Blueprint For Living - Separate stories: Recent Episodes
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Blueprint For Living is a weekly rummage through the essential cultural ingredients — design, food, travel, gardens, fashion — for a good life. Separate stories for bite size listening.
A visit to Revival Projects where Director, Robbie Neville, has established Melbourne's first inner-city timber mill and kiln.
Annie Smithers shares her roast-forward food memories, her abiding food aversions and her recipes for her 8-year old self.French chef Auguste Escoffier identified these as the beginnings from which all sauces spring. Annie Smithers leads Jonathan in a lesson through each sauce – from the richly velvet to the smooth and tangy.Find more of Annie's past Kitchen Rudimentals here.
An idea that echoes still across the peaks of the world today, adding charm and convenience to the steepest ascents.
Jill Griffiths reflects on the implications of our food choices and how it might be possible to eat in a way that nourishes us and does least harm to the environment?
It's remarkable that a simple sweater can weave together so many diverse elements, while highlighting the importance of knitting itself, which remains socially important for northern communities where daylight can disappear for months. The Marius sweater captured the zeitgeist, highlighting the image of Scandinavian quality and Nordic integrity, a symbol of strength laid out clearly in all its softness. And Norwegian to every last stitch.
In anticipation of the arrival of the American 'family' restaurant chain, Guy Rundle - Crikey columnist, chronicler of urban decline and its ever-diminishing pockets of resistance - reflects on the American ‘restaurant experience’ and the corrosive effect of franchise-chain capitalism on living culture.
A transitional moment between seasons, Paul Bangay clings to the rapidly vanishing remains of winter and takes us on a tour of a woodland garden.
Award winning food writer, Anya von Bremzen interrogates the notion of authenticity and asks how the world's most beloved dishes - from pizza and ramen to jamón and pot-au-feu - became so bound up with national identity.
For his final time as Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria, Tim Entwisle takes us on a tour of the National Herbarium, fittingly featuring the titan arum, algae and oaks.
There are five mother sauces; béchamel, velouté, espagnole, hollandaise, and tomato.
French chef Auguste Escoffier identified these as the beginnings from which all sauces spring. Annie Smithers leads Jonathan in a lesson through each sauce – from the richly velvet to the smooth and tangy.
Find more of Annie's past Kitchen Rudimentals here.
If it wasn't for Australian architect Bill Lucas… we might not have had the Opera House as we see it today.
It was Bill who was a founding member of the group that lobbied for the international competition and jury that would go on to select Uzton's design.
He was a man who fought architectural conventions and eschewed publicity, and in recent years, his life and legacy is being re-appraised by critics and curators alike.
Bill's friends and peers Peter Longeran and Julie Cracknell join Blueprint to discuss his eccentric life… one that involved renouncing all pay for his architectural services.
George Monbiot wants to turn the global food industry on its head – from radical changes in farming practices to 3D-printed steaks.
The prolific writer, environmental activist, and rewilder, explores this and more in his latest book, Regenesis.
He joins Jonathan to discuss the advancing science of soil ecology, and how the biological universe under our feet could transform what we eat and how we grow it.
A world of magic at the tip of your wand. And used as important message sticks by First Nations people around the world, including Australia.
There are some things that are so familiar that we barely question them, often because we grew up with them as children. Some, like the tooth fairy, we grow out of.
Others, like the magic wand, we simply accept. Of course we know that a wand isn't magical but still, when someone produces one, we know instantly what it's supposed to do.
Before the microphone and the advent of amplification, performers relied on the acoustics of a room to project voice. Since early enlightenment, architects endeavoured to control sound in large interiors.
Architect and author Joseph Clarke explores the evolving relationship between architecture and acoustics in his book Echo’s Chambers: Architecture and The Idea of Acoustic Space.
Lucianne Tonti on the decline of a once thriving local industry and the complex set of forces that have produced aesthetic uniformity in the world of fashion.
The Hoover Dam on the Nevada-Arizona border is perhaps the archetype of what we think a dam should look like. The tallest in the world when finished, it’s the Eiffel Tower of dams.
Tim Entwisle talks to Fergus Garrett, world renown garden designer, about the rewilding of Great Dixter.
Besha Rodell, chief restaurant critic at The Age, on why Melbourne’s dining scene has a coherent identity, why Sydney’s lacks a sense of place and why the tired Sydney/Melbourne binary in fact reveals a great deal about the evolving geographic, social and cultural conditions that have shaped the culinary landscapes of these two cities.
In Europe today there is a growing emphasis on the removal of dams and the restoration of natural flows. At least 325 barriers, including dams and weirs, were removed across 16 countries in Europe in 2022 - a record-breaking year for dam removals across the continent. Pao Fernández Garrido discusses the momentum behind this growing movement and why there remain pockets of resistance.
Annie Smithers and Jonathan Green reflect on the power of food to unlock memory and vivid sensory recollections of an otherwise forgotten past.
While some of today's cruise ships are as bulky and graceless as factories, many of the smaller vessels follow a similar blueprint to the ship that started it all, the SS Prinzessin Victoria Luise.
Laleh Khalili on the movement of cargo, capital and cruiseliners across the globe and the human economy and exploitative labour practices that facilitiates it.
Lauren Oyler, author and essayist, recounts her reluctant journey into Goop at sea, featuring dry skin brushing, holistic skin care, and a searching moral inventory with a psychological astrologer.
From Gwyneth Paltrow’s court-core to Logan Roy’s baseball cap, Kirstie Clements, author and columnist at The New Daily, discusses what has been identified as the latest fashion trend - stealth wealth.
With its ridges of soft, tufted cotton woven onto a cheaper base cloth, it combined softness and warmth with strength, making it comfortable to wear and popular with farmers and factory workers alike. It even had a kind of utilitarian chic when used by the Women's Land Army in the First World War, which saw women working in agriculture across Britain, filling the gap left by farm hands enlisted to fight abroad.
It's been dubbed the landlord special: beige-grey laminate, vast empty spaces, and colourless walls. Architecture correspondent for The Nation and author of McMansion Hell, Kate Wagner on the emergence of a disturbing new anti-aesthetic and the cultural and economic conditions in which aesthetic conformity is produced.
For some its a site of death and despair but for Paul Bangay the winter garden is a landscape of latent promise.
Find more of Paul's Garden Rudimentals on the ABC RN website.
Annie Smithers gives us a tour of the NGV kitchen, where she is serving a French farmhouse menu in celebration of Pierre Bonnard, including her famous potato terrine and Bœuf Bourgignon.
Barbara Rugendyke and Jerome Vanclay from Lismore's Southern Cross University emphasise the importance of putting geographical realities at the heart of planning decisions to protect flood prone communities in future.
What makes an aged and neglected building worthy of restoration? Anthony Burke, Professor of Architecture at University of Technology, Sydney and Host of Restoration Australia discusses the challenges of transforming a revered wreck of a building into celebration of Australian architecture.
What’s the most stylish car ever produced? It’s a question guaranteed to stimulate debate among car buffs but the Mercedes 300SL of 1954 would doubtless be near the top of any list.
What comes to mind when you think about the word wilderness? For many, it conjures up images of pristine, wild landscapes untouched by humans. But increasingly, the term's being recast, as environmental records show that 'wilderness' is a relatively recent phenomenon.
As Victoria announces the end of native forest logging we talk to Jack Pascoe about the imposition of European style land management on the Australian landscape and what a future Victorian forest should look like.
Architecture critic, Owen Hatherley, discusses his book, Artificial Islands - Adventures in the Dominions which explores the legacy of British-designed cities - some of the most purely artificial landscapes in the world - and the ways in which cities like Melbourne and Auckland are today reimagining their own history.
It's hard to imagine how revolutionary the arrival of the match was. Now we can't imagine life would without them. In this week's Iconic Designs Colin Bisset looks at the invention of the match.
What do the instagrammable ruins of today – the aesthetic of exposed brick, subway tiles, filament bulbs, rough woodwork and welded pipe – suggest about our cultural moment? Tom Wilkinson, author of Life in Ruins: The fetishization of decay in contemporary architecture, reflects on the meaning of the aesthetic of decay in today's urban landscape.
Tamar Adler on what to do with leftover pizza, how to use the Marcella Hazan tomato sauce onion and how to take the moralising out of no-waste cooking.
Surely no one is fooled by a posh name given to something ordinary. Like the Reliant Regal, which was certainly the last vehicle you'd connect to royalty. This was a very basic car that was cheap to buy, thanks to its lack of a fourth wheel, meaning it was taxed as a motorbike not a car. And while car buffs might be sniffy about the vehicle, it was, in its way, actually quite significant and a mark of a company that liked to defy convention.
What are we talking about when we talk about Australian design? It’s a category that’s as difficult to define as it is richly evocative.
Jeremy Atherton Lin discusses his award winning book Gay Bar: Why We Went Out, which traces the cultural history of the gay bar, from pubs, to darkrooms, to dive bars.
Wrenched from her idyllic farmhouse setting and willingly submitting herself to the large-scale, machine-like operation of the NGV kitchen.
From Gertrude Jekyll's Wall, Water and Woodland Gardens to Russell Page's, The Education of a Gardener, Paul Bangay reflects on the gardeners and writers who have influenced and inspired him.
Find more of Paul's Garden Rudimentals on the ABC RN website.
Mention the name César Pelli and you can almost predict the sort of building you might see — shiny, sleek, and tall. Usually very tall. For decades, Pelli has been a byword for skyscrapers, and was even awarded a Lifetime Achievement by the Council of Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. When he died in 2019, his practice had completed over a hundred major projects, many of them dominating the skyline of the major cities of the world. And while they are hard to fault, they can sometimes be hard to love. But does that matter?
A creative new approach to coastal defence that combines new technology, knowledge of intertidal ecosystems and artistic vision.
How do you mitigate risk when it comes to natural disasters like floods, bushfires and earthquakes?
As we crest the whole roasted cauliflower wave, Annie peers into the near future and spies stuffed cabbage bringing up the rear.
Colin Ellard says psychogeography can illuminate the psychological and physiological effects produced by the built and natural environments we inhabit.
You may not expect beauty in these brutalist marvels but at La Tourette beauty is bountiful in every purposeful step.
The Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park is the epicentre of global nickel production. It’s also the site of ever-increasing pollution, labour exploitation, environmental destruction and, journalist Peter Yeung explains in a piece for Wired, its now a city on the brink of collapse.
Eating too much Lamprey is thought to have killed King Henry the First of England but how much of that story is really true?
Director of Revival Projects, Robbie Neville, shows Jonathan Green around his Collingwood workshop where salvaged building materials from demolition sites are repurposed.
It starts conventionally enough – a solid masonry base facing a narrow street in the centre of the city, classically detailed with columns and porticos, but as it moves upward, it becomes odder, with an almost excessive run of columns around a tower that is then topped by a strange, elongated dome like a simplified version of Brunelleschi's great dome in Florence.
Annie Smithers and Jonathan Green discuss the merits, uses and majesty of this most carby of nuts.
Nearly a hundred years ago it wasn't an induction cooktop that made your kitchen look bang up to date but a pedal bin. Invented by Lillian Gilbreth in the 1920s, it was the result of a new and very twentieth-century preoccupation – the study of time and motion. A pedal bin could save precious minutes in the kitchen. It was emblematic of the emerging interest in efficiency in the early twentieth century, a time when architects wanted houses to work like machines and Henry Ford introduced the production line to the factory floor.
Sinister scarlet, butter yellow and deep crimson: Jonathan and Paul get lyrical among the maple and Boston Ivy and appreciate the fleeting beauty of the autumnal garden.
The most successful racing car of all time blending cutting-edge engineering and gut-twisting speed.
Discover the bold flavours, rich stories and ancestral cooking techniques shared by islands across the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans.Guests:Von Diaz, writer, documentary producer and author of Islas: A celebration of tropical cooking ―125 Recipes from the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Ocean Islands.Robert Oliver, Executive Director and founder of Pacific Island Food revolution
Gaetano Pesce, acclaimed artist, designer, architect, is of the last remaining radical designers. At 83, he reflects on the relationship between art and design, function and meaning and the possibilities for radical social critique through design.Thanks to Geoff Newton, Gaetano Pesce's exhibition, Fish in Australia, will premiere at Neon Parc City, between 4–27 May and the Melbourne Design Fair, 18–21 May, 2023.
When you consider the history of the jumpsuit, sows ears and silk purses come to mind. After all, how did an unassuming item of workwear became haute couture?The jumpsuit's popularity has remained, as workwear and fashion statement, both cygnet and swan. Most recently it's cropped up in uniforms designed by Ozwald Boateng for British Airways cabin crew, providing an option for a gender-diverse workforce. The jumpsuit therefore highlights the alchemy of design, turning utility into stylistic gold, and showing that silk purses really can be made from sow's ears.
When we think of home it’s a deeply private space, a refuge and a sanctuary from the outside world. A place to call our own. While our homes are deeply personal, housing is a public matter. There is a collective responsibility to make sure people have a home. So what happens when the public and private meet? Guled Eylas is an architecturally trained multi-disciplinary artist, who is interested in the connections people make with the built environment and the idea of home. Growing up in one of Melbourne’s high rise public housing estates, Guled has been fascinated by the contrasts within these spaces and the contrasts in perceptions around public housing from those who live there and those who don’t. His latest exhibition, Personal But Not Private, seeks to spark conversations and understanding around the multifaceted relationship between public housing and home. Personal But Not Private is presented by NH Architecture + Guled Elyas. It will be on display from 18-26 May as part of Melbourne Design Week at RMIT Design Hub level 3 entry foyer, corner Victoria and Swanston Streets, Carlton. Find more Blueprint For Living via the ABC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts.
For Chef Annie Smithers there's one dessert that has consistently evaded her - the pesky lemon custard tart. That is until now, when she joined the other lemon tart camp, the lemon curd tart. Annie shares her new found success so you too can create this delectable treat.
When Samira Yama was escaping The Taliban she was forced to cover herself with a burqa. In an act of defiance she’s taken the fabric of her burqas and transformed them into party dresses. Samira is one of a handful of Afghan-Australian fashion designers whose work is on display in an exhibition at The Newcastle Library.Inspired by the protest movement #DoNotTouchMyClothes that saw Afghan women around the world post online photos of their traditional colourful clothing, the exhibition highlights the diversity, beauty and ingenuity of Afghan clothing design through the ages.
Good design is usually very simple. Its flipside is kitsch, which is usually overly fussy. And yet maybe kitsch has its place in the design world.The best of kitsch makes us smile, the worst makes us shudder. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder but a plastic chair shaped like a throne has as much right to a room as an Alvar Aalto plywood recliner. Perhaps we need to know about one to appreciate the other. So kitsch in fact helps us understand, in its silly, devious way, exactly what good design is.
What does the term “Blak Design” encompass? This Friday, First Nations designers from all spheres of the design world will come together at the Koorie Heritage Trust in Melbourne to interrogate that very question.The Blak Design Matters Forum will celebrate the depth and breadth of First Nations design talent. From interior and product design; to landscape, architecture and fashion; the forum will interrogate how Indigenous design is defined, emboldenedand made visible in Australia’s contemporary design landscape.
Australia is among some of the highest consumers of meat per capita globally and we export plenty of it, too. But we live in a moment where we need to make urgent decisions to avoid climate catastrophe and yes, this will involve curtailing the sheer amount of meat the world produces and consumes.So how do we balance a healthy diet that’s also sustainable for animals and the environment?
Delicate French pastry and simple to cook don’t usually go in the same sentence, but as Blueprint for Living’s resident chef, Annie Smithers demonstrates, you too can enjoy a slice of Paris for afternoon tea in the comfort of your own home. In part one of a two-part series on tarts, Annie breaks down the Tarte Parisienne to a fine art in deliciously accessible way.
When it comes to paying your bill after a meal out, and the credit card machine asks if you'd like add a tip, what do you? What about if you're ordering online, is it more important to tip then? What about a ride share or taxi? Given the gig economy has essentially imported American-style wages and tipping culture is here for good, we speak with Besha Rodell, Chief Food and Restaurant Critic for The Age and Good Weekend on the ethics and etiquette around tipping.
Two thousand years ago, the Romans were masters of the aqueduct. Many were dotted throughout their Empire and still stand; some even remain in use.Blueprint's resident design expert Colin Bisset investigates the design history of the aqueduct — a sign of a sophisticated civilisation and a demonstration of the ingenuity of builders and engineers as they move water from source to city.
A lot of us have experience of open plan designs. Like any design, there are some wonderful examples and some troublesome ones. In recent months, open plan schools, otherwise known as innovative learning environments, have been pulled into the debate. In this week’s episode, we speak with Mary Featherston, a celebrated Australian designer whose recent work specialises in learning and play spaces; particularly for young children and Rory Hyde, an architectural researcher, curator and writer at the Melbourne School of Design.
We’ve seen it with the recent floods and fires, and of course at the height of the pandemic: when crises happen, community-lead mutual aid responds. So where does design and architecture fit into these movements?Marisa Jahn joins Blueprint to discuss how mutualism can inform design practice of all kinds to imagine new spaces of solidarity.
In a world of near-infinite searchability, finding a recipe can seem like an overwhelming task… particularly when a search for one recipe might bring up dozens of variations.But has this lead to more complex and diverse dishes at home? The editors at the New York Times Cooking section might say otherwise. Their most popular recipe is the humble beef stew, which has clocked 24 million views since it went live in 2019.Emily Weinstein, the Food and Cooking editor of the Times, joins Blueprint to ponder what their most-read recipes say about readers.
Why is it that certain designs become classics and others are soon forgotten? Like the Windsor chair whose history stretches back at least three hundred years and yet it's still got instant appeal and will fit in most modern homes.
What draws people out of the house and into the outdoors? Whether it’s a balcony, terrace, or separate pavilion, award-winning garden designer Paul Bangay walks Jonathan Green through what elements combine to create outdoor spaces worth staying in, in all seasons. Find more of Paul's Garden Rudimentals on the ABC RN website.
In the past couple of years, the markets have ballooned. While the market’s increased popularity has been helpful to local food vendors, the number of people from outside the Muslim and local community, has also brought its own share of problems — including experiences of Islamophobia and racism. Journalist and long-time night market attendee Soaliha Iqbal joins Blueprint to discusses the richness and complexities of the Ramadan night markets.
If you've started the kitchen garden or humble herb patch — and managed to keep it alive — then resident Blueprint chief Annie Smithers is here to help you figure out what's next: How to harvest, and keep the garden brimming for a bigger yield next season.Kitchen Rudimental is Blueprint's regular series where Annie and Jonathan head into the kitchen to chat, cook and bake their way through the skills that will help make you a more confident home cook.
This month there’s a rare convergence among the monotheistic faiths: Easter, Passover, and Ramadan all fall within weeks of each other. To mark this occasion, Blueprint is revisiting conversations on the food rituals associated with these religious festivities. Cameos from Monash University’s Islamic scholar Susan Carland, and Lisa Goldberg and Marilyn Chalmers from the Monday Morning Cooking Club.
Flatpack furniture made its first appearance in the 1950s when an employee of a Swedish furniture company needed to transport a table in the back of his car. But its contribution to modern life has never been as important as the part it plays in refugee housing. To date, the Ikea Foundation has sent 80,000 shelters to 78 countries, helping more than 400,000 people.
Expression Australia is the country’s oldest deaf society, founded almost 140 years ago. But in that time there has been no purpose-built office for the deaf community… until now. Last month, the society’s new headquarters opened in inner Melbourne, a building co-designed with the deaf community. Interior designer Sian Neame-Smith and Expression Australia’s outgoing CEO Nicky Long join Blueprint to discuss how the building came together.
Right now, there are more than 100 million people displaced due to war or disaster, many of whom still reside in their country of origin. That’s a population greater than the total number of those displaced after the Second World War. All of these people need shelter, whether it’s short or long term. Brett Moore is the man people turn to for solutions. The Australian-born architect joins Blueprint to discuss how design contributes to his current role as head of the UNHCR’s global shelter cluster.
Join Tim Entwisle and Jonathan Green as they brave the Melbourne rain and take a stroll around the Royal Exhibition Buildings visiting the wonderful and intricate display gardens. Admire artistic masterpieces and get inspired on how you can spruce up your indoor and outdoor gardens at home.
Small-scale versions of most things have enchanted people for centuries, from dolls houses to Shetland ponies. And in 1961 there was the surprisingly small motorbike called the Honda Z100. Commonly known as the monkey bike, it started life as a novelty and quickly became an international sensation.
If you’ve toiled with the idea of a kitchen garden or even a humble herb patch, but didn’t know where to start, chef and gardener Annie Smithers shares practical tips for the budding kitchen gardener. Annie teaches us the basics and shows us what kitchen gardens teach us in return.
Gone are the days when a four-cylinder sedan was Australia’s car of choice — it’s all about SUVs, or the sports utility vehicle. From Mazda to Lamborghini, SUVs have fast become a must-have in an automaker’s offering, and global demand is exponentially increasing (and so are the costs). Esteemed Canadian urbanist Brent Toderian joins Blueprint to discuss the consequences this SUV romance is having on our cities and streets.
With several foodies and headlines speaking of 'Filipino food revolution', it seems Filipino food's time has finally come in Australia. Unlike other South-East Asian cuisines such as Vietnamese or Thai, Filipino food has been little understood, even though Filipino migrants are Australia's largest South-East Asian migrant group.But for an archipelago nation spanning some 7,000 islands… can there be such a thing as a Filipino cuisine? Grace Guinto and Fides Mae-Santos are here to help. They're co-founders of the Entrée Pinays, a Filipina-Australian women's collective working to raise Australia's literacy about Filipino cuisine and produce.
Perth isn't the first place you'd think of as Australia's design capital. For much of its history, the city has shed its built environment in a race for the new, burying layers of design history along with it. So how would we define Perth's design culture? And what design stories does the city tell beyond architecture?The city's inaugural design week will have some clues. Founders Sandy Anghie and David Smith join Blueprint to challenge our assumptions about the WA capital.
When Australia's award-winning landscape designer Paul Bangay travels, he seeks out the most enchanting and beautiful gardens the world has to offer.Travel vicariously or get some tips for your next trip as we explore an abandoned 13th-century Italian town delicately decaying behind a labyrinth of wisteria and roses, one of the best gardens in England, Australia's native Cranbourne Botanical Gardens, and the world-renowned garden designer Russell Paige's perfectly manicured garden in Turin
Architecture always plays a role in nation building. But in the Philippines, 'national' architecture has been contested, thanks in part to Imelda Marcos's edifice complex — a woman not known for aesthetic subtlety.But iconic architecture outlives the passing parade of politics, and the work of Filipino architect Francisco Mañosa has played an important role in establishing a proud and more equable national identity.
As Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens transitions to autumnal hues, Jonathan heads on a post-summer stroll with outgoing director Tim Entwisle.Together, the duo discuss the impact climate change will have on Tim’s successor, and efforts to recognise and amplify the deeper history of the Indigenous land on which the gardens now stand.
When speaking about our built environment the phrase "embodied carbon" is increasingly being used by industry pundits. It's a term that describes the total emissions produced to create a building — from resource extraction to construction.But what does the term mean in practice? And how is it being applied beyond the design world? Caroline Pidcock, architect and spokesperson for Architects Declare Australia is here to give us a snapshot of where things are at.
Australia's relationship to Italian food certainly has come a long way from the time when cappuccinos were seen as exotic.After all it was an Italian staple — pasta — that flew off supermarket shelves as lockdowns struck. But is Italy's culinary ubiquity its own kind of curse? What assumptions do we now make about this cuisine?Ahead of her Italian-inspired end of summer feast for this year's Melbourne Food and Wine Festival, chef, author, and Italophile Julia Busuttil Nishimura joins Blueprint for an Italian culinary refresher.
Occasionally a brand name becomes a noun – like a Hoover for any type of vacuum cleaner or a Biro for a ballpoint pen. And then there's Teflon, which has become synonymous with anything that is non-stick.Find more of Colin's iconic designs on the ABC Listen app or on the Iconic Designs page.
Blueprint's resident chef Annie Smithers returns with another edition of Kitchen Rudimental, this time revealing her obsession with knivesAll that time spent cooking has meant that Annie is well attuned to the melodies of the kitchen, including that of a resonant sharp knife.Kitchen Rudimental is series from Blueprint where chef Annie Smithers and Jonathan Green head into the kitchen to chat, cook and bake their way through the skills that will help make you a more confident home cook.Find more of Annie's past Kitchen Rudimentals here.
Eleanor Coade was a woman ahead of her time. Not only did she run an extremely successful business in 18th-century London but she helped develop an outstanding artificial stone known as Coadestone. It wasn't the first but it was the best.
Architectural history is an overwhelmingly white and male — a fact that's also reflected in who makes up the profession. But a new website is trying to shift the dial.Women Writing Architecture does what it says on the tin — it's an open-source archive of texts about architecture written by women.Texts span a variety of languages and perspectives — you'll find Florence Nightingale's writing on hospitals cited alongside bell hooks' reflections on Kentucky.The site's editors Helen Thomas and Emilie Apperce join Blueprint to discuss the origins of their project, and how it might feature in architectural education.
What if architects and urbanists could become authors of "spatial hope"? That was the brief set by Esther Charlesworth and John Fien for their new book, Design for Fragility: 13 Stories of Humanitarian Architects.The text surveys a range of humanitarian architecture projects from a maternity waiting village in Malawi, a women's resource centre in regional Fiji, to a Cairns rehabilitation centre for people living with an acquired brain injury, and many others.
The fashion industry is increasingly heeding calls to be more sustainable. High street brands speak of their closed-loop supply chains, while the high-end speaks of small-batch, ethically-produced garments.But for an industry that is inherently geared towards the new… can it ever really be sustainable?Alice Payne, dean of RMIT's school of fashion and textiles, and Ken Pucker, the former chief operating officer at Timberland, join Blueprint to discuss.
Award-winning Australian landscape designer Paul Bangay begins his first rudimental of the year with a primer on finding inspiration.From an empty patch of land to a cluttered, overgrown urban garden, Paul reveals the ways proportion, scale, and sightlines can be used to move beyond the tabula rasa.Garden Rudimental is a regular series from Blueprint For Living with Paul to take you through the basics and give you the skills to become a confident gardener.Find more of Paul's Garden Rudimentals on the ABC RN website.
Architecture's Achillies heel is its perception as an elite creative discipline. But when you think about it, architecture has no other choice but to be accessible — the built environment is something we all use, regardless of our social status or income.But for architectural scholar and curator, Rory Hyde, what's often recognised as 'good' architecture often serves the former — the expensive private homes and institutional buildings that shine in the design glossies.That's why he's co-created the ArchitectureAU Award For Social Impact, a new award devised to recognise projects that promote the common good.
Venetian glass continues to dip in and out of fashion. For many today Murano glass means the gaudily-coloured glass figurines and ashtrays found in tourist shops throughout Venice. For others, it remains the epitome of truly great glass making, the fluid forms creating extraordinary statements in hotel foyers or private homes around the globe.
Musician and architectural scholar Simona Castricum is sick of talking about gender neutral bathrooms.For many trans and gender diverse people, 'accessible' space purely being defined by those spaces alone is a tired one, and often is forced on those groups alone.So how do our cities support and celebrate the production of gender non conforming space? What would a gender euphoric space feel like?
The rainbow flag, and its subsequent evolutions, are instantly recogniseable symbols for our sexually and gender diverse community but how that happened is not quite so clear.
Adam Nathaniel Furman and Joshua Mardell — editors of Queer Spaces: An Atlas of LGBTQIA+ Places and Stories — set themselves an ambitious brief.
The award-winning Victorian Pride Centre is Australia's first purpose-built centre for LGBTQIA+ communities. Opened in July 2021, the centre is based in Melbourne's bayside suburb of St Kilda, housing a range of different queer organisations including health, youth services, arts, and even a 24-hour radio station. For a building like this, the architectural brief wouldn't have been an easy one, given it's a space that is meant to be home for a diversity of groups whose tastes may not always be in harmony.So how did the architects rise to the challenge? Head on a tour with the building's architects, James Brearley and Grant Amon, to find out.
Feast on a strawberry sorbet you can pair with a raspberry beret.In part two of Annie's mini-workshop on sugar syrup, Annie shows Jonathan how to whip together a sweet summertime treat with a splash of Campari in the latest edition of Kitchen Rudimental.
Urban planning has become the latest target of conspiracy theorists. In recent weeks, the 15-minute city concept — where neighbourhoods provide life's essentials in 15 minutes by foot or bike — has become a harbinger of big brother in conspiracy-land.Misinformation has triggered fierce protests against 15-minute city plans in the UK and Canada, with the City of Oxford even having to clarify they wouldn't be erecting physical barriers to separate citizens.Brent Toderian, a keen urbanist and Vancouver's former chief planner, is here to help us understand how the polite world of urban planning crashed into conspiracies.
Day by day, the scale of need across the disaster zone in southern Türkiye and northern Syria expands dramatically. While rescue crews continue the search, those displaced are sheltering in makeshift camps, aid tents, and even train carriages to escape the region's harsh winter. But as rescue will make way for recovery, shelter will need to last beyond the short-term.Tom Bamforth is a writer and aid worker who specialises in shelter and settlements, and joins Blueprint to canvas what kinds of shelters are available — from Ikea's award-winning flatpack to the DIY. If you would like to help those affected by the disaster, head to abc.net.au/gives
Architecture is a man's profession. That's what a young African American girl in Harlem, New York, grew up thinking. But Norma Merrick Sklarek would soon prove she could be a top-tier architect and in doing so, would become a pioneering figure in the history of American architecture.--This episode was first broadcast on August 6, 2022.
John Claudius Loudon would have been the first to agree that his name should be better remembered. In 1832 he published a remarkable book, An Encyclopedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture, which would influence the look of towns not just in Britain but across America and Australia, too.Loudon was a maverick, without a doubt, but he started an important conversation about urban and landscape design that remains current. Without him, our suburbs might be more uniform and our cities less green. And farmworkers everywhere less comfortable.
The floods of early 2023 in Western Australia and the Northern Territory exposed Australia's road network and food supply chains, with the heavy water across the Kimberley region shutting down parts of the critical Great Northern Highway.What more can be done in Australian manufacturing to ensure food security as we know it? Elizabeth Jackson, Associate Professor at the School of Management and Marketing at Curtin University, paints a picture of the current food supply chains, and investigates how prone they are to natural disasters.
Berlin is a city that mingles severity and style, Western abundance, Soviet austerity and where brutalism and the baroque live cheek by jowl.It's also the home of maestro Lydia Tár, Cate Blanchett's complex, bravura character in director Todd Field's Tár, a film dripping with power dressing and suave German design. Tár wears authority and genius in a suit, a button-down shirt, cashmere vests and pleated pants.The film's costume designer, Bina Daigeler, shares her inspiration behind the costume design: from the grey skies of Berlin to the elegance of Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan.
Statues speak to us. They tell a story of celebrated achievement, or status. They are characters in a certain historical and cultural narrative, a dominant narrative which increasingly can come under challenge.So, what do we lose by simply removing monuments? How do we best deal with memorials that commemorate a dark history? And who has a right to this public narrative? These are questions heritage consultant, and author Robert Bevan sets to answer in his book Monumental Lies: Culture Wars and the Truth about the Past.
The icons of the American century are not what they once were. Some of the malls, office parks, and motels that were symbols of mid-century prosperity are tired, dying, or simply abandoned. And this is happening not just within the US, but in other places that emulated the American city.Tastes are changing, and so too are the demographics that call the suburbs home — and this is prompting a whole lot of retrofitting.For decades, architectural scholars June Williamson and Ellen Dunham-Jones have been documenting the phenomenon of retrofitted suburbia, where dead malls and other 'underperforming' properties are remade to meet people's needs. Malls have been turned into community health centres, Kmarts into schools, while huge office parks now host thriving medium-density communities.
While many visitors to Japan might get a crick in their neck gazing up at towering pagodas and Tori gates, there’s one item that is much more down-to-earth but equally unmissable: manhole covers, or manhorukaba.Finding one embedded in the footpath is like finding a jewel, and can become addictive: they are, quite simply, tiny treasures waiting to be found.Japanese culture has always focussed on the micro, including complicated toilet seats that perform all manner of intimacies. As one walks the long straight streets of Japan’s modern towns and cities, the manhole covers shine like sunbeams of art and engineering.Reminders that greatness often lies in hidden things.Find all of Colin's past iconic designs here.
Around this time of year there's a familiar claim – that Australia is one of the most successful multicultural nations in the world. But beyond evidence of more diverse food, and different faiths… where else do we find the wealth of diversity found across this continent?Architectural scholar David Beynon says it pays to look at Australia's built environment for clues. He's a co-curator of a new exhibition called Immigrant Networks, which looks at a phenomenon called trans-Asian-suburbanisation: a term that describes the decades-long process of waves of Asian migrants shaping Australia's urban form.
When you consider the history of the jumpsuit, sows ears and silk purses come to mind. After all, how did an unassuming item of workwear became haute couture? The jumpsuit started out, as the name implies, as a one-piece garment designed for parachutists. It had to be form-fitting with minimal openings to stop the force of air ripping it open when hurtling to the ground. It was based on aviator suits, created for the new aeroplanes.During the First World War, when fighter planes were first used, British pilots often wore a Sidcot suit. Most recently it's cropped up in uniforms designed by Ozwald Boateng for British Airways cabin crew, providing an option for a gender-diverse workforce.The jumpsuit therefore highlights the alchemy of design, turning utility into stylistic gold, and showing that silk purses really can be made from sow's ears.
Here at Blueprint, we take a rummage through the cultural ingredients of a good life — design, architecture, food, travel, and fashion. And while we track the trends we see in interiors and garden design; the food and dining scene is also a place of constant change and evolution.Food forecaster Besha Rodell takes a glance into the culinary crystal ball. She is a chief dining critic at The Age, Good Food Australia and Good Weekend magazine.
When you think of the world's wine superpowers, France, Spain, or Portugal might come to mind. But for historian Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre, Britain should be added to that list (it sounds paradoxical, we know). But it's not in Britain where we find this power, instead, Jennifer argues British wine began abroad, as wine was central to the British Empire.In settler-colonies including Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, vineyards were among the first things to emerge after imperial dispossession. Jennifer's compiled this complex and at times dark history in her new book, Imperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine's New World.
What happens if a city doesn't have a chief restaurant critic? Does anyone care and are we worse off for it?Besha Rodell, the recently appointed Chief Restaurant Critic for The Age and Good Weekend discusses the role of a great food writer and why she prefers to remain anonymous.This was first broadcast on June 4, 2022.
Just as there's always a debate about whether gelato is superior to ice cream, the means of serving either is open to argument.While there's nothing wrong with using a simple spoon, at least two people thought they had a better way of doing it.This was first broadcast on March 26, 2022.
He's a six-foot-seven lover of "spoofs and goofs, food, wine and cats" whose latest book comes with a glowing testimonial from Jack Black. You may also know Eric Wareheim from the comedy duo, Tim & Eric.His debut cookbook, FOODHEIM: A culinary adventure is now on the New York Times-best seller list. Ahead of his banquet at the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival, Eric stopped by Blueprint to introduce us to the "Complete Heimy Experience".This was first broadcast on April 2, 2022.
Chef Annie Smithers and Jonathan head into the kitchen to chat, cook and bake their way through the skills that will help make you a more confident home cook.This week on Kitchen Rudimental, Annie and Jonathan jump into the oily, vinegary, salt and pepper inflected world of salad dressings.This was first broadcast on February 19, 2022.
Jonathan makes the trip to Mallacoota in far-eastern Victoria, land of the Gunai Kurnai people, to visit writer, historian, and Dark Emu author Bruce Pascoe.During a wander around the farm, they discuss native crops and grasses, food sustainability and farming and ducks.This episode was first broadcast on May 7, 2022.
It's time to dig, mulch and prune with Australia's award-winning landscape designer Paul Bangay.He's here to take you through the basics and give you the skills to become a confident gardener.Lawns are completely changing. The mown lawn down to a millimetre, and a big monoculture is largely disappearing from our plots and gardens.Paul offers Jonathan lawn substitutes: from gravel to plants and garden beds.Could this be the death of backyard cricket?This was first broadcast on August 13, 2022.
Forests are places of otherness. Which is why they've long been used for human rituals of all kinds.Like the weddings that take place in Thorncrown Chapel, a magical structure nestled among the trees of the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas.It's a building so attuned to its leafy setting that you might dismiss it as almost glib.And yet, since it opened in 1980, it's proved to be one of America's most popular, and even important buildings.This was first broadcast on August 13, 2022.
Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria, Tim Entwisle, has put his life among the plants and gardens into a book.The result is Evergreen: The Botanical Life of a Plant Punk. He shares with Jonathan how a study of algae turned into a life botanic. This episode was first broadcast on September 24, 2022.
If you're an Australian of a certain age or mid-century obsessed , you'll love the country's motels. Author, broadcaster, and architecture nerd Tim Ross sure does.He's been working on an exhibition at Canberra's National Archives, Reception this way: Motels – a sentimental journey, on show until February 4, 2023.This was first broadcast on July 2, 2022.
We see Indigenous art and motifs used extensively in Australian tourism marketing campaigns but do Indigenous communities and businesses benefit from this branding?Anne Poelina — a Nyikina Warrwa woman from the Mardoowarra River in Western Australia's Kimberley region — is on a mission to make sure they do.This was first broadcast on May 28, 2022.
While some of today's cruise ships are as bulky and graceless as factories, many of the smaller vessels follow a similar blueprint to the ship that started it all, the SS Prinzessin Victoria Luise.This was first broadcast on November 6, 2021.
Everyday travelers are fed thousands of meals in the air and at sea. Transport food has come a long way since the first meal – a cold chicken sandwich – was served in-flight in 1919.Besha Rodell, chief dining critic at The Age, Good Food Australia and Good Weekend magazine, has eaten her way around the globe.She charts the rise and fall of transport dining, from the advent of flying and transcontinental cruises to the mass marketing of airlines today.This was first broadcast on October 15, 2022.
Celebrated fashion designer Issey Miyake died in August 2022. His creations – a mainstay of fashion curators and architects alik — paired the ancient principles of Japanese design with advances in textile design.Robyn Healy sat in the box seat during Miyake's rise. She was the NGA's inaugural curator of international fashion in the 1980s, and later became the NGV's senior curator of fashion and textiles – institutions among the first in Australia to collect Miyake's work.She now leads RMIT's school of fashion and textiles.This was first broadcast on August 20, 2022.Find more Blueprint For Living via the ABC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts.
For the dandy, looking swell is a way of life! He prides himself on wit and dress, but their influence reaches beyond fashion and intellect, as Dominic Janes discovers in his latest book British Dandies: Engendering Scandal and Fashioning a Nation. It tells a scandalous story of fashionable men and the role they played in the cultural and political life of Britain.This was first broadcast on July 2, 2022.
You'd be hard pressed to come up with a more ridiculous fashion item than the top hat. And yet, as silly fashions go, it's somehow survived for over two centuries.
In the fashion industry and the corporate world, you’d be hard-pressed to find as influential a figure as Anna Wintour.Feared, loved, loathed, and imitated in equal measures, she’s been at the helm of Vogue Magazine for longer than most Editors in Chief and is now also the Global Chief Content Officer of Condé Nast.In her latest book Anna, journalist Amy Odell charts the rise and fall, and then the extraordinary rise of the woman dubbed the ‘unofficial Mayoress of New York’.This was first broadcast on June 11, 2022.
Little boys peeing. It's a motif that repeats in neo-classical statues, bas-reliefs, and fountains the world over… officially called the Puer Mingens motif.But did it come from? Who was Puer? And why did it become the motif of choice for artisans in classical Europe?Amy Boyington, is an architectural historian who has researched the motif's opaque origins.This was first broadcast on August 20, 2022.Find more Blueprint For Living via the ABC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Letters have no gender, but that hasn't stopped our species ascribing masculine and feminine qualities to them. It's a phenomenon type designer and scholar Marie Boulanger examines in her debut book, XX XY: Sex, letters and stereotypes. She joins Blueprint For Living to tell us the origins of this habit, and why we need to be critical about type and gender. This was first broadcast on October 23, 2021.
Who was she? The namesake of the Lazy Susan remains unknown, though former US President Thomas Jefferson makes a cameo in the search. One thing is clear though, the object's been a staple of dining tables ever since its widespread adoption in 20th-century America.This was first broadcast on June 26, 2021.
Hotel designer Bill Bensley lives by the motto, if it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing. The California-born designer has studios in Bangkok and Bali, and his latest book More Escapism: Hotels, Resorts and Gardens features some of the region’s most extravagant resorts.His inspiration comes from treasures around the globe, including a 1930s Vietnamese bamboo hat, covered in pink polka dots, that provided the design spark for his Hotel de la Coupole in Vietnam.It tells a story of how the local hill tribes influenced the haute couture of Paris and includes some of his more ridiculous design ideas, including the installation of a yellow submarine in a hotel pool in Singapore which was deemed unsafe and soon after removed.
It's the happiest time of the year, and you're invited to a very special lunch with Blueprint's nearest and dearest. We'll meet you at Stonefields, the award-winning home and gardens belonging to landscape designer — and Garden Rudimental's — Paul Bangay.Call this our Very Rudimental Christmas.Start with a stroll in the gardens with Jonathan, Paul, and Tim Entwisle, director of Melbourne's Royal Botanic Gardens. They talk all things landscape architecture, from the Oak lawn to the white garden… drawing comparisons between public and private spaces.Afterward, Blueprint's resident design expert Colin Bisset does his best impression of an Antiques Roadshow dealer. Paul's secateurs and Tim's botanist's hand lens are offered up for inspection.Then it's time to meet the Kitchen Rudimental chef herself, Annie Smithers. She takes Jonathan and Paul through a tour of the veggie garden; a bounty of rhubarb, gooseberries, lettuces and broad beans. Annie gives Colin her shepherd's crook for a brief examination.Finish with a spot of lunch. Annie's put her twist on a traditional Christmas meal; sharing secrets for the perfect brined turkey breast with a flush of sage, served with a roasted garlic mayonnaise sauce.Recipes: Roast turkey with mustard mayonnaise, bacon and sageGlazed Berkshire hamBoned Chicken roast stuffed with prunes, Armagnac and applePlum pudding with Armagnac custard
Few people would look at a prehistoric pinecone and think 'delicious' but chef Justin James would. He turned that Bunya pinecone into a toffee-crowned dessert.That ability to turn fresh, local, and sometimes untested ingredients into dazzling dishes has earned him, and his Restaurant Botanic, Gourmet Traveller's Australian Restaurant of the Year.Justin investigates the relationship between Adelaide's Restaurant Botanic and the gardens that surround it; a museum of plants, trees, shrubs and flowers, and a bounty of fresh ingredients for the taking.
Lina Bo Bardi is a perfect example of how place can shape the direction of our work. She was also a rarity: a female architect making headway in the boy's club of mid-century modernism and an Italian making a mark on Brazilian design. This was first broadcast on September 11, 2021.
Loata Ho is on a mission to explain her role as an architect. Ho is Fiji's only architecturally trained Indigenous woman, and the founder of architectural practice WomenBuild.Her award-winning work is designed to help bring Fijian women into the design process, and de-mystify the role of the architect in regional communities across Fiji. Ho joins Blueprint to discuss what we can learn from pre-colonial Fijian architecture, and how design can help Fiji rapidly adapt to a changing climate.
'Architecture nullius' is the myth of a country without Indigenous architecture, but the first peoples of Australia are no strangers to architecture.This relationship is detailed in the work of Professor Paul Memmott in Gunyah Goondie + Wurley: The Aboriginal Architecture of Australia.Paul explores the range and complexity of Indigenous-designed structures and spaces, from shelters to semi-permanent houses and villages, debunking false perceptions of early Indigenous constructions and settlements.
The work of an interior designer is one of constant negotiation, with clients, budgets, taste, time — and a fair dose of the unpredictable — defining the end result.For Sydney duo Juliette Arent and Sarah-Jane Pyke, their mission is to create homes that host those small moments of whimsy and delight… without feeling like a design showroom.Now in their 15th year of practice, the duo have their debut monograph, Arent & Pyke — Interiors beyond the Primary Palette.
Oslo Davis, the award-winning illustrator and cartoonist, is a professional voyeur.He's made a career out of observing the banalities of urban life — mostly in his hometown of Melbourne — and re-interpreting them on the page. Many of these have featured in his long-running 'Overheard' series for The Age.Be it revealing conversations on the tram, curious quips in a children's bookstore, or — in Oslo's words — "delicious" deliberations in the line for movie tickets, Oslo has caught a swathe of shared intimacies that play out in public. A mix of his new and old work has been compiled in the new book, Oslo's Melbourne — Illustrated Adventures in the World's Most Tolerated City.
You might call them thumb tacks or push pins, depending on where you're from, but their essence and their useability is the same the world over.They're just another in a battery of tiny workplace heroes, always on hand to help out.
Chef Annie Smithers and Jonathan head into the kitchen to chat, cook and bake their way through the skills that will help make you a more confident home cook.In this edition, Annie takes Jonathan through the painstaking process of making Eugenies, or candied oranges encased in chocolate (yes, all seven boiling sessions).Eugenie of course, being named after the French town in which they originated — not the British princess of the same name (it's hard to google, trust us).
It's springtime at award-winning landscape designer Paul Bangay’s house… and that can only mean one thing — it’s a Buxus pruning party!
Jonathan visits Paul just in time to nip, tuck, and trim the tens of thousands of box hedges dotted across his property… and finds out why these plants have been a staple of garden design for centuries.
Find more of Paul's Garden Rudimentals on the ABC RN website.
In the early 2000s, Kate Reid thought she had it all. She made it into her dream career, working as an aeronautical engineer for Williams’ Formula 1 team in the UK. But in the space of three years, her health nosedived, and was back on a plane to Australia to heal.
As part of her recovery, Kate took a chance and booked a one-way ticket to Paris. Within days, she found herself at a dial-up internet café the size of a broom closet, working up the courage to email a Boulanger for an apprenticeship — and luckily for Kate — he said yes.
If it wasn’t for that moment, we might not have Lune — the bakery Kate created after her departure from the racetrack. Since its founding, its croissants have taken on a cult status, and now have their own cookbook, Croissants All Day, All Night.
Jonathan pays a visit to Kate’s workshop to see what all the hype is about.
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This conversation briefly touches on an eating disorder. If you, or anyone you know is experiencing body image concerns or an eating disorder, you can call the Butterfly Foundation National Helpline on 1800 33 4673, email support@butterfly.org.au or chat online.
The radiator grille is the face of a car. It's been an important design feature for over a hundred years, a defining element that helps identify the brand of vehicle while giving a hint to the car's character. But with the rising popularity of electric cars, maybe they're destined to disappear.
British architecture and art collective Assemble raised eyebrows when they were awarded the 2015 Turner Prize — the UK’s highest art accolade — for a public housing renewal in Liverpool.
Since their founding in 2010, Assemble have forged a non-traditional architecture practice, bringing a variety of makers, creatives, and locals into the business of building.
Co-founder James Binning joins Blueprint to discuss Assemble’s first Australian project, which is the design and master plan of Dairy Road, a new mixed industrial neighbourhood for Canberra.
Next week, James will be presenting free public lectures at the National Gallery of Australia, the Australian National University, and the Melbourne School of Design.
Find more Blueprint For Living via the ABC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Chef Annie Smithers and Jonathan head into the kitchen to chat, cook and bake their way through the skills that will help make you a more confident home cook.
Fancy and frivolous, but dead simple — roulades are lovely things. This one has new-season raspberries and sweet, juicy spring strawberries, bound together with lashings of cream. Rolled, sculptured, decorated and served with a flourish at the table.
Find more of Annie's past Kitchen Rudimentals here.
You can escape art, but you can never escape design. Those words belong to Tim Marlow, the director and CEO of the Design Museum — the UK's only national gallery solely dedicated to design.
Tim admits, design is an inherently nebulous field: it's everything to everyone, high and low brow, and the product of absolute ubiquity. Tim, an ex-director of the Royal Academy and White Cube Gallery, explains the challenges of defining design, and what makes design museum-worthy.
Italian-Australian artist Diego Bonetto grew up on a dairy farm in Northern Italy, where it was commonplace to forage — to reap the wild produce of the land around him.
It's a habit he continued when he moved to Australia in the 1990s, and it has recently been compiled in a new book, Eat Weeds: A field guide to foraging. Diego leads Jonathan around Sydney's Queens Park for an urban forage — identifying what weeds are and aren't safe for human consumption.
If furniture can be assigned a gender then the Chesterfield sofa is blatantly male. With its muscular rolled arms and low back, it speaks of gentlemen's clubs and colonial times and while that may appeal to some, that patriarchal quality gives the sofa an air that many dislike. Yet its popularity seems never to have waned.
Find more of Colin's iconic designs on the ABC Listen app or the Blueprint website.
In this three-part special, Lord Mayor of Sydney Clover Moore takes Jonathan on an urbanist's tour of the NSW capital.
In this tour, learn how design interventions — big and small — respond to the City of Sydney's mission to bring 'design excellence' through its dense, inner urban boundaries.
In the world of passementerie, everything is about gilding the lily. The French term is used to describe the fancy trimmings used in clothing and furnishings.
When first-time visitors arrive in the centre of Sydney, few expect to find the Cahill Expressway. It's the scar in the centre of the glittering city that many now believe shouldn't have been built. But when you look through Sydney's history books, things could've been a lot worse.
Robert Freestone has tracked the design disasters Sydney avoided, in Unrealised Sydney. a new exhibition at the Museum of Sydney that charts the chequered history of redevelopment in the harbour city.
Chef Annie Smithers and Jonathan head into the kitchen to chat, cook and bake their way through the skills that will help make you a more confident home cook.
In this edition, Annie takes over Jonathan's kitchen and reveals her inner dread of pavlova. She takes us through the United Nations of Meringue: French Meringue, Italian Meringue and Swiss Meringue. Then, she shares her perfect Meringue recipe for Pavlova.
Tourists to Paris flock to the terraces of the Trocadéro to get the perfect view of the Eiffel Tower. But a few steps away stands an equally remarkable structure, an apartment building on Rue Franklin that was completed in 1903.
Australians love living by the water, but can we continue to build walls around flood problems? Brian Cook is an Associate Professor in the School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Science at The University of Melbourne.
While he understands the desperate need for solutions, he believes our unhealthy addiction to flood levees is building our nation into the problem.
Writer and artist Vanessa Berry explores her urban space with an eye for detail, and for the other creatures who share those spaces with the human tide — the intersections of human and animal life have been catching her eye.
Architecture is one of many professions spread thin across regional Australia, with big city firms often called in to design buildings that bear little resemblance to what communities need or want.
But this is changing for the residents of the regional NSW town of Corowa. In 2017, architect Phillip Nielsen and his partner established their architecture firm, the Regional Design Service, in the centre of town.
Nielsen joins Blueprint to discuss the challenges and rewards of setting up a country practice, and how architects can help de-mystify design in places where it’s been missing in action.
Home cooking is less about perfect technique and more about being true to your home and identity.
This home cooking style is key in Rosheen Kaul and Joanna Hu’s Chinese-ish, a cookbook about exploring ‘in-authentic’ food that speaks to a mixing of cultures.
If history is the best teacher then there’s a great lesson in moderation and empathy sitting on a hillside in Pasadena, California.
Chef Annie Smithers and Jonathan head into the kitchen to chat, cook and bake their way through the skills that will help make you a more confident home cook.
For this edition, duck egg pasta is on the menu in Annie's kitchen. She takes Jonathan through the method of making pappardelle from scratch, paired with spring vegetables including broad beans, peas, asparagus tips, chervil, parsley, and tarragon.
But first, Annie must catch the egg.
Find Annie's recipe for duck egg pasta on the Blueprint For Living website.
A tower is a many-splendored thing. From the Leaning Tower of Pisa to the Space Needle in Seattle, there are few cities in the world that lack a tower that gives focus and a sense of place.
Blueprint’s resident design expert Colin Bisset believes whatever the scale, the tower provides interest, interrupting a regular roofline, always drawing the eye.
Find more of Colin's iconic designs on the ABC Listen app or the Blueprint website.
Before the microphone and the advent of amplification, performers relied on the acoustics of a room to project voice. Since early enlightenment, architects endeavoured to control sound in large interiors.
Architect and author Joseph Clarke explores the evolving relationship between architecture and acoustics in his book Echo’s Chambers: Architecture and The Idea of Acoustic Space.
In black America, McDonalds represents something more than ubiquitous fast food.
From the civil rights era onward, McDonalds — in concert with the US federal government — promoted black franchise ownership to advance African American social and economic mobility.
Marcia Chatelain has faithfully compiled these intersecting histories in Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America — a book that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for history.
A change in season means it's time to explore the array of colours Springtime has to offer.
Jonathan joins Tim Entwisle, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens of Victoria, on the blooming Oaklawn.
The male flowers hanging from the Algerian Oak have caught their eye. Plus, a look inside the Australian forest walk – an antidote to the flowering going on outside.
Two thousand years ago, the Romans were masters of the aqueduct. Many were dotted throughout their Empire and still stand; some even remain in use.
Blueprint's resident design expert Colin Bisset investigates the design history of the aqueduct — a sign of a sophisticated civilisation and a demonstration of the ingenuity of builders and engineers as they move water from source to city.
Everyday travelers are fed thousands of meals in the air and at sea. Transport food has come a long way since the first meal – a cold chicken sandwich – was served in-flight in 1919.
Besha Rodell, chief dining critic at The Age, Good Food Australia and Good Weekend magazine, has eaten her way around the globe.
She charts the rise and fall of transport dining, from the advent of flying and transcontinental cruises to the mass marketing of airlines today.
During his tenure as the Prince of Wales, the King made his distaste for contemporary architecture plain.
He railed against modernist architecture in speeches, produced a book and documentary extolling the virtues of traditional British crafts, and built the neo-Georgian village of Poundbury on his former Duchy of Cornwall estate.
Jack Self, architecture critic and editor of the Real Review joins Blueprint to discuss the King's architectural passions, and why a laundry list of starchitects once called the Prince to butt out of London's planning decisions.
Nineteen upstate reservoirs provide New Yorkers with more than four billion litres of fresh water each day.
In Nineteen Reservoirs, author Lucy Sante tracks the creation of this water system.
From its engineering brilliance to its profound human impact.
Chef Annie Smithers and Jonathan head into the kitchen to chat, cook and bake their way through the skills that will help make you a more confident home cook.
It's exciting times at Annie's farm in central Victoria — her asparagus crops are due for harvest after a two year gestation period.
Together, Jonathan and Annie explore her spring garden, complete with peonies, Cockatoo-proof shallots, and rows of hard herbs.
Find Annie's recipe for asparagus with a boiled egg and herbed crumbs on the Blueprint For Living website.
In the Central Highlands, on the northern fringe of Melbourne, ash forests as old as 400-years grow.
Mountain Ash are the focus of considerable attention; from loggers, protestors, politicians, scientists… and furniture designers.
Jonathan walks Victoria's Central Highlands with Lachlan McBurney, an Australian National University scientist and co-author of Mountain ash: Fire Logging and the Future of Victoria's Giant Forests.
The Green Man is a symbol that has cropped up in buildings for centuries but nobody really knows what he means.
Commonly used in architectural decoration, the face of a man emerges, surrounded by leaves, sometimes spewing vegetation from his mouth… But what does he symbolise exactly?
The second Elizabethan era saw a surge in the proliferation of the royal image, from the commemorative plate, tea tin, or teaspoon.
The Sydney's Powerhouse Museum is home to a vast array of these objects, from the cutlery bearing the Queen's image to the cutlery used by the Queen herself.
Powerhouse curator Anni Turnbull shares the stories these items tell us about Australian modernity, the history of industrial design and the increasing informality in our relationship with the monarchy.
Movements in design are often amplified by a single figure. Like Siegfried Bing, whose gallery in the centre of Paris gave its name to Art Nouveau.
Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria, Tim Entwisle, has put his life among the plants and gardens into a book.
Chef Annie Smithers and Jonathan head into the kitchen to chat, cook and bake their way through the skills that will help make you a more confident home cook.
You can love them or hate them — or be completely indifferent — but chances are very few of us have been able to avoid the mall.
With the recent change in the royal line of succession, there will be even greater attention paid to those at the top.
And for women in the House of Windsor, this inevitably will attract even greater scrutiny of their style: every hat, glove, broach and colour will be analysed profusely for a statement about British trade, diplomacy, or aristocratic tradition.
The New York Times's chief fashion critic Vanessa Friedman joins Jonathan to discuss what sartorial signs and symbols continue to court intrigue… and why the King and the Prince of Wales aren't subject to the same gaze.
For chef and writer Ela Mittas, food helped her find a sense of family belonging.
In her first book Ela Ela – To Turkey and Greece, Then Home she reflects on her Anglo/Greek heritage and a desire to understand her diasporic identity through food.
In Bruce Mau's ideal world, everyone recognises they are a designer.
The multi-awarded Canadian designer believes that everything is design… if you hit a moment with a particular outcome in mind, then you are a designer.
It is an ethos that has been applied to Mau's design work at varying scales… from redesigning Netflix, the public library, to the Holy City of Mecca.
He is in Australia for Sydney Design Week and stops by Blueprint to tell us how design can elevate the world around us.
Once in a while a building comes along that changes the course of architectural history.
Like the tiny little chapel – or tempietto – that's squeezed into a courtyard of a church in Rome.
It's the work of Donato Bramante and was built in the first years of the 16th century.
Colin Bisset charts how it moved architecture up a notch, leaving far behind the memory of medievalism that lingered in buildings of the time.
When Queen Elizabeth II visited Melbourne in 1954, she not only planted a tree in the grounds, but the idea that Victoria should have a Royal Botanic Gardens.
Melbourne's Royal Botanic Gardens director Tim Entwistle reflects on the gardens that surround the British royal family – from the Scottish wildness of Balmoral Castle to the parks of Windsor.
Statecraft is an act that arises away from the cameras and often happens over a good meal.
During her 70-year reign Queen Elizabeth II and her royal coterie would attend an incomprehensible amount of official state banquets, high teas, and receptions with ample catering.
Jonathan enlists the help of chef Annie Smithers to cook one of the Queen's favourite lunches: dover sole swapped for flathead with wilted spinach.
Legendary British designer Vivienne Westwood once said the Queen was the most fashionable woman in the world.
She was a monarch who needed to be "seen to be believed", and see we did — the Queen cut an instantly recognisable silhouette despite the crowded media landscape that arose during her reign.
Peter McNeil, a design historian at UTS, believes this mission was a delicate and politically sensitive one, which set out to broadcast a modern, post-imperial Britain… with the Queen as its global symbol.
There is perhaps no better way to study the language of power than through the built environment. While monarchs (and monarchies) come and go, their palaces and castles (mostly) remain.
For the House of Windsor, their buildings represent more than bricks and mortar — they're structures of state housing the symbols of state.
Blueprint's resident design expert Colin Bisset, walks us through the design history that's brought Buckingham, Balmoral, and Windsor into being.
If it wasn't for Australian architect Bill Lucas… we might not have had the Opera House as we see it today.
It was Bill who was a founding member of the group that lobbied for the international competition and jury that would go on to select Uzton's design.
He was a man who fought architectural conventions and eschewed publicity, and in recent years, his life and legacy is being re-appraised by critics and curators alike.
Bill's friends and peers Peter Longeran and Julie Cracknell join Blueprint to discuss his eccentric life… one that involved renouncing all pay for his architectural services.
There are five mother sauces; béchamel, velouté, espagnole, hollandaise, and tomato.
French chef Auguste Escoffier identified these as the beginnings from which all sauces spring. Annie Smithers leads Jonathan in a lesson through each sauce – from the richly velvet to the smooth and tangy.
Find more of Annie's past Kitchen Rudimentals here.
A world of magic at the tip of your wand. And used as important message sticks by First Nations people around the world, including Australia.
There are some things that are so familiar that we barely question them, often because we grew up with them as children. Some, like the tooth fairy, we grow out of.
Others, like the magic wand, we simply accept. Of course we know that a wand isn't magical but still, when someone produces one, we know instantly what it's supposed to do.
George Monbiot wants to turn the global food industry on its head – from radical changes in farming practices to 3D-printed steaks.
The prolific writer, environmental activist, and rewilder, explores this and more in his latest book, Regenesis.
He joins Jonathan to discuss the advancing science of soil ecology, and how the biological universe under our feet could transform what we eat and how we grow it.
Small-scale versions of most things have enchanted people for centuries, from dolls houses to Shetland ponies.
And in 1961 there was the surprisingly small motorbike called the Honda Z100.
Commonly known as the monkey bike, it was first launched on the Japanese market and became an instant global hit, cheap to run and light enough to be loaded in the back of a car.
There are more alcohol-free drinks pouring at restaurants than ever before.
Now, zero-proof pairings are the new trend in fine dining — but what is that doing to the country's restaurants?
Besha Rodell, chief restaurant critic at The Age, examines how the hospitality industry is pivoting from its reliance on alcohol mark-ups, with thoughtful combinations of non-alcoholic menus.
In this edition of Repair Rudimental, Jonathan learns how you can set yourself up for a life of needle and thread.
Jonathan joins Gaye Naismith, founder and director of The Gaye Abandon School of Sewing and Upcycling, for a lesson in the art of stitching.
It's a step-by-step guide in creating a running stitch, and a lesson in mindfulness and concentration.
Curt Beech, the Emmy-nominated production designer on the hit show Only Murders in the Building, creates a complete reality for the characters he is designing for, based on the thinnest of clues.
His notebook isn't full of pretty pictures, but writings, drawn from the smallest of ideas hidden in the show's script.
It's these ideas that lead to the design decisions that so boldly colour the homes of main characters Charles (Steve Martin), Oliver (Martin Short) and Mabel (Selena Gomez).
Chef Annie Smithers and Jonathan head into the kitchen to chat, cook and bake their way through the skills that will help make you a more confident home cook.
In this edition of Kitchen Rudimental, Annie and Jonathan tackle an Australian classic: jam lamingtons.
According to Annie, the key to a perfect lamington is to freeze the sponge, before dunking it into the icing and desiccated coconut.
Find more of Annie's past Kitchen Rudimentals here.
Little boys peeing. It's a motif that repeats in neo-classical statues, bas-reliefs, and fountains the world over… officially called the Puer Mingens motif.
But did it come from? Who was Puer? And why did it become the motif of choice for artisans in classical Europe?
Amy Boyington, is an architectural historian who has researched the motif's opaque origins.
Find more Blueprint For Living via the ABC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Tributes continue to flow since the passing of the celebrated fashion designer Issey Miyake.
Robyn Healy sat in the box seat during Miyake's rise. She was the NGA's inaugural curator of international fashion in the 1980s, and later became the NGV's senior curator of fashion and textiles – institutions among the first in Australia to collect Miyake's work.
She now leads RMIT's school of fashion and textiles.
Find more Blueprint For Living via the ABC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 1754, a quiet revolution took place when Thomas Chippendale released a book of designs called 'The Gentleman and Cabinet Maker's Director'.
It had 160 illustrations of all kinds of furniture, from a basic clothes press to a book cabinet elaborately inlaid and decorated. The designs followed the fashions of the time, everything from Gothic to Chinese, including a fanciful Rococo style he called Modern.
Find more of Colin's iconic designs on the ABC Listen app or the Blueprint website.
Forests are places of otherness. Which is why they've long been used for human rituals of all kinds.
Like the weddings that take place in Thorncrown Chapel, a magical structure nestled among the trees of the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas.
It's a building so attuned to its leafy setting that you might dismiss it as almost glib.
And yet, since it opened in 1980, it's proved to be one of America's most popular, and even important buildings.
Find more of Colin's iconic designs on the ABC Listen app or the Blueprint website.
In many of Australia's oldest towns and cities, some canopies are reaching the end of their lives, prompting new discussions about what trees might come to define place in the decades, even centuries, to come.
Right now, researchers, councils and developers are all having to think about what trees, planted today, will survive a much warmer climate.
Jonathan explores this with Michelle Leishman, the lead researcher of the Which Plant Where project.
Find more Blueprint For Living via the ABC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Lawns are completely changing. The mown lawn down to a millimeter, and a big monoculture is largely disappearing from our plots and gardens.
Paul offers Jonathan lawn substitutes: from gravel to plants and garden beds.
Could this be the death of backyard cricket?
Find more of Paul's Garden Rudimentals on the ABC Listen app or the Blueprint website.
Sydney's Powerhouse Museum is entering the final weeks of its Eucalyptusdom exhibition — a show that explores the cultural relationship Australia has to the Eucalypt.
It's a species that has been on this continent for millions of years — and in the time that humans have co-existed alongside it — Eucalypts have become more than just trees.
They've become sites of resistance, national mythology, and even the genesis for museums like the Powerhouse.
Eucalyptusdom artist-in-residence Agatha Gothe-Snape and curator Sarah Rees join Jonathan.
Find more Blueprint For Living via the ABC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Architecture is a man's profession. That's what a young African American girl in Harlem, New York, grew up thinking. But Norma Merrick Sklarek would soon prove she could be a top-tier architect and in doing so, would become a pioneering figure in the history of American architecture.
In Melbourne, Robin Boyd's first home went under the hammer for the first time in 50 years ending a decade-long battle between its owners and Heritage Victoria. So, what is the role of property owners — and what onus is placed on them — when purchasing a heritage home? James Lesh, urban historian and Lecturer in Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies at Deakin University in Melbourne, joins Blueprint to discuss.
One chef, one cook, one home kitchen, and many ways to make a Lamington… it's time to get your sponge on.
When was the last time you used taste, smell, sound or touch as a way to explore the place around you?
If so, you might be already be aware of the burgeoning field of sensory urbanism —a practice that aims to amplify senses other than sight when discovering our cities and towns.
David Howes, a co-director of Montreal's Concordia University's Centre for Sensory Studies and author of The Sensory Studies Manifesto, joins Jonathan to reveal his multi-sensory discoveries.
This conversation forms part of the ABC's inaugural Arts Week, celebrating creativity right across the ABC, with a weekend filled with books and authors, deep dives with some of our best-known artists, thought-provoking talks, and tributes to everyday artists.
Mention streamlining and you might think of the Art Deco period with architecture like the exuberant Chrysler Building piercing the sky above Manhattan. Streamlining seems to sum up the modern age, being all about movement, speed and light. Colin Bisset explores its life in design.
The National Library of Australia has tapped into the handmade revolution. While digitising newspapers over a decade ago, they came to learn that vintage knitting patterns were among the most popular online searches. The result is Vintage Knits, published by The National Library of Australia, featuring 25 knitting patterns from the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Kathryn Favelle, Director of Reader Services at the National Library, shares the work of an intimate chain of knitters, who were part of adapting the vintage patterns for today.
Paul Mangan, Associate Professor in urban and regional planning at the University of Western Australia is the co-editor of Suburbia in the 21st Century: From Dreamscape to Nightmare? He explores the evolving character of the suburbs along with two of the book's contributors, Carol Bosman, Head of Architecture, Planning and Design at Griffith University, and Elizabeth Taylor, Senior Lecturer in urban planning and design at Monash University.
This 267-year-old botanic garden in the heart in Madrid became part of a World Heritage listing in 2021. It displays plants from all over the world, in formal garden beds dating back to the 18th century as well as in specially designed glasshouses. Dr Esteban Manrique, Director of Real Jardín Botánique talks to Tim Entwisle about the garden’s history, its aspirations and some of its more interesting collections.
Every signature is special. Just ask any autograph collector. It's why the instruments that are used to sign anything from swooning love letters to historic presidential decrees are so cherished. A fountain pen has an old-fashioned quality that conveys gravitas and even decency, in a way that the undiscriminating ballpoint pen can never possess. Colin Bisset explores its design history.
To be able to repair something, rather than replace it, puts a fork in the endless road of consumption. But hand sewing is a skill not one everyone has in 2022. Jonathan joins Gaye Naismith, founder and director of The Gaye Abandon School of Sewing and Upcycling, for an introduction to the world of mending. They begin with an essential starter kit: needles, beeswax, buttons, and cloth. Making clothes is but a dream for Jonathan just now, so we begin with learning how to wrangle a needle and thread.
Menus have evolved greatly over the last few centuries. They reflect a restaurant's location, culinary trends and of course the availability of ingredients. Now, scientists are studying 130-year-old seafood restaurant menus in Vancouver, to uncover how climate change is impacting the food making it to diners' plates. Ian Rose is a writer based outside Portland, Oregon. He's charted this study, which sought help from city hall, historical societies, and local museums, to uncover the link between restaurant menus and our warming seas.
Two years ago, urban planning and housing experts told us Australia had a shortage of 430,000 social and public housing dwellings. Within 20 years that shortage will be somewhere between 730,000 and one-million dwellings. Increasing the simple supply of affordable housing is crucial, but it's more complicated than numbers. What does it take to design good public and social housing? And what exactly does that good design look like? Director of MGS Architects Rob McGauran joins Cr Bill Harvey from Hobart City Council, and Carly, who lives in social housing in Melbourne's inner-west, to explore the key ingredients needed to deliver good social and public housing design.
Nearly a hundred years ago it wasn't an induction cooktop that made your kitchen look bang up to date but a pedal bin. Invented by Lillian Gilbreth in the 1920s, it was the result of a new and very twentieth-century preoccupation – the study of time and motion. A pedal bin could save precious minutes in the kitchen. It was emblematic of the emerging interest in efficiency in the early twentieth century, a time when architects wanted houses to work like machines and Henry Ford introduced the production line to the factory floor.
Have you ever wondered what to do with your puff pastry scraps?
Annie has the answers – it's called a rough puff! Plus, she takes you on a step-by-step journey in assembling a vol-au-vent.
While the natural world paints its own picture, the colours we choose in the spaces we live, and work are deeply personal. From burnt orange to mission brown, when it comes to colour trends for the home historian of architectural paint Patrick Baty has seen them all. He's advised on paint colour for Buckingham Palace, Hampton Court Palace, Tower Bridge, 10 Downing Street, and even BBC's Broadcasting House. He has written two books on the range and history of colour, Nature's Palette and Anatomy of Colour and The Story of Heritage Paints & Pigments.
Jonathan takes you on an adventure through the breathtaking landscape of the National Arboretum. He is joined by Scott Sadler, Executive Branch Manager of the National Arboretum Canberra and Stromlo Forest Park, as they explore the 250-hectare site's beauty, rich history and scientific importance. Plus, Scott shares the inspiring story of coming back from devastating fires to create a unique, ever-changing garden.
For many of us, the rotary clothes hoist is as Australian as a kookaburra, even given a starring role in the Sydney Olympics closing ceremony, and so it is natural to assume that it's an Australian invention. In fact, it's difficult to pinpoint exactly who created it. Blueprint's resident architecture and design commentator Colin Bisset explores its many variations.
We take a hike through Bundian Way, an ancient Aboriginal track that runs between Mt Kosciuszko and the NSW town of Eden. Stretching 365 kilometres, it has been used by Aboriginal people for thousands of years. Chair of Eden Local Aboriginal Land Council BJ Cruse shares stories from the ancient pathway that runs from the sea to the mountains and was almost lost to history.
A change in season means it's time to explore the array of colours the cooler months have to offer. Jonathan joins Tim Entwisle, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens of Victoria, as they take a moment for reflection and appreciate the different perspectives the rainy garden has to offer. Even the sun-loving succulents thrive in the wetter months. Plus, some bird watching across the lake.
If you were paying close attention to Vivid Sydney just now you might have caught mention of something called the Blak Hand Collective. A forming idea that connects indigenous architects, interior designers, landscape designers and beyond. Award-winning architect and a man of Wailwan and Kamilaroi country Jefa Greenaway is one of the people behind the idea along with Wiradjuri architect Craig Kerslake. It's a wonderful and rich set of possibilities for connecting ideas of design, identity, and place.
The Great Bed of Ware was intended to wow. And who among us doesn’t feel excited by the prospect of sleeping in any four-poster bed, even one that is half the width? Blueprint's resident design expert Colin Bisset explores their influence as symbols of romance and intimacy, majesty, and class.
One chef, one cook, one home kitchen.
This week on Kitchen Rudimental, Annie gives Jonathan a puff pastry masterclass. Layers of dough and butter – butter and dough - form a gorgeous silky texture – if you can get it just right! It’s a beautiful process that’s perfect for a Saturday afternoon.
Regular listeners might remember a conversation Jonathan had with Blueprint friend Annie Smithers on the controversial subject of his preference for cold toast. For him, it all goes back to the motels of the mid-sixties and little wax paper envelopes of white toast delivered through the breakfast hatch. If you're an Australian of a certain age or perhaps even a mid-century obsessed hipster, you'll love the country's motels. Author, broadcaster, and architecture nerd Tim Ross sure does. He's been working on a new exhibition at Canberra's National Archives, Reception this way: Motels – a sentimental journey.
For the dandy, looking swell is a way of life! He prides himself on wit and dress, but their influence reaches beyond fashion and intellect, as Dominic Janes discovers in his latest book British Dandies: Engendering Scandal and Fashioning a Nation. It tells a scandalous story of fashionable men and the role they played in the cultural and political life of Britain.
Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier are considered titans of the modern movement but in this week's Iconic Designs, Colin Bisset examines the contribution that women made to some of their most famous designs. It’s only been recently acknowledged that Lilly Reich was behind much of Mies’s furniture, and Charlotte Perriand behind all of Le Corbusier’s.
In this week's Garden Rudimental, Paul and Jonathan stroll through Stonefields, one of Victoria's most beautiful country gardens where exotics and native plants merge to create a definitive style of Australian garden..
Cookbooks aren't just a bunch of recipes. They often contain insights into the political and cultural contexts of their time. Never was there a better example of this than Australia's oldest continuous community cookbook, The Barossa Cookery Book. Initially released in 1917 as a war fundraiser it's now in its 33rd edition. Sheralee Menz and Marieka Ashmore, also known as Those Barossa Girls, have begun a companion venture with The Barossa Cookery Book Project.
Hotel designer Bill Bensley lives by the motto, if it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing. The California-born designer has studios in Bangkok and Bali, and his latest book More Escapism: Hotels, Resorts and Gardens features some of the region’s most extravagant resorts. His inspiration comes from treasures around the globe, including a 1930s Vietnamese bamboo hat, covered in pink polka dots, that provided the design spark for his Hotel de la Coupole in Vietnam. It tells a story of how the local hill tribes influenced the haute couture of Paris and includes some of his more ridiculous design ideas, including the installation of a yellow submarine in a hotel pool in Singapore which was deemed unsafe and soon after removed.
One chef, one cook, one home kitchen. There's nothing that quite beats the decadent crunch and taste of a freshly deep-fried potato cake (or scallop).
How do you design a building to house a nation's cultural and social history? The new home of the Australian National Archives has been purpose built for this extremely demanding role.
With enough shelving to stretch from Canberra to Cooma the purpose-built facility is environmentally controlled, environmentally friendly and energy-efficient. Jonathan Green takes a stroll through its corridors with Sean Debenham, Assistant Director Storage and Lending to check out what’s in there.
Nature-based design is becoming imperative as we search for ways to reduce our carbon emissions. Claire Beale, Executive Manager at LCI Melbourne, takes us through the Three Bs of organic design; biomorphic, biomimetic and biophilic.
Toilet, loo, powder room, the toot; no matter what you call it you use it everyday. In this week's Iconic Designs Colin Bisset casts his eye over the design evolution of the public toilet.
Ever traced your family history? Now you can do the same with your home. Dr Christine Whybrew of Heritage NZ has started giving How to Research Your House seminars so folks can uncover the history of their house.
In the fashion industry and the corporate world, you’d be hard-pressed to find as influential a figure as Anna Wintour.Journalist Amy Odell discusses her biography of the fashion industry's most powerful influencer.
Via their Instagram page Design.Emergency Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli have brought designers together to tackle some of the worlds intractable problems.
Imagine the architect of your new house insisting that you build it in a style that was fashionable six hundred years ago. That's precisely what was happening in nineteenth-century Britain in what was called the Battle of the Styles. It's hard to imagine that anyone who walked past Tower House in London's Holland Park ever thought it was entirely normal, even in the 1870s when it was built. It's the work of William Burges, an architect whose output was small but significant, and it represents a high point in the Gothic Revival.
One chef, one cook, one home kitchen, and one potato. In this edition of Kitchen Rudimental, Annie and Jonathan are back on potatoes learning how to master a Potato Terrine with Gruyère. Find the full recipe on the Blueprint For Living website.
Herbariums are more than places to store old plants and seeds for posterity. They're critical to understanding how plants evolve and adapt to new conditions which will be essential in our fight to save species under threat from climate change.
Denise Ora, Chief Executive of the Royal Botanic Gardens and Domain Trust, and Brett Summerell, Director Research and Chief Botanist, join Tim Entwisle for an amble through the new facility.
The world's greatest cities have a few things in common. Architecture, art, culture, night life, and .... a really good food and restaurant critic?
Besha Rodell, the recently appointed Chief Restaurant Critic for The Age and Good Weekend discusses the role of a great food writer and why she prefers to remain anonymous.
The best way to buy food is undoubtedly fresh from the farm but it's hard to imagine our lives without the convenience of tinned and frozen foods. And, of course, those that come in a Tetra-pak. It's the cardboard container that's more complicated than that sounds, and which revolutionised the transport and sales of everything from milk and fruit juice to soups and even wine. It's so much part of our kitchen landscape that it's easy to forget just how ground-breaking it was when it first appeared.
Growing Farmers is a new Melbourne-based initiative is seeking to sow seeds for change by turning unused back yards into small scale urban farms.
They pair trainee urban farmers with residents who want to turn their empty yards into flourishing, small-scale market gardens.
Recently, Jonathan met host Sapphire McMullan-Fisher at her farm in Melbourne's outer-north, along with Growing Farmers' president Alice Crowe.
We're all familiar with the grand mansions that dot the British Isles. At their height, they hosted hundreds of staff serving their aristocratic, industrialist (and slave-owning) inhabitants.
Today, these buildings are more likely to host film and tv crews or tour groups. This is a marked contrast to their teetering fate by the end of the Second World War, with many left in ruins, sold off, or simply demolished as aristocratic families fought over the scraps of empire.
But many others did survive and bounced back with gusto. Adrian Tinniswood joins Blueprint to tell this tale. He's the convenor of Buckingham University's Country House Studies program, and is author of Noble Ambitions: The Fall and Rise of the Post-War Country House.
We see Indigenous art and motifs used extensively in Australian tourism marketing campaigns but do Indigenous communities and businesses benefit from this branding? Anne Poelina — a Nyikina Warrwa woman from the Mardoowarra River in Western Australia's Kimberley region — is on a mission to make sure they do.
As Australians make their way to the polls this Saturday, in-house design guru Colin Bisset leans into the election, democracy sausage in hand, and takes us through the design history of the voting booth. Surprisingly, the idea of voting in private is an Australian one, first used in Victoria in 1856, and later adopted by the British and Americans. But how has it evolved since?
It's that time of year for preserving pickles, jams and chutneys, and Kylee Newton is a master at it. She's also the author of Modern Preserves and calls herself a saint of produce, giving fruit and vegetables another life through her time capsules in jars. She shares ideas on how to use up that glut of keeps, that won’t involve toast or crumpets.
It's time to dig, mulch and prune with Australia's award-winning landscape designer Paul Bangay. In this edition, Paul throws formality to the wind as he takes Jonathan through The Woodland, where geometry and grids give way to the freedom of wilding. For those of us with smaller green spaces Paul and Jonathan muse on whether you can rewild an urban courtyard.
To truly get to know a place, is to smell it, so what did the ancient cities of Rome, Athens, and Thebes smell like? Barbara Huber is an archaeologist at Germany's Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. She's on a mission to advance the science of olfactory archaeology so we can better understand how ancient peoples navigated and interpreted their world.
Master Kong, or Confucius as most of us know him, died over two and a half thousand years ago but the venerable sage's impact on Chinese life was immense and long-lasting. While we can't view the actual rooms in which he lived and worked, it's still possible to visit the home of his descendants in the pleasant town of Qufu in Shandong province.
It's 50 years since the glorious Lake Pedder in Southwest Tasmania was dammed for the Hydro-Electric Scheme.
It was a glacial, alpine lake, a place of deep and obvious ecological significance. Rima Truchanas learned to swim in Lake Pedder and watched on with her family as it drowned.
Her early life was shaped by her parent's involvement in the campaign to save it.
Now, there are plans to restore the Lake to its former glory. Frances Green has produced a documentary for RN's History Listen about this campaign — a movement that spearheaded the Greens political movement in Australia.
It's a perfect Autumn Day to go for a walk through Melbourne's Royal Botanic Gardens with its director Tim Entwisle.
Australia is a country of so many climates, but for those who have the distinction of seasons, Autumn is a glorious time of year in the garden — also known in the Kulin Nation seasons as the Wombat time of year.
We ask philosophical questions about flowers; if you're a Tibetan, why do you choose now to bloom? And Jonathan discovers a new pocket of the garden: the compost yard.
One chef, one cook, one home kitchen. In this instalment of Kitchen Rudimental, chef Annie Smithers and Jonathan head into the kitchen for a meditation on spuds. Annie digs into her home-grown stash hiding in bags, tyres and barrels.
A white picket fence might seem as genteel as tea at the Ritz but actually it's a fiendish thing loaded with meaning, the Jekyll and Hyde of the streetscape. You only have to look back at the genesis of its name — from the French piquet, meaning the pointed stakes that would be erected around archers back in the middle ages to protect them as they went about their business of killing people. The plain wooden fence has been around for much longer, of course, but who decided to make something prettier?
From the floods in NSW and Queensland to the war and destruction in Ukraine, there's a lot of building and rebuilding to do.
'Build back better' was a phrase bandied about during the initial phase of the pandemic but according to humanitarian architect Esther Charlesworth, it barely scratches the surface of what is required.
With each disaster we often see a similar cycle: a surge of good intentions, an initial flurry of activity… but how often does what ends up being constructed actually suit what the people want and need?
Jonathan makes the trip to Mallacoota in far-eastern Victoria, land of the Gunai Kurnai people, to visit writer, historian, and Dark Emu author Bruce Pascoe.
During a wander around the farm, they discuss native crops and grasses, food sustainability and farming and ducks.
Surely no one is fooled by a posh name given to something ordinary. Like the Reliant Regal, which was certainly the last vehicle you'd connect to royalty. This was a very basic car that was cheap to buy, thanks to its lack of a fourth wheel, meaning it was taxed as a motorbike not a car. And while car buffs might be sniffy about the vehicle, it was, in its way, actually quite significant and a mark of a company that liked to defy convention.
Surely no one is fooled by a posh name given to something ordinary. Like the Reliant Regal, which was certainly the last vehicle you'd connect to royalty. This was a very basic car that was cheap to buy, thanks to its lack of a fourth wheel, meaning it was taxed as a motorbike not a car. And while car buffs might be sniffy about the vehicle, it was, in its way, actually quite significant and a mark of a company that liked to defy convention.
It's an image that sticks with you. A group of five men, rugged up …beanies and gloves … to move a life-sized statue of Jesus Christ, arms outstretched in crucifixion, into an underground bunker.
The photo was taken at the Armenian Cathedral in Lviv, in Ukraine's west … and it's one of many examples where people have risked their lives to protect the country's rich cultural heritage, whether it be classical statues, religious figures, or entire buildings.
Freelance journalist Evan Rail recently detailed the breath of this destruction — and the complexities of discussing heritage protection amid grave human suffering — for the New York Times.
It's an image that sticks with you. A group of five men, rugged up …beanies and gloves … to move a life-sized statue of Jesus Christ, arms outstretched in crucifixion, into an underground bunker.
The photo was taken at the Armenian Cathedral in Lviv, in Ukraine's west … and it's one of many examples where people have risked their lives to protect the country's rich cultural heritage, whether it be classical statues, religious figures, or entire buildings.
Freelance journalist Evan Rail recently detailed the breath of this destruction — and the complexities of discussing heritage protection amid grave human suffering — for the New York Times.
It's time to dig, mulch and prune with Australia's award-winning landscape designer Paul Bangay. He's here to take you through the basics and give you the skills to become a confident gardener. In the next edition of Garden Rudimental, Paul reveals his adoration for Vita Sackville West.
While she's best known for her writing, her Bloomsbury Group membership, and her enduring partnership with Virginia Woolf, Sackville-West was also a passionate green thumb.
It's time to dig, mulch and prune with Australia's award-winning landscape designer Paul Bangay. He's here to take you through the basics and give you the skills to become a confident gardener. In the next edition of Garden Rudimental, Paul reveals his adoration for Vita Sackville West.
While she's best known for her writing, her Bloomsbury Group membership, and her enduring partnership with Virginia Woolf, Sackville-West was also a passionate green thumb.
Is there a certain dish, a certain food that triggers your sense memory and takes you right back to a time in your childhood? Or perhaps it is a time of year, when the seasons change… the heat of summer ushered out by cooler air and the browning of leaves?
For Katherine Tamiko Arguile, both these things connect her to her heritage, her sense of family and the world around her.
Is there a certain dish, a certain food that triggers your sense memory and takes you right back to a time in your childhood? Or perhaps it is a time of year, when the seasons change… the heat of summer ushered out by cooler air and the browning of leaves?
For Katherine Tamiko Arguile, both these things connect her to her heritage, her sense of family and the world around her.
Penury is often the mother of invention. Just look at the inventor of the dishwasher, Josephine Cochrane.
This was first broadcast on July 22, 2021.
Letters have no gender, but that hasn't stopped our species ascribing masculine and feminine qualities to them. It's a phenomenon type designer and scholar Marie Boulanger examines in her debut book, XX XY: Sex, letters and stereotypes. She joins Blueprint For Living to tell us the origins of this habit, and why we need to be critical about type and gender.
This was first broadcast on October 23, 2021.
The way we farm is changing and calls for intensification of agricultural production to feed a growing population are mounting. Pesticides are common practice everywhere, and the impact on our food system is rather alarming — with a mass decline in the insect population being but one symptom of this hyper-efficient farming.
So how do we feed ourselves sustainably? Ecologist Francisco Sanchez-Bayo has some answers.
This was first broadcast on February 23, 2019.
The fact of the matter is we live in co-existence with our environment: our cities, our neighbourhood, animals, trees and plants… as well as our ex-lovers, however many billion corpses and the world's garbage and excrement. In the age of the Anthropocene, ecological collapse, and a pandemic what does it mean to be 'all in this together', especially when there's no getting out of it?
Timothy Morton, a Texan-based philosopher and Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University, joins Blueprint For Living to help us with these questions and introduce us to the idea of the 'hyper-object'.
This was first broadcast on July 17, 2021.
Lina Bo Bardi is a perfect example of how place can shape the direction of our work. She was also a rarity: a female architect making headway in the boy's club of mid-century modernism and an Italian making a mark on Brazilian design.
This was first broadcast on September 11, 2021.
If you wore the likes of Country Road or Bonds in the '90s, chances are they were made by Vietnamese-Australian outworkers. Journalist and illustrator duo Emma Do and Kim Lam have shone a new light on this lesser-known story of Australian manufacturing in a new book titled Working From Home or May ở Nhà.
This was first broadcast on May 22, 2021.
Amid urban conflicts, how can architecture be used to investigate and expose state violence, human rights violations? To answer this question, you'll want to get to know the team behind Forensic Architecture. They're a research collective using architectural analysis, open-source investigations, digital modelling — alongside traditional investigative methods — to trace the residue of conflict in our built environment.
Its founder, Eyal Weizman, joins Blueprint for Living to introduce this practice, and how his work stretches from the world's premier art galleries to the halls of the International Criminal Court.
This was first aired on August 26, 2017.
We live in an era of near-frictionless design, where incredibly complex pieces of technology — like the smartphone — rarely require an instruction manual. For this we have to thank the world of user-experience, or UX design — a design practice that governs the shape, tactility, look, and understanding of the objects of everyday life.
Cliff Kuang is someone who's spent a lot of time thinking about the history and ethics of this field, which recently culminated in the book, User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design are Changing the Way We Live, Work & Play. He joins Blueprint to give us a brief introduction to the world of UX, and why we should all be a lot more critical about what makes design 'friendly'.
This was first broadcast on November 27, 2021.
Mention the name César Pelli and you can almost predict the sort of building you might see — shiny, sleek, and tall. Usually very tall. For decades, Pelli has been a byword for skyscrapers, and was even awarded a Lifetime Achievement by the Council of Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. When he died in 2019, his practice had completed over a hundred major projects, many of them dominating the skyline of the major cities of the world. And while they are hard to fault, they can sometimes be hard to love. But does that matter?
Cities have been described in many ways. They've been compared to bustling ants' nests and trees, and likened to computers with complex networks of intersecting technologies. But Shannon Mattern, a social anthropologist at New York's New School for Social Research thinks we should be wary of the city-as-computer. Her new book, A City is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences, argues that cities are inherently messy creations — home to things, places and people who are allowed to not compute.
Chef Annie Smithers and Jonathan head into the kitchen to chat, cook and bake their way through the skills that will help make you a more confident home cook. This week on Kitchen Rudimental, Annie and Jonathan take on the battle of the hot cross buns. Hot or cold? Crunchy or mushy? Chocolate or fruity? Tune in and rid yourself of this cross to bear.
It's time to turn a new leaf, because the Southern Hemisphere's biggest horticultural spectacular returned for another year… after a two-year pandemic pause. Tim Entwisle, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens of Victoria, takes us on a tour through the show grounds, which includes a stroll through a garden co-designed by tennis champion and current Australian of the Year, Dylan Alcott.
While many visitors to Japan might get a crick in their neck gazing up at towering pagodas and Tori gates, there’s one item that is much more down-to-earth but equally unmissable: manhole covers, or manhorukaba.
The Urban Design Forum are a group of Australian urban designers who want to put the public back into public space. Their mission? To strengthen a national voice in urban design and show it's more than just making pretty squares and planting street trees.
With another film awards season done and dusted for another year — and while we recover from that slap — design historian Jess Berry is here to walk us through the symbiotic relationship between film, fashion, interior design and architecture.
Since the dawn of cinema, films have given designers the chance to market their wares, while design has given filmmakers opportunities to propel their plots forward… or at least make value judgements about certain kinds of design.
Dr Berry explores all of this and more in her new book, Cinematic Style: Fashion, Architecture and Interior Design on Film.
He's a six-foot-seven lover of "spoofs and goofs, food, wine and cats" whose latest book comes with a glowing testimonial from Jack Black. You may also know comedian Eric Wareheim from the duo, Tim & Eric.
His debut cookbook, FOODHEIM: A culinary adventure is now on the New York Times-best seller list. Ahead of his banquet at the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival, Eric stopped by Blueprint to introduce us to the "Complete Heimy Experience".
Just as there's always a debate about whether gelato is superior to ice cream, the means of serving either is open to argument.
While there's nothing wrong with using a simple spoon, at least two people thought they had a better way of doing it.
If you've ever dabbled in the cuisine of China's Sichuan province, you'll likely be familiar with "the chilli burn". As one of the world's leading experts in the region's cuisine, Fuchsia Dunlop knows it well.
It's time to dig, mulch and prune with Australia's award-winning landscape designer Paul Bangay. He's here to take you through the basics and give you the skills to become a confident gardener. For this edition, Paul's taking Jonathan through the basics of using water in landscape design.
While the term 'riverkeeper' might conjure something out a Grimm brothers' fable, there aren't any trolls or fairies to be found here. Instead, what we've got are a global network of excitable nerds passionate about their local waterways.
In Melbourne, there has been a recent changing of the guard, with Charlotte Sterrett becoming the Yarra/Birrarung's third riverkeeper in January. It's time to meet Charlotte… on the river.
Eleanor Coade was a woman ahead of her time. Not only did she run an extremely successful business in 18th-century London but she helped develop an outstanding artificial stone known as Coadestone. It wasn't the first but it was the best.
We now live in a world where we can walk in one city and scroll in another simultaneously. There are almost 300 million people who consume Kim Kardashian's version of Los Angeles daily. So what is this new paradigm doing to our relationships with cities… both on and off screen? Louis Nuccitelli, who wrote an award-winning Masters' thesis on this very topic, joins Blueprint to take us beyond the selfie.
How much should a street bin cost... and can a bin do more than simply collect trash? These questions have been rolling around San Francisco ever since 2018, when the city embarked upon a quest to find the perfect street bin. In that time, garbage has continued to pile up, FBI arrests have been made, and all up, taxpayers have been charged almost $580,000 for 15 prototypes… So how did bins get so complicated? Lydia Chavez, San Francisco local and emeritus professor at the Berkley Graduate School of Journalism, joins Blueprint to walk you through the ups and downs of this curious Californian story.
It starts conventionally enough – a solid masonry base facing a narrow street in the centre of the city, classically detailed with columns and porticos, but as it moves upward, it becomes odder, with an almost excessive run of columns around a tower that is then topped by a strange, elongated dome like a simplified version of Brunelleschi's great dome in Florence.
What is it about a dark alley, or an underpass at midnight that triggers a fight or flight mode?
When journalist Alexander Sammon read about the violence happening on the floors of Romania’s old growth forests, he was compelled to see it for himself. Why were environmentalists and filmmakers being targeted by loggers?
The organisers of the Chicago World Columbian Exposition of 1893 wanted something that would capture the world's attention in the way the Eiffel Tower had at the last World Fair of 1889. George W Ferris, a civil engineer, proposed a giant revolving wheel.
One chef, one cook, one home kitchen. In the latest edition of Kitchen Rudimental, Annie and Jonathan count all the ways one can address an abundance of tomatoes, starting with a classic tomato sauce.
Arterial roads lead to the heart of a city, parks are a city's lungs; as for it's bowels… let's not go there. But why do we continue to speak of the city in bodily terms? Marco Amati, author of The City and the Super-Organism: A History of Naturalism in Urban Planning, joins Blueprint to flesh out some answers.
What began as a bunch of friends with a shared cause and $50 in a bank account, has blossomed into the Tasmanian Land Conservancy, an organisation that has facilitated the purchase, conservation and management of millions of dollars of private land. Tasmanian Land Conservancy CEO James Hattam, and Jane Rawson — writer and editor of the new book, Breathing Space: Essays, Stories and Poems on Tasmania's Changing Relationship with Nature — join Blueprint as the conservancy celebrates its 21st birthday this year.
Who would have thought that railway safety would lead to a measuring jug, an item as common in kitchens as a wooden spoon? But that’s the story of Pyrex.
Stringy bark, coral gum, Silver top ash, lemon-scented gum… with over 900 different species, it's hard to pick a favourite.
It's time to dig, mulch and prune with Australia's award-winning landscape designer Paul Bangay. He's here to take you through the basics and give you the skills to become a confident gardener.
For Angela, food has been the starting point for many different projects examining politics, culture, ephemerality and a culinary kind of theatre. Her most recent project is a debut cookbook titled, Filipinx: Heritage Dishes from the Diaspora, co-written with New York Times food writer Ligaya Mishan.
With its ridges of soft, tufted cotton woven onto a cheaper base cloth, it combined softness and warmth with strength, making it comfortable to wear and popular with farmers and factory workers alike. It even had a kind of utilitarian chic when used by the Women's Land Army in the First World War, which saw women working in agriculture across Britain, filling the gap left by farm hands enlisted to fight abroad.
Writer and horticultural historian Judith M Taylor has written a book building on the late feminist historian Susan Groag Bell's unfinished work, which explores women's roles as gardeners and founders of horticultural schools.
Living With Country brings together a range of Indigenous Australians to reflect on land management and our built environment. In this edition, hear from Ballardong Noongar writer and former urban planning scholar, Timmah Ball on the complexities of seeing Country in a discipline charged with parcelling up, packaging and selling.
The Tolix captures a moment of French design, a chair that echoes both the functionality and cleverness of the Citroen 2CV.
The house's cathedral ceilings and soaring acoustics are perfect for baroque music concerts, according to harpsichordist Peter Hagen.
His work was an exercise in the fantastical, the kind of creative imagination that could team a sense of baroque grandeur with a biker gang aesthetic, or put the the cyborg into Cleopatra. Fashion director and chief fashion critic of the New York Times Vanessa Friedman joins Blueprint to discuss immense impact of Mugler's work.
The pandemic has changed the utility of our central business districts; working from home means there's no need to commute, let alone have an office. So how might we adapt our cities to allow us to thrive? Dan Hill is director of strategic design at Vinnova, the Swedish government's innovation agency, and an Adjunct Professor at RMIT University. He has spent some years living in Australia and says a refocus and investment in our suburbs could be the answer.
You may not expect beauty in these brutalist marvels but at La Tourette beauty is bountiful in every purposeful step.
Over 120 years ago, Hinemihi, one of the Maori's oldest existing meeting houses was taken from her home in Te Wairoa, Aotearoa-New Zealand. After years of negotiation, there has now been a breakthrough in the effort to bring her home from her current location in the gardens of an English country house. Architect Anthony Hoete lead the negotiations and joins Blueprint to explain the significance of Hinemihi and the role of wharenui (meeting houses) in Maori culture and life.
One chef, one cook, one home kitchen, and one big question: What makes a salad, a salad?
Following his death in January he's been described as many things — trailblazer, genius, iconic force — but there's one label which is perhaps most apt. The Only One, coined by New Yorker critic Hilton Als in the 1990s, because for many years André Leon Talley was the only Black man in a very white industry. Pulitzer Prize winning fashion writer for the Washington Post Robin Givhan discusses the legacy of Talley and why there'll never be another like him.
You'd be hard pressed to come up with a more ridiculous fashion item than the top hat. And yet, as silly fashions go, it's somehow survived for over two centuries.
Den Barber, a Wiradjuri man, ex-fire-fighter and park ranger, says it's time we reframed our fears about fire. While life in Australia often means watching unsettling bushfires roll out on our screens — and in some cases, horizons — fire doesn't have to be scary. In fact, manipulating fire was a pillar of Indigenous Australia's management of this continent since at least the last ice age… until of course, colonisation attempted to snuff it out. Barber joins Blueprint to share his vast and varied experiences in fire management from elders past and present, and how this can inform the protection of our towns and cities.
It's time to dig, mulch and prune with Australia's award-winning landscape designer Paul Bangay. He's here to take you through the basics and give you the skills to become a confident gardener.
The influenza pandemic of 1918, which killed more than 50 million people around the globe, changed the course of world history — and architecture was not immune. Design and art historian Theodora Philcox, joins Blueprint to discuss how that pandemic was the death-knell of the dusty Victorian attic, how the post-pandemic world's preoccupation with hygiene informed modernism, the 20th century's dominant architectural style, and what changes may await architecture following our present pandemic (and yes, Le Corbusier's bidet makes a cameo).
Belfast is kaleidoscopic — a product born out of contested histories and the desire to break free from it. As Northern Ireland commemorates 100 years since partition, take a journey through a city that is shedding its historical sectarian binaries.
Author Kirsty Manning transports us to the Cote D'Azur in the 1940s via the music of Noel Coward.
Slazenger, Country Road, Jag, New Balance, Bonds and Esprit… if you bought clothes from any of these brands in the '90s, chances are they were made in the garages or spare bedrooms of Australian cities, by families of Vietnamese-born garment outworkers.
Out of the groundswell of counterculture and progressive social movements in 1970s London, a group of women came together to form the Matrix Feminist Design Collective to challenge our male-centred built environment. Co-founder Jos Boys joins Jonathan to talk about their radical architectural history.
At the back of a school, surrounded by suburban streets. three young urban farmers are cultivating a market garden.
Could there be a more controversial vegetable? Chef Annie Smithers and Jonathan join forces to convince the good people of Australia to give Brussels sprouts another chance.
The notion of 'heritage' in Australia is most often associated with buildings erected in the years following colonisation. But how should we think about heritage when it comes to Country, and sites whose histories go back thousands of years?
Take a tour of Canada's largest and most multicultural city via it's underground walkways, it's myriad of restaurants and a Toronto Raptors home game.
Today, the humble yoyo might seem rather quaint… but the simple invention has had an exceptional history, taking us back as far as ancient times.
By now you may have heard of the Australian War Memorial's staggering 500 million-dollar redevelopment, which involves the demolition of the award-winning Anzac Hall… which is less than 20 years old. So how long are buildings supposed to last?
The senior research scientist at the CSIRO tells us about the migration patterns of waterbirds via the music of John Farnham.
The confluence of geography and development, bad planning and accelerating global warming has made western Sydney an increasingly dangerous place to live.
Behind the cosmopolitan, dynamic, and fashion-filled city of Milan lies a long and rich history. Down your aperitivo, hop on the underground train and take a tour around this grand Italian city.
Who was she? The namesake of the Lazy Susan remains unknown, though former US President Thomas Jefferson makes a cameo in the search. One thing is clear though, the object's been a staple of dining tables ever since its widespread adoption in 20th-century America.
Could there be a more controversial vegetable? Chef Annie Smithers and Jonathan join forces to convince the good people of Australia to give Brussels sprouts another chance.
Emily Spivack joins Blueprint for a chat about the myriad of relationships people have with their clothes, or, in the case of nudists, an absence of them.
Sharing economy platforms are radically disrupting the social and spatial dynamics of cities. What role can architects play in mitigating or subverting the more pernicious effects of urban 'disruption'?
Take a trip to South Auckland, a city within a city; it's geographical lines drawn by greater Auckland's collective imaginary (allowing a glimpse of how one might come to understand race relations in New Zealand).
Planting verdant, well-connected urban forests are critical in mitigating the impacts of global warming in our cities. But what happens when these ideas are put into practice in areas where these ideas are foreign?
Despite being off the air for 15 years, the sitcom Frasier has experienced a renaissance, and it's prompted some to wonder about how the fictional radio host paid for an apartment boasting pricey pieces of design.
What if we all owned a stake in our local pub? It's an idea that was first generated in the Swedish city of Gothenburg in the late-19th century, and the model still holds in Europe… and regional South Australia. Hear from ANU social anthropologist Maggie Brady, who has written a paper on this curious history.
Creating truly equitable cities involves a lot more than just making sure things are wheelchair accessible. A newly-completed community hub in Melbourne's south-east has integrated universal design principles, with direct input from people with lived experience of disability. The building's users and design team join Blueprint to tell us more about what a universal building needs.
Christmas in the city… well, a city emerging from six lockdowns. Join Jonathan as he takes a stroll through the spine of central Melbourne decked out in full Christmas garb, with a few street Santas mixed in for good measure.
The sleigh has always been a magical thing. However practical they actually were, they are forever imbued with a mythical quality, thanks to Christmas.
Mistletoe. It's a staple of Christmas iconography the world over, thanks in part to some old Norse mythology. But how much do we know about the actual plant, of which there's about 1,000 varieties? Tim Entwisle, director at the Royal Botanic Gardens of Victoria, is here to walk us through the many chapters of its history.
Pop on your gumboots take a trip around the farm of Blueprint's resident chef, Annie Smithers… because we're finding some treats for Santa and his reindeers. Then, we'll hop in the ute and head over to meet a new addition to the rudimental family, award-winning garden designer Paul Bangay.
Glenda, Julie, Angela, Leesa and Paul generously agreed to join Blueprint for their next worldwide exclusive media appearance, and share a new recipe for Blak Christmas
It's certainly easy to dismiss the huge showrooms that dot our suburban retail parks as nothing more than sheds but in America in 1972, one company decided to change that.
Writer, critic and poet Gail McConnell takes us to the place of her childhood in East Belfast. Her latest poetry collection, The Sun Is Open, rifles through a box of artefacts related to the life and death of her father, who was murdered by the Irish Republican Army outside their home in 1984.
Their new book, Country: Future Fire, Future Farming, examines Indigenous Australian land management and why its implementation is crucial to bringing down the intensity of fires, and the realisation of a more sustainable world.
In the aftermath of long lockdowns — particularly in Australia's east — hospitality businesses are having trouble sourcing and retaining staff. But for journalist Dani Valent, the pandemic isn't entirely to blame, as a cocktail of wage-theft, long working hours, and an oft-undervalued profession are inflecting the recovery.
It's a global tourist mecca, drawing in visitors to its Wes Anderson-like dreamscape of pastel-coloured row houses, quaint lemon yellow trams, and cobblestone streets cascading down to a glittering river mouth. But dig a little deeper, and you'll find the darker histories beneath Lisbon's bright veneer.
Although popular for at least two centuries, it's only relatively recently that they've become truly fashionable.
Jonathan meets with baker Maaryasha Werdiger to chat sourdough, the process of making kosher bread and Chanukah preparations.
Through a carefully observed process of research, trial and error, Jeff has managed to create a habitat attracting box turtles, racoons, armadillos and native birds.
There are plenty of industries who don't need to wait for transnational agreement to combat climate change... and architecture is among them.
When the Louis Ghost chair was released in 2002, it seemed the perfect symbol of a new millennium. It was jokey but posh and it reinvented the past.
During one night online shopping in the thick of the pandemic, Rachael McPhail had a spur of the moment idea to write in the name of her Country in the address field — and it stuck.
It's the world's longest national highway that loops around the Australian continent over some 14,000 kilometres, traversing bitumen, red dirt, and everything in between. It's a road which award-winning documentary photographer Matthew Abbott circumnavigated upon his return to Australia after years of photographing conflict zones abroad.
What price do we pay for this frictionless world of tech? And who gets to define what's intuitive for us?
Its name is taken from a word that means later, meaning not only that it was built later than the medieval castle that overlooks it but that it was created for pleasure — the pleasure that comes later, after fulfilling one's duties.
The architecture design review panel is a process of urban planning increasingly championed by Australian governments of all types — and Melbourne's the latest to join the club. These are made up of experts who are invested in the creation of cities — architects, planners, urbanists, and passionate citizens — who advise governments on development proposals. But do they work? Or do they risk creating a city of technocratic conformity? We've enlisted the help of architects, academics and passionate urbanists Shelley Penn and Elizabeth Farrelly to help us understand the history and function of design process.
The Victorian capital has long touted its position as a city of architecture, design, and 'liveability' — and it was consecutively ranked as the world's most liveable city between 2011 to 2017. But in the time since, its shine has diminished somewhat, with many — including the City of Melbourne's Deputy Lord Mayor Nicholas Reece — saying that Melbourne had allowed too much "crap" to be built, resulting in nothing more than "spreadsheets in the sky". Councillor Reece joins Blueprint to discuss a council-approved design excellence program aimed to raise the bar for Melbourne architecture.
Pop on your walking shoes and head out to discover the wealth of art, architecture, cuisines, and histories that reside in this seductively chaotic city… as well as the razed metropolis beneath it.
As the New York Times wrote in 1888, they were 'invented by a fool to diminish the visual capacity of an idiot'. They were, it added, 'the sign of a weak head, not a weak eye.'
What can delving into the worlds of crows, and examining the worlds they share with us, tell us about existing in this current moment?
The multidisciplinary designer transports us to the small Greek village, Kato Assos, via the sounds of Zorba the Greek.
Home cooking is often joyously messy, unglamorous, and improvisational — so how can a cookbook assist with that?
A journey to the Lithuanian capital featuring a visit to Vilnius' last remaining synagogue and a day trip to a Soviet theme park.
While some of today's cruise ships are as bulky and graceless as factories, many of the smaller vessels follow a similar blueprint to the ship that started it all, the SS Prinzessin Victoria Luise.
Amsterdam was the world's first city to elect a mayor representing everyone's right to the night — a model that has been replicated in other global cities including New York, London and Paris.
What comes to mind when you think about the word wilderness? For many, it conjures up images of pristine, wild landscapes untouched by humans. But increasingly, the term's being recast, as environmental records show that 'wilderness' is a relatively recent phenomenon.
Contrary to what we see, there is plenty of life to be found in an urban cemetery – especially where trees and plants are concerned.
It may be a minor character in the sometimes competitive history of rubber itself but that doesn't lessen its importance.
Answering this question involves getting up to speed with the sheer scale of industrialised food processing — a major part of our world few of us know little about.
In a world where artificial intelligence is increasingly taking the place of fallible humanity, do we risk making a monster of our own creation?
Or in your backyard, on your rooftop, or in your front garden – Blueprint consults an expert on all your urban beekeeping needs.
Tuck into a brioche-style Sally Lunn bun, admire Palladian and neoclassical Georgian architecture, and retrace the footsteps of a 25-year-old Jane Austen to the Pump Room.
The designing mind comes in many forms, seeing solutions to problems in a myriad ways. It's certainly true with Temple Grandin, whose particular sensitivities helped change the design of many slaughterhouses.
For too long, Malaysia and Singapore's examples of classical architecture have been derided as poor imitation of their European forebears, but architectural scholar Soon-Tzu Speechley begs to differ. His PhD was the first survey of classical architecture in British Malaya, and he says the region went on to create classical marvels worthy of everyone's attention.
Letters have no gender, but that hasn't stopped our species ascribing masculine and feminine qualities to them. It's a phenomenon type designer and scholar Marie Boulanger examines in her debut book, XX XY: Sex, letters and stereotypes. She joins Blueprint to tell us the origins of this habit, and why we need to be critical about type and gender.
Being known as one of the largest brick buildings in the world is a pretty banal accolade. But then you look at the cathedral at Albi in the south west of France, the birthplace of the man who almost beat Cook to Botany Bay, La Perouse, and it blows your mind. Large and brick it certainly is but what grabs you is its extraordinary shape. If you're used to medieval cathedrals being all flying buttresses and pinnacles, Albi will let you down. It's more like a great ship, rounded at each end, with its upright walls undulating thanks to its buttresses encased within semi-circular columns. A gigantic tower at one end completes the exterior.
When you try on a piece of clothing and think, 'this isn't me', what's happening psychologically?
It's time to head to Victoria's Cape Paterson with novelist Allee Richards. Pack your togs, sunscreen, a few paperbacks, and let the jangly sounds of Melbourne's Dick Diver take you to this sleepy seaside town down south on Bunurong Country.
What's love got to do with it? For Trawlwulwuy woman Emma Lee, 'love bombing' has been central in her mission to get Indigenous Tasmanians back into the state's contemporary history, as well as a seat at the table — efforts that have since resulted in Tasmanian constitutional reform, and joint-management of the state's world heritage.
Too often obscured by news headlines and stereotypes, it's time to get to know the vast urban expanse that is Western Sydney.
Johnston created two gardens that are marvels for anyone with the least interest in colour, form, plant biology and garden structure.
One chef, one cook, one home kitchen. Chef Annie Smithers and Jonathan continue their discussion of the best kitchen basics to have on hand. Are fancy kitchen gadgets worth it? And what's the difference between a male and female spoon (yes, there is such thing as a male and female spoon)?
It's picnic season! Tim Entwisle leads Jonathan Green on a tour of the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria in spring.
Complete societal collapse? Or a chance to start anew? Hear from journalist and author JB Mackinnon whose recently published book considers this very idea.
To the outsider, 'Florida' evokes a certain kind of hot, swampy and technicolour Americana — a particular kind of heat-warped American eccentricity with added canasta. But what is the place really like?
'Oh chintzy, chintzy cheeriness,' runs a line in John Betjemen's poem Death in Leamington, published in 1932. It encapsulates a genteel interior with its china ornaments and floral fabrics. That cheeriness is ironic; he means cheerlessness. But why chintzy? And come to that, what exactly is chintz?
How many creative ways can we humans interact with nature? Blueprint's Annie Hastwell gives us a glimpse into the festival trying to answer that very question… South Australia's Nature Festival.
The crowd can be both euphoric and menacing at once, and it's a phenomenon that urban scholars identify as a form of informal urbanism: shaping cities through self-organisation, oscillating inside and out of formal urban regulation. Kim Dovey, director of the University of Melbourne's Informal Urbanism Research Hub, InfUr-, joins Jonathan to talk about the paradoxes of informal urbanism, and what makes the 'good' or 'bad' crowd.
We've spent an awful lot of time in our homes, and for some this has re-started a romance with home cooking. Chef, restauranteur, food writer, and former librarian Stephanie Alexander joins Jonathan to discuss her 19th cookbook titled Home.
It's time to go on a journey of the mind around the world via the bookstore. For our second and final edition, let some new and old friends whisk you around New York, Maastricht and Chandigarh.
When the Bendix automatic washing machine was launched in 1937 it changed the way we looked at domestic laundry. It not only simplified a laborious task, it also established a design language for domestic appliances.
It's the wonderful time of the year… it's time to nominate your pick for Australia's Bird of the Year! Sean Dooley, national public affairs manager at BirdLife Australia, joins Jonathan to tell us more about the 2021 avian pageant, and how you can get involved.
If you're building a kitchen from scratch, then this Kitchen Rudimental's for you. Let resident Blueprint chef Annie Smithers guide you through the tools to make you a more confident home cook.
What are the design interventions we need to make to help us breathe easy indoors? Lidia Morawska, a distinguished professor and director of the International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health at the Queensland University of Technology, is one person who can help. She says it's high time we reset our relationship to air quality.
It's time to go on a journey of the mind around the world via the places that are the ultimate conduits for escape — the bookstore. In part one of two, discover Wales' 'town of books', and Juliana Engberg's bibliophile guide to London and Paris.
You can thank Georges Paulin for the hardtop convertible. He was the French dentist who dared to dream of a world where cars could open up to the sun at the touch of a button… a feat of engineering that's made our summers all the richer since.
How far would you travel to pay tribute to a dear friend? For Paul Taylor, it's about 2,900-kilometres. He's embarked on a moped journey through some of the UK's silliest placenames to raise funds for cancer research.
New York City's street vendors are as much of a fixture of the city as steam rising from the sidewalk, or a taxi driver with a story to tell. But coupled with gentrification, the pandemic, and more frequent flash flooding, how is the industry faring?
How do we move beyond the legacies of colonial ways of seeing, and inhabiting, the urban grid? This is where speculative design comes in handy, where Indigenous practitioners can offer us another way to see our shared urban spaces.
Belfast is kaleidoscopic — a product born out of contested histories and the desire to break free from it. As Northern Ireland commemorates 100 years since partition, take a journey through a city that is shedding its historical sectarian binaries.
Lina Bo Bardi is a perfect example of how place can shape the direction of our work. She was also a rarity: a female architect making headway in the boy's club of mid-century modernism and an Italian making a mark on Brazilian design. She studied architecture in Rome under Marcello Piacentini, whose stripped classical buildings of the 1930s became emblematic of Mussolini's Italy. After graduating, she worked alongside Gio Ponti in Milan, whose elegant Pirelli Tower of the early 1950s would show how beautiful a skyscraper could be. So when she arrived in Brazil in 1946 with her husband, she brought with her a wealth of experience in European modernism.
Novelist Mette Jakobsen transports us to a dense and lush forest on the border between Finland and Russia. Turn your phone off, take a long walk, sit in a sauna and drink a beer while Keith Jarrett plays in the background.
In 2013 the fire at Dhaka's Rana Plaza captured the world's attention and starkly laid bare the conditions faced by garment workers who make our clothes.
The Reef Design Lab create 3D-printed 'ecological structures', which assist vulnerable marine ecosystems in tropical and temperate waters. Founder Alex Goad tells us more about the fabrication process, and how this technology has been applied from the Maldives to Melbourne.
A mind journey to a landscape of sky and water, bubbling reefs and delicious food shared generously.
Vasari's Lives may not have invented the renaissance but it opened our eyes to the creative life and showed how there is always a story behind every great work.
Kitchen Rudimental: One chef, one cook, one home kitchen. As we approach Father's Day weekend, and what better way to celebrate than with the Annie Smithers' family recipe for boiled fruitcake?
Ian Callum is one automotive designer whose designs have had some staying power in an industry that's notorious for chasing new trends. Hear from the former director of design for Jaguar and Ford about what makes a beautiful car, how to balance aesthetics and function and why some designs endure.
Melbourne's modernist buildings tell the story of rapid post-war growth which laid the foundation for the city as a cultural centre.
Come on an urban tramp, in search of enchantment, to discover the industrial city anew.
An elegant, seemingly simple house in Galway that was home to Robert O'Hara Burke, later John Huston and host to some of the 20th century's creative and intellectual superstars.
Pru La Motte was a weaver, painter and potter, fiercely determined and relentlessly productive; we take a tour of the Wombattery in Adelaide where she lived and worked.
Annie Smithers talks the pleasures of butter and shows Jonathan a recipe for buttery green beans and almonds.
Swiss darn, stitch hack, replace cuff, alter section, reknit, cardiganise and take back fashion for the people.
The Philippines is a melange of Austronesian, Spanish, Chinese, and American histories which have their focal point in the capital, Manila. But to really see Manila as it is now, throw out everything you've been told… because it's time to head to the mall.
Snug and warm, a pair of slippers takes us back to babyhood, when our fat little feet were kept toasty in knitted booties.
The community-led project aims to link together hundreds of suburban nature strip gardens to create a safe and attractive place for pollinating insects and people.
In Australia, more than 350 such items have been returned to Indigenous Australians from overseas institutions since the 1980s, but there's still a plethora waiting to find their way home.
Design is one of those frustratingly elusive terms which seemingly evades concrete, tangible examples; yet it's effects are felt and lived by all of us.
Hop on board one of the best transit systems in the world and arrive on time to enjoy hot pot, oyster omelettes and braised pork over rice; before taking in the culturally eclectic sites that make up Taiwan's capital.
If you were to describe the perfect garden then you'd probably include a birdbath. They're part of our horticultural landscape and yet the birdbath has an indistinct history. Any investigation into where they came from will immediately take us to the ancient gardened spaces of Persia where the introduction of water in rills and splashing fountains would surely have drawn the attention of any birds. There are also the courtyard pools that captured and stored rainwater in the venerable buildings of Asia and the Roman Empire. But in these cases, any bird daring to take a bath would probably have been kept as a pet or captured to be eaten.
Join Blueprint's resident chef Annie Smithers in a chat with Jonathan Green about her memoir, Recipe for a Kinder Life. She reveals an "incredibly simple recipe that is beguiling in its intricacies when it's on the palate".
What if we all owned a stake in our local pub? It's an idea that was first generated in the Swedish city of Gothenburg in the late-19th century, and the model still holds in Europe… and regional South Australia. Hear from ANU social anthropologist Maggie Brady, who has written a paper on this curious history.
Climate change is happening faster than we thought, and it's going to have profound effects large and small, including in our backyards and balconies. Landscape designer Paul Bangay joins Blueprint to give you tips about how to best plant a resilient home garden.
From the outrageous street-styles of Harajuku to Le Corbusier's concrete legacy, we take you on a journey through the thrilling metropolis of Tokyo.
The house he built for himself and his family in Moscow is famous because it’s just so odd.
Award-winning architect Kevin O'Brien joins Blueprint to discuss the myth of the blank page and a new architectural installation at this year’s Bleach Festival.
Discover the exhilaration of ocean swimming on a frosty winter’s day via the music of Joni Mitchell
A conversation with Batoul Faour, a Lebanese Canadian architectural researcher and designer whose essay titled Glass Politics: On Broken Windows in Beirut, recently won the 2021 Avery Review Essay Prize.
Come on a journey of the mind overseas and through time, as the ABC's Norman Swan transports us to the Glasgow of his childhood.
In a special edition of iconic designs, Colin is joined by Jonathan for a chat about Olympic cauldron design and the symbolic use of fire.
One chef, one cook, one home kitchen. This week on Kitchen Rudimental, Annie and Jonathan discuss the wonders of a winter soup.
Built in 1926, the building has housed business in the rag trade, architects, medical professionals and is now a creative hub for Melbourne's arts professionals… but it's now up for sale.
Ernest, Alfred and Otto Wunderlich transformed the look of the Australian built environment, one terracotta tile at a time.
Creating truly equitable cities involves a lot more than just making sure things are wheelchair accessible. A newly-completed community hub in Melbourne's south-east has integrated universal design principles, with direct input from people with lived experience of disability. The building's users and design team join Blueprint to tell us more about what a universal building needs.
Put on your beanie and gloves, exhale some steam and take a COVID-safe winter wander through the Royal Botanic Gardens of Victoria with its director Tim Entwisle, and Blueprint's Jonathan Green.
Every four years, the International Olympic Committee compels host countries to expend huge amounts of capital and capital works to produce the games. When you couple that with the sheer air miles to get athletes and their staff to the host city… it begs the question: Is there such a thing as a sustainable Olympics? Ben Glasson, a postdoctoral research fellow in environmental communication and media at Monash University, joins Blueprint to help us with that question.
Urban music… it's a London thing. From grime to garage, to drum & bass, the city itself has been instrumental in incubating these rich musical cultures. Take a trip through the council estates, radio stations, and social histories that made this happen.
In Turkey, the practice is called ebru, from a word meaning water surface. The water itself was thickened into what is called size, using carrageen or plant starch, enabling different pigments to be floated and then worked upon, creating densely coloured designs.
Worn by figures such as Cab Calloway and Malcolm X, the suit rose prominence among Mexican-American youth during the second world war.
In the age of the Anthropocene and ecological collapse, what does it mean to be ‘all in this together’?
Has there ever been a better time to learn about this place, our home; about country, connection, the stories of the land and its people?
Two First Nations chefs discuss the role of ecology, history, relationships and consultation as part of a new gastronomic undertaking at this year’s Bleach Festival on the Gold Coast.
Jonathan meets Naomie Sunner, propagation and volunteer co-ordinator at the Victorian Indigenous Nurseries Co-op (VINC), to learn more about native plants.
The notion of 'heritage' in Australia is most often associated with buildings erected in the years following colonisation. But how should we think about heritage when it comes to Country, and sites whose histories go back thousands of years?
From the Ruin Bar to Budapest's spectacular thermal bath houses, Bela Lajta's proto-deco Parisiana nightclub to Bartok's transformational impact on 20th century music, we take a mind journey through the Hungarian capital.
It's no surprise that the Green School in Bali is something of a pin-up for bamboo architecture given the way it sits so beautifully in its surroundings. Resident design expert Colin Bisset takes you there.
Have you ever tried to fix a broken phone screen, only to be told that it's cheaper to replace the whole thing? Well, one intellectual property lawyer's doing her bit to make sure you can repair it the next time.
It's a renovator's dream! Or perhaps a nightmare? Of the eight people who live in the town of Linda, Tasmania, one woman has been brave enough to attempt the restoration of an historic pub. Producer Catherine Zengerer pays her a visit.
The host of popular Kiwi comedy show New Zealand Today transports us to the allegedly haunted town of Marton, population 180, via the sounds of Nesian Mystik.
Planting verdant, well-connected urban forests are critical in mitigating the impacts of global warming in our cities. But what happens when these ideas are put into practice in areas where these ideas are foreign?
Victoria's tallest summit is Mount Bogong, a place of dazzling beauty nestled in the Great Dividing Range on Yaithmathang country. Jonathan Green takes you on an icy journey up the mountain.
Who was she? The namesake of the Lazy Susan remains unknown, though former US President Thomas Jefferson makes a cameo in the search. One thing is clear though, the object's been a staple of dining tables ever since its widespread adoption in 20th-century America.
Re-engineering clothes, whether it's your own wardrobe or an entire warehouse, requires careful thought, planning and expertise. Abi McNeil heads to Ellery's Paris atelier to see if some of her old clothes can be made new.
One chef, one cook, one home kitchen: It's Kitchen Rudimental. This time, we're looking at dumplings.
Out of the groundswell of counterculture and progressive social movements in 1970s London, a group of women came together to form the Matrix Feminist Design Collective to challenge our male-centred built environment. Co-founder Jos Boys joins Jonathan to talk about their radical architectural history.
Beautiful beaches, ideal surfing conditions, national parks and plenty of sunshine; it's not hard to see why Byron Bay attracts everyone from holiday makers to social media influencers, to the global film industry.
The bobby pin seems to sum up femininity, even when used by men, from Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot, who kept his hair in place at night using them, to the elaborate coiffure of drag queens.
Do we all experience taste in the same way? The relatively new discipline of neurogastronomy — the study of food and the brain — suggests otherwise. Neurogastromonist Dan Han is here to take our tastebuds apart.
When was the last time you mended a piece of clothing rather than buying a replacement? The modern mending movement is here to show how to slow down our fast fashion impulse, stitch-by-stitch.
Victoria's recent devastating storms have shown us the risks climate change poses to Australia's Eucalypts. But the resilient species has survived many climate epochs, so what will Eucalypts do in the face of a new climactic paradigm?
By now you may have heard of the Australian War Memorial's staggering 500 million-dollar redevelopment, which involves the demolition of the award-winning Anzac Hall… which is less than 20 years old. So how long are buildings supposed to last?
A mind journey to the sprawling Californian centre of wealth, techno utopianism, self-optimisation and exemplar of the contradictions and excesses of 21st-century urban life.
Inspired by Nigella Lawson, @murrigellas is a place to exchange recipes, share cooking triumphs and give support to each other's cooking adventures.
Annie Smithers talks clarified butter and showed Jonathan how to make the perfect pancake.
Scottish-Ghanaian architect, Lesley Lokko reflects on her affinity for architecture, the future of architectural education and the enduring question of identity in the discipline.
Behind the cosmopolitan, dynamic, and fashion-filled city of Milan lies a long and rich history. Down your aperitivo, hop on the underground train and take a tour around this grand Italian city.
Today, the humble yoyo might seem rather quaint… but the simple invention has had an exceptional history, taking us back as far as ancient times.
With Australian Fashion Week just having just passed, it feels as though the local fashion industry's snapped right back after a 2020 pause. But after the pandemic… do we still need fashion weeks? Ben Mazey, former design director at Kenzo, lends Blueprint his thoughts.
What does it mean to think about place... on Instagram? Planning and heritage guru Rohan Storey has done just that, informing thousands of followers about the reasons why certain parts of our cities are kept, and why others get consigned to the archive.
Have you ever been in a new city desperate to find new restaurants and cuisines that aren't usually captured on city guides? If you're in Sydney, Have You Eaten is here to help strengthen your culinary curiosity.
Bound by their respective five-kilometre lockdown radiuses in Melbourne, Jonathan goes on a garden stroll… well, over the phone… with Tim Entwisle, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens of Victoria.
Gamilaraay man and ABC Top 5 Arts residential scholar Beau de Belle brings us along on a visit to the house of his mentor and friend, the revered architect Richard Leplastrier.
The laid-back comfort of the great outdoors is perfectly encapsulated in the Adirondack chair — a design classic that first appeared at the turn of the 20th-century.
While the idea of the flat-pack may conjure up ideas of Swedish minimalism and perfectly-timed supply chains, a lesser-known forebear emerged in the 1800s — the prefabricated building. Australia has the lion's share, and some experts say they deserve to be World Heritage-listed.
While agriculture supports the lives of billions, the West's contemporary relationship to food is dependent on 'just in time' supply chains and heavily processed foods — a paradigm veteran New York Times food writer and author Mark Bittman wants to see changed.
Arid dessert air, plunging temperatures at night, bright white light and framed by multiple mountain ranges: Xinjiang is the kind of place that inspires poetry, music and delicious food.
Penury is often the mother of invention. Just look at the inventor of the dishwasher, Josephine Cochrane.
Join author and former Australian Greens senator Scott Ludlam, on a traipse through the wetlands and sleepy suburban streets of South Perth.
Care homes and social services come in for a lot of criticism, but imagine a time when there was nothing. The Melbourne Benevolent Asylum changed all of that when it was introduced in 1851.
The billion-dollar flower industry is part and parcel of our world's appetite for 'on-demand' products — a process far removed from the seasonal flower production of old.
If you wore the likes of Country Road or Bonds in the '90s, chances are they were made by Vietnamese-Australian outworkers. Journalist and illustrator duo Emma Do and Kim Lam have shone a new light on this lesser-known story of Australian manufacturing in a new book titled Working From Home or May ở Nhà.
A country rich in biodiversity, a festival for every saint and 16 different types of avocado: come on a journey to Costa Rica.
Despite being off the air for 15 years, the sitcom Frasier has experienced a renaissance, and it's prompted some to wonder about how the fictional radio host paid for an apartment boasting pricey pieces of design.