“New Look” Hostels: Domestic Framings of Hospitality at the Villawood/Westbridge Migrant Hostel

Abstract

Established by adapting ex-military facilities and in use until the early 1980s, Commonwealth migrant hostels were conceived by the Australian federal government as transitory on-arrival accommodation and provision for assimilatory practices. The paper investigates the role of architecture in relation to the modes of nation-state hospitality exercised in Commonwealth migrant hostels. Its focus is the addition of purpose-designed hostel buildings at the Villawood Migrant Hostel in Western Sydney in the late 1960s. Designed by the firm Bunning & Madden, the housing blocks were part of a nationwide programme to improve resettlement facilities to aid continued migrant recruitment. There was a gr..