Habitus Magazine | Issue 1

One reason, is that we’re trying to do with this magazine what I don’t think has been done before in this part of the world – to bring together dwellings of architectural interest with the people who live in them and their way of life. In other words, Habitus is about people who value design, not as something just skin deep, but as an essential part of a life worth living. The magazine is about the design decisions those people make – the house, the products inside, the landscaping, the responses to climate and to the ambient culture – and how those decisions express who they are and what they believe in.

But Habitus has another agenda: to reflect the global economic engagement of Australia and New Zealand through a cultural engagement with their immediate region – South and South-East Asia. The rapid economic development of the Region has been expressed through a new generation of architects (many of whom have been trained in Australia and New Zealand) who have developed an astonishing new wave of ‘tropical modernism’, homes which splendidly reconcile the principles of international modernism with local culture, climate and landscape – and so reflecting the new global culture of what the Indonesians might call ‘unity in diversity’.

Habitus aims to mirror that diversity, and in that respect it will be an invaluable resource of ideas, a stimulus and even an inspiration for those who are driven to express who they are through the environment they create for themselves. The name, I think, communicates wonderfully what we are on about, adopting the term promoted by the great French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, and summarised by the Australian academic, Mark Bahnisch, as denoting “a constellation of attitudes, practices and behaviours peculiar to a particular group”.

Habitus is not a repository of ‘politically correct’ architecture or a guide to the latest fads in design. It is about diversity and about the stories behind the design choices people make. To quote the great Viennese proponent of ‘non-dogmatic’ architecture, Oscar Strnad: “We shouldn’t live practically, we should live pleasurably; we should feel a bond with the things in the home. The dwelling must suit the character of its occupants, and that is the architect’s sole task.” Or, what about Strnad’s famous colleague, Bernard Rudofsky: “Architecture is not just a matter of technology and aesthetics, but the frame for a way of life – and, with luck, an intelligent way of life”, what Rudofksy elsewhere described as reconciling “technology with the art of living”.

The magazine is organised into various departments which basically represent different approaches to the whole ambit of dwellings, interior and personal products, landscape and climate. Each department has been given a heading drawn from the world of film. Why? Well, imagine Habitus is a film and you can begin to appreciate the rhythms, the sharp or gradual transitions, the textures, the colours, the details and the broader picture, the personal and the social which characterise the way of life of a rich and diverse region which Habitus sets out to celebrate.

PAUL MCGILLICK | EDITOR