Queensland architect Elizabeth Watson-Brown will run for the federal seat of Ryan in Brisbane as a Greens candidate at the next election.
Watson-Brown, who directed her own practice for 20 years before joining Architectus and becoming its national design strategy leader, was announced as the candidate at an event in Brisbane Tuesday with Greens leader Adam Bandt.
The electorate of Ryan encompasses the western suburbs of Brisbaneand is classified as a safe seat for the Liberal National Party with 48.61 percent of the primary vote. The Greens have been steadily increasing their vote, finishing with only a few thousand less votes than Labor in 2019. Party strategists see an opportunity to edge out Labor in the first-preference count and win the seat on preferences.
“There is a general sense [in Ryan] that the two major parties are not addressing some fundamentals concerns that people have,” Watson-Brown told ArchitectureAU.
“There are lots of underpinning concerns that people have in society, and I think that the Greens are answering those. For one, we’ve got governments across Australia, both blue and red, who are promoting energy sources that are problematic in terms of dealing with climate change.”
Ngungun House, Elizabeth Watson-Brown’s first project, 1990.
Image:
Michael Nicholson
Through her career as an architect, Watson-Brown has been a keen advocate for sustainable and socially responsible design. She has been involved as a volunteer with the Greens for a number of campaigns, and sees her tilt at political office as a way of prosecuting some of the agendas she has focused on throughout her career.
“It was really good to enact these sorts of things project by project, and that has its power,” she said. “But I’ve started really being aware that it is in the policy settings and the overarching context in which we design and build that important steps need to be made.”
One key initiative she would like to see at the federal level is a ministerial portfolio with a focus on the sustainability and resilience of cities in the face of climate change.
“85 percent of us live in cities, so it’s absolutely central to how we navigate the effects of climate change, right now and in the immediate future, not in the distant future,” she said.
“[It’s something that] architects and urban designers and planners can address, and to bring that all together, under an umbrella, to figure out how we deal with it across Australia, would be really, really powerful.
“There are lots of really good architects, lots of good designers, lots of good urbanists, but so often, they’re putting their creative energies and their intelligence into fighting not very good systems. If we can get the policy settings right, so that we’re all working together towards dealing with this incredible challenge [of climate change], that would be huge.”
443 Queen Street is a high-rise apartment development designed by Architectus and Woha.
Another policy area where Watson-Brown sees her architecture background as a real strength is housing affordability and homelessness.
As of late 2020, there were around 430,000 people on waiting lists for public housing around Australia, and at the 2016 census 116,000 people were counted as experiencing homelessness.
“We’re a wealthy country, we should not have anyone homeless,” Watson-Brown said. “And that’s a design issue, as well as an ethical and political issue – not just in terms of architecture, but in the design of the policy settings and how we spend our resources in this country.”
Watson-Brown, who in addition to practice has taught architecture at the University of Queensland since 2019, recently retired from Architectus.
She is a life fellow of the Australian Institute of Architects and serves on independent design advisory panels for Brisbane and Sunshine Coast councils.
The seat of Ryan is held by first term MP Julian Simmonds, who won the seat in 2019 with a two-party-preferred vote of 56.03 percent compared to Labor’s 43.97 percent. The Greens received 20.35 percent of the primary vote, which is an increase of 1.59 percent from the previous election.
Source: Architecture - architectureau
