U A L International Housing Conference, October 5 – 8, 2006
Urban Architecture Laboratory, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia

Overview

This conference aims to examine recent transformations in the contexts surrounding housing in Australia and reconsider architecture’s involvement in, or contribution to the general provision of housing. Immigration, the ageing of the population and the transformation of household makeup have created enormous projected housing demand particularly in cities such as Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney.  These pressures lead to significant environmental threat to available land for housing in Australia’s fragile urban fringe. In response to this, government in Australia now promotes higher density housing at existing activity centres on redeveloped sites and restricts green-field housing development. It appears that the traditional small-scale, craft-orientated building practices that have characterised the Australian housing industry to date may not be able to meet the challenges these contemporary pressures create. New relationships between government and development for the provision of housing are occurring in response to these pressures. Do these new conditions create an opportunity for architectural design to make a broader contribution to general housing? Is architecture able to articulate a new relationship to housing and re-conceive its contribution in light of these transformations?

The re Housing conference is seeking responses to these issues in the form of actual dwelling design projects, as well as academic papers. Papers and projects will be presented alongside each other, and projects can be refereed if required by the contributor.

An exhibition of a selection of the presented projects will open the conference. This exhibition will host conference events and will be open to the public.

05/09/06

Early Bird Registration Extension

Early bird registrations have now closed. Full/day registration is still available.

Student Registration

Free student full registrations have now closed. Students can continue to register, for free for keynote presentations only, up until the commencement of the conference. Please note that numbers are limited.

Exhibition

The conference launch and exhibition opening will be on Thursday the 5th of October in the Melbourne Central – Myer Link Bridge, starting at 6.30pm. Housing design projects submitted for the conference will be exhibited alongside projects from many prominent architects including: Kerstin Thompson, Bird de la Couer, McBride Charles Ryan, Chris de Campo, Donaldson + Warn, Williams Boag and Estudio Teddy Cruz. Many of these practitioners will present their projects during the conference.

Programme

The conference programmes have been consolidated and updated in more detail.