It never gets really cold in the Top End. But it does get very humid during the Wet. However, simple steps in house design can make the house comfortable and you don't need fans and air conditioners.
Mudflat arts believes that the landscape is not there to be painted so much as to be protected. The role has changed from one of passive painter to active member of the community.
Two recent shows in Melbourne of installations by Alex Danko have investigated issues indirectly referring to architecture and the private and social body within the Australian environment.
Affecting one's city, state or country requires wit, wisdom opportunity and a sense of fun. Robert McNulty, President of the extraordinarily successful Washington based 'Partners for Livable Places' gives a thumb-nail sketch of the last 15 years of the organisation and some of the tools they have used as operational forces for action.
Written with Andrew Bryan The increasing urgency for us to achieve a harmonious relationship with the environment is stimulating artists in many media and designers in a range of disciplines to work in new ways with one another and community groups who share this concern.
Change, and how it effects the evironment and the quality of life, is a recurring theme and metaphor in the work of artist Jeannie Baker. While celebrating the beauty and fragility of the environment she delivers a provocative and powerful message about our responsibilities towards the natural world.
"In modern architecture we find difficulty in managing the relation between the physical presence of a building and its intimations of the mental and spiritual. Our architectural objects rarely serve as objects of intermediation between the ordinary, the physical and the present on the one hand, and the mystical, the spiritual and the abstract on the other...."
New Zealand is not only snake less and nuclear free but also has a tradition of earth buildings. In pre European times, Maori utilised the ground's insulating properties by partially sinking thatched roofed houses into the ground.
There is a video which shows the noted Viennese artist Hundertwasser sitting on a bucket in his public home unit in Vienna City, uttering this exhortation. He then takes the bucket upstairs to a roof garden of sorts and dumps the contents into a compost bin.
Written with Paul Mutton. Merz is a new urban artist's village in the inner city suburb of Brompton, South Australia. Photos and drawings of the project.