Collective agency

The beginnings of disciplinary transformation

Review by Sam Spurr

A conference on the subject of collective agency in architecture necessarily asks two questions: What would this look like for the discipline? And how do we make it happen?

The 2019 National Architecture Conference grounded these questions in a radical reconfiguring of Australian architecture through its relationship to Indigenous knowledge. While other issues emerged during the two days, this will be the remarkable legacy of the conference. Across diverse scales of practice, we heard how engagement with the First Nations people of Australia is not only a necessity but a way to enrich and propel the design of our built environment. I can’t imagine a more important topic to be brokered at this point in time.

The conference plunged participants directly into personal narratives, passionate declamations and uncomfortable truths, making visible and making heard stories rarely told in architecture. The first speaker, social justice advocate Dhakshayini Sooriyakumaran, set the tone with a direct and articulate framing of identity politics. She was passionate, without being hectoring, about a discipline in which gender inequity, and the absence of Indigenous and non-white practitioners, continues in extremis.

Conference directors Monique Woodward and Stephen Choi are to be applauded for their commitment to bringing these voices so