Architectural Witnessing: Revealing the Spatial Redaction of Australia’s Grey Network of Hotel Detention

Through investigating Australia’s hotel detention network, with a particular focus on the Park Hotel, this research explores how architectural representation can act as a form of witnessing, particularly where architecture actively conceals or contradicts the sites’ function as carceral infrastructure. Beyond functioning as technical and evidentiary tools, this PhD examines expanded approaches to architectural documentation which can record in both accurate, and affective and embodied ways. To do this, redaction, absence, and opacity are employed as spatial strategies to connect representations to the carceral transformation of investigated sites and subjectivities of the architect-researcher, thus functioning as a mode of witnessing.