Forum: industrial sites and immigrant architectures. A case study approach

Migration labour history linked to industry and national growth and how it intersects architectural narratives is yet to be comprehensively explored for the Australian context. The ephemerality, lack of authorship, and generalised or prefabricated nature of industrial sites prove challenging to architectural historians, as do labour histories and experiences in such sites. However, sites such as these are significant for temporal transformation of physical places, and the subjectivity of those persons largely unrecorded in authorised histories. The sites and their physical structures and landscapes come to stand for architects, their works, or their reception. Greater historical forces can be traced through changes to these sites.

This forum invited contributions on environments that accommodated immigrants to Australia, the industries that employed them, and the architectural, landscape, and urban spaces that were transformed by their presence. We asked for brief discussions of key case studies (or building types) that might provide a foundation for developing this area as a subfield within architectural studies. Contributions were asked to cover, but were not limited to, immigrant hostels and reception centres and detention facilities, industrial sites, infrastructure projects, manufacturing, farming, mining, or commerce. We asked contributors to identify the immigrant cultures and nationalities linked to the selected sites and the migrant centres and residential neighbourhoods of their domicile. We invited contributions that consider Anglophone and non-Anglophone migrants as well as recent refugee and immigrant arrivals in Australia, limiting our selection to the Australian geography. Our aim was to deepen historical understanding of the larger collectives who are typically excluded from architectural histories, rather than individual refugee or immigrant architects or their custom-designed buildings. The several discursive contributions that follow offer innovative explorations of how these neglected spaces and people might enter architectural histories.