“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” Steve Jobs, Apple founder.
Housing Map (worst title ever)
The NSW government has released a map of about 100 well-designed housing schemes, collected together by the Government Architect (industrious advocates for ‘design excellence’). Launched in a media release this month (see top of image) it extolled the virtue of built examples in ‘your backyard’.
The release directs to a planning website page that simply and elegantly explains the issues (the bottom part of the image). And then it inexplicably invites you explore a ‘housing map’.
A housing map? Seriously. Is that the best name for a this expertly curated collection of design excellence works that focus on two to six storey housing from many suburbs and (mostly coastal) towns. Great content, lousy, uninformative name.
Which is biting the hands that feeds, since three of our projects made the shortlist. A row of terraces and WFH studios in Alexandria, a low-and-close set of apartments on an old petrol station site (which featured in ToT 168), and a four-storey compact apartment scheme at the base of a 20-storey tower. You can spot those irritations amongst the pearls.
Made in Australia
The PM is spruiking the idea of a manufacturing revolution he calls ‘A future made in Australia’. Happy for him to look to the sustainable energy industries, but he might also look to where success has already been achieved and could be expanded: home building and construction. Australia has quite a number of innovative creations in the construction industry.
Some say that Aussies invented cavity brickwork and brick veneer, (not me) but the latter was certainly perfected here, to the point of it becoming brick veneereal disease, only cured with lightweight concrete panels by James Hardie. The reinvented panelling, economically made and installed, is now so successful in the United States, the profits are powering a major part of the compensation to victims of the asbestos debacle.
Or think of how the dry continent has spawned water saving inventive work of Caroma, mass produced waterless toilets and dual flush dunnies. How the efficiency of a myriad small fabricators are turning to prefabrication of small parts for apartments (bathrooms, kitchens, laundries) at far higher quality than China.
When the Ford factory closed outside Melbourne, the sites which made car parts were redeveloped for other industries, including one of only 3 phenolic resin insulation plants built by Kingspan (Irish company, now huge in Australia). As the architect of the factory and warehouse, I had the dubious pleasure of showing the then liberal minister for the environment around at the opening. I pitched the idea of the entire area to be a base for a whole new industry in mass manufactured buildings. Fell on deaf ears, which is exactly what Josh Frydenberg got from the electorate a few years later.
Hip Hip Hooray for Heresy and Hypocrisy
This artwork, entitled Always Was, Always Will Be, was commissioned by the City of Sydney in 2012 from Reko Rennie, a Kamilaroi man, assisted by Peter Lonergan from Cracknell and Lonergan Architects. Rennie wanted the painting to pay tribute and acknowledge the original Aboriginal custodians of the land. It both deconstructs the building and provides an arresting counterpoint to the ubiquitous advertisements (on Council erected shelters).
It covered the entire facade of the council-owned building until they decided to sell it in 2017, at which point the artist reluctantly agreed to have it painted over. Which was only the beginning of this Council’s heresy and hypocrisy.
Firstly the building should never have been sold – it was a public asset, and could have been reworked as a LGBTQI museum (as some suggested) or indigenous workshops or…or… Now, just corporate offices that we, the public owners, lost.
This is the same council that dictates the exact shade of brown that your project has to be painted. Mass beige inoffensive blandness out of some misguided sense of history. How does the head of planning reconcile painting one of Council’s buildings in outrageously beautiful colors, and yet demand that citizens not express their personality in the color choice for their houses?
After WW2 Australians thought modern buildings were white, maybe grey, because they only had B+W photos. What a shock it must have been to see Le Corbusier’s riotous colours in the flesh, or realise what Iwan Iwanoff was up too in Perth (as we shall see).
Bookends
Iwan Iwanoff is a celebrated modernist architect in Perth, WA. Not so much in the east. On the left is a book of images by Jack Lovel, 400 self-published copies in early 2021. Hard to make these highly modelled buildings look anything but gorgeous in Perth’s sharp light. Now sold out everywhere. The book that is.
So it is timely for Warren Andersen to self-publish a book on this ever-inventive architect. A former town planner, he spent years assembling the ‘catalogue raisonée’, including B+W images from never seen before archives and rarities of commercial designs. Every scheme has lists of key elements, but sadly not the addresses.
His former profession comes through from time to time as he describes: “an imposing front bunker addition and steel balcony overwhelms the original rectangular façade”. Ouch. Application refused. I would rather have found an original image, or photoshop out the offending excrescence.
Nevertheless it’s great and fascinating work that the easternites need to see more of. By buying the book, or better still, by going to Perth and driving round and round the suburb listed in the book.
Signs Off
An ad, pasted onto a traffic light electronics box, sparks this week’s humdrum conundrum: if you graffiti an illegal poster, is that act, in itself, illegal. Do two wrongs make a right? Or is it left to the council cleaners?
Design Notes is researched and written by Tone Wheeler, architect /Adjunct Prof UNSW /President AAA. The views expressed are his. Past Design Notes and Tone on Tuesday columns can be found here. You can contact TW at [email protected].
