Tents and monuments: Canberra’s sites of Australian identity

Abstract

At Canberra’s Aboriginal Tent Embassy, a politically profound assertion of difference has inveigled itself into the grand composition of Canberra’s urban landscape with a group of small, informal and flimsy buildings. The Embassy’s dishevelment and formlessness is aesthetic. In this paper, the strategies of the Tent Embassy are considered in relation to architectural discourse on ornament and the monumental. The borders of architecture as a discipline have often been defined in relation to the discipline’s discourse on ornament. Disdained in early modernist thinking, ornament slowly returned to architectural discourse through mid-century debates on new monumentality and then in the 1980s in ..