University of South Australia

Faculty Member, Art, Architecture and Design

Other Affiliations: The University of Queensland, ATCH (Architecture | Theory | Criticism | History) Research Centre

Lecturer

Thesis Title: Images in Space & Space in/within Images

About

BIO:

Chris Brisbin teaches design studio, analogue and digital communication, and history and theory in Architecture and Interior Architecture and is currently the Communication Skills Studies Coordinator in the Architecture Program, School of Art, Architecture and Design.

Chris graduated from The University of Queensland in 1995 with a Bachelor of Design Studies. He later completed a Bachelor of Architecture (Hons I) in 2001. Chris commenced a Masters in 2002 that he subsequently upgraded to a PhD in 2003. Under the supervision of Prof. John Macarthur, Dr. Antony Moulis, and Dr. Andrew Leach, Chris’s doctorate was awarded in 2010.

Chris has taught at a number of different Architecture Schools across a broad range of curricula. Having taught freelance at The University of Queensland from 2001-2005, Chris joined the School of Design team at the Queensland University of Technology in 2006, before moving to the University of South Australia to join the School of Art, Architecture, and Design in November, 2009.

Chris’ PhD research concerns the relation between space and image in art and architecture, from the fourteenth century to today. In particular Chris’ research examines the impact of recent image-technologies in architecture through the lens of older relations between space and image in Western Art in an attempt to reveal and re-present conceptual and technical clues as to how to accommodate the embodying potentialities offered by ocular image-technologies in architecture today.

The Anatomy of the Edge: Exploring the threshold between Landscape and Architecture in the verandas of Australia:

This research is based on a design-research based (teaching nexus) project that I have been working on for several years that aims to (A) identify and chronologise a history of the ‘veranda-edge’ as a vernacular form of edge treatment unique to Australian Architecture; and to (B) establish a cultural history that outlines the importance of urbanising such veranda edge-conditions in promoting a vibrant occupation of a building’s urban and suburban edges. In so doing, verandas effectively promote social interaction between people, galvanizing communities together through the social rituals of the ‘everyday’ events of urban and suburban life, whilst also acting as a key architectural device in maintaining the safety and security of both the occupants of the veranda, and the public space the veranda addresses.

It is an interdisciplinary project that moves between the domains of Interior Design, Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Philosophy and Critical Theory. The research uses measured-sectional/elevation drawings, as a device to interrogate and reveal the anatomy of a-typical verandas in South-East Queensland and in South Australia, in combination with conventional literature-based research. The research investigates both the verandas’ pragmatic and phenomenological qualities in addressing questions such as; the climate specificity of building edge conditions in mediating climate; the sociological aspects of the veranda as privacy threshold and identity marker; and finally, the veranda as a conceptual and liminal space; as a space that is neither interior nor exterior, architecture nor landscape, but something uniquely in-between.

The veranda is generally discussed in terms of its functional ‘threshold’ characteristics; the space held in tension between the domestic interior and urban/landscape exterior. Its emphasis was on the technical and the experiential; based on the scale of people, at moments of either transition from inside or out, or inhabitation of the in-between. As a result, this project aimed to document variations of the veranda’s anatomy in its context and, in so doing, speculate upon the nature of its relevancy in architecture today.

This research is significant as it provides key strategies in addressing environmental and social sustainability challenges of how to design and build contemporary architectural projects that thermally responsive to their environments whilst promoting vital connections between people and the communities and places that they live. The challenge to transform our lives and our cities to be more sustainable—for both the sake of the environment and our own psychological well-being—requires an erosion of the traditional research silo that inhibits interaction between conceptually familiar disciplines. The capacity of this project to bridge between disciplines has already been manifest in the collaboration between artist Victoria Hamilton and Landscape Architect and academic Julian Raxworthy. Pivotally, the veranda research aims to provide a unique picture of an architectural building typology that doubles as a narrative device through which to discuss vital aspects of sustainable urbanism; how we create and connect to vibrant places and liveable cities in the era of climate change and increasing global population growth. It therefore aims to provide key strategies to aid architects in designing new homes in Australia, and providing more thermally comfortable and sociable living environments for the people whom dwell in them.

Visuality to visualistic: reconciling the developed surface/s of contemporary architecture

This research chronologises a history of the theory and techniques applied in the representation of space in both art and architecture. It draws upon various key moments in this history when the way in which we view and understand the technical representation of objects—their meaning and relationship to the viewer in space—fundamentally changed; such as the development of linear perspective in the Renaissance, the development of the camera in the nineteenth century; or the development of virtual reality today. This research attempts to draw upon and learn lessons from this complex pluralistic history in order to suggest how we might go about addressing contemporary problems in visual culture and architecture more specifically. Contemporary problems such as the compositional tactic and embedded meaning that might be engendered in the application of images onto the surfaces of buildings—when the buildings themselves loose their sense of object-ness, and become pure image. How do we reconcile such imagistic and aesthetic-based compositions with the reality of the places in which these compositions are to be inserted: real spaces with real flesh-and-blood people whom occupy and experience space haptically—as a bodily and multi-sensory experience—not purely visually? Put simply, how do we embed the old with the new when the formal surfaces of the new are conceived as image/s?

This research is significant because it bridges between art history, visual culture, and architectural history, using historical resources in order to instrumentally explore contemporary problems in Visual Culture and Architecture. The research both historicises and speculates on the changing relationship between pictures and viewers in Western Visual Culture; in terms of the dynamic interchange between static and moving images, and stationary and moving viewers. That is to say, it is both reflective and projective in attempting to provide a lens through which to suggest relevant techniques that could be applied in the conceptual and technical application of pictures on the interior and exterior surfaces of architecture today. This research is therefore aims to assist academics and architects alike in approaching the design of technically and conceptually rich façade systems for their buildings that use new image technologies in meaningful ways.

TEACHING INTERESTS:

Digital and analogue forms of design communication
Ontology: bringing into being of ideas through drawing/making/thinking
History & Theory of Architecture and Interior Architecture
Ethics and concepts of judgement and taste
Concepts of edge: liminality, threshold, in-between-ness
Design–research theory and practice
Unitisation Pedagogy


PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS:

Affiliated Academic Member: ATCH (Architecture | Theory | Criticism | History) Research Centre, The University of Queensland
Contributing Editor: Ultima Thule: Journal of Architectural Imagination
Editor | Moderator | Administrator: s-architecture blog


RESEARCH INTERESTS:

History & Theory of Architecture and Interior Architecture (concepts of Visuality—Medieval to Contemporary)
Generative pattern in contemporary Architecture
Ontology: bringing into being of ideas through drawing/making/thinking
Edge/Threshold conditions in vernacular Australian Architecture

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