Carte Blanche on Campus?

Abstract

This paper explores counterculture and activism in the production of the modern Australian university in the 1960s and 1970s in Australia. In focusing on the building of new suburban university campuses, it interrogates how spatial production was important to the politics of occupation and transformation. Through this examination of campus planning, landscapes and architecture we explore design intentions to the realisation of mid-term consequences in situation, buildings, spaces and form. We unearth alternative historical narratives and understandings of counterculture and activism in two Australian universities: Monash University in Clayton, Victoria and La Trobe University, Bundoora, Victoria. We therefore interrogate here, not the liberating opportunities of the counterculture movement in terms of shifting the way architecture was conceived and produced, but instead the consequences of actions of resistance within the spaces of newly built university campuses, and how this altered the way buildings and landscaped amenities were occupied, used and also developed in subtle and temporary ways.