Australia: Modern Architectures in History

Harry Margalit’s Australia was published in 2019 as part of the Reaktion Books series, Modern Architectures in History, and joins volumes on Brazil, Britain, Canada, Finland, France, Greece, India, Italy, Russia, Turkey and the USA. At the time of writing this review, the world’s geopolitical context is shifting courtesy of a relentless and mutable global pandemic; dynamic political landscapes; rising nationalist tendencies and conflicts; devastation of cultural sites; climate emergency on every doorstep; and looming economic crisis. What might future accounts of Australia’s architectural history make of the impacts of this moment on architecture’s modes of production, and what Margalit refers to as its material artefacts? As it stands, he acknowledges the “keenly felt” issues of “geographic location” that characterise the culture of this place, “still evidently under construction” (14).