Dr Josephine Vaughan

Innovation is key for productivity improvement and advancements in different sectors of the economy, including the construction sector. The criticism of the slow pace of innovation in construction industry may be unwarranted, considering the structure of the industry and nature of the construction business. The loosely coupled nature of firms, mostly Small and Medium Enterprises (SME¿s), delivering ¿projects¿ through partial engagement, together with the distinction between the project innovation and firm innovation makes it difficult to extract innovations in a meaningful way. The problem also lies in conceptualising, defining, articulating and assessing innovation in construction. The literature is replete with research into construction innovation, however, there is limited research into understanding how innovation is perceived and narrated in practice. The paper aims to explore how innovation is assessed and narrated in construction, specifically analysing theory and practice perspectives. A theoretical model was constructed from a structured literature review illustrating existing discourse and narratives of construction innovation assessment. A qualitative analysis of ¿Professional Excellence in Building¿ submission documents to the Australian Institute of Building was performed to identify the practice perspective of innovation. The findings suggest that internal organizational and process innovation account for the majority of improvements identified. Importantly a taxonomy of narrative is developed that articulates how the construction industry in Australia views industry innovation.

Historians and critics argue that a key characteristic of late twentieth century Australian regionalist architecture is the close visual connection it creates between the interior and the landscape. While various design properties are allegedly responsible for this connection, one of the most tangible of these is associated with the use of transparent and layered elements in a building's façade. Indeed, as exemplified in the work of Glenn Murcutt, the importance of façade transparency is a recurring theme in Australian architecture. But is it really that significant? In this paper, computational fractal analysis is used to measure the difference between the visual complexity of opaque and transparent depictions of façades. By comparing these two façade conditions, first in sets of elevations derived from 10 of Murcutt's houses and then in a detailed review of one of Murcutt's most iconic works, the Marie-Short House, this paper calculates the visual impact of transparency on the characteristic complexity of Murcutt's architecture.

Architects John Hejduk and Peter Eisenman were members of the "New York Five" and of the famous late modernist group, the "Whites." Early in their careers, both Hejduk and Eisenman proposed that form or shape (the aesthetics of architecture) was more important than program (the function of architecture) and they designed experimental houses to demonstrate this. The present article uses the computational fractal method to analyze 78 design drawings to develop a mathematical description of the visual complexity of five early domestic designs by each architect. These data will provide an important basis for empirical comparisons of buildings using characteristic visual dimensions. Through this process it is possible to test a variety of hypotheses about the visual and formal qualities of both architects' works. Among the article's conclusions are that the mathematical data typically supports both architect's claims about the formal properties of their designs while challenging several assumptions about scale and Deconstructivist architecture. © 2013 Baywood Publishing Co., Inc.