Welcome to Paradise

Paradise is an online journal for Australian architecture and research. It operates in the present moment of endless apocalypse, at the very height of our global anxiety. The end of something is just the beginning of something else. Bad omens are the growing pains of a body in transformation.

Paradise is Australia. The lucky country at the end of the world. The dream of a clean slate. The violent history written over Country. It is the dramatic irony of the promise and the problem being one and the same. Australia lies at the intersection of the global contemporary: both east and west, both desert and tropical, both future-minded and so backward. We’ll be the first to reach nirvana or the first to tear ourselves apart. Paradise is a cold beer in a living room on fire.

Paradise is a product of dissatisfaction with architecture and our spaces of violence and dispossession, of smoothness and exclusion. It is disillusioned by the carbon form of our world, petrified through decades of human life seeking boundless abundance and individualism. It acts to amplify the fury, the angst, and the achingly optimistic, and seeks to construct an image of our future.

Paradise is for the unexpected and the emerging, the established academic and the bright-eyed underdog. It is both completely serious and totally naive. Paradise welcomes the discomfort of the agonistic multitude, the itchy immaterial condition of adjacency.

Surrender to Paradise.