I am not an architectural photographer In the sense of celebrating buildings that are designed and created by architects as geniuses. My interests are in architecture as history; as interpreting the built form to provide us with a sense of history of Adelaide as the modern industrial city. The juxtapositions of the different architectural styles of the built form bring to the fore the history of the city—we can see the concrete and glass buildings of the late twentieth century pushing their way through the smaller and lower brick buildings of the nineteen century.

In reading these buildings a text my interest is less an interest in architectural history and in more how they embody different forms of life. Thus the tall modernist buildings are associated with superhighways, a dominance of single-family housing, a reliance on automobile transportation and a strict separation of land uses. It was a response to the overcrowding of the polluted city ie., the worst excesses of the Industrial Revolution., it ‘liberate’ us from the inner city and it was intent on creating a new and better world.

Despite the development of suburbs and the car as a primary mode of transport Adelaide at the start of the second decade of the 21st century was still a nineteenth century city. The modernist buildings were scattered amongst the nineteenth century ones. There was just the odd post-industrial building.

The pictures above and below gives some indication of how built environment of Adelaide’s CBD was primarily a 19th century one. This was in marked contrast to Melbourne and Sydney and more like Hobart.

The new buildings were starting to be constructed in the CBD after the global financial crisis. They were hotels and high rise apartments rather than office buildings.

Architecture as history

Dry Creek Salt Fields

Recovering a sense of history