“It is clear to me that unless we connect directly with the earth, we will not have the faintest clue why we should save it.” Helen Caldicott “If You Love This Planet: A Plan to Save the Earth (Revised and Updated)”, (2009), p.235, W. W. Norton & Company

Nuclear Design – Oxy-moron

Debate is raging about Peter Dutton’s bomb throwing idea of nuclear power. Sizes, power output, timing, grid connections, waste. Very little about the designs, our main interest in this column.

The image the LNP is touting is a small modular reactor (SMR) from Rolls-Royce. Makers of hugely expensive and ugly  ICE cars and climate burning plane engines. Good choice. Except that SMRs are now the unlikely choice. Classic bait and switch.

The CGI image (needed since none exist in reality) has smoothed it out to look like a community centre. But it will never look anything like that. Nuclear power works the same way as coal, creating heat to make steam, to drive a turbine, with excess heat released in giant chimneys. They look like this.

Speaking of images, it's worth remembering that the plumes of escaping steam has been used to misrepresent the idea of emissions of greenhouse gases.  Instead of the CO2 from the coal burning. But the whole idea is still deeply, stupidly ugly.

Vale Guy Warren

Sad to say goodbye last week to artist and teacher Guy Warren at the age of 103. As an artist, he’s in every Australian gallery; for many years in the 70s and 80s, he was the painting teacher at the Tin Sheds at the University of Sydney.

As a former, albeit little talented, student I can only say he was a joy. He taught alongside his lifelong friend, the great sculptor Bert Flugelman. Together with Lloyd Rees teaching art and drawing, and Chips Mackinolty for screen printing, he had an enormous impact on several generations of architecture students.

I pay tribute to his extraordinary enthusiasm, his intelligence in dealing with people with little artistic talent, and his love of drawing and painting undiminished over 103 years. You couldn't ask for better fine art training, given so insightfully to architecture students. So long Guy, it was wonderful to know you.

Edo-Tokyo Open-Air Heritage Museum

Architectural heritage in Australia is binary. Knock it down or preserve it. There's a third solution in Tokyo. In the huge post WW2 expansion a large number of 18th, 19th and early 20th C  heritage buildings were dismantled very carefully and re-erected.

Rather than being lost forever, they were re-assembled outdoor in a park, now called the Edo-Tokyo Open-Air Architecture Museum. The shops were arranged into a street to give an appreciation of its urban flavor, and fitted out with the contents of the shops to reflect the nature of the times (the image above).

There is an urban house and a rural house, both based on to ‘tatami mat’ patterns, which can be visited and walked through, with the removal of your shoes.

There's also a modest police box where police would sleep overnight whilst maintaining order. As everything is outdoors, so are the vending machines.

Pod-casts

Warning; blatant self-promotion ahead. Some say I can talk under water with a mouthful of marbles. Amply demonstrated on two recent podcasts. On Ecogradia I’m talking about remaking Australian suburbia, which is where most architects work.

On Architecture and Design I’m banging on about how immigration has nothing to do with the housing crisis, except solving it. My experience over the last 50 years working on sites in suburbia shows an intertwining of immigration and construction: so many of the tradies have come from OS.

Bookends

Speaking of immigration: two books. They’re A Weird Mob by Nino Culotta  (aka John O'Grady), with very good descriptions of house construction from the late 50s. Made into a fillum.

The Snowy: A History, by Siobhán McHugh tells a story, amongst many, of how our largest ever infrastructure project was built on the back of migrants. The Anniversary edition (70 years) was published in 2019 by UNSW Press.

Signs off

This is the recycling sign that you know so well. A recent article in Grist Magazine entitled How the recycling symbol lost its meaning - Corporations sold Americans on the chasing arrows — while stripping the logo of its worth, suggests the symbol has been misused, to the point of being misleading about how recycling works. As a result, the quality and quantity of recycling has not been as successful as the universal symbol would suggest.

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]