Tony Trobe, director at TT Architecture, was recently appointed president to the ACT’s Chapter of the Australian Institute of Architects.
The architect was recently reported as saying Canberra shouldn’t ignore its heartless reputation.
Architecture & Design spoke to Trobe about what’s wrong with the state of Canberra’s planning, why architecture in the territory is like a liquorice allsorts and why Le Corbusier would be choking on his croissant if he could see architecture today.
How would you describe Canberra’s current approach to planning?
To be frank it’s just a little buggered! I should make the point that this is my personal view so that I don't get sacked as the ACT president.
Next year is the 100th anniversary of the competition that gave Canberra its clothes. When comparing the current state of play with the boldness of those that gave birth to the idea of our capital, one is inclined to weep.
Elizabeth Farrelly (in the SMH last year) wrote “Canberra, the city, is much less charming, partly because the intellectual content has been strained out of it by successive amendments, like flavour out of an old teabag”.
The planning document she refers to and that encapsulates Canberra’s ambition seems have toppled off a summit. At some time in the past the peak that encapsulated the rather glorious ‘performance-based ideals’ of our Territory Plan seems to have sunk into a turgid swamp of numbers. There is a palpable lack of an ongoing ‘big picture’ for Canberra — an agenda committed to fleshing out the fabulous bones it has bequeathed.
What about its approach to architecture?
Well that's a different thing altogether. Not many people know this but the ‘mission statement’ of the Institute of Architects is to “make the world a better place through architecture”. Having reviewed the entrants to this year's Institute awards (and those of recent years), it is self-evident that the architectural profession should have coolly walked to the front of the stage and taken a well-deserved bow. Mission achieved.
Canberra's architecture is like a bag of liquorice allsorts. The submissions to the awards process typically range from a particularly cute little sundeck that emerges glowing from deepest, darkest suburbia to something bold and provocatively public such as the National Portrait Gallery. Currently, however, the architecture, splendid though as it is, may as well be ornamental litter if it is not beaded together on the thread of a liveable city.
St Gregory’s Hall by Collins Caddaye Architects was awarded Canberra’s most prestigious architecture prize, the Canberra Medallion at the Australian Institute of Architects’ 2012 ACT Architecture Awards. Image courtesy of Stefan Postles.
In an ideal world, what would you like to see happen to Canberra’s architecture and planning?
It might be time to upset the apple cart! If one were to replace the names of some of Canberra’s precious inner suburbs with places names like Passchendaele, Somme or Ypres one might get a sense of the sort of trench warfare that is manifest between the half of the community that has strong and vocal vested interest in the status quo and those who desire sustainable change and are less addicted to the motorcar and suburbia.
My personal view, which is an almost certainly a certifiable naive one, consists of a temptation to drop the whole current gargantuan planning document into the recycle bin and force the community and developers to sit down with a big fat pen, some butcher paper and decide once and for all on solid and clear imperatives. We still need to invent a workable mechanism to realise this exercise, but it may provide a blueprint for the city. Hopefully future generations won’t have to continue to pretend that they hail from elsewhere. Canberra will not be, as Bill Bryson famously said, “a gateway to everywhere else”.
You established TT Architecture in 1990. What has been the biggest change you’ve witnessed in your profession since then?
Apparently there have been five major extinction events in the history of the planet and currently we are in the middle of a sixth.
The dinosaurs that are currently being expunged from the fossil record are grey-haired old relics such as myself who still believe in set squares, Rotring pencils and if they're honest, their much loved thin leather ties. Technology has not just moved the goalposts, but it has resurfaced the pitch.
We are playing a totally different game now — and a very exciting one. The possibilities opened up by advances in software and materials technology have empowered designers to a point that if we had a Tardis and could show the current state of play to Le Corbusier, it would have him choking on his croissant.
What do you think will have the biggest impact on architectural design over the next five years?
I guess more of a continuing, ramping trajectory, driven exponentially by escalating technology.
In recent times I've been involved with some primary school projects where small clever sprogs get passionately stuck into the design of passive solar houses for their mums and dads. These kids had been brought up to swim in the soup of sustainability and now they are light years ahead of their parents in their sensibilities. These are proto-consumers and the next batch of opinion makers - they are the future. It is catering to their increasing sense of global citizenship that will drive the profession into the next generation.
If you weren’t an architect, what would you be doing?
I was a proto-chemist for a year back at uni in the ‘Old Dart’ before waking up from that particular little nightmare. So my doppelganger might have been formulating exciting compounds to improve the performance of rubber bands in lovely Leeds. Or a diplomat perhaps — I love the idea of being paid to go to cocktail parties, but I have realised through introspection that although I am relatively chatty for a bloke, I am not discreet … so maybe not? Architecture it is then!
