Regional Bureaucracy
Guillermo Fernández-Abascal and Hamish McIntosh
Perimeter Editions
English
Contributions from Jordan Bamford, Jack Cooper, Christopher Kerr, Billy McQueenie and Nyoah Rosmarin.
Softcover
224 Pages
200 x 270 mm
2021
ISBN 9781922545060
Every regional city and town has basic amenities of some description. A post office, a school, a town hall, a police station, and sometimes, a pool. Across the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW), the majority of these buildings were designed by the NSW Government Architect’s Office (GAO), most prolifically over a period of thirty years from 1958 to 1988. These civic structures – equally recognisable and indistinguishable in their form and wider sensibilities – create an oeuvre of public architecture that is both statewide and specifically local. Yet, due to the fact that these buildings largely act in service of our daily lives and routines, they are often perceived as exceedingly ordinary and overlooked as serious architecture.
Led by architect and academic Guillermo Fernández-Abascal, photographer Hamish McIntosh and a team of contributors – including Jordan Bamford, Jack Cooper, Christopher Kerr, Billy McQueenie, Nyoah Rosmarin and others – Regional Bureaucracy corrals these buildings as a distinct, if not idiosyncratic, collection. Utilising new drawings, photographs and stories, the book outlines a body of work that stands as recent evidence of how modern architecture can construct a state – albeit a complicated and ambitious one.
This is not a monograph of the GAO. The goal was not to capture an exhaustive or historical ‘truth’, nor to form a clear argument about the GAO’s output and production. Rather, Regional Bureaucracy – anecdotally, analytically and always critically – presents a selection of relevant regional works that reveal an architectural mode that is distinctly ‘good enough’. None of the GAO’s projects are presented in a comprehensive manner here. Instead, this book draws a looser fabric of observations and details, leaving the reader with the space to make their own interpretations and, perhaps, the inspiration to visit the buildings themselves.
(source: https://www.thelibraryproject.ie/collections/international-art-books/products/regional-bureaucracy)
About the Artists
Guillermo Fernandez-Abascal is an architect, academic, co-director of GFA2, and lecturer at UTS Sydney. Based in Sydney, Australia and Santander, Spain, his recent work destabilises the dichotomy of research vs. buildings and includes diagrams, stories, exhibitions, films, prototypes, housing, and public buildings across the globe.
(source https://profiles.uts.edu.au/Guillermo.Fernandez-Abascal)
Hamish McIntosh has worked as a freelance photographer and designer since 2016, they hold Bachelor of Design in Photography (Honours), University of Technology, Sydney.
hamishmcintosh.format.com
About the Publisher
Perimeter Editions is the award-winning publishing imprint of Melbourne-based bookstore Perimeter Books and distribution house Perimeter Distribution. Releasing its first publication in 2012, Perimeter Editions’ focus rests on publishing autonomous books in close collaboration with photographers, artists, curators and writers. Its publications exhibit a criticality and sensitivity to content and form.
perimetereditions.com
(source https://www.perimeterbooks.com/products/pre-order-regional-bureaucracy)
