By Design
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15 May
A luxurious trip into retail therapy; influential design; and getting graphical
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8 May
Arabic typography; a song about a girl about an era; a simple cup; and competitive architects
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1 May
About how design and art can interact; a cathedral made of cardboard; a special bag for your cast-offs; then we're off to the park
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24 April
We're with a fixit person for design problems, going to a museum of writing, looking squarely at the Post-It note and trying to make sense of all that data.
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17 April
Photographing buildings, browsing the library, interstate signs, and branding, branding, branding
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10 April
We're talking galleries, glamorous cars, concrete and stadia
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Drawing Room: What's in a home?
In the Drawing Room tonight, we find out how to create those special touches that make for a stylish home and uncover a comedian with a fetish for mounted animal heads.
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The campaign for the accurate measurement of creativity
Chicago-based industrial designer and illustrator Craighton Berman created the 'Campaign for the Accurate Measurement of Creativity' to make a statement about our modern age.
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Historyonics: Melbourne 1950s fashion
Hall Ludlow was one of the Australia's most important couturiers, and his salon at the Paris end of Melbourne's Collins Street was at its peak in the 1950s and 1960s.
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Designing a new Australian capital in the top end
While Canberra celebrates its centenary, The Gallery of Australian Design asks what would happen if a similar design competition were held today?
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Body Architecture
Imagine wearing clothes that convey your mood by glowing and blushing? Or perspiring a fragrance through your skin? Lucy McRae has a background in dance and design and she's come up with a unique job title: Body Architect. Plus, a look at the extravagant architecture of the hair that was in vogue in the 18th century, when fashionable women wore towering edifices of decorated hair.
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Broadsheet to Tabloid
After more than 150 years, Fairfax publications The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald are about to go tabloid, or as they like to describe it, compact. What are the pros and cons of converting from broadsheet to tabloid? Is it simply that you can read a tabloid on the bus without elbowing your fellow passengers? Tony Sutton has consulted for more than 100 newspapers around the world, including a few in Australia, on how best to redesign their publications.
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360documentaries 2 February 2013
Canberra is a city sculpted by trees. In this program we visit the new National Arboretum to learn more about Walter Burley Griffin's vision of trees for Canberra and meet some dedicated tree enthusiasts who are keeping his dream alive.
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Climate proofing and the future
If extreme weather is going to occur more frequently, many argue it is time we started thinking of ways to mitigate the damage.
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कुम्हार Potters Re-Caste
An enduring collaboration between Indian and Australian potters is featured on Creative Instinct this week.
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The art of food styling: Ann Creber
Ann Creber has been a food stylist for 30 years and there's not much she hasn't seen or done using found objects, patience and a cunningly wielded satay stick. She reveals how you work around military coups to get the recipe on to a page.
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Drawing Room: Hats, Fashion and Racing Culture
It's the race that stops the nation -- or so they say. Maybe it should be the hat that stops the nation!
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Picasso vase discovered at valuation
A couple in Mackay struck gold at a vintage valuation over the weekend.
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Where there's smoke
A fatal fire in a Sydney high rise apartment building has exposed widespread failures in fire safety compliance. For residents of Australia’s tallest apartment building it is a burning issue. Stan Correy investigates.
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Fashion what's on
Occasionally Life Matters turns to all things sartorial – from muffin tops to bumster jeans. It's a look at fashion design and it's also a guide to design exhibitions around the country. Our fashion guru is Paola Di Trocchio
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Drawing Room: African Australians for social change
In the Drawing Room tonight, you're joined by two African Australians who are young, passionate, hardworking, creative, and dedicated to community.
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The Radio Hour Part Two
Radio storytelling in front of a live audience at the Melbourne Writers Festival, stories on the theme Do You Read Me?
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360documentaries 14 October 2012
A program that makes heartwarming oberservations about life and people across the globe. In Part Two of The Radio Hour a story about two letters from Afghanistan that tell of falling in love with dust and the call to prayer and a tale about the way we read people's faces, all presented before a live audience as part of the Melbourne Writers Festival. Also amusing comments made from a balcony overlooking a cobblestoned street in Brussels, one of the City Nights stories.
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Fashion crafted from agricultural products
When you look at a display of agricultural products, how many of you think of fashion?
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The Himalayas to the Darling Downs: Cities of Peace and...
Lumbini, Nepal, the Buddha's birthplace is a small poor hamlet that is set to be reborn as a model city of peace and harmony. Toowoomba, Queensland has a vision to become a leading example of a multi-faith community that lives in peace and harmony.
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Drawing Room: Suits and cardigans
Suits and cardigans are worn everyday by millions of office workers around the world, but how did they become so ubiquitous?
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'Deadly Dressed' shows off Indigenous fashion and design
The competition includes both professional fashion designers and "styled up" community members.
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Kevin McCloud: Grand Designs Live
Kevin McCloud's TV series Grand Designs follows determined individuals undertaking unique and somewhat challenging home renovations.
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Dressing Sydney: The Jewish Fashion Story
The Perkal brothers, now in their 90s, are still working five days a week and since the 1940s they have been making shoes for some big names, including Kerry and James Packer and even the Queen. The story of these Sydney based cobblers is part of a new exhibition that features in the NSW History Week, a week exploring the history of threads. Dressing Sydney: The Jewish Fashion Story is at the Sydney Jewish Museum.
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Drawing Room: Australian architecture
Which Australian city has the best architecture?
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Urmadic University
A group of design experts are thinking through the possibility of creating an 'Urmadic University' - a new kind of university designed to address some of society's major challenges.
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Age appropriate children's clothes
One mother's online post has snowballed into a social media campaign calling on the department store Target to stop selling clothes that make young girls look like tramps. Tens of thousands of Facebook users liked the initial post and several thousand added their comments. Target has responded on Facebook, saying it takes great care to ensure its children's range is age appropriate and inviting people with concerns about specific products to email them.
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Vintage fashion: why are old clothes trendy?
Why has second-hand or vintage clothing become so trendy? From Portobello Road in London to Camberwell markets in Melbourne, vintage clothing is a marker of style. So why, in an age of cheap new clothes, do we seek out the old and worn?
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Cultural Precincts
Why do arts institutions love to congregate?
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Turning industrial decline around: Tom Murphy
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania was once the poster city for post-industrial decline. As manufacturing moved offshore in the decades after the second world war the city emptied out -- over 500,000 people left the city between 1970 and 1990. The city has now been voted 'America's most liveable city.' The man credited with that turnaround is Tom Murphy, who is in Australia to attend an international planning symposium at Sydney University.
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Art in public spaces
How do you respond to artworks that you encounter beyond the white cube? Art in the public space?
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The Panel: Living in the City
A whopping 64 percent of Australians live in our state capitals alone. For this week’s panel Janne Ryan takes us in-the-field to a kitchen bench in the city of Brisbane where a group of thoughtful people gathered together to discuss the problems and challenges of urbanisation.
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Design Files: London's Routemaster bus
A trip to London was once never complete without catching a red double-decker. In the latest instalment of his series Design Files, our writer-in-residence Colin Bisset rides the famous Routemaster bus.
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The Conversation: Harry Sprintz on designing a home for...
Architect Harry Sprintz has spent four decades arguing that we should think about the possibility of disability or frailty in old age when designing a house. The trouble is, largely we don’t. Instead we wait for it to happen then either attempt to modify our homes or find ourselves forced to abandon them for aged-care facilities.
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Olympic posters on show in Melbourne
Cities and countries have always used the Olympic games as an opportunity to market themselves, often using well-known artists to design Olympic posters. An exhibition featuring more than 100 Olympic posters has gone on display in Melbourne, as we near the opening of the 2012 London Olympics.
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India: Future Traditions
The power of tradition in a modern India.
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Brisbane's sneaker exhibition
The humble sneaker has travelled a long way since its birth as a no-frills, utilitarian sports shoe. In recent decades it has been elevated to the world of high technology, cutting edge innovation and high-end fashion. Brisbane's Artisan Gallery is celebrating The Sneaker—with 150 pairs of shoes, including priceless collectors pieces.
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Colder weather creates perfect conditions for the...
Beards might go in and out if fashion, but in Ned Kelly country, around Beechworth in central Victoria, it seems they've never been so popular. A competition called Ned's Needles is now open to find the best and most creative knitted beards.
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Yarn bombing offers spinoffs for Conargo Public School
Getting a young child interested in knitting is quite an ask, because knitting requires patience, tenacity and skill, but it does have spin-offs.
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Bringing GPS indoors
Over 100 companies are working toward the new holy grail of navigation—building an indoor positioning system. If it can be developed, an IPS will do for the indoor world what the GPS has done externally.
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A Friend To Us All - Art From the Torres Strait to John...
Two short features celebrate the way art has befriended very different cultures.The diversity and history of the Torres Strait are glimpsed through a series of exhibitions of art, artefacts and fashion in Brisbane over the last twelve months. We go on to the University of Queensland for our second feature, to join a group of students and their teacher as they reflect on John Keats’ poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn”.Torres Strait Island art, ancient Greek art and the Romantic poetry of John Keats...
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Faith, fashion, fusion: Muslim women's style in Australia
It’s not often that fashion and faith meet on the same page … but that’s exactly what’s happening in an exhibition currently running in Sydney.
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Timber building will be tallest in the world
This morning construction will start on a revolutionary new building in the heart of Melbourne. The new apartment block will only be ten storeys high but it will be made out of timber—the only one of its kind in Australia. According to the building company, Lend Lease, it will also be the tallest timber building in the world.
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A fashion staple: the male suit
The suit is a sign of male aspiration and success. And while fashion for women can come and go, the suit is a real staple of menswear. So why has the suit endured?
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Mummy Secrets of the Tomb
Why the enduring fascination with all things Ancient Egypt?
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Saturday 12 May 2012
Imagine the urban grid minus half its' buildings. What's left? The Aboriginal notion of country. The architect Kevin O'Brien tells us why the Finding Country exhibition he's taking to the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale is more than a design concept. And the choreographer Gary Lang talks about the new work he's developing, Mokoi. The new production will explore some tough themes: suicide and self-harm as they relate to Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory.
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Penang's heritage conservation
With conservation efforts underway in Yangon, Burma, to preserve the city’s rich architectural legacy, we take a look at another Asian region that has managed to pull it off.
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Mummy Secrets of the Tomb
Queensland Museum opens its doors to a new blockbuster exhibition, Mummy: Secrets of The Tomb.
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Drawing Room: Shelley Penn and Brendan Gleeson
Where have you settled? What place have you made home?
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The office
Journalist and author Gideon Haigh has written a comprehensive account of the evolution of the office: everything from the changing physical characteristics of the place where so much time is spent, to the politics and gossip that go on there.
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The Conversation: Deyan Sudjic
Deyan Sudjic is one of the world's leading design commentators. He talks about his life in design and reflects on the changing role of Milan Design Week
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Your Say
An audio version of your comments and emails.
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In The Field - in a heritage garden
Cultural historian James Broadbent talks about his love of drowsy gardens - and his dislike of the sit-on lawnmower.
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Design Files - with Colin Bisset
This week writer-in-residence Colin Bisset looks at the Anglepoise lamp
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The Panel: Designing with Wool
Wool—that great Australian product—gets a modern interpretation at Wool Modern a global travelling exhibition, featuring international and Australian contemporary fashion and interior designers.
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The Conversation - Wiki House
The wikipedia revolution is now changing the way we design and the cost of building. Now you can download plans available to everyone - you don’t need to be an architect or a builder to make it happen.
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Your Say
An edited audio version of your letters and comments.
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In The Field - Melbourne Brain Centre
In The Field visits the new Melbourne Brain Centre and discovers that light - a light-filled environment - is a key design element encouraging sharing and collaboration in science research.
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The Panel - our noisy world
Today's panel examines the way noise is shaping the design of our houses, cities and towns. Increasingly there is no place in the world untouched by 'noise'. How is this changing the way our designed world looks and performs.
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The Conversation - architect Lawrence Nield
Lawrence Nield is the 2012 Australian Institute of Architects Gold Medallist. Lawrence talks to By Design about his life in architecture.
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Your Say
Some of your comments and emails. An audio version.
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In The Field - Federation Bells
Melbourne's Federation Bells have been undergoing a design adjustment. We find out why.
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Design Files with Colin Bisset
Writer-in-residence Colin Bisset looks at the objects of our time. Today the Sony Walkman.
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The Panel - luxury camping
Luxury camping is now available throughout the world. You can be in the wilderness but not without a warm comfortable bed with sheets, and beautiful food and wine.
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The Conversation - with Daniel Bell
By Design continues its ongoing discussion about the city with philosopher Daniel Bell who revives the classical idea that a city expresses its own ethos or values.
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Your Say
Some of your emails and comments - a very short audio version.
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In The Field
Visits RMIT's new Learning Centre - designed with Generation Z in mind.
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The Panel: Urban Farming
Urban farming is a growing world-wide. Many of us now grow our own vegetables and make sustainable and aesthetically interesting gardens in unlikely places—like the side of the road, a small balcony in the inner city, or the side of a corporate office block.
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The Conversation - with economist Ian Harper
The Grattan Institute this week launched it Social Cities report. Loneliness is one of the issues it says comes from bad planning. Ian Harper, in responding to this report, which he co-launched, analyses the costs of bad - and good - design.
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Your Say
Your comments and emails - an audio version
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In The Field
Denton Corker Marshall is one of Australia leading and most experienced architecture firm, with its headquarters in Melbourne. DCM have worked in China since the early 1980s and while there is a strong market for Australian architects in China, John Denton suggests this may not last. He explains why.
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Design Files - the Mini
Writer-in-residence Colin Bisset looks at the design and development of the very successful Mini
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The Panel
Dumas House in Perth is a focus of The Panel, By Design, around a larger discussion about modernist architecture in Australia.
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The Conversation: Charles Dickens at Home
Charles Dickens loved interior design. He was one of the first people in England to have a shower in his house rather than a bath, and he was passionate about wallpaper.
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Your Say
Here is an audio link to some listeners' letters [edited]
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In The Field
In The Field goes to Sydney's Darling Place to visit a new city playground and landscaping project
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The Panel: Provocative Architecture
Good design and architecture starts with great ideas. How do these ideas then move to becoming part of our urban environment? What use is provocative architecture, and where can it be found?
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The Conversation
You might think the iPhone is all about the way it looks and feels - but new research adds another dimension: the iPhone is 'listening' to you.
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In The Field
By Design visits US architect Frank Lloyd Wright's school and winter home in Arizona.
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Design Files
By Design's writer-in-residence Colin Bisset looks at the history of the bean bag.
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The Panel
The style of buildings in capital cities across the world can seem pretty generic. Historically, though, every culture has had its own identifiable architectural style. How does architecture create a national identity? We look at the work of Inigo Jones, often described at Britain's first architect.
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The Conversation: Grace Kelly's clothes
Grace Kelly's iconic wardrobe—from Hollywood to Monte Carlo—is in Australia at , Victoria.
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In the Field
By Design goes behind the scenes at the .
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The Panel: sustainable, real
By Design looks at a number of approaches to sustainable architecture and design. Three architects put forward their ideas for living in the outback, in the city, and with some radical thinking.
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The Conversation - Victorian Modern
In 1947 a 28-year-old architect set himself the task of writing one of Australia's first architectural histories of Australia. Robin Boyd went on to become a household name.
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Design Files with Colin Bisset
Writer-in-residence Colin Bisset.
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Digital data re-shaping Indian slums
Work is being carried out in the slums around India's Taj Mahal that is changing the lives and culture of a . Using global positioning models the relationship between where this burgeoning population live and work is changing.
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The Conversation
Art critic and author Hal Foster looks at the role of architecture in the contemporary art world. What role does art have in shaping the current architectural shapes and forms.
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In The Field: the design world of Heather Sutherland
Heather Sutherland was an important architect working between the wars in Canberra. Her work can be seen primarily in domestic houses in Canberra and played an important role in shaping Canberra's contemporary aesthetic.
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Design Files with Colin Bisset
Colin Bisset, By Design's writer-in-residence, looks at the designed world. This week he considers Art Deco.
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The Panel: designing for the spirit
By Design looks at the many ways we are designing for the spirit—from traditional places of worship to sports stadiums to smaller personal shrines to our daily lives. Guests include Alain de Botton, author, .
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The Conversation: with Chris Bosse
The Conversation looks at the ideas of German architect Chris Bosse, who works globally on projects that are sustainable and innovative.
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In the Field: on-site at Sydney's MCA
In the Field goes behind the scenes at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art with architect Sam Marshall, the architect leading the re-development of the MCA, in partnership with the NSW Government architect. Today a special sneak preview for By Design of the new building, which opens to the public 29 March 2012.
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Design Files with Colin Bisset
This week Colin Bisset considers the influence of the Bauhaus
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The Panel
This week The Panel looks at the predictions of Chris Sanderson, in particular those around food and hospitality. Panellists in this discussion also include Michael Mackenzie, host of , and Elizabeth Farrelly, author and columnist. We consider how we are designing our spaces for food and eating.
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Conversation with Reinhold Martin
In The Conversation we explore the Occupy Wall Street movement late last year, about some of the challenges of creating a more equitable society and how architecture can help.
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Hobart as wilderness
Wilderness is a hotly debated topic. Hobart-based architect Scott Balmforth puts forth the idea that the city of Hobart in Tasmania, Australia, is in fact part of the wilderness. Find out why, next on By Design
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Design Files
This week writer-in-residence Colin Bisset looks at the history of the Bentwood Chair.
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The Panel - Design influence from China
This week The Panel looks at how China is changing the way we design our houses and the way we live. Once our design aesthetic was drawn primarily from Europe. Today China is playing a powerful role. How is it changing us—and where is its design influence most felt?
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The Conversation: Camouflage
We learn about the Australian artists, architects, designers and scientists behind some of the most ingenious camouflage for Australia’s civilian and military defence in WWII
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In The Field with James Grose
James Grose is National Director BVN Architects, whose head office in Sydney has a new interior fit-out designed to engender collaboration and trust.
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Design Files
Writer Colin Bisset takes on the topic of wallpaper - and looks at why and when it came into existence
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The Panel
Each week By Design will look at the ideas of interest and making news in the design and architecture world. This week we look at the issue of trust and how this is affecting the way we do business. We look at how the world of fashion and retail is changing, the role technology is playing in that change, and at the larger social changes around collaboration and trust.
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The Conversation
Peter Mould has spent many years as the NSW Government Architect. At the end of January he finishes up, and on By Design he talks about the job of a government architect. He speaks from the heart.
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Sydney Botanic Gardens renovation
By Design visits the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney, the oldest botanic garden in Australia. The garden is undergoing its first major design shift: to herald a way forward for the 21st century
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Design Files
Design Files is a snapshot of our time through the objects in our world.
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The Panel
Each week By Design introduces you to a range of ideas from people working in design disciplines to people who have a great interest in the way our lives are 'designed', from the way we think about ourselves, to the way we design our houses and shape our cities. This segment will be an open-ended conversation from week-to-week, canvassing ideas from the panellists.
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Conversation with author and former architect Barry...
Barry Maitland is a prizewinning novelist. His crime novels have a popular following and he works full-time as a writer. But Barry started out as an architect, and is a former head of the architecture school at Australia's Newcastle University. He reflects on how this training and way of thinking help shape his life as a writer.
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Conceptual Gardens
Tim Richardson has carved an international reputation, not through designing gardens or shaping landscapes, but by writing about them. He's a landscape critic and UK-based author of several books concentrating not on conventional gardens, but on contemporary landscapes that often grow out of complex ideas. Whether you call them avant gardens or conceptual gardens, they are a thinking person's horticulture; places that sometimes challenge our idea of what a garden is. And they are indicators...
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How food shapes cities
UK architect Carolyn Steel talks about the concept of 'sitopia', or food place, harnessing the power of food to shape cities and the importance of urban agriculture.
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Architecture and the senses
Although architecture is thought to address only one sense, that of sight, Juhani Pallasmaa thinks it should be all about touch, smell, hearing and even taste as well.
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In the Mind of the Designer: An agIdeas forum
Join Alan Saunders as he delves in to the mind of the designer.
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The Shell Seat at Strawberry Hill
In 1749, Horace Walpole, an English socialite, antiquarian, novelist and letter writer, purchased Strawberry Hill near London and eventually turned it into the world's first Gothic revival building. He thus paved the way for enormous changes in the urban and rural landscape of England, Australia and many other places.
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Signs
Signs help us find places, avoid accidents, locate the right shop or try to convince us to buy this or that. They can amuse or annoy us. They can be downright ugly or, on rarer occasions as with some neon signs, exciting and uplifting. Signs are everywhere on the urban streetscape, part of our lives and the history of whatever city we inhabit. In the age of the internet we are still surrounded by painted words, by physical typography. For better or worse, signs are part of our culture and...
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Coffee machines
A couple of hundred years ago making a cup of coffee was pretty straightforward. You added coffee to hot water, boiled it and poured it in a cup. But over the last century there's been a plethora of devices as designers tried their hand at making the perfect cup of coffee.
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Put the dunny back outside!
Stuart Vokes is one half of the up-and-coming Brisbane architectural firm Owen and Vokes. In the face of open-plan houses and an ever increasing desire for bigger houses, Stuart makes a case for the miniature and for keeping the walls in our houses—and putting the bathrooms and toilets outside. Why?
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Who invented the corridor and why?
The corridor has an interesting architectural history—very different from a pathway and a hallway. So when did a corridor come into existence and why? It has something to do with the Spanish.
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By Design on a tram
Join Alan Saunders and the By Design team for a highly unusual forum celebrating the architecture and urban design of one of our greatest cities. Unusual because the venue for our forum is that quintessential Melbourne mode of transport, a tram: The City Circle tram to be exact. The City Circle tram passes some of the city's major tourist attractions and some of its finest architecture and urban design. Today we'll talk about some of them and expand on the issues they raise for the broader...
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The handkerchief
Do you carry a handkerchief? Perhaps your suit never feels quite right without that square peering out of your breast pocket? For a mere piece of fabric, the handkerchief has a multitude of uses and, it seems, many social meanings. And while the widespread use of disposable tissues today may make the hanky seem like a quaint social relic, in these eco-conscious times, the humble hanky may stage a comeback, as Masako Fukui discovered for By Design.
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Designing the Apollo space suit
When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped on to the lunar surface in July 1969, they wore spacesuits made by Playtex: 21 layers of fabric, each with a distinct yet interrelated function, custom-sewn for them by seamstresses whose usual work was fashioning bras and girdles. Playtex's spacesuit won out against hard armour-like spacesuits designed by military contractors and favoured by NASA's engineers. Today we explore the story of that spacesuit.
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Hat design
Richard Nylon designs extraordinary hats: feathered creations that seem to float in the air, blurring the line between fashion and art. Not only do they appear on some of the most fashionable heads each year at the Spring Racing Carnival in Melbourne but you'll find his one-off creations in the permanent collections of cultural institutions such as the National Gallery of Victoria.
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Fashion during World War II
During the tumultuous years of World War II, what occupied the minds of millions were the necessities of life: food, freedom and survival. Faced with the introduction of rationing and clothing shortages, fashion you'd think wouldn't have been high on the agenda. Yet as individuals struggled to maintain personal dignity, the story of how civilians dressed themselves in the face of adversity, and the impact of war on clothing design, has rarely been told with as much authority and fascinating...
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Conversation with Janne Faulkner
Meet designer Janne Faulkner - 2011 Gold medallist, recent Interior Design Excellence Awards in Melbourne. She has had a powerful influence over an amazing array of everyday object, things like the colour of your telephone, Colorbond steel roofing, design on toilet paper, and the early trend in the 1960s for laminex benches.
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Jewellery reveals our cultural life
Often, we tend to work in this program on a large scale: the building or even the entire city.In this interview we turn to the comparatively small and looking at how it reflects and commemorates the large.The Melbourne jeweller Blanch Tilden has been working for more than a dozen years now, mostly in metal and glass.And her rather avant-garde work is inspired by architecture—particularly the monumental metal and glass buildings of the nineteenth century—and by machinery.Here we meet Blanche...
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Listeners' Letters
Here is an edited audio of your comments and emails. Enjoy!
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Ronchamp - a reflection
The world's greatest architecture delights not only the eye but many of our senses. There are some buildings, which although you might be lucky enough to enter their doors only once, the experience stays with you for a lifetime and their spaces continue to haunt our memory. For Colin Bisset a recent visit to the modernist masterpiece of Ronchamp cathedral in rural France sparked reflection on the essential spirit of place.
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Small House
By Design visits a small house in the inner city Sydney suburb of Surry Hills. This house, designed by Domenic Alvaro, recently won the World House of the Year award at the 2011 World Architecture Festival in Barcelona, and a small house prize from the Australian Institute of Architects. Each level or floor of the house is a room in itself - next on By Design.
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Trends in advanced textiles
From medical implants to spacesuits, advanced textiles have the potential to transform human habitats and transportation, protect the environment and support personal health and wellbeing.
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Listeners' Letters
Here is an edited selection of your comments and emails. Enjoy!
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From Chicago to Canberra: the origins of architectural...
The modernist style of the American architects Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin is known to many Australians because of their work in Canberra
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Inside Mawson's Hut
It's one hundred years ago this month since explorer Douglas Mawson departed Australia on his Antarctic expedition. The site now commonly known as Mawson's Huts relates to that historic expedition (1911-14). The Mawson's Huts site is unique amongst those associated with early exploration on the Antarctic continent, because the majority of the portable artefacts outside the huts are still in essentially the same locations they were when Mawson left the site in 1914.
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Apology for duplicate podcasts
We have just upgraded to a new website, and the move has caused some podcast subscribers to download duplicate mp3s. We apologise for this issue and hope you continue to listen to Radio National podcasts in the future.
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1546 A Conversation with Bruce Mau
In our conversation corner this week we meet the Canadian Designer Bruce Mau. Informed by decades of design innovation and collaboration with some of the worlds leading artists, institutions and businesses, Bruce Mau has made the commitment to connect his life and work to education and human development. His deeply philosophical approach to design led him to co-found Massive Change Network, an initiative committed to developing purposeful projects in education, health leadership and...
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1533 Trends: Design thinking in business
In our Trends segment today were learning increasingly governments and business are learning how good design, and use of what has come to be known as design thinking, can pay big dividends. Our teacher is Sir George Cox, past Chairman of the UKs Design Council and author of the Cox Review, on creativity in business. Sir George is here as a guest of the Australian Design Alliance to speak to politicians and business leaders how design can is critical to the economic growth of nations.
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1531 Listeners' Letters
Here is an audio clip of this week's Listeners' Letters. Enjoy!
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1518 Adelaide Parklands
In her new book, The Adelaide Park Lands, Patricia Sumerling recounts tales from the time of earliest European settlement until present days. Where crowds once thronged for a public execution, or to see Blondin, the tightrope walker of Niagara Falls fame, now thousands gather for car races and cultural festivals. Adelaideans play sport in the Park Lands, get married, enjoy picnics, and meet for secret assignations.
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1505 NSW Planning Laws undergoing major changes: Tim...
Tim Moore is the Co-Chair of Urban Planning NSW, currently working on major changes to the NSW Planning Laws. This is the first radical change since the laws were enacted. Tim Moore talks about the ideas being put forward from communities across NSW, and what kind of urban future he is preparing for.
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1546 Conversation: Philip Cox on future of Australian...
Philip Cox talks to By Design about the shifting dreams we have when it comes to architecture, and about his vision for Australian cities. A fascinating reflection by one of Australia's most experienced architects.
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1533 Rachel Neeson, AIA 2011 Robin Boyd winner, shows By...
Architect Rachel Neeson takes By Design's Janne Ryan on a tour of the four-level family house in Castlecrag on Sydney Harbour that won her firm the Australian Institute of Architect's 2011 Robin Boyd Award. This is one of Australia's most important awards for a house. This house is a substantial re-development of an old family house on the site. Its palette is re-cycled bricks, steel and timber, and concrete. The house sits in the rocky sandstone, in the Australian bush overlooking Sydney...
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1529 Listeners' Letters
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1518 Trends: A space to think
Where do you get your best ideas? When youre swimming, when youre walking, when youre on the loo? Can architects design spaces that encourage creative thought, or are those spaces more likely to be found in the natural landscape? Where we do our best thinking is one of the questions dealt with in a new book about the way the digital age is changing our minds.
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1505 The colonial veranda
The veranda seems a very Australian architectural space, but how Australian is it really? This week we talk verandas with Barbara Brooks, a Sydney writer and independent scholar. Her work Verandahs is a fictional memoir about an interesting intermediate space. Brooks came to Australia from India and, among much else, she reveals that one of her first crosses into fiction received the UTS Chancellor's Award for an outstanding thesis. She tells us that the first recorded use of the word...
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1545 Conversation: Dawn Casey, Sydney's Powerhouse Musuem
Spirit jain-in, treasure of Korean metal craft has just opened at Sydney's Powerhouse Museum. This exhibition of 163 exquisite objects showcases craft skills some thousands of years old. Meanwhile the Powerhouse itself is evolving, with a new thinking of the building itself, and some contemporary architectural projects are underway. The Powerhouse is changing with the times, symbolised through the design.
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1533 Early Soviet art and architecture
In the courtyard of the Royal Academy of Arts in London you can now see a very striking object: a veering red spiral, intersected by a girder jutting through it like a rocket launcher. Its a copy of the original model of the Monument to the Third International, designed by Vladimir Tatlin in 1920 and it heralds the Royal Academy's new show, `Building the Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture 1915-35. Many have associated Soviet architecture with the wedding-cake monumentality of the Stalin...
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1529 Listeners' Letters
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1518 Trends: is there an Australian family car anymore?
The news this week that Holdens Commodore car may be designed overseas, or at least part of the elements of the car designed overseas, is not a new story in the Australian car industry. What is does, though, is confirm the trend that the idea of what constitutes the Australian car is really undergoing a very major shift from the days when a car was part of the family, parked right beside the house, and treasured.
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1506 Melbourne takes architecture to China
Denton Corker Marshall are one of Australia's most successful architectural firms working across the world. For nearly 30 years they have been working in China. DCM was part of a recent trade trip to China with the Lord Mayor of Melbourne, Robert Doyle. Find out why architecture is part of such a trip, and what it yields for Melbourne and Australia.
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1546 Woolsheds
Woolsheds represent one of the most iconic forms of Australian vernacular architecture. In our conversation corner today we meet photographer Andrew Chapman, a man who has roamed Australia in search of woolsheds. And for him every one of these buildings has a distinct personality and a story. His new book, simply called Woolsheds, celebrates their place in the landscape and the subtle beauty of old beams and rusting galvanized iron.
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1534 Architectural Competitions
If you want a big new public building, how do you find someone to build it? One way is to hold a competition: invite architects from all over the country, perhaps from all over the world, to submit designs and choose the best one, or at least the one you like most. This sort of thing has been going on for a long while now: the Acropolis in Athens was a result of an architectural competition, as were several cathedrals in the Middle Ages. In 1419 a competition was held to design the dome of...
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1530 Listeners' Letters
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1519 Women in architecture
Only about a quarter of the registered architects in Australia are women. The number of women practising architecture is much smaller than the number who qualify. Then the numbers drop even further when women rise—or don't rise—to senior roles. What is going on and why?
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1505 Australian architecture: an encyclopedic look
Behind the images of Australian homesteads, beach houses and the sails of the Sydney Opera House lies a rich and enthralling history of how Australians have responded to the natural landscape and urban environments to shape a nation. Now that nation has its first Encyclopedia of Australian Architecture, a massive research project documenting and analysing our built environment from Indigenous beginnings to colonial, modern and contemporary eras. But how did the editors decide what was worthy...
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1546 Conversation with Julia Peyton-Jones, Serpentine...
London's Serpentine Gallery puts experimental architecture on display each year through its Serpentine Pavilion project, a temporary structure that showcases the ideas of some of our most challenging and interesting contemporary architects, including Peter Zumthor, Rem Koolhaus, Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel, Frank Gehry and more. Julia Peyton-Jones talks about this project, how it came about, and what influence it is having.
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1542 Listeners' Letters
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1531 Iconic Aussie houses from the 70s 80s and 90s.
A collaboration between an architect and a client to create a perfectly tailored home that speaks of the owner is a luxury not many Australians have experienced. The stories of those collaborations, of how these houses came into being, is often as interesting, if not more so, than the finished architectural product. A new book looks at 14 remarkable architect-designed houses from the 70s, 80s and 90s, each with its own story about how the dwelling grew out of the personalities of the owners...
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1518 Jan Gehl on planning for a burgeoning population
As the world population clock ticks over to 7 billion, we all face concerns about how we will eat and live together. Urban consultant Jan Gehl is particularly interested in how we plan for the rapid populations growth as we all seem to be moving to cities. This trend is gathering pace, and it wont be long before the vast majority of people live in complex urban spaces, cities. This is the case now in Australia, with 80 per cent of us living in cities and larger urban clusters.
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1505 Building the New Deal
First there was the Depression, then there was Franklin Roosevelts answer to it: the New Deal. Many of those who worked for the New Deal believed that they were building a civilization. They left thousands of schools, colleges, bridges, dams, murals, parks and aqueducts. On a smaller scale, similar things happened in this country: in Melbourne, the Shrine of Remembrance was built largely by unemployed workers during the Depression. Happily, the Shrine of Remembrance is still in good nick,...
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1545 Conversation: Density happening in the suburbs
The discussion about density in cities is moving to the suburbs. In Melbourne research done at Monash University shows suburbs becoming smarter, denser and showing the way forward. A new perspective on urban density.
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1542 Listeners' Letters
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1530 Streetworks: Reimagining underutilised urban spaces
In Trends this week we look at how cities around the world are moving toward installing little interventions that reclaim underutilised spaces, transforming them into places that invite public participation in urban life. Now this approach has come to Sydney. Street Works is a competition to create temporary installations that change underutilised public spaces into vibrant places. The Australian Institute of Landscape Architects invited designers to reimagine such spaces in Sydney,...
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1518 $1,000 House project
And small houses is the topic of the day, it seems, because our next guest Tony Ciochetti has initiated a very challenging project to build houses for $1,000. In Australia $1,000 would hardly be enough to get you kitchen cupboards, let alone a house. The $1,000 house is a joint research initiative between MITs Department of Architecture and Centre for Real Estate. It is into its third year, with some projects underway.
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1505 Living small
Australian houses are the largest in the world -- the average new dwelling is 253 square metres, with most new houses well over 400 square metres. We did a quick in-house survey and the By Design team all live in apartments measuring less than 100 metres. I suppose that makes us champions of living small -- or does it? Perhaps we could do with even less space. Small homes is our first topic today.
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1547 Conversation: Alex Stitt
In our conversation corner today we meet the designer who brought to life some of Australias most famous public health campaigns, including Slip Slop Slap and Life Be In It. Graphic designer Alex Stitt started his career before he left art school in 1956. As well as the iconic animated community service campaigns and films his work has included print ads, postage stamp designs, book packaging, posters, games, calendars and more.
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1542 How do you live with your books? Add your comment
In the age of the iPad, the sale of touch-screen tablet personal computers is growing enormously as we make the switch from paper to screen. So what place has the physical book in your life and home? If the days of the book are numbered as some suggest will you continue to keep your old books? Wed love to hear from you about how you store your books, what their presence lends to your home and why you continue to keep them. Tell us how you live with your books by adding a comment below.
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1530 Remembering Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs, the Apple Inc. chairman and co-founder who pioneered the personal-computer industry, changed the way people think about technology. In the week following his death we remember Jobs by bringing you an edited recording of his inspiring 2005 Stanford University Commencement Speech. Thanks to Stanford University for permission.
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1518 Paul Bangay
Today, we meet Paul Bangay, one of Australias most acclaimed landscape designers. Hes a busy man: his life is divided between Australian and overseas commissions and his own garden in Daylesford in Victoria. He has a new book out, Paul Bangay's Guide to Plants. He talks about his love of geometric perfection, his use of ornaments, the inspiration of Andre Le Notre, who designed the garden of the Chateau de Vaux-le-Vicomte in 1657 and went on to work on the gardens at the Palace of...
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1505 Strawberry Fields forever
If you have been to New Yorks Central Park over the past 25 years, chances are you would have visited Strawberry Fields, a living memorial to John Lennons life and work. Strawberry Fields was originally conceived by Yoko Ono as a legacy to her late husband, as a garden of peace. And the design of this five-acre teardrop-shaped garden was the result of a collaboration between Yoko Ono, the Central Park Conservancy, landscape architect Bruce Kelly and city officials and contributed greatly to...
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1545 Conversation: Adolescent cities and why the Gold...
Professor Paul Burton is working on an intriguing project - looking at the urbanisation of the Gold Coast in the way one would look at the characteristics of adolescence. So things like rapid growth, developing sexuality, growing analytical capacity and ego-centrism. And just as a city grows, it can die. Paul Burton is fascinating and provocative. Listen here.
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1542 Listeners' Letters
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1531 Trends: food security in regional Australia
In Trends today we look at the topic of food security, in particular at projects happening on the Gold Coast and northern NSW -- areas recently affected by serious flooding -- and at the learning from this experience. What happens when the supermarket empties out? Could you survive?
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1518 Why media is essential for urban growth. Bart...
Bart Lootsma is a historian, critic and curator of architecture, design and the fine arts. We have invited him to talk about urbanism and to get an insight into his ideas about the modern city. What is the effect of globalisation, where does the individual fit - and, why is media an essential ingredient for urban growth?
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1505 Making NYC denser and greener
Jeffrey Shumaker has a leading role in reducing the carbon footprint of New York City. The plans there are to increase the population of New York by one million, but reduce the overall carbon footprint by 30 per cent. Where will these extra one million people live, and how can a city as dense as NYC become denser, yet more sustainable?
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1546 Conversation: 3D printing makes everything from...
Today we welcome to By Design Murray Moss. Murray is an artist and the founder of Moss, on Greene St, New York City, the store many of you in the design world know, or know of. Moss is a design destination, a design store of ideas. Murray is across in London, where he has curated an exhibition on 3D printing: Industrial Revolution 2.0, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, part of 2011 London Design Festival. Virtually anything you can imagine you can create by using 3D printing -- anything...
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1532 The appeal of the handmade
Open your kitchen cupboard or the door of your wardrobe. Chances are that the plates and glasses in the cupboard are all mass produced as is the clothing in your wardrobe; that what you own is owned by others. Is there anything in your kitchen cupboard or bedroom wardrobe you could honestly describe as unique, a one-of-a-kind design? But there once was a time when people knew who made their plates and sewed their clothes and household items were set apart from those of your neighbours by the...
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1529 Listeners' Letters
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1517 Garden Cities
English Garden Cities is a new book about a phenomenon that extends far beyond the shores of England. Sunshine, which is now a suburb of Melbourne, was designed in the early years of the last century as a community developed according to the ideals of the Garden City movement. Canberra is something of a garden city and its architect Walter Burley Griffin produced a number of garden suburb estates, most notably at Eaglemont with the Glenard and Mount Eagle Estates and the Ranelagh and...
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1505 What we want in a home
The housing priorities of Australians are changing, with more people valuing aspects of where they live than a big garden or a large block. A study from the Grattan Institute asked more than 700 city residents to state what was important to them when they thought of moving house. Some of the responses run counter to common assumptions. For instance, having a garden or being close to work were not in the top musts-haves for most people. A whole series of other characteristics of the house and...
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1546 Birdscaping your garden
Imagine a garden full of rainbow lorikeets, sulphur-crested cockatoos, rosellas, kookaburras and currawongs. What can you do to design your garden as a more bird and butterfly friendly habitat? How can you attract a variety of birds to visit your garden by creating an ecologically-friendly and sustainable native habitat, while helping to preserve our natural heritage and biodiversity?
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1542 Listeners' Letters
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1530 Animal architecture
Throughout the centuries there have been castles and monuments, great and small, for animals as diverse as goats and guinea pigs, deer and dogs, cows and bees, pigs and horses, as well as bears and salmon. Imagine a red sandstone elephant with a castle on its back was designed for bees built in the 1800s or a Grecian temple with tapering Egyptioan windows to house pigs. Beyond being just curiosities these buildings once occupied the imagination of some of England's finest architects and are...
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1518 Trends: Future Car
By Designs Janne Ryan is out driving through Sydney with Simon Brook, who designs cars for Ford. The car is transforming into an extension of who we are, and the cars of 2015, for example, are being designed right now.
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1505 Landscape criticism - why we need more in Australia
Tim Richardson has carved an international reputation, not through designing gardens or shaping landscapes, but by writing about them. Hes a landscape critic and UK-based author of several books concentrating not on conventional gardens, but on contemporary landscapes that often grow out of complex ideas. Whether you call them avant gardens or conceptual gardens, they are a thinking persons horticulture; places that sometimes challenge our idea of what a garden is. And they are indicators of...
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1546 Conversation: Clover Moore on cities
Sydney's Lord Mayor Clover Moore gives us an insight into the future of cities in Australia and, in particular, how Sydney is shaping up. What are the challenges and how can we meet them?
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1542 Listeners' Letters
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1530 High flying fashion
Stiletto heels, miniskirts, bobbed wigs, shiny new technology and exotic locations were part of the cosmopolitan lifestyle of the Qantas flight hostesses. As the trends changed, international designers such as Emilio Pucci and Yves Saint Laurent created a range of designs for flight crew, from khaki military style, to burnt-orange miniskirts and on to the Morrissey-designed Indigenous boomerang print.
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1518 Red Cross Blood Bank's directional design
A new Red Cross blood processing centre has been custom built in Sydney and is open for business. The Sydney centre is a new building, but the design concept of linear flow is being adapted in other Australian states, in older buildings being re-purposed. While the Red Crosss processing unit in Melbourne is currently being renovated, Queenslands renovated building in Brisbane is up and running. The $72 million Sydney building, designed by BVN Architects, is the largest blood processing...
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1505 Design that talks back
Since the introduction of the personal computer, objects have increasingly been designed with capabilities that go beyond their immediate use or appearance. Whether openly and actively or in more subtle and subliminal ways these objects talk to us and we have come to expect interaction with them. This is the theme of a new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and a new book. The exhibition showcases nearly two hundred objects and concepts that involve direct interaction,...
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1545 Conversation with Stephen Yarwood, Lord Mayor of...
Adelaide is one of Australia's small cities, but it is the perfect size for the future? Stephen Yarwood, Lord Mayor, tells By Design about his vision and plan for a 21st century Adelaide.
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1541 Listeners' Letters
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1530 Trends: how can sharia law and modern strata...
Today the complex and relatively new world -- in a legal sense -- of strata title legislation. The trend is increasingly towards apartment living, but living with and sharing a property with a number of others is fraught with ups and downs. How, for example, does sharia law fit in with strata legislation? How to balance culture and the law as buildings across the world reach for the sky.
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1520 Learning fashion
This week is Melbourne Spring Fashion Week, an event designed to showcase the considerable talent that the citys fashion scene has to offer. And while much attention will be focused on what established names put out there on the catwalk, today were concentrating on the next generation of fashion designers. As they prepare to graduate from RMIT University in Melbourne, students will be displaying their work both on the runway and in an exhibition. So what skills do students acquire after...
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1505 Remembering 9/11
This week the world will remember the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Those making the pilgrimage back to New Yorks Ground Zero will be able to find some solace in a National September 11 Memorial, which will be opened after a decade of debate, planning and construction. Architect Michael Arads design for the memorial is called 'Reflecting Absence' and consists of two massive square voids in the footprint of the Twin Towers, into which water cascades from all sides. At the bottom of...
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1545 Conversation: Building the Future with architect...
There is a lot of discussion in architectural circles about generational change -- how to make opportunity for a young generation not getting the chances they should. Gerard Reinmuth puts forward a case for change he sees as integral to the development of our cities and urban thinking, and how it should be done. He sees the architectural profession, in a general sense, as having lost their way when it comes to building cities and being at the decision-making table. He explains why.
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1540 Listeners' Letters
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1530 Trends: crime and prevention
Garner Clancey is working on ways of reducing crime through environmental design -- and of testing what works and what doesn't. As cities consider density and development, surveillance and safety are very much part of this. Once there were moats and castles to protect towns and villages; what is there today?
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- Architecture & Design, Art
- ABC (Australia)
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By Design
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