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(2022)ThesisAchieving whole life cycle net-zero carbon buildings requires decision-making on reducing building carbon emissions at each stage during the entire building lifecycle in an integrated way. However, most existing research has focused on embodied and operational carbon assessment separately, without considering carbon emissions occurred across all building stages. There is a lack of integration of the key decision variables throughout the whole lifecycle building process to support decision-making in achieving whole life cycle net-zero carbon buildings. Building information modelling (BIM) provides an object-based representation of a building which facilitates exchange and interoperability of building information across multiple disciplines. Most BIM applications are focused on design and construction stages. There is a lack of entities, properties, and relationships in the current Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) schema required to support whole life net-zero carbon buildings. Digital Twin (DT) is a virtual representation of building assets, processes, and systems. It can facilitate the construction and operation of buildings by simulating real-time building conditions. Integrating information acquired by DT with BIM has considerable potential to enable whole life cycle net-zero carbon assessment. Therefore, a framework integrating BIM and DT is needed to provide ontology-based computational representation to incorporate all key decision variables throughout the entire building process to support decision-making on net-zero carbon buildings. To fill the gap, this research develops a novel framework that integrates BIM and DT to tackle challenges in supporting net-zero carbon buildings over the whole building lifecycle. Firstly, through a systematic literature review, all key decision variables affecting net-zero carbon outcomes of buildings at each key building stage, throughout the whole building lifecycle, are identified. Then, a mapping process between identified variables and the existing IFC schema is conducted to define these variables using current IFC entities, properties, and relationships. Finally, through utilising the ontology-based representation method, the novel framework is developed by proposing an extension to the current IFC schema and integrating data from the DT to encourage well-informed decision-making on whole life cycle net-zero carbon buildings. The framework has the potential to pave the way for further research on an automated system to support well-informed decision-making on whole life cycle net-zero carbon buildings.
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(2022)ThesisA key issue that prevents many Aboriginal communities in Australia from being able to engage in self-determining social and political participation is related to developing English literacy. While many adult literacy programs assume a deficit position in terms of people ‘lacking’ literacy, the Literacy for Life Foundation (LFLF) program takes a critical pedagogical approach with an emancipatory aim. While LFLF programs have been funded for non-urban Aboriginal communities, urban Aboriginal communities have not received similar attention. Using a critical Indigenous approach, this study explored the impacts on the participants involved in the LFLF’s first urban Aboriginal adult literacy pilot program in Campbelltown, NSW. It also considers the wider implications for individuals and the community when funding for this critical literacy program ceased after two iterations. The findings suggest that engagement in this urban LFLF pilot increased participants’ sense of self, confidence, connection to family and community, and contributed to a sense of empowerment that is commonly associated with critical literacy endeavours. More importantly, the urban LFLF pilot provided students with a reflexive sense of their place in the world and how their developing literacy was a result of how western education systems oppress Aboriginal peoples. However, the findings also suggest that these positive impacts were undermined by the cessation of the program, which ultimately resulted in anger, followed by apathy. This study provides further support for arguments about the invisibility of urban Aboriginal communities in policy and funding to ‘close the literacy gap’, as well as the evidence for the ongoing problems with the endemic ‘revolving door’ of policies aimed to redress structural marginalisation that Aboriginal peoples face. This points not only to the importance of creating sustainable, strength-based, community-led programs that are self-determined and not dependant on temporary funding, but also the critical need for further research on the impacts of literacy programs in an urban context.
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(2023)ThesisThis thesis interprets the significance of Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House through the framework of the public realm, as understood after the Second World War. In the 1950s, the Opera House was considered a monument for its potential to enrich civic life. This was perceived through the theories of New Monumentality and CIAM, which built upon Sigfried Giedion’s premise of the monument as a symbol – a form that had no apparent significance yet would seize directly upon the senses. Drawing on the Romantic idea of the imagination, Giedion celebrated the power of the symbol to rouse the emotions of the people, with hopes of stimulating their engagement in public life. These endeavours reflected democratic ideals of the post-war period, with a conception of the public realm as a space for both individuality and commonality. The impact of this was felt in architectural circles in 1951, when the eighth CIAM Congress titled ‘The Heart of the City’ adopted the Greek concept of the polis in its planning of new civic centres. Parallels are drawn between the ideas of this congress and those of Hannah Arendt, a contemporary of Utzon and Giedion, who saw the public realm as the space for distinctiveness to appear within the existing conditions of a shared world. By situating the Sydney Opera House within this broader historical narrative, one can comprehend its power as a monument to capture the concerns of its time, while meeting needs that have persisted from antiquity until this present moment.
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(2023)ThesisThis thesis explores and conceptualises the urban phenomenon of meanwhile use as a distinctive state of and model for permanent temporariness in the contemporary global city. Meanwhile use is a relatively new term used to describe the temporary occupation of unused buildings or sites awaiting redevelopment for non-residential, residential, or live-work purposes. Drawing particularly from in-depth interviews with diverse stakeholders working in Newcastle, Australia and London, UK, this thesis both defines the phenomenon and explores its important drivers, benefits, and challenges. It identifies three key forms of meanwhile use: as a form of property tenure, community infrastructure and spatial construct. It also situates stakeholder insights within broader historical, urban, and cultural discourses. While different forms of meanwhile use are specific to the local conditions in which they emerge, they are also indicative of wider global shifts in property tenure and workplace insecurity. Taking its key drivers and forms into consideration, the thesis develops a conceptualisation of meanwhile use as an urban paradox involving a perpetual state of temporality. It will be argued that meanwhile use is a distinctive form of twenty-first century urbanism that redefines how people create, occupy, and possess spaces they do not legally own.
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(2023)ThesisThis practice-led research project explores how sparkle and shine function in global capitalist consumer environments and how they can be mobilised in a contemporary art practice that uses handmade and labour-intensive processes. The alluring aesthetic qualities of sparkle and shine are frequently used in consumer environments to create promises of fulfilment that distract from the reality of mundane daily life and the inner workings of global capitalism. From an artistic perspective, the excessive employment of sparkle and shine in consumer environments provides abundant opportunity for striking aesthetic possibilities to be explored. However, despite their ubiquity in consumer contexts, sparkle and shine have been under-explored in aesthetic philosophy and scarcely explored materially in visual art practices over the past century. Artists such as Rebecca Baumann and Mickalene Thomas offer examples of how contemporary artists can incorporate sparkly materials in their work to engage with the human relationship with shiny consumer items and artifice. In order to communicate the power of sparkle and shine in global capitalism, this project aims to offer new insights into specific artistic strategies that exploit lightreflective materials from the consumer world and embrace processes that signal to the human handmade object to re-signify and aestheticise consumer environments.