectural distinction was conferred upon most Australian towns and cities in the nineteenth century. This was achieved largely through the construction of public buildings designed by architects employed within colonial works departments – a practice that regrettably does not exist anymore. Town halls, post offices, courthouses, hospitals, lunatic asylums, and jails were the product of highl ... (read more)