Welcome to Plainland. Plainland is on a plain designated for the growth of Brisbane. It has a shopping centre off the highway and sits amongst the cows of surrounding grazing land. Plainland is plain: the cost of house and land dictate it. A bold entry statement and a path to the shops are civic flourishes. […]
Read moreGold Coast is a city infatuated with its image. It is the Miami Vice jostling with BrisVegas in the Sunshine State. Bold and brash, the sky is not the limit in Gold Coast City. The city embraced height from its early days and this coincided with Modernism as it washed over our shores from America […]
Read moreHow a space unfolds into a place is a mystery. What ingredients are required to make our cities valued? We go about our daily lives and the things we touch and feel remind us of who we are and where we belong. For most of us the things we care about are actually small and […]
Read moreThe marketplace is clearly failing the landscapes and the towns we live in. Australian country towns are dying as the global economy seeks to extract the cheapest goods in the cheapest location. We live in a very large island with a small population and with inbuilt inefficiencies of distance and time to markets. Our standard […]
Read moreBy John Mongard For Landscape Architecture Australia, No. 129, 2011 The following article is a review of contemporary industrial landscapes and corporate parks, focussing on the recently completed Sunshine Coast Industrial Park on the Sunshine Coast by Gamble McKinnon Green. Industrial estates are the parts of our cities which are normally the ugliest and most […]
Read moreReview by John Mongard FAILA for Landscape Architecture Australia 2011 South-east Queensland continues to grow, and new cities are emerging in its bushland periphery to cope with the pressure of around 66,000 people arriving every year1. Springfield is a new planned city to house an estimated 89,000 people by the year 20252, and its town […]
Read moreThe Strand Ephemera 5The Strand, Townsville Townsville’s main promenade, The Strand, was once again the setting for the biennial Strand Ephemera, an exhibition of temporal works of public art. On balmy clear nights we found many people exploring the parklands, looking for the twenty-two artworks which were spread out over the 2.2 km beachfront parklands. […]
Read moreAbstract Public Art up until the 1950s was predominantly focused on monuments, free standing sculptures and frieze/surface works on prominent buildings. Since then it has developed into a much broader range of creative interventions in the city and in the landscape. This talk will discuss emerging concepts and challenges related to the making of contemporary […]
Read moreAustralia has ridden on the back of mining booms which have reinvigorated regional towns like Gladstone in Queensland. The gold mining boom in the 1880’s left Australia with an urban fabric which is probably the best quality Civic architecture left in our cities. Local entrepreneurs invested into their town and built long-lasting stone and timber […]
Read moreContext Gladstone has been a City of extremely accelerated development in times past, and it is likely this rate of development will happen again. It has some remarkable natural attributes including a deep harbour and substantial mineral resources, which will continue to provide enormous economic potential for the region, however these assets need to be […]
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