Naomi Stead is a Melbourne-based academic who writes about architecture, art and design. You have arrived at her online folio of writing, projects, and scholarly work. This site is not regularly updated and you should assume that anything here is out of date!
Hi folks,
As you can see, this website is woefully out of date, and I no longer actively maintain it. If you’d like to know more about what I have been doing lately, please find me at the Department of Architecture at Monash University.
N
The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:
The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!.
Crunchy numbers
A helper monkey made this abstract painting, inspired by your stats.
A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 7,400 times in 2010. That’s about 18 full 747s.
In 2010, there was 1 new post, growing the total archive of this blog to 37 posts. There were 2 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 2mb.
The busiest day of the year was January 7th with 62 views. The most popular post that day was Scholarly Writings.
Where did they come from?
The top referring sites in 2010 were supercolossal.ch, archidose.blogspot.com, offshorestudio.net, sesquipedalist.com, and en.wordpress.com.
Some visitors came searching, mostly for naomi stead, durbach block, architectural criticism, critical writing on architecture photography, and writing architecture symposium.
Attractions in 2010
These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.
Scholarly Writings September 2008
Architectural Criticism September 2008
Call For Papers closed for second Writing Architecture conference March 2010
Who is Naomi Stead? September 2008
Writing Architecture Conference May 2009
Below was the call for papers for a conference I convened in July 201o, following an earlier event on the same topic in 2009. The Call For Papers can be downloaded as a pdf here, although the call is now closed and the conference complete! Continue Reading »
This is a feature profile of Sydney architects Neil Durbach and Camilla Block, of Durbach Block architects. The feature was commissioned by PolOxygen magazine and published as ‘A Very Different View,’ in PolOxygen: The International Design, Art, Architecture Quarterly, issue 20, 2007, pp.90-98. Words by Naomi Stead. Continue Reading »
It began with a seal. Or maybe it was a sea lion. At the opening of the exhibition Placemakers: Contemporary Queensland Architects, as Anna Bligh, state premier, stood on the Gallery of Modern Art concourse delivering a rapturous opening speech, we latecomers hovered at the back beside Michael Parekowhai’s sculpture The Horn of Africa. Depicting a glossy black life-size seal, balancing an equally glossy black life-sized grand piano upended on its nose, it maintains an impossible feat of balance, defying gravity with a manner both effortless and insouciant. Craning unsuccessfully to see the speaker, I returned instead to contemplating this seal and idly wondered: who here was performing the most virtuoso trick? Was it the premier, producing a cheer from the crowd with her line that “art, architecture and design are just as important as scientific endeavour,” as she simultaneously and invisibly balanced the state’s mineral prosperity on one finger? Or was it the gallery, flush with the success of its new building and two blockbuster exhibitions, seemingly achieving the impossible balance of popular success and high art without dropping either? Or was it the exhibited architects, juggling all the disparate and desperate constraints of contemporary practice, and still managing to produce a series of fine architectural constructions, now rewarded with inclusion in this major exhibition? Well, they were all virtuoso, really. But perhaps there were also more tricks at play here than first met the eye. Continue Reading »
Abundant. The word has rich connotations: the diverse and fertile garden, the bountiful harvest, the cornucopia, the surfeit. We all know, after years of intoning the song, that our land abounds in nature’s gifts. But with the Australian pavilion at the 11th Venice Architecture Biennale, the creative directors – Neil Durbach, Vince Frost, Wendy Lewin, Kerstin Thompson and Gary Warner – propose that this beauty, rich and rare, also abounds in our architectural culture. Continue Reading »
Most Recent ArticlesNaomi Stead on Flickr
Naomi Stead: Architecture, Art and Design Criticism 
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