What better place to start than in our own Backyard?
Welcome to Paradise.
Paradise is a new journal for Australian architecture and research. It is a product of dissatisfaction with architecture and our spaces of violence and dispossession, of smoothness and exclusion, of carbon form built under the pretense of boundless abundance. It acts to amplify the fury, the angst, and the achingly optimistic. It is for the unexpected and the emerging, for the seasoned academic and the underdog. It is both completely serious and totally naive. Paradise is unapologetically Janus-faced and welcomes the discomfort of the agonistic multitude, the itchy immaterial condition of adjacency.
Paradise is about Australia. The lucky country at the end of the world. Paradise is a cold beer in a living room on fire. In the unrelenting present of endless apocalypse, Paradise understands the end of something as the beginning of something else. What better place to start than in our own Backyard?
Through the fence palings what do you see? A well tended garden. A wild lawn. A glistening pool of water edged in blue tiles. Beyond our fence, a private party makes their way through a case of Gold. The other neighbour’s unwashed car sleeps atop a slab of sunbaked concrete. The faint sound of a sitar floats by on the wind from a few doors down. Through the back fence, only dust as far as the eye can see.
Good fences make good neighbours. You can tell a lot about a person by what their fence encloses, the privacy it protects. The beauty of a fence lies in its unassailable authority. Do what you want, just not in my Backyard. We claimed this patch of dirt with imaginary lines drawn with imported ink. We possessed this piece of Country by staking it out in timber posts.
The flames stopped right at our back fence. We are so lucky. This is our little piece of Paradise.
Paradise is seeking contributions for the inaugural theme of the Backyard. All forms and formats of research related to Australian architecture are welcome—written or otherwise, built or intangible, discursive or poetic—so long as they are hostable online. Proposed contributions will be evaluated by the editorial board on the basis of a 300 word abstract. The abstract should contain an indication of the content, length and format of the contribution, and include any relevant images or visuals. Abstracts should be sent as a .pdf to hello [at] paradise-journal.com.au, and include author’s name, professional/academic affiliation, email address, and contact number. Submissions close the December 5.
Paradise is run by students of the University of Technology Sydney School of Architecture. It is produced on the grounds of a complex interrelationship of nations and kinship systems, including the Dharug, Dharawal, Eora, Gundugurra, and Guringai peoples. We pay our respects to the Traditional Custodians of this land, and the Elders past and present. All Australian land is stolen land and sovereignty was never ceded.
