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The purpose of this paper is to examine the design of state school buildings in Australia from the 1880s to the 1980s to establish common threads or similar concerns evident in their architecture at a national level.

The researcher compiled a significant data set of hundreds of state schools, derived from government, professional and other publications, archival searches and site visits. Standard analytical methods in architectural research are employed, including stylistic and morphological analysis, to read the designs for meaning and intent.

The data set was interrogated to draw out major themes in school design, the identification of which form the basis of the paper's argument. Four major themes, identifiable at a national level, are identified: school as house; school as civic; school as factory; and school as town. Each theme reflects a different chronological period, being approximately 1900-1920, 1920-1940, 1940-1960 and 1960-1980. The themes reflect the changing representation of aspiration for the school child and their engagement with wider society through the architecture of the school.

The paper considers, for the first time, the concerns of educational architecture over time in Australia on a consciously national, rather than state, level.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the professional context of the educator and architects who designed and conceived Woodleigh School in Baxter, Victoria, Australia (1974-1979) and to identify common design threads in a series of schools designed by Daryl Jackson and Evan Walker in the 1970s.

The research was derived from academic and professional publications, film footage, interviews, archival searches and site visits. Standard analytical methods in architectural research are employed, including formal, planning and morphological analysis, to read building designs for meaning and intent. Books, people and buildings were examined to piece together the design “biography” of Woodleigh School, the identification of which forms the basis of the paper's argument.

Themes of loose fit, indeterminate planning, coupled with concepts of classroom as house, and school as town, and engagement with a landscape environment are drawn together under principal Michael Norman's favoured phrase that adolescents might experience “a slice of life”, preparing them for broader engagement with a world and a community outside school. The themes reflect changing aspirations for teenage education in the 1970s, indicating a free and experimental approach to the design of the school environment.

The paper considers, for the first time, the interconnected role of educator and architect as key protagonists in envisioning connections between space and pedagogy in the 1970s alternative school.

The purpose of this paper is to canvass debates arising from encounters between architectural and educational history and to introduce a themed section of four papers exploring aspects of the history of school design and the spatial arrangements of Australian schooling across the twentieth century.

This is an interpretive introductory essay that characterizes trends in historical and sociological studies of school space and materialities, and synthesizes the arguments and contributions of the four companion papers.

A case is made for greater exchange among educational, architectural and social historians and key insights and findings from the four papers concerning school space, design and educational ideas are summarized. Themes of community, citizenship and progressive education are highlighted.

The value of the paper lies in introducing the context and scholarly debates framing a collection of four papers that seek to open up new avenues for investigating the history of modern schooling through studying intersections between school space and design and educational purposes and aspiration.

Many heritage-listed gaols in Australia have become obsolete in terms of their original function and were decommissioned decades ago. As a default management practice, decommissioned gaols are usually transformed into museums which are mostly empty and underused without considering other viable alternatives. This research challenges this mainstream thinking and demonstrates that among the entire stock of heritage-listed gaols in Australia, even the least ranked gaol in terms of its potential for reuse can be turned into a thriving and vibrant new function.

Hypothetically, if the least ranked Australian heritage-listed gaol in terms of its potential for reuse is in fact “reusable”, then the remaining heritage gaols have more chance of being successfully reused to accommodate a vibrant new function. To be able to test this hypothesis, first, the Adaptive Reuse Potential (ARP) model is applied to rank Australia's decommissioned heritage gaols which are spatially and structurally sound to accommodate new uses. Second, an architectural design concept was designed to adaptively reuse the lowest scored gaol (Richmond Gaol) to a boutique hotel. The conceptual design proposal was then assessed by three local heritage architecture firms to validate its applicability and viability.

The research showed that Richmond Gaol can be reused successfully to at least one function, and accordingly, the whole stock of heritage gaols can be expected to also be reused to more sustainable purposes. The research identifies several considerations for the reuse of heritage gaols in Australia: the careful intervention to their significant fabric; maintaining sufficient evidence of the gaol's original components, the importance of the new use being compatible to the gaol's morphology to ensure minimum alterations or demolitions in the significant fabric of the site; and evaluating the new use and its components to achieve financial viability.

Due to the continuing closure of Tasmania's state borders amid the spread of the COVID-19 virus, the researchers were not able to travel to Tasmania to conduct a site visit and to run the in-depth interviews with the architects in person. Most of the data of the current status of the site, its current layout, museum elements, historical data and photos were provided by Heritage Authorities in Tasmania and the Tasmanian State Library and Archive Service. Supplementary information and photos were acquired in March 2020 from visitors of the gaol who uploaded their trip images to Google maps or to their travel blogs. Topographical data of the site was gathered from Topographic Base-map of Land Information System Richmond Tasmania (2020). Due to travel restrictions, in-depth interviews with the local architects were done virtually, or over the phone in one case.

Challenges discussed in this research encourage creating nationally designed support programs to better vitalise and help preserve Australia's carceral heritage.

This research utilises architectural design in an empirical research paradigm.

This guide attempts to identify those items that should form the foundation of any collection of reference tools on architectural history and upon which more specialized collections can be built. The core collection suggested here is for a college or university library offering courses in architectural history at the upper undergraduate level and above, but the annotations should enable those developing the collections of other types of libraries to select appropriate items.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a broad theoretical orientation for the themed section of History of Education Review, “Unstable concepts in the history of Australian schooling: radicalism, religion, migration”. Through the conceptual frame of “contrapuntal historiography”, it commends the practice of re-looking at taken-for-granted concepts and re-readings of the cultural archive of Australian schooling, with especial attention to silences, discontinuities and the movements of concepts.

Drawing on Edward Said’s approach of “contrapuntal reading”, this paper refers to the recent work of Bruce Pascoe as an exemplar of this practice in the field of Australian history. It then relates this approach to the study of the history of Australian schooling as demonstrated in the three papers that make up the themed section “Unstable concepts in the history of Australian schooling: radicalism, religion, migration”.

Following in the style of Said’s contrapuntal reading and the example of Pascoe’s work, this paper argues that there are inerasable traces of historical politics – that is, the records of constitutive exclusions and silences – which “haunt” taken-for-granted concepts like the migrant, the secular and the radical in the history of Australian schooling.

Taken alongside the three papers in the themed section, this paper urges the proliferation of different theoretical and disciplinary approaches in order to think anew about silences, discontinuities and movements of concepts as a counterpoint to dominant narrative lines in the history of Australian education.

This paper critically analyses the urban memory and heritage interpretation of postcolonial Harbin, a city in China that was founded by the Russians in 1898. It investigates the role and making of Russian colonial heritage in contemporary Harbin with a detailed case study of the Harbin Railway Station

Research methods include archival analysis, observation and semi-structured interview. In-depth interviews were conducted with local people, architect/urban planners and officials.

Local people of different generations with different backgrounds have different interpretations of the recently made colonial heritage of the Harbin Railway Station. The urban memory of Harbin has been consistently re-forming with both nostalgia and amnesia. Younger generations tend to regard the colonial heritage as their own heritage and a symbol of Harbin's cultural character without considering much about its related colonial history. In today's Harbin, colonial heritage as the “colonial past presencing” is more about a feel of the Europeanised space rather than the actual historical events of the period, and colonial heritage making becomes a tool for urban development and revitalisation at the institutional level. However, due to the paradigm shift in China's urban development, Harbin is facing new challenges in dealing with its colonial heritage.

Harbin is an under-researched case in terms of urban heritage studies. This paper offers a new entry point for understanding the westernisation and colonial heritage making in the contemporary China more deeply and thoroughly and helps to see the trend of China's urban development more clearly.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how Australian universities commemorated the First World War, with a focus on the University of Melbourne as an institution with a particularly rich history of wartime participation and of diverse forms of memorialisation.

A case study approach is taken, with an overview of the range of war memorials at the University of Melbourne. These include memorials which acknowledged the wartime role of individuals or groups associated with the University, and took the form of architectural features, and named scholarships or academic positions. Three cross-campus war memorials are examined in depth.

This paper demonstrates that there was a range of war memorials at Australian universities, indicating the range of views about the First World War, and its legacies, within university communities of students, graduates and staff.

University war commemoration in Australia has not been well documented. This study examines the way in which the particular character of the community at the University of Melbourne was to influence the forms of First World War commemoration.

Design studio and technology subjects are two dominant parts of the architecture curriculum. How to integrate these different parts of the curriculum is one of the important challenges in architecture education around the world. With increasing internationalisation of both the profession and higher education, an understanding of similarities and differences across the globe is important. This paper illustrates two different approaches to such integration in two very different contexts: case studies at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Australia and the University of Tehran (UT) in Iran.

The study implemented a case study approach based on document analysis methods. This paper explores the integrated role of technology subjects in architecture education, followed by a critique of the teaching of technology within the design studio. The analysis is conducted across four significant features of the curriculum.

Overall, in both programmes, the aim is for students to develop architectural knowledge and skills; although the Iranian programme has a stronger focus on knowledge, the Australian programme has a stronger focus on the application of knowledge and skills, particularly within the design studio projects.

The comparative analysis of architectural education in these two different contexts offers an insight into alternative approaches to teaching technology. Such an insight may offer guidance in curriculum development to support the exploration of new hybrid approaches as well as supporting international student mobility.

The casual nature of employment in the construction industry makes planning human asset requirements a vague exercise. Human resource information systems (HRISs) offer a means of coping with these problems through improvements in the reliability, accuracy and accessibility of the human resources (HR) information. Aimed at improving the understanding of construction HRISs, interviews were carried out with three leading construction companies in Australia. The HR needs of the companies were examined by identifying the HR‐related functions and activities conducted, the internal and external users of HR information, the type of data needed, and the specific purpose of those data. Twenty‐three HR activities were identified and grouped into seven major functions: project management and control, strategic planning, review and analysis, employee profile, employee performance, HR development, payroll and accounting support, and information systems outside the company. The HR information for each function was established. The findings of this study may facilitate the development of a HRIS for construction companies.