Veranda urbanism: projecting the veranda edge onto the city

The idea of the threshold, the space held in tension between the interior and exterior, has a long-standing history in Queensland exemplified in the ubiquitous ‘Queenslander’ typology and its encircling veranda motif. Its phenomenological uniqueness mythologized by writers such as David Malouf, underpinning the conceptual and spatial organization of the architectural creations of architect’s such Brit Andresen & Peter O’Gorman, and more recently and Donovan Hill. This article explores this unique edge condition historically, examining how it has been extended into contemporary Queensland architecture through a combination of precedent study, and section drawings with accompanying text. Drawing will become the primary means of researching, recording, and understanding the veranda as a self contained building element, and as a threshold that mediates the sequence of spatial, temporal, and environmental filters from inside to out. Its emphasis will be on the technical and the experiential, based on the scale of people, at moments of either transition from inside or out, or inhabitation of the in-between. The essay will then extrapolate the implications of the veranda and threshold to consider larger typologies that result in a ‘veranda urbanism’. This ‘veranda urbanism’ that results is both historically grounded, but also projective, offering insights as to how the edges of the city might be informed transformed by this balanced critique of the technical and experiential conditions of the veranda as threshold.