Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2021 i Architecture Australia

In recent years, various state governments and universities have sought to re-imagine suburban housing for tomorrow. This is both an acknowledgement of the primacy of the suburb in defining Australian cities, and a recognition of the limited suitability of current patterns of development.  Here, we present three winners from competitions in New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria, and a scheme from a collaborative research project in Western Australia. While all are proposed for different sites with different contexts, they share similar aims: to increase density, to improve sustainability, to be more affordable and to increase the diversity of home types available.  Each project adopts a different approach: building along the fenceline, respecting existing trees, constructing a village of tiny homes, and creating a multi-residential block. All are beautiful, intelligent and…

Built on the land of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin nation Harrison and White’s Zoology building at Lilydale High School is a modestly scaled building in a modest setting. It nevertheless has architectural ambition. It sits at the entry to a large state high school, facing a carpark and – across a road and a bit of “terrain vague” – some anonymous industrial and warehouse boxes. The immediate setting is kind of ugly. The broader context, however, is typical of Melbourne’s north-east: suburban architecture merging into gently rolling hills and vegetation. The vibe is loose-fit, even shaggy, but somewhat beautiful. With another new building by the same architects – an administration centre – the Zoology building forms the new entry to the school, which with the demolition…

A few years ago, my partner and I wanted to rebuild our family home in Melbourne’s northern suburbs. I’m talking proper far-northern suburbia. Not Brunswick or Fitzroy, but a terrain complete with industrial badlands and identikit postwar homes that have had only one owner. We wanted to hire a firm of inner-city architects for our new design but soon received a reality check. “No-one will work out there,” came the warning. “It looks bad on the folio.” In the end, we hired building designers, who not only respected our budget but also acknowledged the terrain for what it was: a low-cost pathway for new families to enter the housing market. They were glad to show their faces out there and we appreciated their empathy and understated skill. Since we arrived,…

Brisbane suburban streetscapes are often formed out of roads that cut through the side of steep terrain like a belt that’s worn too tight. Houses on the high side bulge over roads, where they appear bold and pronounced. In contrast, the houses on the lower side shyly sink beneath the road, with only their rooflines visible to passing traffic. This familiar streetscape is present as I drive through the southern middle-ring suburb of Tarragindi. Built on the land of the Turrbal and Jagera peoples Twin Houses by John Ellway sits on the high side of a busy main road full of activity, with tradespersons’ utes and vans lined up along the street. It’s a typical scene for a low-density postwar suburb undergoing renewal, boosted by short-term economic stimulus. Twin Houses…

Emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, I am left with a nagging sensation that it is horrifying not only because of the death rate – which is in fact much lower than a pandemic has the potential to produce – but because it has revealed rather more fundamental underlying patterns. They describe a set of deeper crises now finally here at scale, beginning to roil and roll around us. A global pandemic, almost certainly generated by rampant biodiversity degradation, appears hot on the heels of Australia’s continent-scale bushfires and is, in turn, followed by devastating floods. And yet life itself seemed on hold. There was a great waiting though for what no one knew. — Richard Flanagan, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams1 These crises, encompassing not only COVID and climate…

In 2019, a former student who had ascended to the position of Head of Innovation at a large-volume housing company approached our studio, Other Architects, with an irresistible offer: the opportunity to design a new variant on the standard Sydney suburban project home. If our design met the right criteria for cost, constructability and market appeal, it might one day go into production alongside established models such as the Balmoral Hamptons, the Leona Coastal and the Wilton Contemporary. To kick off this potential engagement, we drove out to Marsden Park, a rapidly developing suburb in Sydney’s north-west. There, within a vast housing estate, we toured a range of completed display homes and new houses under construction. We were no strangers to suburbia. In the years leading up to our Marsden…

Built on the land of the Bunurong people of the Kulin nation Since the 1970s, Australian cities have wrestled with their identities, questioning where their centre – or heart – lies. Is that heart best understood in the concentrated, capital city CBDs, or in the sprawling suburbs that make up the majority of their area? Does it reside in its colonial occupation or in the waves of twentieth-century migrants that have followed since? As a suburb 22 kilometres south-east of central Melbourne, Springvale represents a highly distributed form of city, in both its physical form and its social makeup. It is one of the most ethnically diverse places in Australia, with a huge percentage of its population coming from various countries in South East Asia.1 This is not by accident.…

Built on the land of the Whadjuk people of the Noongar nation The experimental housing development WGV has been unfolding for six years in the Perth suburb of White Gum Valley. Behind the coastal limestone cliffs of Fremantle and beside a golf course lined with tuart trees sits a series of fascinating experiments with water, energy, landscape and architecture. A space for housing experimentation and demonstration is of great importance in Australia. In contexts dictated by quantity – where housing factors as a commodity before it factors as a place to live – quality can be scarce. Medium-density demonstrations offer chances to prove and experience the gains in sharing and sustainability that can come from living closer together, as well as giving designers, communities and governments a space to lead…

I have a love-hate relationship with the drive to my mother’s house. As an Indigenous woman whose family has been disconnected from Country due to colonial processes, I am on a journey of reconnecting, so I relish the opportunity to move through Country and connect the landscape with the cultural knowledge I’m learning. As I drive from my home in Gundungurra Country, I think about the stories I have been told. I think about the 330-million-year-old mountains created during the Dreaming, the rivers and hills formed by creator spirits awakening from their slumber. As I move through Mulgoa Country, I remember the stories of the Black Swan people that speak of their plight during the last ice age, 11,000 years ago. I admire the beautiful golden hills and plains, imagining…

Built on the land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation We seem to have lost our way in the production of the built environment. Our cities and suburbs are built for profit, not for people, leading to an acute crisis of housing access and affordability. The market for new housing is dominated by freestanding project homes on the rural fringe and miserable highrise units in city centres. An entire generation of young people are effectively locked out of owning a home. And even if they can get a foot on the ladder, the choices available are few and lacking in quality and design invention. Despite claims to have all the answers for how to build an equitable, social and just city, architects and urban planners instead often play…