The town of Austral is destroyed, 100,000+ homeless

In a rarely reported story this week, the town of Austral was destroyed entirely by a climate related event. More than 100,000 residents were made homeless.

Curiously, no government has acted to help them in any way, and even curiouser, there has not been a hue and cry in the media about this dereliction of responsibility.

Actually, the town of Austral is Australia, and the townspeople are the homeless. They are the hundred thousand in doorways, under bridges and sleeping rough in cars, that Australian governments have failed.

You can’t cure homelessness by providing a home, you need the wraparound social services, the kind that are delivered to every town after a bush catastrophic fire or flood. Wouldn't it be wonderful if federal and state governments treated the homeless with the same emergency services they do when catastrophic floods and fires occur? Australia is shamed by its continuing neglect of increasing homelessness issues.

Electric Land Rovers rule

A most interesting electric vehicle (EV) conversion company is Fellten, a joint venture between Jaunt, a Melbourne business specialising in converting Land Rovers, and Zero EV, an English EV conversion kit manufacturer. Why Land Rovers? Well, Australia has the largest number of Land Rovers in the world. Before Toyota’s Landcruiser, the only right-hand, four-wheel drive available in Australia (and South Africa) were Land Rovers. Thousands were sold, mostly based in the bush, where they resisted the inevitable rust.

Easily stripped down for rebuild, Jaunt became experts at conversions, and sought out a company to make kits specifically for EV Land Rovers. Curious idea really, turning one of the noisiest cars on the road, at least for its occupants, into silent running.

Vale Peter Muller, architect joining two worlds

One of Australia's greatest architects, Peter Muller, died recently, and you can read an obituary here. Muller brought an authentic modernist approach to house designs in the Australian landscape and climate, an approach he’d seen on his Fullbright scholarship in Pennsylvania, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s work. This is most redolent in his own house (top image) and the startling round forms of the Richardson House, both in Sydney’s northern beach suburbs.

More importantly for many, was his engagement with Asian architecture and the introduction of cultural appropriate modernism into Asia. His melding of two architectures created modern Asian design, typified in his early hotels, including the Amandari (lower image), using modern planning and spatial arrangements, built in traditional Materials. He paved the way for other Australians, notably the late Made Wijaya, to practice extensively in Bali.

In other climes, Muller would be better celebrated with many books on his life’s work. So far, we have only an excellent biography by architect and historian Jackie Urford, available as a print on demand book here.

Dissonance in USyd architecture degrees

Like many architecture schools, the University of Sydney has grown dramatically in the last 25 years, from an intake of about 80 to over 300. The undergraduate program now features two degrees, a Bachelor of Design in Architecture and a Bachelor of Architecture and Environments. The courses run in parallel and share resources, and you would expect that would lead to better coordination than was on display at last year's end of year exhibition.

The environment students were tasked with investigating the history and environment of Sydney Harbour’s edges. They produced skillfully researched documents on the issues, highlighting the impossibility of building in such a precious environment.

On the other hand, the design students were tasked with designing a modern drama or performance theatre on the harbor's edge. The premiated schemes seem to have set out to do as much damage to the harbor as possible. There was a startling dissonance between research students, with admirable briefings, and the design students who let creativity rip in displays of architectural ego.

It was all the more depressing to see the designs dressed in brilliant documentation and vibrant presentations, using the latest digital techniques, with content so rooted in mid 20th century ideology.

Bookends: Reality strikes not once but twice

Bookends this week features two books dealing with reality. In 1971, Victor Papenek wrote Design for the Real World, in response to his alarm at the consumerist concerns of modern industrial design, that entirely missed the third world's pressing problems of poverty, water, food, and clothing. For him the real world lay beyond the shores of the USA, rarely visited in design schools and practices then, but now well addressed because of his demanding book.

In a similar vein, Michael Benedikt was alarmed by the excesses of postmodernism, the theatrical displays, obscure narrative concoctions and non-formalist compositions that abounded in the 80s. For an Architecture of Reality, published in 1987 is pungent, but also remarkable for its layout: a single image on a black page on one side and the related text, with only as many words as necessary, on a white page opposite. It clearly pushed the demonstrative argument forward, but the layout has never been repeated to my knowledge.

Both books stand the test of time, the former is still used in industrial design schools, but the latter has been superseded by PoMoHo passing into history. Both still available on the soon to disappear Book Depositry.

More things next week. Tone Wheeler is an architect / the views expressed are his / contact at [email protected].