“Ever since I was a child I’ve collected things: pebbles, shells from the rocks in the Abruzzi, strands of wire, little screws.”

• Lina Bo Bardi

In the callout for this issue, published three years ago, we gave ourselves permission to sit and think slowly—“(a few days, months, another year?)” We cannot say this was unintentional, or that the prolonged silence that followed was wilful. Time has sped up; or it finds itself spread thinner across those things that are necessary, sometimes tediously so, and those things at the centre of this issue.

The generosity of Lina Bo Bardi’s words speaks to these intentions: to collect, to bring together, never mind how disparate or tangential, the things and the people, that have come to exert any amount of influence on how we perceive and experience the world - for better or for worse. The third issue of Paradise Journal assembles a collection of essays that dwell and diligently unpick the Icons and Idols that have been taken up as representations of the Australian context, sometimes unveiling the unsteady ground below. But this issue also makes space for those more fleeting, if one would allow it, nostalgic ponderings for those precious things we have come to hold dear.

DIY (do-it-yourself) is the sophomore issue of Paradise Journal. Both not much and a great deal has changed in the last year. Most of the editorial team have now finished their postgraduate studies, with a few to begin in the coming year. We are standing in the doorway, or perhaps hesitating before the endlessly forking path. We wonder what comes next. DIY comes as a direct result of this moment we find ourselves in, a train of thought both rambling and precise.

If we are to understand the architectural profession as a pipeline, our futures in practice are fixed. We may find ourselves working as graduate architects, in our choice of small, medium, or large offices. Slowly, or all at once, we may begin to build projects that make worlds…

As an editorial team of seven postgraduate and two undergraduate students entering our final years of study, the professional practice of architecture is not as radical as we hope it to be. We find ourselves facing a future that crumbles underfoot with each timid step.

Paradise is dissatisfied with the echo chamber that is architectural discourse in Australia. The cloistered pages of traditional academic journals stifle most genuine messages with inaccessible jargon or theoretical wank. This discourse is produced by the academic, for the academic, primarily to meet the institutional quota. On the other hand, the glossy feeds of popular architectural media serve only to sell the image, the service, or the mythology of artistic genius. Laboured obsessions with the autonomous object and our self-image as a creative field distract us from the reality that we are a service industry, fully entwined and implicated in the global flows of capital and carbon…