The Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ) promotes standards of excellence in the field of architectural history research with a focus on Australia, New Zealand and the Asia-Pacific region.

SAHANZ acknowledges the traditional owners of the lands on which our members practice.

Events

Events

Events

Extremities: South, East, North, West of Architectural History

CfP: The 41st SAHANZ Annual Conference theme of Extremities encourages challenges to architectural history from a multiplicity of positions, critiquing the evidence underlying prevailing narratives and re-investigating architectural history from all points of the perspectival compass.

Drawing entitled "Neo-Gaya" by Rui Shen Chong, 2022

Events

Islands

Proceedings from Islands, the 40th Annual Annual SAHANZ Conference are now available on our site.

Publications

Publications

Media

Fabrications

34.3 (2025)

Across Australasian and Pacific scholarship there has been an uneven history of interest in First Nations architecture. In Australia in recent decades there has been a long overdue acknowledgement of the millenia of architecture, land stewardship, history, and family connections to Country by First Nations people, which has slowly gained acceptance in the academy. Some of this has recognised the work, skills, knowledge, and experiences of First Nations people as designers and creators of their own living environments prior to colonisation. Another strand has emerged from academic research into pre-invasion First Nations architecture and the responses First Nations people had to the brutal colonisation of their Countries, including creative and canny strategies to house themselves and their families and to enable the continuation of their communities. In Aotearoa New Zealand and Moana Pasifika, there is more advanced architectural research of Māori and Pacific people’s building and place making activities across both pre- and post-colonisation or contact with Europeans eras. Likewise, in the decades since then, there has been an increasing body of architectural history scholarship that explores the ways in which the economic and governance structures of colonisation (in all its varied forms across Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the Pacific) take hold and grow through the built environment. This is an important element of working towards the reckoning of this traumatic era in our region. The editors’ themed issue asked authors to consider the history of the building types and styles designed specifically to accommodate First Nations communities, whether by them or by others, including those from colonial and European-contact eras such as missions and reserve buildings and precincts; and the governance relationships and engagement of First Nations communities that have affected the architectural outcomes.
Taylor and Francis

Media

Fabrications

34.2 (2025)

Across Australasian and Pacific scholarship there has been an uneven history of interest in First Nations architecture. In Australia in recent decades there has been a long overdue acknowledgement of the millenia of architecture, land stewardship, history, and family connections to Country by First Nations people, which has slowly gained acceptance in the academy. In Aotearoa New Zealand and Moana Pasifika, there is more advanced architectural research of Māori and Pacific people’s building and place making activities across both pre- and post-colonisation or contact with Europeans eras. Likewise, in the decades since then, there has been an increasing body of architectural history scholarship that explores the ways in which the economic and governance structures of colonisation take hold and grow through the built environment. The editors’ themed issue asked authors to consider the history of the building types and styles designed specifically to accommodate First Nations communities, whether by them or by others, including those from colonial and European-contact eras such as missions and reserve buildings and precincts; and the governance relationships and engagement of First Nations communities that have affected the architectural outcomes.
Taylor and Francis

Pages

Calls for papers

Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand —

36.2 Spatial Practices of Transnational Care – November 1, 2025
36.1 Open Issue – April 2, 2025

An Island

News

INVITATION FOR PROPOSALS: FABRICATIONS 36(2) GUEST-EDITED SPECIAL ISSUE

The Society of Architectural Historians, Australia & New Zealand invites proposals for a special, guest-edited issue of its journal, Fabrications, to be published in June 2026. 
The deadline is March 21, 2025. 

Media

Fabrications

34.1 (2024)

This Open Issue of Fabrications features six research articles that examine architectural histories that span the breadth of the Australian continent, and range across over one hundred years from 1970s to the 1880s, beginning in postmodern Queensland, and through early twentieth-century Alice Springs and Tasmania, to William Wardell in Victoria and colonial architectural education in New South Wales. This issue covers time and geography ably illustrating the breadth of current architectural history scholarship. The lack of papers in this issue on Aotearoa New Zealand is perhaps best explained by the immediately previous issue’s focus on trans-Tasman architectural work. An additional seven book reviews and an event report compliment the research articles.
Taylor and Francis

Media

Fabrications

33.3 (2024)

Under the editorship of G. A. Bremner and Andrew Leach, a 2019 special issue of Fabrications, “The Architecture of the Tasman World, 1788–1850” (29:3), examined the shared history of southeastern Australia and New Zealand when the political entities of Van Diemen’s Land and New South Wales (NSW) were barely minted and modern New Zealand was but a flash in the pan. Bremner and Leach noted that the nineteenth-century architectural history of these places “has long been shaped by the nationalist historiographies of twentieth-century Australia and New Zealand’ and sought to elicit a more nuanced history by turning to a period when the region’s modern national identities were still nascent. For this new special issue, we turn attention to a later period – 1850 to the present – and see how history might be written against the grain of the conventional architectural histories of both Australia and New Zealand.
Taylor and Francis

Media

Fabrications

33.2 (2023)

In Frank Moorhouse’s Cold Light (2011), the last in his trilogy of novels focusing on the life of internationalist, bureaucrat-diplomat protagonist Edith Campbell Berry, Edith finds herself in a new position in Canberra in the early 1950s. Occupying a Department of Works office in a modest weatherboard building in Acton, Edith decides to elevate her circumstances by purchasing her own furniture and redecorating her workspace. She removes the standard departmental furniture and, we learn, on the advice of Brian Lewis contacts Fred Ward in Melbourne to obtain a quote on the design and making of new office furnishings. In her note to Ward, she mentions a Douglas Snelling chair that she has seen in magazines in Sydney and on Ward’s recommendation orders a Frances Burke desk lamp. Her follow up conversation with Ward on the telephone includes mention of Sam Atyeo and Cynthia Reed and Edith briefly contemplates painting the walls of the office in a bold colour, a possible reference to the work and sensibility of Marion Hall Best. Moorhouse intends, of course, that this roll call of interwar and mid-century Australian designers should underline Edith’s self-conscious cultural sophistication. But it is also striking the degree to which this list overlaps with a canonical group of Australian designers circa 2011, when the book was published.
Taylor and Francis

Media

Fabrications

33.1 (2023)

An Open Issue of Fabrications is an opportunity to witness the breadth of scholarship in architectural history in our region, and this issue is no exception. We have a great variety of papers from across the spectrum of topics and approaches, with authors also ranging from some of our most experienced, to some of our most freshly minted scholars, an exciting dynamic which unfolds through this issue.

Keen-eyed readers of Fabrications online will have noticed that, as per our new “online first” approach to papers, some of the papers in this issue have been available for online some weeks and months, along with the book reviews and reports which are faster to reach publication than our peer-reviewed papers. This practice enables a more steady stream of papers available as soon as they are ready; such papers are available through the “latest articles” section of the Fabrications website through our publishers Taylor & Francis. As ever, we appreciate the contribution of reviewers to Fabrications, and thank them for their selfless work in reviewing papers.

Taylor and Francis

News

2022 SAHANZ Conference Proceedings – now available

The proceedings of the 2022 SAHANZ Conference ‘Ngā Pūtahitanga / Crossings’ (held jointly with the Australasian Urban History Planning History Group) are now available through the Publications pages of this website (here). Consisting of 40 papers, they can be accessed in the form of an entire 665-page document or, alternatively, the papers …

The Auckland waterfront, showing the Auckland Harbour Board Downtown Scheme. Whites Aviation Ltd Photograph. Ref: WA-66196-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. /records/23236356

The Auckland waterfront, showing the Auckland Harbour Board Downtown Scheme. Whites Aviation Ltd Photograph. Ref: WA-66196-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. /records/23236356

Media

Fabrications

32.3 (2022)

The phrases “state architecture” and “architecture of the state” today might be understood to refer not to buildings at all, but to the formal arrangements of power in sovereign states; the composition of a representative assembly, for example, and the relationship between the judiciary and the executive; the role of the bureaucracy and ministers of state and other such arrangements that define who can legitimately exercise state power. Such a usage implies that the word architecture principally denotes a diagram of functions and responsibilities. This editors’ themed issue of Fabrications is dedicated to a more expansive, but also more concrete and conventional idea of “the architecture of the state.” For the work included here, architecture unquestionably involves the design and use of buildings. Yet, each of the papers in the current issue also coveys a sense that architecture is inexorably involved in delineating relations of power.The papers contained here encompass great geographical and stylistic diversity. We encounter a technical apparatus of colonial expansion wrapped in the decorous formal language of the classical tradition in the Victorian period; prefabricated German buildings in Nauru and other parts of the Pacific in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; expressions of Belgian identity and materiality at the beginning of the twentieth century in Seoul; tensions between modernity and tradition and the authority of religion and the state respectively in Tehran in the 1930s; functional prescriptions for Australia’s permanent national parliament as planned in the 1970s; and debates about the Englishness of postmodernism in England in the early 1980s. But each paper asks probing questions about meaning and function in architecture and how states depend heavily on both what buildings do and what they can say.
Taylor and Francis

Pages

Fabrications

Fabrications is the refereed journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ). Established in 1989, it is devoted to scholarly publication in the field of architectural history.

News

News

News

EOI for 2025-2027 Committee Members

The role of the Committee is to uphold the Constitution of the Society, support its annual events and activities, and develop strategic initiatives and programmes that will advance the aims of the Society. The term of the current committee has come to an end and we are looking for expressions …

June 9, 2025

News

Notice of SGM

The 2025 Special General Meeting will be held online on Friday July 11th at 1:00 – 2:00 AEST time. Current SAHANZ members will receive a reminder email on the Friday morning with the Zoom link for the meeting.  If you would like to attend the SGM and vote please ensure …

June 9, 2025

News

Applications for the David Saunders Founder’s Grant are Open

SAHANZ annually offers The David Saunders Founder’s Grant in memory of the founder of the Society, to support research by emerging researchers in the disciplines of architectural history and theory. Applications can be made to apply for funds to assist in field-work, archival assistance, printing and reproduction costs in preparation …

June 9, 2025

News

Call for EoI for Fabrications’ reviews editor

The Editorial Board of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand calls for Expressions of Interest for the ongoing role of Reviews Editor of the Society’s refereed journal, Fabrications: JSAHANZ published in three issues each year by Taylor & Francis.  The Reviews Editor will work with the journal’s two Editors …

May 13, 2025

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