Tone on Tuesday 101: An index to all the articles

I have written 100 articles over two years, and upped stumps last week. Some have asked, before I go, to summarise the 115,000 words. And I’m happy to oblige, with an index below. Before I do, let me describe the premise of the columns, which is two-fold.

Firstly, design infuses every aspect of life, although it is not often discussed that way. Most design press is self-referential, discussed within narrow lines. I wanted to widen the discussion, into areas not often thought of as design, or with a different view of the design process.

Secondly, one most interesting aspect, so rarely linked to design, is politics. And many of these columns are decidedly political; mostly ‘left’ leaning because it is only the ‘left’ that has a shown even a glimmer of interest in design. Although I redesigned the idea of ‘left’!

Sustainability

The key area for design to address right now is sustainability. And it has occupied many columns:

• Who defined sustainability? Answer here. And hint, it’s a woman coining ‘spaceship earth’.
• The ‘third wave’ of sustainability (the first is moral encouragement, the second is regulation and the third is the use of lifestyle as a motivator)
• What six steps can lead us to a more sustainable life?
• The failure of autonomy and autonomous houses. And the need for community.

Then a series on passive solar houses:

• An introduction to passive solar, and it’s emphasis on an understanding of thermal comfort, and the five big ideas in solar passive design called the ‘Ausssie Five-O’: Outsulation, Openings, Orientation, Optimass & Operation
• The best first book on passive solar in Australia: ‘Homes in the sun’.
• Then two discussions of the computer program NatHERS, here and here.
• The possibilities of ‘outdoor rooms’ for sustainability.
• How buildings learn can better illuminate sustainability over time.
• Dissecting and re-writing the slogan ‘Technologies not Tax’.
• And a failure: how solar water heaters never took off.

Politics and design

Often politicians use the word ‘architect’ when they mean a making a policy. I wanted to turn the tables and use design to analyse policies and politics.

• Left and right are inadequate to describe politics, design offers us the chance to see politics in 3 dimensions. If we can have greens on the social, wet, left, then we can have crimsons on the conservative, dry right.
• Protests are so 20^th C, the climate strike and architects declare are passed their use-by date.
• Evolution, not revolution, done piece by piece, via a ‘Piece Corps’, a take on JFK’s great idea.
• One version is the use of the military in civilian disasters, discussed as ‘Anzac Daze’.
• Words are swords, which I examined in the ways indigenous names could be deployed, and how nouns and verbs can be used interchangeably in design.
• Not to neglect some massive failures when politics fails design: by not building quarantine facilities, but pouring unconscionable waste into the Australian War Memorial and the Sydney Football Stadium.

Social Housing

Most of my practice is focused on various forms of social housing, so you’d expect that a big proportion of the columns on that topic, and most can’t disguise my frustration with the way politics discriminates against the lowest two quintiles of our society.

• We can start with an understanding of the history of our ubiquitous suburban housing; the politics of affordability and housing inequality explained through home ownership for all.
• Social housing was explained, examined and typologies promoted in three columns addressed to architects who normally work on glamour homes.
• The failures of federal housing policies to reverse the inequality were discussed, along with more optimism through state based social housing.
• The failure of the pink batts program has spilled over to social housing, but there are glimmers of possibilities for social housing at last.
• But the darkest sides are seen in aged care and the mobile services for the homeless (substituting for homes).
• And a controversial pitch for a sustainable suburbia as a possible saviour.

Building

It’s one thing to design well, but another whole fish kettle to build well, the subject of several columns.

• Declining building quality was discussed through the lens of crafts, then trades, then subbies.
• Are the failures in build quality in apartments as bad as they say?
• And the surprising role of the banks in creating that mess.
• The inexorable rise of the project manager, and the consequent loss of design and build quality.
• A possible role for ‘PreFab’ in making better buildings.
• And a contrast in buildings in the USA. Two successes; the little known Clark County Government Centre and the much more famous original World Trade Centre, followed by the massive failures in the WTC rebuilding (at the time of the 20 year anniversary).

Teaching and Learning

Having spent 20 years full time and twenty years part-time in architecture schools I’ve experienced the good and the bad, sometimes finding it hard to divine the two.

• In four linked articles I set out a crit of the current state of architecture schools, a definition of architecture as space, curricula and the design process.
• I taught an introductory course on urban design, planning and architecture through a program called ‘Opus Musivum’ described over two columns.
• Principles in my teaching revolved around ‘plan and section’, a better ‘crit culture’, the importance of science in design, and reading (and more reading).
• An early column described the relationship between study and practice through an penetrating analysis of the Harvard GSD.

Architectural Practice

A number of issues of practical issues of practice intrigue me: the use of feasibility studies to start any project; the process in practice; how architects are sidelined; admitting you can be wrong; objectionable objectors; and whether droit de suite could apply to architecture.

Bushfires and Ventilation

Two contemporary topics of the last two years have been the bushfires (designing and surviving and most importantly looking to indigenous fire techniques) and ventilation (the con in Air Con, the failure of ventilation in quarantine hotels, and how it can be improved).

Industrial Design and E-Vehicles

I have written another thirty columns under the pseudonym of +one, all on industrial design, and some ideas leaked over into Tone on Tuesday including the issue of repairing fake Eames chairs, good goods, and seeing history through 100 objects. The e-vehicles included bikes, the failure of American juggernaut cars and the NY Yellow taxi.

Current events seen through design

Several current events demanded design attention: The inauguration of Joe Biden (the beauty of saying farewell to design-disaster Trump, and the failure of the USA); the Tokyo Olympics, events and temples, buildings and objects; and the fall of Kabul, but the articles (1,2,3) on design for Covid have not worn all that well. Too much too soon.

Obituaries

I wanted to mark the passing of some of my favourite designers during the last two years including overseas luminaries: Charles Jencks, Christo, Edward de Bono and three articles on the hidden talents of graphic designer Charlie Watts; and the local architects, all of whom I knew: Brian Klopper, Dirk Bolt, Marr Grounds (so good I wrote twice) and the remarkable Derek Wrigley.

Happy reading, I’m off to do a little catch up myself, there’s a pile of new works to devour.

Tone Wheeler is principal architect at Environa Studio, Adjunct Professor at UNSW and is President of the Australian Architecture Association. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and are not held or endorsed by A+D, the AAA or UNSW. Tone does not read Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or Linked In. Sanity is preserved by reading and replying only to comments addressed to [email protected].