Regional Bureaucracy | Author: Guillermo Fernandez-Abascal

Every regional city and town has basic amenities of some description. A post office, a school, a town hall, a police station, and sometimes, a swimming pool. Across New South Wales, the majority of these buildings were designed by the NSW Government Architect’s Office (GAO), most prolifically over a period of thirty years from 1958 to 1988. These civic structures – equally recognisable and indistinguishable in their form and wider sensibilities – create an oeuvre of public architecture that is both statewide and specifically local. Yet, due to the fact that these buildings largely act in service of our daily lives and routines, they are often perceived as exceedingly ordinary and overlooked as serious architecture.

Regional Bureaucracy corrals these buildings as a distinct, if not idiosyncratic, collection. Utilising new drawings, photographs and stories, the book outlines a body of work that stands as recent evidence of how modern architecture can construct a state – albeit a complicated and ambitious one and presents a selection of relevant regional works that reveal an architectural mode that is distinctly ‘good enough’.

Softcover
27 x 20cm
224 pages