Among Buildings brings together photographer Tom Ross, architect and poet Michael Roper, and graphic designer Stuart Geddes to reframe 26 significant Melbourne buildings through poetry and photography — a collaboration that resists the authoritative survey in favour of personal, open-ended reflection.
About This Book
This is not a guidebook to Melbourne architecture, nor a catalogue of canonical works. Among Buildings operates in the productive space between image and language, asking what a building means to those who inhabit, observe, and imagine it. Each of the 26 featured structures — from Robin Boyd's Featherston House to the Griffins' Capitol Theatre, from Federation Square to the Sidney Myer Music Bowl — is met not with technical description but with fragments: poetic, photographic, and experiential. The result is a work that treats Melbourne's built environment as a site of myth, memory, and ongoing interpretation. This second edition presents the work in a lay-flat binding for the first time, allowing the full spread of Ross's photography to be read alongside Roper's verse without interruption. An introduction by architect, artist and poet Alex Selenitsch anchors the project in broader thinking about architecture and language.
Key Features
- 208 pages of lay-flat bound photography and poetry across 26 Melbourne buildings
- Photography by Tom Ross; poetry by Michael Roper; design by Stuart Geddes; introduction by Alex Selenitsch
- Featured buildings include Featherston House (Robin Boyd), Capitol Theatre (Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin), Sidney Myer Music Bowl (Yuncken Freeman), National Gallery of Victoria (Roy Grounds / Mario Bellini), Federation Square (Lab Architecture Studio), RMIT Design Hub (Sean Godsell), and Storey Hall (Ashton Raggatt McDougall), among others
- Published by Uro Publications, 2018
What You'll Discover
- How poetry and architectural photography can operate in tension rather than illustration — each medium unsettling and expanding the other's account of a building
- A non-hierarchical reading of Melbourne's built history, from public housing estates and lifesaving clubs to national cultural institutions
- The role of place, myth, personal memory, and imagination in how significant architecture is experienced beyond its programme or authorship
- A formal argument made through the lay-flat binding itself: that the relationship between image and text demands physical openness and uninterrupted spread
About the Author
Stuart Geddes is a Melbourne-based graphic designer whose work engages with print, publishing, and the relationship between design and language. Among Buildings is a three-way collaboration with architect and poet Michael Roper and photographer Tom Ross, with an introduction by Alex Selenitsch, who practises across architecture, art, and poetry.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover, lay-flat binding
- Pages: 208
- Dimensions: 235 x 165 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781922601292
- Publisher: Uro Publications
- Publication Date: 2018
Perfect For: Architects and designers with an investment in Melbourne's built history; readers interested in the intersection of poetry and architectural photography; students of Australian architecture seeking a work that prioritises interpretation over documentation.