Dr Anna Tweeddale

Anna Tweeddale grew up on Yuggera and Turrbal Country, lived for many years in Naarm (Melbourne) on the land of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung and Bunurong / Boon Wurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation, and is now living and working on Awabakal Country. She has also gained valuable insight and inter-cultural experience from living, working, and/or studying in the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, UAE, and China.

Multi-modal practice

Working consistently between architectural practice, creative arts, practice-led research, and writing over more than 20 years, Anna has effectively woven together a rich, multi-model practice. Her practice approach, ‘Spatial Elaboration’, was featured in ‘Formations: New Practices in Australian Architecture’ at the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, 2012.

Deep understanding of different disciplinary tools enables her to investigate current concerns of architecture and construction through creative research methods, incorporating conceptual frameworks from environmental humanities, material feminisms, and posthumanisms.

Anna is open to collaborators as well as seeking PhD candidates to engage with these and related topics under her supervision.

Current research projects include:

• critically rethinking contemporary construction materials and practices amidst the climate and biodiversity crisis
• applying creative research approaches and critical thinking to important questions of indoor air quality (as new research emerges with the pandemic)

Anna’s practice-led PhD, titled ‘Diffracting Construction: A Praxis of Attentiveness to Situated Material Entanglements of Architecture and Construction’, established a new praxis research approach to architecture and construction that is attentive to the specific ethical concerns of construction-based practices within climate and biodiversity crisis.

Her creative research praxis began with ‘Lost Garden Found’, a project that explored historical and contemporary intersections of embodiment, garden design and narrative through a thesis at the Metropolis Program (CCCB & UPC, Barcelona), an interactive art garden installation involving over 14 artists (Next Wave Festival, Melbourne), and a hand-printed artists book called ‘Lost Garden Found: The Sampler’.

Research collaborations

Collaboration with artists from disciplines including visual arts, dance, photography, installation and illustration is a significant theme in Anna’s practice. Performances / exhibitions of resulting collaborative works have been presented at QUT Art Museum (Brisbane), Canberra Theatre, Dancehouse (Melb), Forty-Five Downstairs (Melb), Next Wave Festival (Melb), Dr Julius Gallery (Berlin), Instituto de America, Santa Fe (Granada, Spain), and DAN_24 Spatial Culture Event (Novi Sad, Serbia).

Creative practice works have been supported by arts funding bodies including Australia Council for the Arts, ANAT (Australian Network for Art and Technology), Keir Choreographic Awards, and B.C.C. Lord Mayors Fellowship for Emerging Artists.

Written publications span across architecture, arts and urban culture, with examples including Momentum: New Victorian Architecture (The Miegunyah Press) and ‘Improvised Territories: Aphids and Architecture’ in book ‘Sonorities of Site: Aphids, Architecture & New Music 1998-2010’ (APHIDS). Anna has also been published extensively in professional journals and magazines including Architectural Review Asia Pacific, Architecture Australia, Quaderns (Journal of the Catalan College of Architects, Barcelona), RealTime Arts, and New Matilda.

Anna is a registered architect (in QLD - BOAQ) with practice experience across projects of all scales from residential architecture to strategic urban design, and project stages from conceptual design through to construction. She is founding director of research-focused practice Studio Apparatus and has previously worked with multiple award-winning architectural practices.

Before taking up a position as Senior Lecturer in Architecture at University of Newcastle, Anna has taught architecture at Queensland University of Technology, RMIT University, Monash University, Melbourne School of Design (UniMelb) and University of Queensland. She has also been an invited guest critic at schools in Australia, Canada and Spain.