Far Out

In Australia, housing for our First Nations people is generally substandard, being of poor quality, badly planned, and inconsiderate of the context of people, their culture, and the landscape and environment in which it is situated. Traditional Western cookie-cutter models of suburban-style housing are often imposed for various reasons: site access, skill availability of trades, materials, or lack of any appropriate design consideration of who the house is designed for. Often, we witness a housing typology brought from the south of Australia and remade in the north, as if it could be appropriated and adapted by leaving a few bits off or making it in a different material, like corrugated iron.

Further to this are the challenges of the displacement of Indigenous people into a Western idea of what a house is. Putting a generic pitched roof house with three bedrooms, a living room, and a bathroom doesn't seem to sit too well with a culture that has been here for 65,000 years before this housing typology existed. There is a need for better housing, and this design studio explores how it can be designed better, more appropriately, for the Aboriginal people of this land around the Kalumburu area.

The studio has explored remote, flexible housing models on a site at Munnaru campground, near Kalumbaru in the North West Kimberley. It focuses on the adaptability of space and program within an indigenous context, exploring cultural, social, physical/spatial and environmental parameters and constraints. Studio projects investigated the development of flexible housing models for indigenous housing for the Wunambaal Gaambera People of the North West Kimberley. Students engaged with ideas of kinship, health, cultural practices and environmental considerations in their approach to designing houses for the studio. Further to this,  they worked across multiple scales, translating relevant influences in the design of a single house to a group of houses and a master plan of the area.

Students have developed a deeper understanding of housing and dwelling design, with deep consideration of all aspects of the sensitive cultural context that we are working within.

Studio Leaders: Fraser Paxton