Rhiannon Brownbill completed a Bachelor of Architecture at UTS in 2017. The experience made her start thinking differently about how the built environment shapes human lives, and the Master of Architecture was the ideal vehicle for to continue exploring her ideas.
Rhiannon Brownbill enrolled in the Master of Architecture after a personal tragedy: in 2018, her father passed away after a long battle with mental ill health. During his illness, he’d traversed through a series of clinical environments that left him disconnected from the things in life that brought him joy.
“My dad treated his illness through protecting and caring for plants,” Rhiannon says. “The way he died in such a medical environment just stripped everything away from him.”
For Rhiannon, who completed a Bachelor of Architecture at UTS in 2017, the experience made her start thinking differently about how the built environment shapes human lives.
I was interested in exploring the ways in which architecture intersects with disability and health care and trying to pull apart that system to re-examine what architecture can offer within those kinds of frameworks.
The Master of Architecture was the ideal vehicle for exploring her ideas. Alongside studio, research and professional practice subjects, Rhiannon enrolled in electives on Aboriginal Sydney and the evolution of housing and design policy in New South Wales, from colonisation to the present day.
But it was in the Wingara'ba'miya design studio led by architecture academic Joanne Kinniburgh and D’harawal eora Knowledge Keeper Shannon Foster that it all really came together.
Almost immediately, Rhiannon began to see the ways in which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ knowledges of Country could be used to decolonise medical spaces. She was particularly drawn to the complex relationships between Country, knowledge, community and culture and their potential to inform western models of care.
“Indigenous knowledges have existed here forever and they can inform the way we begin to pull apart and de-medicalise these spaces,” she says.
“My final thesis project looked at the ability of architecture to respond through local Indigenous protocols and knowledges of Country and embed that spatial knowledge into architectural, contemporary built forms.
‘It’s about bringing together western and Indigenous knowledge systems and seeing how they can strengthen each other.”
