PlanningxChange 127: Dr Derham Groves - Sherlock Holmes + City Making + Popular Culture

In PX127 our guest is architect, former academic and author Dr Derham Groves. He studied architecture at Deakin University and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and art history at the University of Minnesota. He taught architecture at RMIT from 1985 to 1997 and the University of Melbourne from 1999 to 2019 and was a Senior Fellow in the Faculty of Architecture, Building, and Planning at the University of Melbourne from 2020 to 2024. Derham is the author of many articles and books about popular culture, architecture, and design, including, Feng-Shui and Western Building Ceremonies (1991), You Bastard Moriarty (1996), Mail Art: The D-I-Y Letterbox from Workshop to Gatepost (1998), TV Houses: Television’s Influence On the Australian Home (2004), Mask: Pro Hart’s Frankenstein Monsters (2006), There’s No Place Like Holmes: Exploring Sense of Place Through Crime Fiction (2008), Victims and Villains: Barbie and Ken Meet Sherlock Holmes (2009), Anna May Wong’s Lucky Shoes: 1939 Australia Through the Eyes of an Art Deco Diva (2011), Out of the Ordinary: Popular Art, Architecture and Design (2012), Hopalong Cassidy: A Horse Opera (2017), Monkeemania in Australia: Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of The Monkees’ Australian Tour in 1968 (2019), Arthur Purnell’s “Forgotten” Architecture: Canton and Cars (2020), Sherlock in the Seventies: A Wild Decade of Sherlock Holmes Films (2021), Australian Westerns in the Fifties: Kangaroo, Hopalong Cassidy on Tour, and Whiplash (2022), and Homicide on Hydra: George Johnston’s Crime Novels (2023). His latest book, Walt Disney’s Forgotten Australia: From Mickey’s Kangaroo to Outback At Ya! has been released in February 2025. Derham agrees with the Austrian architect Hans Hollein that ‘Everything is architecture,’ and the American designer Charles Eames who said, ‘Eventually everything connects—people, ideas, objects.’ Episode released 10 February 2025.