Architecture and industry: the migrant contribution to nation-building

This project involves a multi-institutional partnership between researchers from University of Melbourne, Deakin University, University of Tasmania, Australian National University, in collaboration with the Immigration Museum, Melbourne.

This interdisciplinary project focuses on the historical intersections between migration, industry, architecture and landscape, in the period 1945-1979. It examines the inhabitation, inscription, intervention and shaping of the built environment as a legacy of the refugee and migrant populations who were directed to work and labour in Australia’s major industries, including construction related to infrastructure, heavy industry and manufacturing. The broad influence of migration represents an extraordinary confluence of transnational cultures within Australia’s modernisation. Informed by migration histories of selected case studies, this project will determine corresponding impact on Australian cities and the wider built landscape contributing valuable architectural insights into economic and social histories of industry, population growth and modernisation that have continuing relevance.

Immigration, industry and settlement were catalytic for modernisation in Australia after World War II, a period shaped by post-war reconstruction. Federal and corporate funding for major industries together with government policies for population growth enabled nation-building programs that shaped remote, rural and urban environments into modern industrial landscapes. Populations were drawn from war-destroyed nations, underdeveloped economies, and hostile political environments. Focussing on the architecture and landscapes of major but under-documented industrial sites and their complex social histories, this project will examine the intersection of the built environment and industrial growth, shifting attention to acknowledging the spatial and material dimensions of the immigrant legacy and broadening the social scope of design and planning historiography including architecture, landscape and domestic living environments. In a contemporary sense, this project speaks directly to both anxieties and aspirations of new refugee and immigrant arrivals by uncovering the extent of the contribution made by war displaced populations to national development in the past with the following specific aims:

1. to uncover neglected social dimensions of architectural historiography including non-Anglophone social and industrial contributions to the built environment;
2. to explore interaction between architecture, landscape and the sites of habitation with other interdisciplinary ways of knowing and seeing the built environment that bring these stories to light;
3. to develop a new framework for examining complex material conditions outside conventional building practices by uncovering the largely overlooked architectural and landscape dimensions of industrialisation in Australia;
4. to highlight the transnational forces embedded in Australia’s national narrative, as a basis for internationalisation of an otherwise apparently insular period in the nation’s history.

The project commenced in 2019 and will be completed in 2022.