“Our culture’s systems, technologies and social structures were designed with care for the land, sea and sky and the people in them as a guiding principle,” she says. It should be drawing from our millennia of history pre-colonisation. Page says new Australian design should be doing the opposite. Imported architecture that is just planted on top of place instead of allowing Country to inform it.” “You can see that along Macarthur Street in Sydney as well as in every major city. “The colonisers took buildings they liked in England and replicated them here,” she says. She says this tendency to import architecture and design from overseas predates Boyd’s seminal text. It was while studying interior design at university in the 1990s that Page discovered Robin Boyd’s Australian Ugliness and our “obsession with pasting imported woods over native boards.” “We should be showing them how to have a deep and mature identity despite having chapters in our history that are extremely painful, and using our architecture and the design of our cities as part of that healing process.”ĭesign: Building on Country, cowritten by Page and Memmott. “We are home to the oldest living culture in the world, so we’re actually older than America and England.
“We aren’t second hand Americans,” Page tells ADR. In her new book, Design: Building on Country, cowritten with Paul Memmott, Page outlines how all buildings, no matter their use, should be an extension of Country. All architecture in Australia should be an act of co-creation with Indigenous Australians and Indigenous design principles, says interior designer and Walbanga and Wadi Wadi woman Alison Page.
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