Architect Victoria Official Journal of the Australian Institute of Architects Victorian Chapter Print Post Approved PP 381667-00206 ISSN 1329-1254
Winter 2012
Editorial Social, Housing, Complex – Catherine Ranger Contributors Arthurson, Bryar, Carter, Chan, Darcy, Giannini, Hamann, Huon, Khor, McGauran, Press, Ramirez-Lovering, Rogers, Rowe, Sauer, Stampton Slice Brett Seakins Institute News Awards Task Force, Large Practice Forum, Member Services Committee, Small Practice Forum, Sustainable Architecture Forum, Victorian Chapter Council Messages Office of the Victorian Government Architect – Tom Alves Victorian Chapter President – Jon Clements
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Living Places, Dandenong, Bent Architecture (2011) Photographer Trevor Mein
Social, Housing, Complex Catherine Ranger Architecture’s role in social housing has always been charged with delivering a sense of community. As a key contributor to this holistic ‘goal’ it is fundamental in developing and fostering a communally orientated, societal ideology which is itself vital to the ongoing social and contextual welfare of a place. But this ideology requires significant and constant adaptation. The caution that resulted from the infamous modernist experiments in social housing hindered its evolution, and the realities of today’s social and political environment complicate it further. “Social housing” encompasses two housing typologies, both made available to selected tenants at a reduced rent, but otherwise characteristically different. Community housing is funded or semi-funded by governments, private investment or not-for-profit organisations and is mostly managed by housing associations (in some cases, by local government). Public housing is owned and managed by the government. Providing housing for people in need is a balancing act; the intended use and the selection of tenants is carefully balanced against a range of internal and external factors. Social housing can cater to: low income key workers1, the homeless, the disabled or the mentally ill, but also to contextual specific demographic needs, such as senior singles who might otherwise be forced to leave their local area. These programmatic distinctions give rise to idiosyncrasies in the architectural genetic of each project, both through its brief and in its realisation. Variation in procurement and management methodology — and the intertwinement of stakeholders, authorities and funding bodies — also leads to an array of distinctly different outcomes. Frequently, social housing is highly politicised, which can have a fundamental effect
on the nature of the projects commissioned. This has been coupled with a gradual dissolve of the institutional approach to social housing — the singular governing body — in favour of smaller, more mobile, not-for-profit organisations and partnerships with government departments. While largely beneficial, this compartmentalised approach can create further complexity.
The following observations are by no means an exhaustive list of strategies, but they describe a sort of operative mentality and generative potential. It is important also to regard these strategies as operating simultaneously rather than independently.
Also, the view is now commonly (and reasonably) held that architecture is secondary in the success of a social housing project. Architecture can only have minimal affect without ongoing building management, building maintenance, careful tenant selection and an appropriate location with access to employment, education, shops, services and transport.
There is an obvious ambiguity and contradiction in designing a place to live for unknown inhabitants. In broader practice, the architect acts as a conduit and interpreter of the brief for a client. The architect cannot perform this role in social housing, yet identity, belonging, and a sense of place and defendable space remains critical. This ambiguity of brief is mirrored in that of the role of the building. It requires an appreciable uniqueness while refraining from ‘iconism’.
Against these constraints, or perhaps because of them, architecture’s communal aspirations continue to evolve to find new modes of realisation in social housing. Without room for grandiose visions, the ‘formation’ of community relies on architectural methods that incite and foster, and are adaptable in the face of caution. The contemporary translation of this is one that, in accordance with its political and social aspirations, has become far more strategic and canny in its deployment. It is a translation that is adaptable to the constraints of the brief and reflective of the architect’s paradoxical mandate to design for the community but also for the individual. These generally small-scale architectural interventions are unsurprisingly aligned with the gradual shift in procurement model and policy that has seen a renewed focus on smaller, more integrated, infill developments embedded in — and belonging to — established places. One could consider them as operating within the ‘infill’ of the creative architectural process.
Identity, “house is where you live, home is what you create”2
Fortunately this complex requirement can still result in clever, artful architecture; often the outcomes are medium density and mixed tenure buildings that do not pander to the urge to totally assimilate their scale into the surrounding neighbourhood. This is really the question of the building identifying itself (even if considered merely in terms of yield) in the same manner as any other commercial, economically savvy investment. This aligns with the general progression of urban housing stock and minimises the stigma of being artificial (and overly charitable). At an internal level, identity comes through giving the incoming tenant agency over their new home. This goes beyond simply the depiction of ‘difference’ and extends to opportunities for ‘spatial ownership’ or tailoring. This means spaces that the tenant can use in their own way and inhabit with their own personality — an example might be deep window reveals that double as
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shelves and lighting strategies that are not functionally prescriptive.
ambiguous in response to the challenge as the challenge is itself.
Context and the domestic The relationship of the architecture to the street can be thought of as analogical to the relationship of the building’s inhabitants to their neighbourhood. This contextualisation is (not unexpectedly) a frequent cause of conflict in the planning and approval of social housing. It is not universal — many developments in areas where amenity is already pitched against density (such as Melbourne’s CBD) go unnoticed. When conflict does occur it is easy to dismiss it as fear of the unknown, NIMBYist melodramatics, or a lack of planning vision. It should be remembered however that the insertion of social housing — generally at a higher density than the otherwise residential neighbourhood — is usually a shift away from the neighbourhood’s existence as a self-governing, slowly evolving entity. Interesting social housing architecture often plays with this ambiguity that a building must both be utterly sympathetic to its surroundings, but also very different.
Aside from this translation, perhaps the clearest indication of a strategy in action in the contextualising of new social housing projects is in the entry and the approach. This interface is arguably the most critical area of investigation, given it forms the threshold between the public and private domain. Its fostering of community comes through de-stigmatisation — the blurring of the line between the private and the public opens up the building and re-engages the tenants with the street, without formality or ceremony. It is the opposite of Melbourne’s 1960s commission architecture — the irrevocably iconic commission towers — that figuratively and literally tower over their barren surrounds, and whose approach is undeniably theatrical. In considering the aforementioned suburban contextualisation at play in many new social housing projects, it is also worth noting that the translation of the entry is often not entirely domestic in character: after all, residential dwellings with their verandas and meandering garden paths are not without a sense of ceremony.
Given the suburban context of many new social housing projects, there is generally a degree of borrowing or playful reconfiguration required to achieve this somewhat paradoxical goal. Parts or finishes of local buildings are translated or subverted to create architecture that is as
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Instead contextualisation often manifests in two ways, both of which are gestures of ‘blurring’. The first is akin to entering through the back garden. The approach is deflated by the sense that
you are already in the building, without having ‘crossed over’. Perhaps the boundary to the space is unclear, or the interior of the development is public in its functional programming. The second gesture is also devoid of ceremony but delivers access more through efficiency. Here it is the ease and quickness of access that is paramount; the crossing of the threshold becomes so simple and so generous that there is no real regard necessary in its performance. These spaces are generally human scaled and well connected to the street, traits that offer unostentatious and modest access for inhabitants and visitors alike. Surprise! Surprise can de-formalise the building and may be delivered through formal or material juxtaposition, or through an appearance that is occasional or almost accidental. Surprise can also appear as chance-like and in doing so its intended function is mirror-like — spaces provide opportunities for meeting and for further casual interaction. The provision of surprise often becomes, again, a play on the domestic through the subversion of familiar formal compositions, materials, colours and furniture. It is interesting to speculate on this subversion as an aspiration for a more progressive, and emergent, social housing community. After all, surprise is unpredictable, and hence non-prescriptive.
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Encouraging chance is important in an environment where there is a tendency toward isolation. Commitment could be made to the surprise, through quality of finish and integrity of design (and, in many cases, of humour) as much value lies in its aversion to tokenism. The spaces that play host to surprise are similarly ‘opportunistically’ inhabited — corridors, corners, double height spaces, airlocks, entries, letterboxes, and at a stretch, even bin rooms — but in some cases we also see a subtle encroachment into the semi-private realm, especially in balconies. Value adding the in-between Shared spaces provide the most direct examples of these and other architectural strategies encouraging community in social housing. Social housing has become more complex, in part as a result of its increasing interconnectedness with disability, mental health, and other human services; services that have inherent and specific functional spatial requirements. It is all too easy to fall victim to rudimentary application of these requirements which often results in dull and oppressive spaces that, it is reasonable to assume, yield indifference toward the building by its inhabitants. By devaluing these spaces social housing takes on an institutional quality and can — at the extreme — foster stigmatisation of residents from both within and outside the development.
The exact treatment of these spaces varies from project to project and in accordance with the relevant brief. Rooming houses, for example, are often more like small studio apartments with shared facilities such as kitchens and lounges, which go beyond the circulation spaces mentioned above. These additional spaces can (if effectively managed) be used for other purposes including meetings, classes, etc. and their amenity can be prioritised to have direct address to outdoors. But in projects where such generous communal space is neither mandated nor appropriate, this strategy continues and becomes far more intricate. Waiting spaces, such as lift lobbies and entryways, become spatially engaging and imaginatively detailed. This playfulness gives rise to pause — it is an extension of the need for identity, but it is a communal and collective identity, and thus far more varied and unassuming. Perhaps a good way of considering this space is that it becomes shared private space; it imbues the quality and amenity that a resident would desire themselves, but with the collective responsibility of the community. Thus, its realisation is a key component in the emergence of said community. Complex While far from exhaustive, these strategies are important in the architecture of today’s social
housing, and in the consideration of tomorrow’s. They reiterate the criticality of community, support and humanism in the face of complex social crisis, and demonstrate that this can be flexible, artful, playful and expressive. Most importantly, methodologies for identity, surprise, value adding and contextualisation are canny in character and subversive in application. This is necessary, for it seems that all too often the role of good, articulate architecture in social housing is misunderstood or dismissed by stakeholders, and as these projects demonstrate it is a role that is of the utmost importance, not only to the longevity of the project itself, but in the fostering of a collective social conscience. I would like to thank all the contributors for their research, insight and speculations on this complex issue. Catherine Ranger is an architect at MGS Architects, with experience in a variety of public and community housing projects. She is dedicated to making architecture that is ‘good’, in all senses of the word.
Footnotes 1. A key worker is a public sector employee who is considered to provide an essential service. 2. As spoken by tenant from PPHA (Port Phillip Housing Association) resident stories short film.
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17 1. Foyer upgrade of 140 Brunswick Street, Atherton Gardens Estate Fitzroy, Harmer Architecture Photographer Rhiannon Slatter
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2. Atherton Gardens Estate Redevelopment, Fitzroy, Bird de la Coeur and McCabe Architects (under construction) 3. Drill Hall Community Hub and Housing, Melbourne, MGS Architects (2012) Photographer John Gollings 4. Drill Hall Community Hub and Housing, Melbourne, MGS Architects (2012) Photographer John Gollings 5. Pearcedale Community Housing, Broadmeadows, CHT Architects Photographer Emma Cross 6. Eunice Seddon Homes, Dandenong, Allen Kong Architect (2011) 7. Eunice Seddon Homes, Dandenong, Allen Kong Architect (2011) 8. Barkly Street, Footscray, Stoll Long Architecture Photographer Martin Saunders
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9. Altona Housing Development, Altona, MGS Architects (2012) 10. Living Places, Dandenong, Bent Architecture (2011) Photographer Trevor Mein 11. Living Places, Dandenong, Bent Architecture (2011) Photographer Trevor Mein 12. Chapel Street Housing Development, St Kilda, MGS Architects (2012) 13. DHS Milk Bar, Carlton, Bent Architecture (under construction) 14. Pearcedale Community Housing, Broadmeadows, CHT Architects Photographer Emma Cross 15. Kyme Place Rooming House, Port Melbourne, MGS Architects (2012) Photographer Trevor Mein 16. Kyme Place Rooming House, Port Melbourne, MGS Architects (2012) Photographer Trevor Mein 17. St John’s Place, North Melbourne, Rothe Lowman Photographer Michael Downes, UA Creative 18. St John’s Place, North Melbourne, Rothe Lowman Photographer Michael Downes, UA Creative 19. Chapel Street Housing Development, St Kilda, MGS Architects (2012) Photographer John Gollings 20. The Nicholson, East Coburg, DesignInc (2011) Photographer Dianna Snape
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Disaggregation and Innovation in Social Housing Lee-Anne Khor, Deborah Rowe and Diego Ramirez-Lovering Social housing involves a long history of incongruent aspirations, conflicting political agendas and a lack of certainty around its funding, delivery and management. It is inextricable from broader economic and political cycles and, in Victoria, this has led to the fragmentation of government land assets, the dilapidation of public housing stock and a lack of appropriate dwelling types to accommodate contemporary social needs. In the current context of broad housing stress and rapid population growth, the need for housing assistance is expected to increase significantly. The urban pressures brought about by climate change only amplify the considerable challenges already confronting the sector. New and innovative redevelopment strategies will be required to increase the supply, quality and performance of social housing, particularly for the residual, fragmented public assets in the middle suburbs. To better understand the distribution of social housing and the redevelopment challenges involved, it is useful to briefly reflect on some of the policy initiatives that have led to the fragmentation of government dwelling stock. Until the 1930s, government housing assistance was primarily geared towards private home ownership through subsidised loans1. The Great Depression brought about an “enduring inability of private housing markets to adequately house low income people … the only adequate solution … [was] for the state to assume the burden”2. It was at this point Australia’s housing policy expanded to address broader issues around housing access, health and productivity of both social tenants and the wider community. In 1945 the first Commonwealth State Housing Agreement (CSHA) was put in place, providing the States with Federal funding for public housing. Victoria’s Housing Commission initially focused on the reclamation of over-crowded inner city ‘slums’ that had emerged through the Great Depression. A program for relocating occupants of informal city dwellings into new houses in the (cheaper) outer suburbs was initiated (Fig 1). Melbourne’s housing shortages hit crisis point in the aftermath of World War II and the Commission began developing more extensive fringe estates to accommodate a larger catchment of tenants. The new estates engendered garden suburb ideals, with lowdensity dwellings and cul-de-sac street patterns. By 1954, 64% of all public housing in Victoria had been allocated to ex-servicemen3. Some local
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councils provided the Commission with cheap land for additional key worker housing that served the expanding manufacturing sector4. Even at this early stage, the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works, the Town and Country Planning Board and several architects, including Best Overend, recognised urban sprawl and the isolation of social tenants was cause for concern5. Simultaneously, post-war rising inflation made the development of detached housing less viable. In parallel with advancements made in concrete construction methods, innercity high-density flats and three to four storey walk-ups were introduced into the public housing portfolio (Fig 3 and 4). The sale of public housing stock began early with the promotion of home ownership under the Menzies government; ‘home owners were seen as “men of substance”, pillars of the community, while renters were seen as feckless transients with no connection with the community and no desire to be engaged6.’ The CSHA was renegotiated in 1956 and by 1959 30% of funding previously allocated to the construction of public housing was redirected to enable social tenants to purchase their own homes7. By the end of the 1960s, Victoria had sold off approximately 43% of the detached housing built under the CSHA8 (Fig 2). The Whitlam Labor Government sought to limit public housing sales in 1973, instead proposing to build on existing assets; however this was met with resistance from the States and stock levels continued to fall9. In a bid to improve efficiency, housing assistance shifted from ‘public housing’ to ‘welfare housing’10; tenant eligibility narrowed to those with high-needs. This shift triggered concentrations of disadvantage, which caused significant social frictions, particularly in the high-rise flats and cemented the stigmatisation of social housing within the community. The Victorian Government subsequently abandoned large-scale development, opting for smaller infill projects and ‘spot purchases’ in established inner city and middle suburb locations11 (Fig 5). By 1989, public housing stock was at its lowest in 50 years12. The political and economic cycles surrounding social housing created an untenable situation for the Victorian Government. Diminished federal funding and the lack of appropriate expertise within government agencies saw the now ageing and fragmented public assets fall into various
levels of disrepair. Inadequate ongoing support for the high-need tenant body proved detrimental for both the occupants and the community. Proposals for new housing experienced strong community resistance as the deep-seeded social stigma exposed itself as the Not-In-My-Back-Yard opposition to development. The adverse impacts of displacing existing social residents from their neighbourhoods and support networks further hindered redevelopment possibilities. Essentially, social housing had become hamstrung. In the 1990s, the Commonwealth Government introduced Community Housing funding streams to enable the involvement of not-for-profit (NFP) and non-government (NGO) organisations in social housing delivery13. Recently, the CSHA was replaced by the National Affordable Housing Agreement as the principle funding instrument for housing assistance, underpinning the transfer of social housing responsibilities to community sectors. Notably, the 2008/09 Nation Building Economic Stimulus Plan (NBESP) required 75% of the dwelling stock developed under the scheme to be transferred to NFPs/NGOs to manage. The continuing challenge for the social housing sector is to upgrade existing housing stock to meet the demands of climate change, such as rising energy costs, and to increase supply of net new dwellings to meet the likely growth of this sector. The residual, disaggregated public housing stock in suburban areas is perhaps the greatest challenge in this context. Innovative design and development approaches will be required to achieve better quality and more effective outcomes in these areas. Extending previous research into greyfield precinct redevelopment14, Monash Architecture Studio (MAS) is leading a new research project15 funded by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI). This project will examine potential design strategies for the redevelopment of non-contiguous public assets in the middle suburbs. Coordinating development across a number of sites enables a reconsideration of building forms, program distribution and open-space arrangements, which are typically highly constrained in these contexts. The precinctbased approach integrates design strategies at both urban and dwelling scales, allowing for more effective density increases, greater dwelling variety and improvements in the environmental performance and urban amenity in these areas16 (Fig 6 and 7).
Fig 1: 1940s Large estates built on the fringes of Melbourne on inexpensive land to relocate people living in inner city slums, address the enormous housing shortage crisis and provide homes for key workers in expanding industries.
Fig 2: 1950s Policy focusses on home-ownership and the sell-off of public housing to tenants, over the next decade 43% of stock in Victoria is sold.
In the context of social housing, greyfield precinct redevelopment offers a number of other potentials. The density, diversity and distribution of housing in a proposed precinct can support flexible tenure arrangements that respond to specific contexts, encouraging positive interactions and better cohesion between social and private residents. Incorporation of less conventional housing typologies with higher levels of design quality might also better accommodate the diversity of social tenant needs. Another advantage of working at a precinct scale is the ability to stage works across several public land holdings, enabling suitable relocation strategies that allow existing social residents to remain in the area. Precinct regeneration has the potential to involve local authorities, businesses and neighbourhood organisations to collectively develop community services and social capital appropriate for the location. Multiple interests and stakeholders provide opportunities for effective financing, delivery and ongoing management of a redevelopment. The cross-sector partnerships that have successfully delivered better quality outcomes in large multi-unit projects might also be transferred to smaller infill housing through a precinct approach. While social housing has evolved through a history of economic and political constraints, the resultant disaggregation of public housing stock in the middle suburbs may in fact provide an unforeseen regenerative benefit. With the advantages of single ownership and proven development partnerships, the Victorian Government has a unique opportunity to demonstrate innovative redevelopment solutions to the broader industry addressing, both, urban and architectural imperatives within a social framework.
Fig 3: 1960s -70s Walk-up flats and towers are built on more expensive inner city land to provide tenants access to essential services, proximity to transport and employment and cease urban sprawl.
Fig 4: 1980s The shift in focus from ‘public’ housing to ‘welfare’ housing results in huge social problems. The government responds by abandoning large scale development, opting in favour of smaller infill projects.
Fig 5: 1990s - 2000s The Federal government provides funds to support housing co-operatives, housing associations or joint housing ventures between governments and sponsoring organisations to deliver social housing
Lee-Anne Khor is a researcher and PhD candidate and Deborah Rowe is a full-time researcher, both located in MAS (Monash Architecture Studio). Diego RamirezLovering is the Head of Department and Foundation Programme Director, Department of Architecture, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at Monash University.
Fig 6: Piecemeal infill redevelopment 2002-2006 Conventional detached and semi-detached units providing a 2-for-1 dwelling replacement with few design quality or performance enhancements. Footnotes 1. Howe, Renate (1988). Renate Howe. ed. New houses for old : fifty years of public housing in Victoria, 1938-1988. Melbourne: Ministry of Housing and Construction. p. 18 2. Hayward, David (1996): The Reluctant Landlords? A History of Public Housing in Australia, Urban Policy and Research, 14:1, p.10 3. Howe (1988) p. 79 4. Housing Commission of Victoria estates (2007) in City of Darebin Heritage Study, Volume 1: Thematic Environmental History and City of Darebin Heritage Study p.38 5. Howe (1988) p. 61 6. Troy, Patrick (2011):The Rise and Fall of Public Housing, paper presented to the fifth State of Australian Cities Conference, Melbourne, 29 Nov - 2 Dec 7. Hayward (1996) p.5 8. ibid p.18 9. Troy (2011) p.6 10. ibid p.7 11. Hayward (1996) p.25 12. Troy (2011) p.8 13. Australia Industry Commission (1994): An overview of public housing reform, Growth (Melbourne) March:42, p.93 14. Newton et al (2011) Towards a New Development Model for Housing Regeneration in Greyfield Precincts, research report for the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute 15. Research collaborators include Monash Architecture Studio: Prof. Shane Murray, Prof. Nigel Bertram, Diego-Ramirez Lovering, Lee-Anne Khor, Deborah Rowe, Barend Meyer; Office of the Victorian Government Architect: Tom Alves; Swinburne University: Prof. Peter Newton, Stephen Glackin; MGS Architects: Rob McGauran. Research funded by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) 16. For more detail on this research see Murray, S and Khor, L (2011) “Renovating the Suburbs”, Architecture Australia, 100/3 (May/June), 2011: 35-37
Fig 7: Indicative Greyfield precinct across same allotments Incorporating a diversity of higher-density dwelling types, public open space upgrades with the potential for shared amenity and services within the local community and district-wide sustainable development initiatives.
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The NIMBY Battle: Understanding Neighbourhood Opposition to Social Housing Mandy Press Central government policy imperatives for more compact cities and for local government to govern on behalf of the ‘whole’ community by the introduction of community engagement strategies often produces contradictory outcomes. These outcomes represent the ‘dark side’ of community engagement where neighbours band together to fight locally unwanted land uses (LULUS), particularly social housing developments. Local government is frequently the meat in the sandwich. There are greater expectations from other levels of government, a need to comply with State planning rules, and rising expectations from citizens, who do not understand the rules. Local government planners are often torn between commitments to community led planning, responding to local opposition, designing inclusive processes, assisting the developer and challenging their proposals. ‘Being a planner is a bit like trying to row a barbed wire canoe uphill’ (Hillier 2003). Elected representatives also have to consider local votes and are seriously threatened by ‘decibel democrats’ who argue that they truly represent ‘community’ interests. This article will identify some common themes emerging from local and international research on community opposition to social housing (Press 2008; Press 2009) and will conclude by identifying some practical strategies, which can be utilised to more confidently engage the community, based on the findings of this research. The research drew on a wide-ranging literature review of the international experience in managing neighbourhood opposition to social housing. Research also documented the experience of a number of Victorian local governments and community housing providers/ developers in managing local opposition to social housing. Nine detailed case studies were gathered and used in order to better understand the issues and to identify some practical strategies for local government and housing developers to assist them in supporting social housing developments. Some common themes emerging from the research were as follows: Demography and Geography of Opposition Typical opponents were immediate neighbours and property owners, longer term residents, or newcomers concerned about a loss of property values, with resources/knowledge to mount an opposition campaign in defence of their ‘heartland’. Often the primary organiser of opposition was an immediate next-door
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neighbour. Frequently described as demonstrating NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) syndrome, they had no objections to social housing per se, they just did not want it to be near them. As a result the objectors frequently saw themselves as ‘victims’ and their community/way of life threatened by the proposed development. Type of Objections There were similar kinds of objections expressed about each development. Most proposals were resisted based on their proposed use and the types of tenants to be housed. The concerns expressed were about an increase in crime, the impact on public safety, increase in drug trafficking and that tenants would have a negative impact on the community. This kind of stereotyping of tenants was common in all those proposals, which were contested, with neighbours unable to acknowledge that those to be housed were more often than not already living in the area or at least having close ties to it. There were fears about a reduction in property values. The design and density of the proposals was often a concern. Design issues included concerns about visual bulk, buildings that were unattractive, ‘too big’, ‘too high’, ‘overbearing’, or did not respect existing or preferred neighbourhood character. Concerns about density were identified as overdevelopment in a ‘low-density’ area, and excessive site cover. Objectors often cited that the consultation process was flawed resulting in a lack of trust in the process. Sometimes objections were unrelated to the particular proposal but reflected dissatisfaction with how council had resolved past complaints. Life Cycle of Opposition All projects experienced strong opposition initially with the number of objectors diminishing over time. By the time the proposal was heard at the Appeals Tribunal (VCAT) the objectors were usually confined to a small number of immediate neighbours. The final stage of opposition lacked the emotional intensity of the initial phase. The nature of objections was toned down considerably as objectors learned that objections about the use of the facility and types of tenants would not be seen as reasonable or pertinent grounds for refusing an application. Post occupancy evaluations of neighbours revealed the initial negativity and opposition to the community housing proposals diminished over time. This finding compared with a large
North American study where at all 66 social housing locations examined overtly negative expressions, were infrequent among the sampled neighbours who were aware of the sites (Zippay and Lee 2008). Likewise, surrounding property values were rarely detrimentally affected, on the proviso that the housing was well designed and effectively managed. These findings were consistent with comprehensive international research on the impact on property values of affordable housing (Ngyen 2005). Consultation There were varying perceptions of what consultation means; to objectors it meant ‘the right to veto a proposal’; for proponents, getting feedback following presentation of their ‘case’. The rational, bureaucratic and regulatory features of the community engagement process, represented by preplanning and statutory planning consultations, were usually unable to deal with the level of emotion generated by objectors concerned about the negative impact of community housing on their neighbourhood and the value of their homes. The standard public meeting formats did not respond to the real life issues and concerns of the objectors and frequently relied on overly technical presentations of the issues and solutions. Formal meetings with preset agendas often alienated objectors who lost trust in the council’s willingness to listen to or show empathy about their concerns. A more effective approach was to make contact with immediate neighbours early in the process. Small-scale informal discussions were held where the concerns of immediate neighbours could be listened to and addressed. These information discussions were arranged prior to the formal decision making forums with their fixed rules and procedure, where it was acknowledged that calm and rational planning processes are not capable of reconciling conflicting agendas about issues that people feel passionate about. Preconditions for a More Confident Community Engagement Process Encourage local governments to establish a clear policy framework that is supportive of social housing, both in the council plan, the Municipal Strategic Statement and the council Housing Strategy. Build partnerships with social housing providers, who are prepared to build
well designed and managed housing, but who can also work with the community through all stages of the project. Support social housing providers and managers to undertake activities that aim to break down the stereotyping of social housing tenants by reaching out to the local host community. These might include open days at social housing facilities, morning tea with neighbours and promoting stories in the local press, which put a human face to tenants. The development of neighbourhood protocols make clear how any potential problems might be addressed and can be effective in allaying the concerns of neighbours. Participate in community education campaigns which highlight the benefits of social housing and help to destigmatise tenants. Understand the demography, geography and life cycle of opposition, in particular who is likely to oppose and how opposition will change over time. It is important to understand the ‘argumentative context’ of local opposition and develop appropriate communication strategies based on this understanding. Develop a communications framework based on a thorough analysis of the neighbourhood and its people. Identify likely arguments and how they might be addressed, as well as the community benefits attached to the proposal.
cited in our research seriously threatens the legitimacy of local government, discourages councillors from acting in the broader community interest and can undermine a broader social justice agenda about maintaining diversity and promoting social inclusion. This is more urgent now as homelessness and housing stress are becoming more widespread and because all levels of government need encouragement to play a greater role in promoting more affordable housing.
the City of Port Phillip to document the lessons from the experience of Port Phillip and other local governments in managing the community engagement process for social housing. The study, Community Engagement and Community Housing, presents nine case studies where community housing proposals were hotly contested.
Mandy Press has spent a good deal of her working life in senior management positions in local government. Since her ’retirement’ in 2006, she has undertaken post graduate research on the governance issues concerned with social housing. She was subsequently commissioned by
Press, A. (2008) Place, Voice and Governance in Local Government Planning: a Case Study on Woodstock Community Housing, MA in Public Policy ,Melbourne University, Available in MU e repository or via Google
References Hillier, J. (2003) Puppets of Populism, International Planning Studies 8(2). p157-156 Ngyen, M. (2005) Does Affordable Housing Detrimentally Affect Property Values, Journal of Planning Literature 20(1)
Press, A. (2009) Community Engagement and Community Housing: a Research Report Prepared for the City of Port Phillip, Available on the Community Housing Federation of Victoria website Zippay, A. and S. K. Lee (2008) Neighbour’s Perceptions of Communitybased Psychiatric Housing, Social Service Review (September)
Undertake informal meetings with immediate key neighbours individually. Organise informal preplanning information sessions. These give an opportunity for viewing plans and providing feedback, which are preferable to formal theatre style meetings with fixed agendas. Large formal meetings can be easily dominated by a vocal minority who, while legitimately representing their own concerns, are not necessarily representative of the wider community. Make clear the parameters of negotiation about the proposal, in particular that use and type of tenant is not a planning issue and a minimum housing density is required to be viable to address local housing needs. It may be that competing ‘communities of interest’ can never be reconciled and conflict is ineradicable but this does not mean the task of improving governance processes should be abandoned. The governance process needs to be seen as fair and inclusive. At the same time community interests beyond those of a vocal minority need to be taken into account for the outcome to be considered to be fair and just. This is important because the kind of vocal opposition
Media clippings from the 'battle of Balaclava' involving the Woodstock Rooming House designed by MGS Architects for Port Philip Housing Association (2007). Image by Mandy Press
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Building the Pioneer Legend?1 Contradictions and Permeability in the Idea of Social Housing Conrad Hamann One way to look at social housing is as conspicuously socially and politically directed housing, reshaping or ‘reflecting’ its occupants to a way desired by the prevailing polity or by prevailing social expectations. It is often equated with public housing2 but can apply just as well to company towns,3 the settlements of shared religious, convict4 or political communities, retirement villages, university housing, groups of defence and railway personnel, and regional development, especially the soldier and closer settlement schemes of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These have all had social and political purpose worked through the providing housing in a specific way. They are all predicated on various industries or agriculture in their imagery, construction and purpose – or on the direct departure from these: their inversion, as in religious communities and retirement villages. Many of these developments have at their aim the improvement of ‘character’. This gives social housing a ringside seat at modern architecture’s hall of heroism. Over a long period this improvement of character also ensured surprising political alliances, many of them with the conservative end of Australian politics. There has always been a link between public housing and company towns, especially garden cities of the Port Sunlight-Letchworth-Welwyn variety, and American towns from Pullman Indiana through to Radburn New Jersey. But the boundaries are also indistinct between public housing and other types. The Commission’s Garden City housing at Port Melbourne (c.194041), at Richmond Racecourse (1938-41), Preston and other early estates is an extension of the State Savings Bank Garden City initiative in the 1920s. The State bank had provided general ‘spot’ housing finance in suburbs, and before that, finance for farm houses under the Closer Settlement and Soldier Settlement acts. So the ideology went from establishing a society of yeoman farmers in rural Victoria to setting up similarly yeoman families in suburbs and regional towns. When the Housing Commission was formed its architects and planners invariably went on to be associated with other building genres, and their builders, engineers and other consultants, especially AV Jennings, went on to make names in detached speculative and individual housing. In other words the sphere of action in Victoria’s social housing genres, and its enablers and finance sources, were by no means ‘sealed’.
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The Housing Commission architects’ panels were staffed by architects active in other genres: Tompkins and Shaw, Best Overend, Leith and Bartlett. McIntyre and Partners, who documented the last two Housing Commission towers, Carlton’s red brick pair, in 1970, and are best known for their private, commercial and municipal work. In the same way, Bates Smart, who planned the semi-government ‘community’ at Eildon (1948) were scions of the private sector and champions of the private sector against the perceived monopolies of Government architecture. The Public Works under the redoubtable Percy Everett began a formal program of co-documentation with private architects, cut short by the recession of 1951–2. Frederick Romberg was an early collaborator on planned community buildings in the La Trobe Valley electricity towns, and Everett called on Romberg for High School design in 1950–52. All this activity bypassed apartment living, apart from occasional small blocks of four set among the detached houses of earlier commission estates: Norlane and Burwood spring to mind. Apartments and tenements, even ‘models’ such as Gordon house in Little Bourke Street (1884) were seen as a legacy of Old Britain and Old Europe, and to be avoided at all costs. The home-as-castle notion prevailed, to the degree it became the intellectual focus of government financial policy and overshadowed other concerns such as foreign policy. Government nurtured the detached house to the degree that Australia eventually believed in the house-andgarden as both a natural condition and a national definer. This initially compelled social housing to work within this framework. Hugh McKay’s housing for his workers at Sunshine (1906-9 ff.), accompanied by community buildings, remained strongly rural in imagery, being cast as a set of homesteads with encircling verandahs. Significantly, Australia’s major steps in social housing were under conservative parties rather than Labor. These include the Housing Commission of Victoria’s formation (Albert Dunstan, 1937-38), the Commission’s tower program and the government program for detached aboriginal housing (Bolte in the 1950s and 1960s), the Ministry of Housing Infills (Hamer and Kennett in 1973-81), the largest company towns La Trobe Valley in 1921-8 (under Nationalist-Country Party governments) and again in the mid 1950s under Bolte, the retirement village boom and its intimate connection with
the Howard Government after 1996: all were as much the insignia of conservative politics as were first home-buyer schemes and the housing enlargement industry. This worked both for social housing and against it. The towers, particularly, were sufficiently austere as to ‘encourage’ their occupants to move on, rather than as Peter Buchanan has recently described architecture’s role, an arena for people to enact their culture. Again this was arguably part of the conservative character-building agenda. But in New South Wales the Housing Commission flourished under William McKell and Labor, and Victoria’s concrete housing prefabrication program commenced in 1945, a year shared by both Labor and conservative governments. The main Labor initiative was the program of post-war reconstruction, which grappled with the backlog of under-building from 1928 through till after WWII so that housing and works policy under Curtin and Chifley focussed more on providing shelter rather than character-building. Public housing does not seem in itself conservative territory, though government and company towns are perhaps more so. The prevailing conservative involvement is more likely to be based in the considerable overlap between public and private housing design and technique and the proximity social housing can have to character building. This was well-established in Social Housing theory. From 1886 the Salvationist General William Booth prepared a vast map of contemporary London using an analysis of its streets and housing and linking this to seven grades of wealth and criminality5. The implication: change housing and change society, was taken up in the London County Council Housing program of the 1890s onward. The United States stirrings against slums drew great interest, especially from Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives, where Riis’ ascription of slum problems to the ‘wrong’ immigrants struck responsive chords in both the United States and Australia, and his photographic angles, subjects and techniques found direct emulation in a series of slum studies here into the 1930.6 This is where Victoria parted general company with the British, at any rate. Local councils undertook no similar housing initiatives here, though the severity of the 1890s depression (and the involvement of many pillars of local government) was a significant factor in their inaction. The house-as-castle was a preventive ideology, not one that engaged existing social
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problems. But its hold in Australian ideology was already formidable and the social legitimacy of the house and garden, and the illegitimacy of tenements, flats and terrace housing bit deep, and was one of the few overt visions of Australian ‘idealism’ that our sin-haunted polity allowed itself7. Outside of standard speculative and individual housing, the nearest communal thing Melbourne could get together was the Old Colonists’ Homes in Clifton Hill, commenced to George Johnson’s designs in 1870 and eventually providing 125 houses for the elderly. George Coppin financed the initial scheme8. The major Government initiatives for an urban public housing first came in New South Wales, where William Holman’s state Labor government initiated Dacey Garden Suburb (Daceyville) in 1911-12, instantly seen as ‘architectural socialism’. The Chippendale experiment in inner urban terrace housing followed 1914, breaking the restriction on row or group housing. But Daceyville still maintained a standard suburban density and form that had been established in private-sector architecture of the Federation period. Its radial garden city layout was an extension of what had been set out in long grids in the privately-developed Haberfield and parallelled company use of garden suburb layouts as at Newcastle and at Darra in Queensland. South Australia, later celebrated for its Housing Trust, was initially as reluctant as Victoria. Its Colonel light gardens completion was basically designed to pick up the pieces after the original building companies went bust. The South Australian Housing Trust, as with the Victoria’s Housing Commission, was legislated under a Liberal Premier, Sir Richard Butler in 1936, and developed under his successor Sir Thomas Playford, through to 1965. In Rosebery, Tasmania (1893 ff.), library and community buildings were provided, and the layout used convergent roads and central parks. As with Mckay’s housing at Sunshine this resembled the town of Pullman in the United States. As in Pullman, Sunshine’s imagery of security and benevolence in the housing belied confrontations between the proprietor and his subjects, that led both to the stipulation of a minimum living wage and the financial breaking of his workers’ main union.
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Social housing in highly co-ordinated communities could either be good and bad. For
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all their benevolence and promise of security, company towns act like that more recent social housing genre: retirement villages, with often fortress managers, links to political parties, investors, embedded utilities and lock-you-in financing. They define people, seal them apart to some degree, as living and working in a particular echelon and sphere, under the aegis of specific organizations. Overseas, garden cities were harnessed to a spectacular blood and soil agenda after c. 1935, as with Wolfsburg, for workers on Germany’s new KDF-Wagen (Strength-Through-Joy Car) or at Oranienburg, a set of similarly ruralist suburbs around Ernst Heinkel’s new bomber plant. Sunshine did, however, incorporate the lessons of more benign models, especially the British Garden Cities. Its logical extension was in the new State Electricity Commission towns, and their communities at Yallourn (1921-28), Rubicon (1922-29), and later Morwell (1949 ff.), and additions to Traralgon. Rubicon was a singlestreet township of modern Bungalows near Eildon, serving five nearby power stations. Eildon itself was developed effectively as a Public Works town of 1947-50 designed by Bates Smart. The other SEC initiative was Tawonga South-Mount Beauty (1943-9) in the Alps, hailed in Boyd’s Victorian Modern9. Victoria’s government took a lot of prodding, and worked to a marked degree through semi-government agencies, especially the State Savings Bank. This initially focussed on financing farms through its credit-foncier system, extending this to suburban housing in the Homes-for-Heroes enthusiasms of 1918. But the outcome-houses were primarily cellular objects, protective containers mostly unlinked to community buildings, where Returned Men and their nuclear families could retire for the night to face recollected war terrors; claiming stakes in the landscape for Real Australians rather than apartment and lodger types; ‘heading off’ the Bolshies as urged by visiting speakers from the American Real Estate Association10.
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The other semi-government housing of this time was through the Victorian Railways, who, as with the State Bank, developed a basic set of house types and put these up in clusters where railway workers were needed in groups, or where station staff needed accommodation. The Education department followed suit increasingly with a mixture of rented and purpose-built family
housing led to quasi-garden city developments, as at East Sale RAAF in Victoria and Larrakeyah in Darwin. Again, as in Germany, these garden cities and suburban forms were military in their prime purpose, but the sources are closer to American and British base and munitions town design in the Great War and inter war period, as with Radburn in New Jersey or RAF Debden in
and shared dwellings for teachers. Again these were almost universally ‘spot’ developments, often unconnected and so not working at a really visible scale or a readable precinct, but abundant nonetheless as Percy Everett’s work records show from the 1930s. The railways, in particular, continued social housing of a sort into the 1950s, using prefabricated and other forms of house design in clusters, usually at the edge of rural towns and near railway tracks, some taken from British railways designs, as at the groups in Wangaratta South and some in small suburban clusters as at Westgarth. None of these schemes incorporated community facilities to any major degree, and the assumption was that their communities, though in visibly different clusters and precincts, would mesh with the town or suburb they were in through existing facilities. The same was basically true of academics and others in the tertiary education, though Bates Smart’s earliest master plan for Monash University (1957-8) emphasised an encircling ribbon of academics’ houses that was later discarded when the University car parks began to grow. This would have had the effect of linking Monash much more strongly with its surrounding suburb, Clayton. Later Defence housing has also ‘submerged’ in this way, refocussing in later developments on discreet pockets in suburbs, as with the Tambo Court cluster in Syndal.
England, where an air base was partly concealed by the imagery of an older township. This pattern was extended in 1941 by the War Works Council, sometimes allied with the Housing Commission, which supervised new developments at Braybrook (1941 ff., 268 houses)11, Preston, and other areas.
Social Housing’s other long-term Government presence was Federal. From 1913 onwards, the new military bases in Victoria, Point Cook, Cerberus and Laverton, incorporated housing and closely integrated community facilities, for the family dimension of the armed services. These works’ increasing alignment with other social
In these, the war work was the ‘community’ device. Other aspects of community were to follow – when there was time. The garden city, even in small township layouts, was a meeting point between the prevailing ruralism of Australia’s public ideology and the need for communities, in the quasi-suburban setting of regional towns and cities as much as on ‘open’ farmland. It fuelled South Australia’s take on inter-war regional development , new hydro-electric towns (Poatina, Tasmania, Jindabyne, NSW) and the post-war company towns of Queensland (Mary Kathleen) and Western Australia (Karratha, the Pilbara); but was generally less visible in Victoria apart from defence bases. There were further extensions of the private arm of social housing. In 1944 the Brotherhood of St Laurence announced a bus tour of their new Carrum Downs ‘settlement’12, and religious social housing developed elsewhere, as with the Seventh-Day Adventist facilities at Blackburn and Warburton (1935 ff.) and the Salvation Army’s community at Inala in Blackburn South (1960 ff.), a planned township literally of graded accommodation for elderly. The experience of these communities later meshed with the housing Commission, codified set of dimension and plans for elderly accommodations began shaping ‘spot’ building programs in regional and suburban settings, such as the RSL’s later
housing for war veterans as in Canterbury Road Canterbury (1971-4), and eventually the Ministry of housing’s infill program. These were, however, a reaction to the Housing Commission’s primary trajectory after the mid 1950s, which was, as in so much of Conservative Australia at this time, a contraction of interest to British and American examples, away from Scandinavian influence seen in the first generation of detached and walk-up Housing Commission estates. Here the new guiding star was the London County Council’s switch to highrise at their Roehampton Estate in South London after 1956, under Churchill and Anthony Eden,13 and, probably, American examples such as Robert Moses’ New York City and Bushwick housing, and projects in other US cities such as Howe and Stonorov’s Schuykill River Projects in Philadelphia and Minoru Yamasaki’s Pruitt-Igoe Projects in East St Louis (both later demolished), all in the Eisenhower era. The central component in this housing was the diminished role that the social had to play, even given its rather shaky role in Australian housing to that point. The new towers were primarily self-referential: their materials, colours and detailing spoke of their construction and mass production rather than anything else, and they were virtually indistinguishable from similar prefabricated blocks replacing Glasgow’s Gorbals, the Dublin ‘estates’ of The Commitments or the Welsh new town Cwmbran (1949 ff. with its tower later). Robin Boyd greatly admired this shift and Frederick Romberg recalled he asked the Housing Commission for photographs of their first essay in tower blocks, in Park Street South Melbourne. A chunk of The Australian Ugliness was devoted to arguing how towers could participate in a chain of urbanity, by bringing people in contact with an old city along European lines, entered and left through a restorative circle of parks.14 Has Melbourne ever been such a city? By the 1960s slum reclamation of this type was institutionalised in the University of Melbourne’s final year project, where students routinely ‘demolished’ a large section of Carlton or some other suburb near the University, and put up high density housing in high-rise blocks. Gregory Burgess recalls the stir caused by an early project of his that considered refurbishing existing buildings and threading new accommodation through these – and that was in 1970! The Brooks Crescent revolt – Melbourne’s closest counterpart to the Sydney battle over Wooloomooloo’s invasion by bikies, reached a head at this time and was documented widely in this magazine, Architect (1973 ff.)15. It coincided with the Housing Commission’s new precinct in Lygon Street Carlton, a Tompkins and Shaw
collaboration with James Earle that reflected Earle’s contact with Scandinavia and New Empiricism16 in its return to pitched and skillion roofing, brick textures, balconies, street-like interstices and an inner-city village appearance. That marked an abrupt change in housing under the Commission’s aegis. City Edge, a Daryl Jackson-Evan Walker project completed the following year, repeated the emphasis on village/town precinct with an Italian/Greek Islands hillscape of undulating streets and cluster terraces, deliberately rendering the topography complex and picturesque though the basic site was flat and the ‘topography’ was on stilts and walling. These projects paralleled private sector experiments with cluster housing, notably by Graeme Gunn at Winter Park-Glen Waverley and Elliston-Rosanna. The Housing Commission projects, especially, seem to owe something to the example of Hotham Gardens (1960 ff.), a mediumdensity cluster of apartments in North Melbourne, designed by various architects including Roy Grounds, and John and Phyllis Murphy. This was in the Hamer period of Liberal government, as was the infill phase, the next stage in Government housing, at its outset. This saw a complete refocus on the single or twostoreyed house, as a terrace, dropped into a row of other houses, or continuing a suburban street pattern. Here a convergence of later ideas was brought to bear: mixed urban use as prescribed by Jane Jacobs in 196317 seemed more reachable if you integrated new housing visually within older suburbs. And concerns about social stigma of conspicuously different housing projects could be addressed by embedding new houses in established streets. The revision of a-contextual modernism, and its excessive focus on industrial and production imagery, could be addressed by a return to contextual linkage through older and distinctively local textures, colour, material and forms. The Carlton and North Fitzroy housing of Station, Kay, and Canning Streets, the incursions there by Edmond and Corrigan, Greg Burgess, Peter Crone and Norman Day, accompanied by the act of buying older houses (establishing a new social role and meaning in that process). By 1983-4 this genre had expanded to larger groupings of 26, as with Leo de Jong’s Public Works development in North Melbourne of up to over 100 or more units; also Cox and Carmichael’s Highett development. This latter was part of a new spread for social housing into outer and middle-ring suburbs of the 1920s-1950s, recognising that there was a need for government social housing in these regions. Ian McDougall in Cheddar Road Reservoir, Peter Crone at Box Hill, Gunn Williams Fender at Euston Road Oakleigh used explicit suburban imagery for these larger groupings. A third stage came with the Knox-Schlapp (1985)
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21 Images 3, 10, 11, 16, 21, 22, 23 from UIA International Architect Magazine issue no.4 (1984). Projects featured were completed for the Victorian Ministry of Housing. Images 15, 18, 19, 20, 24 from Aardvark: A selected guide to contemporary Melbourne Architects (1990). Projects featured were completed for the Victorian Ministry of Housing & Construction Victoria.
1. The South Australian Housing Trust was required to provide “accommodation necessary for decent living at low rentals”. 2. The South Australia housing Trust planned the new satellite town of Elizabeth (1954) 3. Infill Housing, South Melbourne, Ministry of Housing, Project Architect Robert Pierce 4. Housing provided by the Pullman Palace Car Company (rail car and passenger car manufacturer) for employees during the decades following 1880. The company maintained total control over housing: they owned the land and buildings, set the rents, monitored (and evicted) tenants. 5. Bushwick Housing, Brooklyn, New York City 6. Demolition of tower blocks in Glasgow’s Gorbals District 7. To ease the housing shortage in Ballarat after World War II, a large estate was built on old Ballarat Common, now Wendouree West by the Housing Commission of Victoria. 8. Detail of Housing Commission flats, Fitzroy 9. Housing Commission towers, Carlton’s red brick pair (1970) 10. Infill Housing, Carlton, Gregory Burgess 11. Infill Housing, Carlton, Gregory Burgess 12. City Edge Housing, South Melbourne, Daryl Jackson Evan Walker (1971-74) Photographer Ian McKenzie 13. Winter Park cluster housing project, Glen Waverly, Graeme Gunn in association with Merchant Builders (1971) 14. Kay Street Housing, Carlton, Edmond and Corrigan for the Ministry of Housing (1984). Photographer John Gollings 15. Infill Housing, Carlton, Peter Crone Architects (1982) Photographer John Gollings 16. Infill Housing, Northcote, Norman Day 17. Knox Schlapp Housing, Port Melbourne, Peter Elliott for the Ministry of Housing (1985). Photographer John Gollings
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18. Cole Street Housing, Williamstown, Williams Boag (1984) 19. Capel Street Housing, West Melbourne, Peter Elliott (1988) 20. Pitt Street Housing, Carlton, Peter Elliott (1986) Photographer John Gollings 21. Elderly Persons’ Housing, Cheddar Road, Melbourne, MMH Partnership, Ian McDougall 22. Infill Housing, South Melbourne, Ministry of Housing - Project Architect Geoff Sargeant 23. Infill Housing, Oakleigh, Ministry of Housing, Project Architect: Richard Marendaz 24. Elderly Persons’ Housing Units, Richmond, Williams Boag (1982)
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Footnotes 1. John Hirst has set out what he terms the Pioneer Legend as a conservative obverse to Russel Ward’s Australian Legend, based in Trade Unionism and Labor definitions of national direction. As he sees it the Pioneer legend asserts the value of European pioneering and its values: carving out a domesticating culture of families and individuals and geared to reflecting the values of enterprise, thrift and probity. It is a mainstay of the conservative position in the History Wars, and came to a head architecturally in the reaction to Ashton Raggatt McDougall’s Museum of Australia, when that opened in Canberra. cf. John Hirst, ‘The Pioneer Legend’, Historical Studies, 18, 78, 1978, pp. 316-37, and commentary on the National Museum by Tim Bonyhady and Keith Windschuttle. 2. Summed up most recently by Renate Howe in ‘Public Housing’, in Philip Goad and Julie Willis (eds., contrib..), The Encyclopedia of Australian Architecture, Cambridge, Melbourne, 2011, pp. 566-8. 3. David Nicholls, ‘Company Towns’, in The Encyclopedia, pp. 165-6. 4. Seen most dramatically in the schemes reviewed by James Semple Kerr in his Out of Sight Out of Mind, and its predecessor Design for Convicts, Sydney, 1984, where prison communities were mapped out in often extraordinarily eloquent geometric patterns and sequences of shapes, diagrams of coexisitent felons and their overseers, rehabilitation and deterrence, and physical connections between community and surrounding landscape, though the intervening scale of exercise yards and 5. booth.lse.ac.uk/static/a/4.html, viewed 21 June 2012: Charles Booth online archive: Maps Descriptive of London Poverty, 18861903, part of his Life and Labour of the People in London. 1903.. 6. Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York, New York, 1890.
and Pitt Street in inner Melbourne, by Peter Elliott and other newer architects. Pitt Street was a collaboration with the Rental Housing Association Limited, a new agency for social housing18. These were Hof buildings, influenced by the newer patterns of European rationalism and injecting a note of European influence again. Transition magazine’s housing competition of 1984 summed this up well. In general these developments were celebrated in Haig Beck and Jackie Cooper’s UIA International Architect, and its Australian edition of 1984.19 The world seemed to be listening to Australia at this point: listening to us through Victoria’s social housing, though the system had emerged in Sydney’s Wooloomooloo Redevelopment and was related to parallel strategies employed by the City of New York under Robert Wagner Jr and others. But soon after the ferment developing in Victoria’s public works was slowed by Labor’s decentralising of government design at the end of the 1980s, and by the death soon after of John Devenish, social housing’s leading Australian mentor at this time and the nearest figure Victoria then had to a chief government architect20.
ups in Richmond and then… silence, at least in the sense of social housing’s profile. The story resembles the tale of disappearing post offices, as Australia Post (following the usual British example) forsook its great institutional buildings for retail outlets and newsagencies: parcels and post boxes merging with Tattslotto21. In magazines, apart from aboriginal housing, a limitless tide of beach retreats, rural arcadias and snappy renovations in seven inner suburbs have swept social housing away from prominence in Victoria. In chronology the change here matches the decline of suburban engagement – of middle and average suburbs – by the architectural culture in general. The concept of Social housing still marks final year student projects. But where does it go from there?
Conrad Hamann, Hon FAIA, works part time as Associate Professor of Architectural History at RMIT University and part-time as a senior associate at Lovell Chen Architects and Heritage Consultants. He has recently completed text for the soon to be released by Thames and Hudson, Cites of Hope Remembered.
The dissolving of the Public Works Office coincided with the reconstituting of the Housing Commission as the Victorian Housing Office, ending the Commission’s 47-year career. After that came a burst of ‘infill-form’ public housing in Footscray and Newmarket, on the sites of former saleyards, meatworks and railway land – the work by Ashton Raggatt McDougall and others on refurbishing tower blocks in Flemington, North Melbourne and Carlton, some demolition of the Elizabeth Street walk-
7. In interesting contrast to the United States, which, despite having functioned as a convict dump before its war of Independence, determinedly recast itself as a biblical land of plenty and a vision splendid, where any number of the twelve tribes could carve out a new polity and environment. Witness the town names: Goshen, New Canaan, Darien and Bethany in Connecticut, Carmel, Providence and Hope Valley in Rhode Island, Sharon and Salem in Massachusetts and Oregon, Jericho and Liberty in New York, Bountiful, Ephraim, Goshen, Liberty, Orem, Moab, Nephi, Paradise and Salem in Utah, Shiloh, Mount Carmel and Philadelphia in Tennesee, Shiloh, Bethlehem, Bethesda, New Freedom and Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, Paradise in California. Australia’s agnosticism about utopia provides an interesting contrast here: that and William Lane’s 1880s utopians having to seek their new realm in Paraguay. 8. vhd.heritage.vic.gov.au/vhd/heritagevic, viewed 21 June 2012. 9. Robin Boyd, Victorian Modern: 111 Years of Modern Architecture in the state of Victoria, Australia, Melbourne, 1947. See ‘SEC’ section. 10. These visitors were publicised widely in the Australian Real Property Annual and then in the Australian Home Builder, the predecessors to Australian Home Beautiful. As their name suggests they were staunch in their calls for all (nuclear) families to have a stake in the landscape through homebuilding and the nurturing and investment that went with that. This policy was also the basis of George and Florence Taylor’s Building magazine (1907-1966) which campaigned constantly against lodgers, flat dwellers and other types who where letting Australia down in their refusal to take up the obligations of home building and a Stake in the Land.
11. David Wixted, ‘It’s got Marybyrnong Written All Over It…’, paper for the Unloved Modern Conference, Sydney, 2009, at www.aicomos.com/…/2209_UnlovedModern_Wixted_David_ Maribyrnong_Paper.pdf, viewed 1 July 2012. 12. Frankston Standard, 26 October 1944, p. 2; details via trove.nla. gov.au, viewed 21 June 2012. 13. Elizabeth Cuming The Garden City Estate of Victoria’s Housing Commission, BA Honours thesis, 1989, Monash University. 14. Robin Boyd, ‘The Non-Featurists’, his prescriptive section in The Australian Ugliness, Melbourne 1960. 15. Kay Hargreaves recalled the whole encounter in her This House not for Sale: Conflicts between the Housing Commission and Residents of Slum Reclamation Areas (1976). 16. Author interview with James Earle, 1983. 17. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, New York, 1963. The immense influence of this book in Australia has yet to be explored in a sustained study. 18. See Doug Evans (ed.), Aardvark 1990, RMIT University, Melbourne, 1990, p. 73. 19. Haig Beck and Jackie Cooper, ‘Victorian Ministry of HousingJohn Devenish: Style replaces Stigma’, UIA/International Architect, 4, 1984, pp. 20-27. 20. Philip Goad and Kim Torney, ‘Devenish, John’ in The Encyclopedia of Australian Architecture, Cambridge, Melbourne, 2011, p. 205. 21. Conrad Hamann, ‘Post offices’, in The Encyclopedia of Australian Architecture, Cambridge, Melbourne, 2012, pp. 552-4.
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Art and Welfare Eli Giannini MGS’s involvement with social housing began in the late 80s with an infill project for the redevelopment of the Hotham estate in Flemington. The brief was for row housing, which at the time The Office of Housing deemed to be a more appropriate form of development for the socially disadvantaged Department of Human Services clientele than the tower blocks dating from the 60s and 70s, where the department’s tenants lived. In fact, the trend was for a return to more ‘traditional’ forms of housing typology (read lots of gables) — not only in the estates where many architects were being directed to design pitched-roof forms, but also by councils who took on conservation values as a default position for any new proposal. Fortunately, we are not in that space anymore and there is a greater acceptance of form making (at the costs of many other things, I will at times admit) with some interesting results. Having temporarily succumbed in the postmodernist 70s and 80s, a late modernist style has now re-emerged in the affordable and social housing market as a model that is easy to understand and therefore replicate. We have all been trained to design with it and it suits most commercial applications as well as more boutique commissions. It’s kind of a uniform that has been adopted with more or less success depending on the talent of the creator. I have always questioned this stylistic code as a one-size-fits-all solution and this is a reason my attention was drawn to a conference publication entitled “Art and Welfare”, containing papers from an International Conference held in Leiden, the Netherlands in 2008. This conference was the
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8th of such gatherings linking the Settlement movements in Holland with the history of the Arts and Crafts. The booklet was appropriately on sale at “Het Schip” Museum in Amsterdam. This Housing block designed by Michel de Klerk between 1915 and 1920 for the Housing association Eigen Haard contains a post office (now converted to a Museum), a school (not designed by him) as well as apartments for the workers. De Klerk died aged 39 but his work became synonymous with that of the Amsterdam school. The project was made possible by the advocacy of enlightened politicians and the introduction of the first housing acts which were put in force in the Netherlands in order to correct the jerry built slums the working class had endured as a result of the rapid industrialisation of cities. During the rise of socialism in Europe, the social justice conscious Dutch ensured that the new housing was not only built according to proper building construction standards but also to social and artistic principles at the forefront of thinking of the times. It is interesting to note that de Klerk, like others who have taken a less well-trodden route and have integrated decorative elements in their designs to invent a more personal vocabulary, was largely ignored by those writing history from a modernist perspective (all the while acknowledging his extraordinary talent for urban design) or relegated his work to a “fantastical Expressionist aberration”1.
I hated putting pitched rooves on everything we did, so as it turned out the pain was worth the gain, because while the restrictions grated, contextualising new to existing has always been the goal we have pursued in urban design. Having adapted typologies as a design method during the creative process and rejecting the forms of modernist minimalism as a response too closely associated with “the preferred model of conspicuous consumption” as Hal Foster2 has so eloquently put it, I have tried to find a typology for our work which would more closely reflect the domesticity, which is required by the brief, though not always explicitly stated. Starting with an early project in Elwood Street, we developed designs that would speak to what is domestic: the adjacency and intimacy of semi-private spaces (front yards, driveways, gates, fences), the theatre of balconies and stairs, the interface with immediate neighbours, the material palette of the neighbourhood and the predominant forms of the surrounding buildings. As a new challenge presented itself in the form of a commission for a boarding house in Balaclava (Woodstock Street), we took these experiences to address a larger scale. The typology of the boarding house belongs to buildings such as the residential hotels in St. Kilda, educational and state institutions like orphanages and university colleges, holiday guesthouses and other temporary accommodation models such as dockside men’s hostels. These models needed updating, so we sought to de-institutionalise their image by giving our design a more benign sense of permanency: the ‘large house’ model
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1. Kyme Place Rooming House, Port Melbourne, MGS Architects (2012) Photographer Trevor Mein 2-6. Het Schip “The Ship”, Amsterdam, Michel de Klerk (1917), image 6 courtesy Museum Het Schip
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seemed an appropriate starting point, however simply multiplying the scale of the construction didn’t speak to the particulars of the brief, so other gestures were required to indicate a collective and shared living arrangement. Michel de Klerk and the good burgers of Amsterdam conceived the ‘Het Schip’ complex as a community development where living, working (the corner post office was incorporated with the aim of providing on-site employment) and socializing would take place within the one structure (albeit a large one that spans a whole suburban block) and commissioned well known architects to design them, unlike the cheap speculative type of building that was commonly built to house the workers at the time. We didn’t have such an extensive program in Woodstock Street but we took the opportunity which the brief gave us to position the required shared laundry space, for example, facing the street — a reference to the corner laundrette often associated with a large population of singles in shared accommodation but also as a way of making what was private facility seem more of a public activity. The carpark, which was to remain as part of the City of Port Phillip’s commitment to the local traders, was used as a symbol of inner city grit and exposed to the residential foyer space in a mutual relationship of surveillance. The relationship between the housing and the carpark is in fact a vital one as this project and the subsequent one which we have just completed in Kyme Place Port Melbourne could not exist without the City of Port Phillip’s commitment to use a council asset for social housing. Kyme Place is also a rooming house and like Woodstock it contains a number of communal lounges, external spaces and shared areas which are emphasised by our design as an indicator of communal living. In both projects, the balconies and the other spaces provide opportunities for urban theatre, one thing that de Klerk made extensive use of, and contribute to the expression of external spaces and built form. They also integrate the bigger building with the streetscapes. This was done very deliberately as a repair to the streetscape that had been interrupted through the introduction of the council car park in both cases. But there is another element that distinguishes Kyme Place and Woodstock as a ‘big houses’ from their domestic neighbours. The City of Port Phillip was always adamant that best practice in the design of these residential buildings would mean the integration of site responsive artworks. This integration has been achieved in different ways, at Woodstock in collaboration with local artists Ben McKeow and Bill Kelly, and at Kyme Place as an in-house generated design response to the façade screens and column support that we treated as a decorative element. What we have
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Kyme Place Rooming House, Port Melbourne, MGS Architects (2012) Photographer Trevor Mein
achieved is closer to the Arts and Craft movement’s idea of Gesamtkunstwerk than equivalent projects elsewhere. Again this notion is close to de Klerk’s work, imbued as it is with the idea of integrating a new beauty in the life of everyday objects for the benefit of all social classes. What we find instead is that housing typologies such as student accommodation are often designed as miniature version of modernist apartment complexes, this approach fits into the “one size fits all” design approach which brought down historic modernism, typically the apartment building model de-emphasises communal areas such as lounges and communal dining spaces for more circulation spaces such as lobbies etc. This approach has given us much fine architecture but has contributed little to the development of a language specific to communal living or to buildings that belong to the community rather than to the private market.
While there is an argument that social housing should not distinguish itself from other forms of residential architecture, recent developments where public land has been exchanged to fund the renewal of social housing hasn’t stimulated innovation of any sort. It is rather the not-for-profit — or the not-only-for-profit sector — which is innovating. This was true in de Klerk’s day, pointing the way for us to again expand our set of social housing delivery models.
Eli Giannini is a director of MGS Architects. She has been responsible for the design direction of the practice and for numerous award-winning projects.
Footnotes 1. M. Bock, S. Johannisse, V. Stissi: “Michel de Klerk; architect and artist of the Amsterdam school 1884-1923” 2. The Art Architecture Complex
Housing Flow Modelling the relationship between social groups and social housing Edmund Carter As far as building typologies go, social housing is unique in the way it brings individuals with manifestly different backgrounds and circumstances together. While it is true that contemporary models of social housing incorporate genuinely beneficial modes of selection and disbursement of housing (one such model, for example, is that where a rental income is returned to the housing association based on a set percentage of the occupant’s earnings) the act of consolidation of those in need in effect discourages the occupant’s sense of choice or ownership. It could, in turn, be considered a deindividualisation of the occupant: an output born not of method but of the reality of the mechanics of this type of building typology. Indeed, significant effort has been made by progressive procurers to ensure that individualism – the personality, the human nature of the forthcoming occupant – is a holistic integration into the design process, but the question remains as to what extent this can be achieved. It is not only a question of architectural means, it is also a question of the ability to which conventional architectural technique can hope to accurately reflect and embed the infinite uniqueness of human experience, and the variability of personal identity. It is important to preface such a discussion by saying that this is not a critique of the endeavour of the procurement body, the architect, or those associated therewith. It speaks of a more abstract dilemma, which is the ability of, and process for which, architecture can manifest an individual’s “genetic”; their identity. This consideration is omnipresent in the practice of architecture, yet the reality of most building typologies is that they are a product of their ingredients. A modest “architecturally designed” single dwelling, for example, often has its identity inscribed through direct interaction with the client. Conversely, commercial development is often driven by conventional economics or marketing preoccupations. But social housing encourages the architect to experiment because it requires both all and none of the above: it has no individual to inscribe it, yet it requires the same degree of inscription. A second preoccupation that occurs with these types of investigations is the degree to which the procurement body, or indeed the architect, has a role in inscribing identity in social housing. Should the architect be providing this service at all? After all what relevance do they have to the future
tenants? And, given this dislocation, how would they go about doing it? Parallel to these questions are generally accepted principles that an aversion to individualism in social housing often manifests itself as a singular, faceless, “collective” which in turn becomes stigmatised (cue Melbourne’s housing blocks). The alternative, an investment in identity, yields social reinvestment by the tenants and subsequently a sense of place, community and belonging. So the paradoxical summation of these parallel lines of enquiry is a need for the inscription of identity, but a questioning of how to achieve it. This paradox is further complicated by the reality that there is a multitude of individual typologies in social housing scenarios. As an umbrella term, social housing encompasses short and long term renters, dependents, disabled peoples, the aged, those in crisis, and many other sociologically defined groups. Within each category individual diversity also exists so that the combination of groups produces a highly unpredictable mix of skills, expectations and manners. Manifesting these variations requires tools (and disciplines) that are inherently suited to complexity; to systems that are nonlinear and composed of elements both related but entirely distinct. Exploring these ideas led to a series of collaborative experiments with MGS Architects in 2011 on a real world social housing project in an inner Melbourne suburb (the political reality of such projects is it must remain nameless). These experiments investigated the use of digital simulations of complex physical processes to explore their possibilities for inscribing identity (and thus social value and community) through architectural form-making and material articulation. The analogy that underpinned this was one whereby the complex qualities and relationships of the prospective tenants were imagined to be similar to that of said processes insofar as they both have their own set of governing rules that remain outside the capacity of the individual (the architect) to map or qualify. This agenda takes on a sort of poetic dimension in that these very specific, scientific tools are applied in very non-scientific ways when their outcomes are observed, analysed, tested and wholly “architecturalised”. This disassociation from the scientific is an important distinction to make when considering the results: firstly, the exactness of such simulations can rarely be applied directly and literally as architectural intent, and secondly,
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the underlying narrative is unabashedly and deliberately abstract in nature. The experiments that were undertaken and discussed here largely concern fluid dynamics. We used Realflow, a particle-based fluid and thermodynamics simulation package that has found significant use in the film industry. It operates under a number of given guiding principles that we characterised as being sources, variables and constraints. Sources are the location of elements that emit fluids; variables refer to the character and genetic of the fluid; and constraints refer to the limitations and environment imposed upon the fluid (which in these studies largely constituted a given site or a volumetric massing study). In the course of speculating on the observations made during the operation of these processes there were a number of naturally occurring coincidences that could infer architectural realities. Seepage Seepage is a term that describes the gradual escape of a liquid through another, generally porous, medium. It is a term common also to soil mechanics. Seepage is a constant issue, and opportunity, in the operation of these processes. Often constraints are imperfect, or overcomplicated, and this results in unintended seepage. However, seepage can also be fostered or brought to play either by an appreciation and subversion of these constraints, or through some other deliberation. Seepage can be seen as a way of mapping and exploring the permeation of the private realm into the public. In this interpretation, an assumption is made that the fluid will emerge from the private realm (that is, the apartment): the house, after all, is the primary charge of any social housing development. There is tentativeness to its initial incursion – almost a testing of boundary or edge – before the surface tension of the fluid is broken and the underlying pressure gives rise to a rapid shifting of mass into the new vessel. Once inside the new space – the void – there is playfulness in the natural mechanics of the fluid as it separates and spreads, unconstrained by the bulk of its mass that remains behind. While we know them as one and the same, the behaviour of the new “public” part of the fluid is distinctly different to that of the “private” part. It suggests perhaps that while consistency and reservedness are underlying principles of the private domain, the translation of these same architectural principles as being playful, highly subverted versions of their “inner selves” could be brought to bear on the public.
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Perhaps seepage should be encouraged, as the cross-fertilisation of fluids between spaces melds identity, provides dialogue, and gives the private tenant a voice in the public realm. Importantly, despite being an unintended side effect of these studies, seepage could be a crucial architectural technique in exploring the nature of the public/ private divide. Tension Tension can be thought of as having a presence within a fluid, between fluids, and with surroundings. The tension of a fluid (formally, surface tension) is brought about through cohesive bonds between liquid molecules and is so-emulated in digital processes as a mesh surrounding simulated particles. Typically the relationship between fluids is thought of as either soluble or miscible, that is, as either being able to be subject to emulsion (blending) or not (consider the case of oil in water, whereby emulsion is not an immediately natural outcome). In the simulating of fluid forces the degree of emulsion is far more articulated and controlled: one is able to see in great detail how different fluids become cohesive wholes, blended solutions, or remain dissonant parts. When observing tensioned particles the common pattern of movement is one whereby separate fluids convene rapidly when they are within a certain distance from one another – it is a phenomenon common to the everyday, as seen
in water running down a window. However, the charging of the individual fluids with an internal and external pressure subverts this behaviour such that there is less predictability to their interaction. Spaces are sometimes filled by a single fluid, pushing others aside or to the edge. Other times the open space between fluids appears as if a contested ground, the incursion into which is met with delicacy, trepidation and care. The analogy is not that tension is a literal reflection of the undoubtedly real idiosyncrasies of inter-tenant relationships, more that the way the fluids carve out space and construct seemingly inherent or instinctive territories is an almost psycho-spatial translation of the introduction of an otherwise alien tenant into a new landscape, where the subsequent, perceived “randomness” in spatial detail is a manifestation of the uniqueness of the individual. This notion of tension as giving rise to territory is of particular intrigue as social housing buildings are often required to deal very delicately with questions of ownership being that they operate in a highly charged political and economic environment. While these simulations don’t yield speculations that are of such extravagance that walls and floors are done away with entirely, they do suggest both flexibility as to the consideration of such spatial divisions and a distribution of the private rather than an agglomeration of it.
Equilibrium In thermodynamics equilibrium is akin to balance: it is achieved when no further flow of energy or matter can occur. In these experiments, despite what might be expected otherwise, true equilibrium is a rarity. Firstly, they take place in a three dimensional void and thus outside of typical physical constraints, and secondly, as they follow general rules of physics, their equilibrium would be generally seen to occur over a longer period of time than is possible to reasonably simulate. Instead, what is often found is an equilibrium that manifests itself in a state of awkward balance or recurring pattern, that is, the observation of the active system as having a familiar trait of some sort. Perhaps in visualising this type of action one could consider the motion of the currents of a tide which simultaneously push towards the shore and away from it. It is an interesting reality as most natural systems are not in equilibrium (at least thermodynamically); they are instead changing, or can be triggered to change, continuously and discontinuously, over time, as in a state of flux. The tidal example is subject to change that is constant, but subtle by our chronological reckoning. In studying these systems physicists also look for reactionary patterns and variance, rather than a completed solution. They look for fields and bands rather than lines and points. The reality of these experiments is that they do not yield definitive outcomes: instead they yield blurred suggestions thereof, the treatment of which can vary. The reality that these experiments do not suggest a solution that is itself in equilibrium requires that the architect not consider it to be a solution at all, rather one of many outcomes, the consideration, deconstruction, and laminating of which, can give rise to architectural generation in an entirely indirect manner.
• Temporary territories in shared spaces should be allowed to exist and democratic inhabitation of these spaces should be allowed to occur. • That the identity of the individual, as inscribed through inhabitation, be allowed to seep forth from the private realm and inform the architecture of the public, both at a building inception level, but also as time goes on. These simulated processes revealed some suggestive parallels between the design of physical spaces and the reconfiguration of the social body. They offered techniques for overcoming the false dichotomy between the individual and the mass (or crowd) that often inhibits the development of genuinely social “housing”. The re-emergence of fluid self-organising social bodies and equally flexible building envelopes to accommodate these resonates with models of social organisation and change which Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and other French social theorists of the sixties and seventies outlined. The general drift of this work is to give up the concept of the individual as a unified Ego and to replace it with a description of the self as a multistranded social and economic construction. The individual or the self is described as something like a ‘milieu’ that is criss-crossed with libidinal ‘flows’, themselves effective of external structures and expectations. For these kinds of political philosophers, individuals can be thought of as ‘groups’ , as centres of self-consciousness and
action formed by the negotiation between libidinal flows (every fundamental orientation to the world from the erotic to the fear of mortality) and the (usually repressive) power structures of other social and political groups. In this context, Guattari, for example, describes a “liberated desire that escapes the impasse of individual private fantasy,” explaining that “the most important thing is not authoritarian unification but a kind of infinite swarming: desires in the neighbourhood, the schools, factories, prisons, nursery schools, etc.” (in Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 2004, p. 267). The innovation that these digital tools allow is in the visualisation and tracking of complex multifactorial flows between parts and environments. Thus, allowing some of the older theoretical models for revolutionary change to be handled at a local level can foster evolutionary change. Edmund Carter is an architect interested in the way complex systems can be co-opted into architectural principles. In exploring this ideology he collaborates with artists and designers of other disciplines as well as teaching in RMIT University’s architectural program.
These three conceptual premises suggest the following design outcomes as manifested through spatial, programmatic and aesthetic architectural design: • That the internal spatial design of a social housing building be driven around a multitude of distributed shared spaces, of varied value, size and use. • That the division between public and private space be blurred, but that this be done in such a way that the retreating into the private realm alone is not lost, but more that the public components of the individual unit are made ambiguously common.
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By Brett Seakins If you have a recent project and would like it to be considered for Slice, please email
[email protected]
Norlane Community Housing DesignInc
The two storey Norlane Community Housing integrates with its setting through attention to hierarchy and transitions between public and private spaces. Community interaction is supported by providing shared amenities while maintaining clearly defined private spaces. A sense of street address is created via shared pedestrian zones, entry porches and a clearly defined edge between street and residence. Sustainable design solutions have been fully integrated into the building and landscape design. From passive design fundamentals; such as maximising winter sun and cross ventilation, to solar hot water panels. A strong emphasis has been placed on the social dimension of sustainability with the introduction of landscaped public open space, porches and shared services and amenity.
Photographer David Weirzbowski
South Rd Moorabbin Hayball
Hayball worked with MAB Corporation, Port Phillip Housing Association (PPHA) and Pellicano Builders to intensify an existing council car park in Moorabbin’s activity centre, providing 55 one-bedroom and 20 twobedroom affordable apartments. Made feasible by the Nation Building stimulus program, the council car parking was retained to the ground floor and residential accommodation and parking was provided above. The repeated floor plans are given variety by the composition of balconies and windows. Living spaces take advantage of solar orientation, views and protective recessed balconies give robust expression to the road and railway façades. A communal courtyard creates opportunities for social interaction while projecting balconies above provide a fine grain expression and allow interaction between residents at upper levels. The street facade is enriched by an integrated artwork by SMLWRLD.
Photographer Peter Clarke
Pearcedale Parade Community Housing, Broadmeadows CHT Architects Designed for Yarra Community Housing, this multi-storey development offers affordable housing for different user groups, including single men, single women and families. Eighty-four apartments are spread across two separate, yet linked buildings, which offer both integration and secure separation within an urban environment. The development evokes a sense of identity for residents through its detailed architectural elements. The ‘families’ building is brick and robust, referencing the family unit with a garden and playground that serve as a backyard. The ‘singles’ building displays a more playful architectural language, reflecting the residents’ individuality. This development provides residents with both a home and a community. Through its use of colour and form, the development creates a language that projects something of the residents’ identities to the community.
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Photographer Emma Cross
Hi-Pod BKK and Peter Elliott Architects
Photographer Peter Bennetts
This project proposes a strategy for the regeneration of accommodation within an existing hi-rise social housing tower block in Footscray. Increased living area and vastly improved environmental performance of the facade are quantifiable improvements, but the project aspires to achieve much more than this. The brief for this project required the construction methodology to enable residents to remain in occupation during construction. Minimal disruption achieved through minimal on site activity. Therefore, a pre-fabricated, lightweight, timber framed structure was developed with cad-cam technology that enabled the structural components to be efficiently cut and assembled offsite. Ultimately, the time taken to embed the addition into the facade was less than four hours from pick up at a factory in Collingwood to installation.
Drill Hall MGS Architects
Photographer John Gollings
Located on the north edge of the city, the redevelopment of the existing Drill Hall in Therry Street as a community hub and affordable housing, seeks to establish a new vibrant focus for community life while ensuring a valued heritage asset remains a central part of Melbourne’s life. The project is a refurbishment of the existing historic building to accommodate childcare, community services and meeting spaces. The redevelopment also includes the original Drill Hall, which now accommodates a function space for 400 guests, as well as the addition of a new medium rise residential tower containing 59 apartments. The project represents best practice in adaptive reuse of heritage buildings and is designed on the basis of lower resource use and lower-costs occupancy per household.
Wellington Street Collingwood Rothe Lowman Part of the Federal Government’s Nation Building initiative, 95 Wellington Street Collingwood, comprises of 86 apartments across six storeys. The modular design is made up of three different components: a timber breaking up the façade to create a dynamic, contemporary composition; materials selected for their ability to assist the speed of construction within specified budgetary requirements; adaptable layouts incorporated to accommodate disabled residents, while the overall design factors in security for all residents. Balconies have an east or west orientation and an elevated courtyard at the rear of the building, which overlooks an adjacent park. A public art project for inclusion in the base of the building completes the design. Photographer Rhiannon Slatter
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Cameron White - Editorial Committee Chair
Urban Composition: Developing Community Through Design
More: The Architecture of Lyons 1996–2011
Robin Dods: Selected Works By Robert Riddel
(Thames & Hudson)
(URO Media)
A kind of local version of OMA’s SMLXL (or Smell Excel), but more digestible and less solemn, this monograph presents a decade and a half of Lyons projects, from their radical yet thrifty TAFE buildings to the all-you-can-eat idea buffet that is the RMIT Swanston Academic building.
There’s a joke that Daylight Savings causes Queensland to be one hour and twenty years behind the other eastern states. It is an interesting choice for a newly established publisher to include in their first handful of titles a book like this — a monograph on a largely forgotten New Zealand-born, Brisbane-based architect who has been dead now for nearly a century. But that is what Uro Media have done with Robin Dods: Selected Works. This displays their passion and dedication for architecture, and their confidence that ‘critically rigorous books’ will find a market. The author’s wellfounded assertion that Dods is “up there with Edwin Lutyens, Lorimer, Tapper and CFA Voysey” means that this should be the case. This book demonstrates Queensland as having an architectural heritage as important as any other city, even if much of it is no longer extant. With their new Campbell Newmann government, perhaps there’s a cautionary tale…
(Princeton Architecture Press) “Not enough pictures” was the comment when I showed this book to a friend, but I think Princeton Architecture Press books strike a good balance between text and image — neither wall-to-wall academic multisyllablisticasity nor glossy coffee table eye candy. They make ideas accessible, and I think that’s to be applauded. Several concise and digestible chapters present a variety ideas of Urban Composition, including collaborative networks, fictive landscapes, community consultation (don’t worry, it’s only four pages) and some interesting metaphors. My favourites were ‘riffing’ (I’ve heard that when Led Zepplin’s Jimmy Page made a mistake, he’d play it another three times and call it a riff. Does that explain Melbourne’s fixation with triangles?), and the idea of a ‘design editor’. An editor’s first duty is to the book (or newspaper or film) and their anonymous responsibility is to do no harm while facilitating the author’s vision (even when the author has lost sight of that vision). I believe there’s a place in the design process for design editing. This book shows some interesting ways of looking at Urban Composition, and would be a great addition to the library of any architect (or planner or civilian, for that matter).
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The Sky’s the Limit: Applying Radical Architecture (Gestalten)
Lyons are not averse to applying multiple contradictory and seemingly incoherent systems, but thankfully this book mostly follows a conventional, logical and chronological order. With essays by Juliana Engberg, John Macarthur, Paul Carter and a particularly fetching drawing by the ubiquitous Leon van Schaik, this monograph embeds Lyons firmly into the academic strata as well as in the local architecture landscape.
This book arrived with Urban Composition, and they’re certainly different. The title suggests a skyscraper pun, but the projects selected are mostly under a dozen storeys tall. The Sky’s the Limit showcases projects that would until recently have been impossible to conceive of, let alone build. Obviously there’s a lot of digitronicametric architecture featured, but I found the photos to be most interesting when the shots were wider and showed the context these buildings are in. The text is mostly made up of the expected project description/ summaries. And while there are some nice discussions of the “Bilboa Effect” that groovy new buildings can have in old cities, I wanted a bit more about the intricacies of getting these projects built in conservative and conservationist areas . This might have been because it arrived with Urban Composition, though. Overall though, a good survey of the vanguard.
Housos: the TV Series, the Stage Show, and Real Life Kathy Arthurson, Michael Darcy and Dallas Rogers In 2011 a an Australian comedy series called Housos aired on SBS television. The program depicts the outrageous antics of tenants trying to beat the system and survive on an imaginary Sydney public housing estate called Sunnyvale. The program was broadcast despite strong opposition from public housing tenants in Western Sydney. Who approached their local Member of Parliament seeking to ban the show while still in production. Tenants feared the highly satirical and exaggerated characters would reinforce some stereotyped, negative images of public housing and lead to increased demonisation among the viewing public. Since then the series has become an underground hit in Australia. It became a live comedy show staged at the 2012 Sydney comedy festival and a feature-length movie, with a second season of the television show currently in production. In depicting its image of everyday life on Sunnyvale estate, Housos draws on a broad range of negative stereotypes. The main characters are irresponsible individuals who avoid work, live on welfare benefits, neglect their children, indulge in substance abuse, routinely committing crimes and cause disorder. Their families are dysfunctional and engage in problematic social relationships. In Housos these topics are an effective vehicle for humour so perhaps we should not be oversensitive. Nevertheless the basic premise, which is sadly familiar to viewers of commercial ‘current affairs’ and other tabloid media, gives a particular new edge to the comedy. Public housing has always attracted some degree of controversy for much of its history. However,
it provided a respectable, affordable and secure alternative for low-income working families, pensioners and others that had difficulty entering home ownership or renting in the private rental market. Now, when it is needed more than ever, public housing is frequently the butt of derision in the popular media. While we realise these parodies and tabloid stories are not presented as a representation of the real lives of tenants, media images shape public and political attitudes. The stigma has real effects on people. How then should we think about a multimedia production like Housos and what is its effect on tenants and the wider community? Is it just another comedy? Or were the tenants justified in trying to stop it being televised? As series one of Housos commenced, a group of tenants approached ‘Residents’ Voices’ (a collaborative Australian Research Council Linkage funded project involving tenants, university researchers, Tenants Union of NSW and St Vincent de Paul Society) to investigate these questions. Working with tenants as coresearchers, we initiated our own version of a television current affairs panel discussion in front of a public audience – but with public housing tenants as expert panellists. The discussion raised questions about meanings attached by tenants and the general viewing audience to the negative representations of tenants in Housos. A study was run over the nineweek season of the show. Tenants and general audience members watched each week’s episode and responded to key research questions in a creative medium of their choice.
Participants’ reflections provided rich material about the intersection between popular culture and daily experiences of stigmatisation of estates and tenants. The collaboration resulted in greater understanding of how negative stereotyping affects tenants’ lives, how people deal with it, and remarkably, how it can even be turned into a positive thing. It does not matter that the show presents satirical and exaggerated parodies. When both groups of participants talked about the show they almost always talked about very real tenant and social issues. Tenants referred to real discrimination and social barriers that can make life harder and also, to the effects of housing management when: much more targeted allocation policy means people with a lot more problems are allocated housing. The ‘truth’ behind the fictional anti-social characters was recognised by both groups, but from different contexts. Non-tenant participants often repeated common prejudices about social housing, such as: they try and get a job for as long as it takes to get the employment agency off their backs so they can get back on the dole. So it does not matter if the show is real or imagined, it clearly appears to reinforce negative attitudes in ways that potentially affect real peoples’ lives. The study revealed examples of how tenants deal with this type of stigmatisation in their daily lives. Feeling labelled in this way can damage confidence and isolate people. However, for some it underwrites community solidarity and can even be a source of strength and pride. One tenant stated: I’m a bit perplexed, this particular show was just ridiculous, you know, and as I maintain it was the silliest of the lot. So who was the joke on? Well I would like to think the viewers, who were silly enough to watch it. Associate Professor Kathy Arthurson, Southgate Institute for Health, Society and Equity, Flinders University of SA, Associate Professor Michael Darcy and Dr Dallas Rogers, School of Social Sciences and Psychology, University of Western Sydney.
Photographer Tony Mott
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Creating Affordable Places for Low Income Households Rob McGauran Australia has a crisis of housing affordability. For many people, housing prices in locations with convenient access to employment and services are prohibitive. In the inner-city transport and employment-rich areas, gentrification has caused a rapid decline in the availability of rental housing that is affordable for the lowest 40% of income earners. There is an obvious responsibility for government and not-for-profit public and community housing agencies to fill this gap. Recent reviews highlight the crisis in existing models and have potentially devastating implications for the social inclusion and participation of low-income households in our State’s social and economic sectors. The Victorian Government Auditor General’s Report (2012) Access to Public Housing highlighted the situation facing the public housing system in Victoria. The report states that the current system is broken and radical changes are needed for Government to have an effective role in the physical delivery of affordable housing for low income households
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in the long term. The report summarised issues including the following: an unviable and unsustainable operating model, with costs exceeding revenues and a lack of strategic direction for public housing and comprehensive asset management. Through its Family and Community development committee, the Parliament of Victoria had also conducted an Inquiry into the Adequacy and Future directions of Public Housing in Victoria. It confirmed these structural problems noting: • A lack of strategic direction for public and community housing in Victoria • Poor procedures around access to public housing and its allocation • Challenges in funding maintenance and renewal of public housing In response to this criticism, the Minister of Housing announced a review to develop a strategic framework for public and community housing to ensure the community housing
system was fair and sustainable. A report is currently out for public discussion. The most recent response to criticisms of the current system has been missing a reassessment of the role of the government agency. Delivering value-for-money housing stock is only part of the solution for enabling lower income householders to engage in the life of communities. Organisations are lumbered with the legacy of poor housing stock, a hopelessly compromised balance sheet, badly configured estates and housing that is often poorly aligned with present needs. To provide affordable living opportunities for householders to participate in the economic, social and cultural life of communities should be the key goal – indeed it was an objective of the Commonwealth Government in their recent Nation Building project. Victoria’s Nation Building allocation of $1.26 billion aimed to deliver about 4,500 new homes and make improvements to 5,600 existing homes.
1. Drill Hall Community Hub and Housing, Melbourne, by MGS Architects for Housing Choices Australia (2012) involved the restoration of a significant heritage building to incorporate a new community hub for Melbourne as well as housing 84 low income residents. The project was financed with support from the DHS, philanthropic donations from the Sidney Myer Foundation with the land value contribution by City of Melbourne. Photographer John Gollings
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2. The Erskine Millennium Village and Adelaide Wharf (image 3 over page), both located in London, provide tenure blind blends of private equity housing, shared equity housing, community discounted rental housing and public housing, in a single development.
The Office of Housing’s criteria for selecting projects was a combination of goals from both State and Federal Governments. It was important to ensure value for money – the Victorian Department of Human Services sought to deliver 4,500 units with its new construction allocation of $1.167 billion. Also, around 2,900 new affordable rental homes were to be delivered by 31 December 2010, so it was imperative that projects be ‘shovel ready’. From the State perspective, the priority was projects that were well-matched to client needs (determined by the Office of Housing), notably projects with smaller households in high demand areas — within 20 kilometres of the Melbourne CBD or regional centres, and compatible with local, regional and state development strategies. To these criteria the Federal Government wanted projects to: • Be located where residents can access public transport, employment, amenities, schools, shops and services • Promote a mix of housing types that fits with the existing area • Provide housing suitable for people with disabilities and better environmental performance • Target high needs groups threatened with homelessness • Enhance the capacity and growth of the notfor-profit housing sector In Victoria, Community Housing Agencies were required to adopt a development model of 25% debt and equity contribution (a level not sought by the Federal Government). In addition to these high debt levels, a lower revenue stream was demanded, with the State asking the agencies to embrace the Office of Housing and Federal Government targets of 50% of tenants being in highest needs/lowest income groups. Financial modelling prepared by KPMG has demonstrated this combination of high debt and low revenues is unsustainable. Disappointingly, the Commonwealth’s aim to create a viable portfolio of integrated community housing that
is more diverse and better – in terms of quality and position – has been burdened by the same uneconomic problems that threaten the ongoing sustainability of the Public Housing sector. So how was the money spent in Victoria? A national study is presently underway through a joint AHURI/Monash University Project. My interpretation of the initial Victorian results is that they are disappointing if measured against Commonwealth aspirations. The mapping identifies widespread application of new investment into large existing Office of Housing estates where high levels of social disadvantage exists. While some of these locations enjoy reasonable access to fixed rail public transport and services, many suffer significant stigmatisation and long-term intergenerational disadvantage and limited access to local employment opportunities. The questions we have asked as a practice is how might we maximise opportunities for positive social development for low-income householders affordably? And how might we deliver value and design integrity in doing so? We believe this integrated approach will ensure that the provision of affordable housing continues to make an important contribution to communities in a social, economic and urban design sense. We have tested these strategies at different scales. At a regional scale, we have developed design strategies for areas of high social disadvantage in urban areas and regional enclaves where a high proportion of housing is controlled by the Office of Housing. We have developed socially diverse housing models for redevelopments of brownfield sites. We also have case study partnerships between agencies at an infill level to facilitate housing affordability in areas where rapid gentrification is occurring. Our research and case studies suggest that:
• Our cities and regions need a hybrid approach rather than a single model • Successful transformations require ongoing government investment and policy commitment for the short to medium term to address the crisis in both housing availability and social exclusion and the now unsustainable leverage in some partner balance sheets • Partnerships should be fostered with other tiers of Government and with the not-forprofit community-housing sector to optimise the effect of government investment and to develop more targeted local support and commitment to finding solutions to the housing problem We think a range of tools and strategies continue to be relevant in the Victorian context. These include: Partnering Enduring partnerships exist between Local Governments, Church Groups, other Not-forprofit organisations, the Federal Government and the private sector to provide affordable local rental and shared equity housing for local people. These have typically been realised through the inclusion of land contributions by either local government or church agencies on either a long term rental tenure or freehold basis. However, in a number of instances, State bureaucrats have recently deemed this model insufficient to warrant investment, thus negating this significant and valuable resource, and consequently marginalising previous and potential housing partners. Legislation further limits the ability of local government to lease land to less than 50 years. Inclusionary Zoning This absence of targeted investment in affordable housing also diminishes the opportunity for Government to attract the necessary private investment in the sector. Inclusionary zoning – requiring developments to contribute to the provision of affordable housing – is an internationally well-tested model. The development industry in Victoria has argued against this model, claiming it would add to housing costs. Modelling by SGS Economics and Planning for the Inner Melbourne Group
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of Councils suggests additional costs would be very modest. The developers’ objections do not take into account higher revenues from the intensification of land and the diminished costs to government of recurring welfare costs. Notwithstanding this absence of support, we have successfully negotiated with our client developers in projects where land rezoning delivered significant value, for the inclusion of a small component of affordable rental housing to be delivered in each instance. Reducing the Costs of Household Occupation The Federal and State Government initiatives have delivered improved energy performance of households as part of delivering affordable lifestyles for residents, but they must be accompanied by proximity to public transport, employment and services. In 2011, Charter Keck Cramer undertook a study that demonstrated the savings for households that could be delivered with reduced car dependency afforded by such a coincidence of locational attributes was of significance.
Reinventing Estates If maintaining household numbers for lowerincome households and achieving social diversity is the measure, recent work by the Office of Housing to renew existing estates has been of only limited success. Our work in this space has demonstrated the need to: • Intensify new developments that diversify household demographics and land use in a way that sustains local public transport and community services while retaining residents who should, and wish to, remain • Diversify communities to minimise the social stigmatisation
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Designing for Community Integration Tenure blind community housing – integrated into commercial housing developments – has secured blended housing for low-income families in new developments in inner Melbourne. In a more general sense, the Nation Building project enabled higher density housing for single and two-person housing, housing for people with disabilities and independent aged housing to be built in transport-rich outer activity centres. Areas where need was high, but where private sector development economics were either not yet proven or not yet attempted.
1. The Merchant in Victoria Harbour Docklands, by Hayball for Lend Lease (2009) secured housing for key workers in the heart of Melbourne’s newest employment precinct through the combination of contributions from various government agencies and a unique partnership with Lend Lease. Photographer John Gollings 2. Monash University Student Housing, Clayton, by BVN Architecture (2011), is a 600 unit development and the first project to be completed under the National Rental Affordability Scheme (NRAS) that delivered high quality housing for low income students. Photographer John Gollings 3. Adelaide Wharf, London 4. Renewal of the Docklands precinct in east Amsterdam has successfully integrated communities across a diverse income profile. 5. In Vancouver, flexible height limitations have been incorporated in planning legislation in exchange for investment in affordable housing, community infrastructure and shared and continuous open space networks. 6. In Paris, community programs are integrated with housing development as part of a community building strategy. Housing delivered through this mode is typically a mix of public, private and community dwelling types operating in a tenure blind arrangement.
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• Connect partners to deliver change. Models that have also been tested with success both interstate and overseas include stock and land transfers, where the not-for-profit sector can use rent revenues, combined with land assets, to finance new development. This has been the model for the large-scale rebuilding program in the UK • Design safe and secure spaces clearly demarcating public, semi-private and private spaces • Design spaces with clear way finding and streets and spaces that facilitate social engagement with surrounding communities • Reduce car dependency
4 Holistically Addressing the Challenge of Social Inclusion Barriers to social inclusion are sometimes inadvertently created through government ‘silos’ of decision making and asset management. A comprehensive approach to making communities sustainable is needed. Our research has revealed that benefits of targeted public transport and public space improvements, reprogrammed education, training and community hubs, provision of local employment opportunities and site rejuvenation include the enabling of private and not-for-profit partners sectors to co-invest.
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Investing in Community Housing Until now, the Office of Housing has controlled investment in affordable housing. If the goal is to foster affordable living and social inclusion for local communities, the community housing model delivers some distinctive advantages to government over and above the direct government delivery model. It typically delivers greater diversity, leverage of government investment and reduced management costs. These agencies have now developed significant organisational capacity and experience that enable them to continue to expand their role. Policy settings should also support these initiatives. This could be achieved through recurrent investment, inclusionary zoning or stock transfers or a combination thereof. The existing structure imposed by the former government on these agencies is unsustainable. They are not in a position to invest or to undertake long-term maintenance. This must be addressed if they are to effectively deliver on their stated purpose. Rob McGauran is a director of MGS Architects. He heads the masterplanning, design advocacy and urban design disciplines within the practice.
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Power Structures and the production of social housing in differing cultural contexts Professor Louis Sauer
Plan Voisin, Paris, Le Corbusier (1929)
In my urban design and architectural experiences as advisor, evaluator, or designer of social housing in the USA, Lebanon, Egypt, Portugal, Russia and Peru, production outcomes were similar, despite the political and/or cultural contexts — to strengthen the values of the prevailing power structures rather than respond to the lifestyle of the inhabitants. Interestingly, although more than three decades have elapsed, to me little seems to have changed. By power structures I mean the institutional processes within the framework that decision makers use to bring social housing into reality. This definition implies that production processes are well defined according to hierarchical rules and that they are an integral part of an administrative organisation. Thus, a power structure represents the values and attitudes of the decision makers. The projects varied in size and location with different densities of occupation, ranged from low- to high-rise construction, and had unchanged or up-dated programs. Bureaucratic organisations also varied. They included highly institutionalised systems for purely public sector production (Russia, Portugal, Lebanon), totally new and emerging systems (Egypt), and a mixture of public and private sectors (USA & Peru). Although I have not engaged professionally in Australian social housing production, I observe similar social and physical characteristics. It is too early to evaluate if recent policies, especially in Victoria to more fully include the private development sector will modify my observations. A theme common across these projects is the empowerment an individual or institution that led to self-importance and the exclusion of the resident community from the decisionmaking process. In Dallas, Texas, the Housing Authority’s director rejected its advisory panel’s
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recommendation to involve inhabitants in the property management process, insisting the inhabitants had no skills to take part in such an “important and complex endeavour”. In Newark, New Jersey, the federal government’s funding guidelines precluded consideration of local community needs. And, in all cases where the bureaucratic mechanisms were strongly institutionalised and the projects were large, the emphasis was on maintaining mechanisms for aesthetic control. Another theme was open space policies that set buildings in park-like settings for idealised ‘relaxed activities’; but in reality these open spaces appear as a no-man’s-land. The policy mandated no building should have enclosed ground-level residential functions to prevent inhabitants having any open space for their own use, based on a philosophy that the land should belong to all people (à la Le Corbusier and Communism). Since residents do not identify such open space as their own, they do not maintain it and it is often unsafe. It becomes a symbol of governmental authority and control. Open spaces were structured by vehicular and pedestrian paths. No provision was made for the interactive activities that occur between the inside and outside of buildings (as in the yards of private housing). Not only do the inhabitants lack choice of the neighbourhood for their dwelling, they cannot choose its form. Certain building forms and styles stigmatises the inhabitants as deprived and poor. The highly repetitive building and landscape designs create a negative connotation. In contrast, private housing does not compromise our sense of social status, even when it has uniform appearances (e.g. townhouses). We select our housing according to the dwelling’s cost, type, internal layout and aesthetics, and the style and residents of the neighbourhood. It is unusual for us to dislike our choices. It would be useful for us to understand the specific characteristics of neighbourhood character, architecture and landscape that project low social status upon the residents of social housing. For instance, resource limitations produce exceedingly low budgets for open space maintenance and management. This factor, coupled with a high percentage of children in
high-density housing (whether in low or high rise buildings) results in trampled ground. Visitors and passers-by perceive the resulting image as a place no one cares about. This is really a discrepancy between planning design and how people live. Because urban open space is extremely expensive, normal development minimises public open space to maximise private land ownership. For example the pattern of development on Melbourne’s St. Kilda Road establishes distinct spatial boundaries between private development, public parks, boulevard, and streets. This contrasts the pattern of social housing at Atherton Gardens (Fitzroy) where no distinction is made between the privacy of dwellings and public parks. Decisions about neighbourhood selection, the resident population and property management are beyond architecture’s discipline, yet they profoundly affect social housing outcomes. Neighbourhood characteristics that affect its suitability for absorbing various social groups include: the existing density and socio-economic demographic inhabitant population; the type and location of various services, facilities and public transit access; and the level of the neighbourhood’s property maintenance. Other factors are the neighbourhood’s cultural identity, the fears about absorbing residents with different cultures and languages, declining property values, and the possible displacement of long-term residents who may resent the intrusion of newcomers. The selection of social housing residents is perhaps one of the most critical management decisions. Problems occur when people with poor histories are selected, e.g. drugs and crime – those reputably responsible for the infamous Pruitt–Igoe fiasco (St. Louis, USA). Also relevant are the household characteristics, especially, the overall number of children1 and their accustomed site and dwelling typologies. Families coming from different cultural norms and/or spatially separated single-storey dwellings may have great difficulty adjusting to denser housing forms. Similarly, people from non-English speaking backgrounds are often isolated, which increases their social stress and difficulty in solving day-today problems. Inhabitants experience their lives through a number of small decisions and individual and shared activities in their daily life. Were social
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1. Pruitt Igoe St. Louis Missouri, Minoru Yamasaki (1952-56) 2. Pruitt Igoe St. Louis Missouri, Minoru Yamasaki (1952-56) The Pruitt Igoe project saw the rise of crime, gang violence and segregation accompanied by unemployment and hopelessness only a few years after its completion. The thirty three, eleven storey towers were imploded less than two decades after they were built. For many years the project was deemed a colossal failure of Modern architecture however as Katherine G. Bristol describes in “Pruitt-Igoe Myth”, Journal of Architectural Education (JAE), May 1991 - Pruitt-Igoe was shaped by the strategies of ghetto containment and inner city revitalisation strategies that did not emanate from the architects, but rather from the system in which they practice.
3. Canterbury Gardens, New Haven, Connecticut, Louis Sauer (1967) Townhouse entries are special places at the ground level. 4. Canterbury Gardens, New Haven, Connecticut, Louis Sauer (1967) The end of the driveway accommodates play.
7. Genesee Crossroads, Rochester, New York, Louis Sauer (1969) A courtyard spatial structure provides for intense ground activity with community facilities, two, three and four bed low-rise high-density units and a high-rise building for studio and one-bed units.
5. Atherton Gardens Estate Melbourne.
8. St. Kilda Road development pattern Melbourne.
6. Orchard Mews, Baltimore, Maryland, Louis Sauer (1973) Entry steps create a pedestrian scale at the footpath and a transition between the public and the private domains.
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Harmony House, New Haven, Connecticut, Louis Sauer (1967) In contrast to the Le Corbusier ideal that separates the ground from housing’s private uses, my ideal for social housing is to create normal behavioural settings at the ground to induce easily understood symbolic spatial relationships. A driveway separates the open space park from the houses and provides parking directly in front.
housing to be understood to serve them in their cultural diversity, housing solutions would be conceived fundamentally differently. With this, we design professionals might understand better the attitudes and environmental behaviours of our lower socio-economic classes to engage more forcefully in the pragmatics of our economic and political system to achieve inclusive housing environments. The quality of management and maintenance can have a significant effect on the residents’ and neighbours’ attitudes towards the social housing development. Management’s willingness to make prompt repairs, to carry out routine maintenance, and the presence or absence of a resident manager has a lot to do with the way residents feel about their housing. There have been exceptions; opportunities (in Philadelphia, New Haven and Baltimore) have allowed my designs to go beyond the limitations of the dominant power structure. This has happened on projects where the site or the number of proposed inhabitants is small, allowing better knowledge of inhabitants and therefore a variety of designs. Also on projects with specific briefs, where attention is given to local needs, the designer is empowered because the risks are fewer. Action can meet new needs that can lead to the evolution of places that fit their contexts.
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More often, though, the authority’s administrative regulation and control of the planning and design process maintained their bureaucratic mechanisms to achieve their image of housing. Could the low quality of the Australian government’s social housing initiatives and its inability to meet demand lie in a lack of imagination, courage or policy skills? Or are inflexible middle-class standards the problem? A successful approach comes from John Turner’s2 groundbreaking participatory work for informal settlements — learned from favelas — and the resultant site and service programs3–4 sponsored by the World Bank. Or, should Australian government’s nonprofit partnerships with housing associations be extended to give the for-profit private market sector responsibility for site selection and physical production, maintenance and management while providing financial subsidies and quality regulation? Why should architecture be important to the quality of social housing? Radical reforms are needed5 to social housing policy and practice to improve its accessibility, financing, development, maintenance and management. What needs to change in the architect’s profession for architecture to become an essential ingredient to government’s social housing policies?
Professor Louis Sauer is an American/Canadian retired practitioner who specialised in neighbourhood urban renewal and public and private sector housing. He was head of the School of Architecture at Carnegie-Mellon University and has taught at a number of other universities including Yale and MIT. He is currently an urban design consultant to the Mornington Peninsula Shire and the Chair of its Design Advisory Panel. He has received over 80 design awards and his work has been published in international books and magazines, most recently in Five Masterworks by Louis Sauer: an Unconventional American Architect by Anonino Saggio.
Footnotes
1. Louis Sauer, Differing Fates for Two Nearly Identical Housing Developments, AIA Journal, the American Institute of Architects, Wash. D.C. February 1977 2. John Turner, Freedom to Build: Dweller Control of the Housing Process, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1972. 3. Urban Environmental Management: Sites-and-Services at http://www.gdrc.org/uem/squatters/squatters.html. 4. Peter Nientied & Jan Van Der Linden, The ‘new’ policy approach to housing: A review of the literature, Public Administration and Development, Volume 8, Issue 2, pages 233–240, April/June 1988 5. KPMG and the Victorian Government Department of Human Services “Social Housing: A Discussion Paper on the Options to Improve the Supply of Quality Housing”, April 2012.
The Commission Flats: RMIT University design studios Richard Stampton and George Huon Since 2010, we have run a series of design studios as part of the RMIT School of Architecture, Masters Program focussing on the “Commission Flats”, the high rise public housing estates of inner city Melbourne. The estates, consisting of 45 towers across 21 sites, have proved to be rich subject matter for students seeking to engage with relatively large, inner city sites charged with a formidable set of very real design, `public policy and social challenges. Throughout the studios, students were asked to assume and advocate considered positions with regard to the provision of inner city public housing. Students were required to review and make use of the specific qualities and opportunities of the high rise estate sites and speculate on how the existing towers might be developed to sustain their use into the future. Particular emphasis was placed on the potential for site specific responses to address a broader metropolitan scale and associated issues around future land use and urban sustainability.
Through running the design studios we were interested to understand: • how the urban and architectural form of the tower estates could be maintained as part of the future city fabric; • how current and future tenants of these sites may benefit (or continue to benefit) from the gentrification of the estates’ surrounds; • what opportunities might exist for more genuine exchange or interaction between tenants of the estates and those living in their surrounds.
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The monumental form, scale and presence of the towers within their low-rise, finer-grain urban context represents a clear affront to current planning policies and highlights a range of questions about the role of public housing in increasingly gentrified, inner-city suburbs. How to manage and sustain the ageing, high rise public housing stock of the 1960s and 1970s in Melbourne (as in other parts of the world) has been a perennial urban and architectural issue. These design studios sought to engage a new generation of aspiring architects with these issues and apply design thinking in order to address contemporary housing needs across a range of scales and urban contexts.
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Our position We believe that diversity of urban form and demography should continue to play a key role in the development of inner Melbourne as a vibrant place to live. We believe in the importance of the ongoing provision of dignified social housing in the inner city. The initial impetus for these design studios was our mutually held position that: • the tower estates are an important part of our urban and social fabric; • the sustainability of the estates will continue to play a significant role in resisting inner city urban and social homogeneity; • the towers should be retained
Student work from the ‘commission flats’ design studio at RMIT, Yvonne Chan (Images 1 - 5)
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The preliminary brief for the first design studio was derived from the Tower Turnaround design competition, initiated by the Office of Housing in collaboration with the Office of the Victorian Government Architect and the Australian Institute of Architects (then RAIA) in 2007. The Tower Turnaround brief, among other things, called for design submissions for a relatively small high rise estate in Footscray that would: • improve the external appearance of the existing tower; • enhance the amenity of the existing tower for occupants; • make better connections to the surrounding neighbourhood; and • consider new approaches for upgrading the existing tower, especially with regard to environmental performance. Initial studio sessions revealed that relatively small scale, building specific issues could not be resolved without a careful investigation of the larger scale site conditions and associated urban and social issues. What students considered During the design studios students considered not only the capital value of these sites but also their cultural value and how architectural and urban design propositions could engage with broader social issues. Each design studio was framed by a specific written project brief and a list of basic design parameters to be addressed, such as: • retain and improve the existing tower/s; • develop other programs or opportunities for the site; • increase the volume of housing on site (including both public and private). Each subsequent brief built upon and refined what we had learnt from the previous studio. The studios were driven primarily by a desire to investigate and draw from the inherent qualities and potential opportunities of each site rather than to provide aesthetic improvements alone. Students were given considerable freedom outside of each specific project brief to implement their own personal interpretation of the issues and were encouraged to develop a wide range of polemical and speculative design responses. Students considered how urban scale architectural propositions might facilitate dynamic development models through a mix of public and private housing. Other building types
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for civic programs on each site were proposed. Staged construction models were also considered that could manage existing residents on site while delivering new buildings for public and private interests. Students were not asked to solve the current public housing crisis in Victoria. However, the sophistication and energy of many student design responses often provided unexpected insights into, and occasionally compelling visions for, what the future of Melbourne’s inner city public housing might look like. In forming their own positions, students drew heavily on their own individual and collective experiences of housing throughout the world. A key topic of debate was how each student’s own experience – be it of the Eastern suburbs of Melbourne, new and old cities of China, SouthEast Asia or elsewhere – could be applied to specific local contexts. We were often surprised by the application of international students’ experiences to local housing issues and the discrepancy between our own preconceptions of acceptable housing models and those of our international peers. Key issues identified Some of the key issues identified by students in their projects included: • whether or not public housing estate grounds are part of the public or private realm. This issue was exacerbated once students had inspected the sites and noted the general neglect of the ground condition of the existing estates; • the ambiguity in ownership of the public and communal spaces on these sites and the resulting lack of maintenance of (and joy provided by) those spaces. Students quickly ascertained that spaces are maintained by people who either have a legal, financial or emotional investment in them. Many students concluded that the amount of public open space on the sites needs to be reduced and/ or allocated to specific user groups with an interest in maintaining it; • the need to significantly increase the housing density and population of these sites; • the anonymity of the existing high rise tower estates and their lack of engagement with the surrounding context. Fencing or the removal of fencing, and the ill-defined and inactive site edges were a consistent design focus. The introduction of various public programs to each site was often proposed as a strategy to diminish the lack of engagement between
site and surrounding context, and to increase the amenity of the site for residents and the broader local community alike; • the difficulty in integrating public and private housing types and associated development models. While there was often in-principle agreement on the importance of maintaining a mix of housing types on these sites, design proposals often revealed the fraught nature of public housing and its integration with private housing interests. Richard Stampton is director of Richard Stampton Architects and teaches at RMIT University and the University of Melbourne. George Huon is an associate at BKK Architects and teaches at RMIT and Monash Universities. Thank you to Christy Bryar and Yvonne Chan, students of RMIT University, for allowing us to include images of their work in this article.
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Student work from the 'commission flats' design studio at RMIT, Christy Bryar (Images 6 -10)
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Awards Task Force This year’s successful Awards program saw the largest number of entries. This exceptional response from our profession demanded adjustments to our improved Awards format and program. Presentation to Juries at Monash University was terrific and well received. Thanks to Monash University, as well as a big thank you to Cox Architects for making their offices available as an alternate venue. Core to our focus and activities is ensuring the Awards program and process is well structured and well run. Most important to the process is the quality of the juries for the various categories to ensure a balanced and well considered selection of projects. Thanks to all jury members who generously contributed their time, skill, experience and deliberations in the selection of projects. Those involved in the winning projects represent the pinnacle of excellence in our profession. A total of 34 Architecture Awards and 24 commendations were presented. Commendations were adopted to accord with the national program. Seven Bates Smart Awards and commendations for Architecture in the Media were also presented. The Awards Dinner at Crown Palladium was again well attended by almost 900 guests. This year a tighter and quicker presentation format was adopted to allow more time for attendees to socialise and celebrate.
Sustainable Architecture Forum Chapter Council is currently looking to engage with members of the Large Practice Forum to ensure it is providing what members want from the Forum. For more information go to: www.refuelvictoria. com/2010/12/large-practice-forum.html
Member Services Committee The Member Services Committee continues to advance the interests of members in 2012. Recently, the committee organised the Lyons SONA Event Night, held at the Lyons Office on Wed 25 July. The night was an opportunity for SONA members to meet award winning architects, hear about the progress of 41 Exhibition Street and the benefits of A+ Membership. The Committee has drafted an Architectural Services Document to replace the existing ‘why you need an architect’. This new national publication will be available for both residential and commercial projects. Available later this year, it will provide a simplified and illustrated explanation of the role of the architect based on the RIBA document in London. A party is planned to celebrate World Architecture Day on Thurs 4 October.
As always, all aspects of the Awards program are reviewed on a regular basis.
Please contact the Institute for further details on all aspects of the Member Services Committee.
Alfred de Bruyne – Chair
Mark Richards – Chair
Large Practice Forum
Small Practice Forum
The Large Practice Forum brings together architectural practices in Melbourne with 30+ employees to discuss topics of particular interest to large practices. Sessions typically involve 20 attendees and a guest speaker. The May/June Forum was sponsored by IMAGINiT Technologies and held at St Elmo Restaurant. Jill Garner, Associate Victorian Government Architect, spoke about the 2012 initiatives of the Office of the Victorian Government Architect. These included the launch of the Victorian Design Review Panels, a three-year pilot project established to provide independent and authoritative advice to government and statutory decision makers across Victoria about the design of significant development proposals.
The Smaller Practice Forum brings together architectural practices in Melbourne that have up to 30 staff. Sessions typically involve 20 attendees and a guest speaker or topic for discussion. Topics are related to running a small practice and provide an opportunity for architects to share their experiences and knowledge. The June Forum covered Contract Administration and the August meeting discussed Architectural Fees.
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For more information go to: www.refuelvictoria. com/2010/12/smaller-practice-forum_13.html
The Sustainable Architecture Forum (SAF) continued to meet on a regular basis and created a special working group with a key focus to create policy and position papers relating to sustainable architecture for the Victorian Chapter. The group is coordinated by Belinda Strickland and comprises the following: Belinda Strickland (Chair), Lawrie Grant, David Mollison, Alex Nock, Michael Shaw and Scott Willey. Initially a review / research of the current literature will be conducted to create a reference document containing relevant articles, case studies, links and other policy documents to be circulated. Consultations with Institute parties who have a logical crossover with the SAF will determine topical issues and focus the policy direction / creation of position papers. While the policy working group actions are underway, the SAF will continue with other activities and include coordinating a Refuel panel discussion on ‘Energy use in multi-unit residential buildings’, scheduled to occur in September. Alex Nock
Victorian Chapter Council July Chapter Council reviewed this year’s State Awards Program highlights and challenges. The record number of entries (236) in this year’s Awards had a major impact on the logistics of the program. Input from members is still being sought, as all recommendations will make the 2013 program even more successful. Chapter Council has reallocated some council portfolios to capture the skills and expertise brought in by new Chapter Councillors. Portfolios are now: Jon Clements Robert Puksand Jose Alfano Ingrid Bakker Tony Battersby Callum Fraser Stuart Harrison Chris Harty Tom Jordan Alex Nock Wojciech Pluta Sarah Rees Shelley Roberts
Chapter President Immediate Past President Planning/ Governance & Urban Design Special Projects Social Justice/Special Projects Design and Heritage Media Education Practice Sustainability Members SONA Rep MA|A
CHT Architects Carabott Holt Turcinov, or CHT Architects, is a design-focused practice offering services in architecture, interior design and urban design. The firm works across multiple sectors, including residential, commercial, institutional, aged care, retirement living and healthcare.
buildings is the result of the team’s core values – CHT’s passionate, creative professionals are design-focused, service-oriented and committed to listening to clients. They provide architectural solutions that not only meet but also exceed clients’ expectations; buildings that people aspire to live and work in, now and into the future.
David Carabott founded the practice in 1999 and since then, it has grown steadily from a small practice to a firm employing 40 staff. David is joined at the helm by two other directors – Michael Holt and Ivan Turcinov.
One such example is CHT’s recent community housing development in Pearcedale Parade, Broadmeadows. Supported by the Government’s Nation Building Social Housing Initiative, the development provides affordable housing for different user groups, including single men, single women and family groups. With this development, CHT is setting a new precedent in the approach to the design of community housing. The architecture is deliberately atypical, referencing nearby civic buildings and reflecting their massing and associated significance in the community. This civic presence is intended to erode traditional
Recognised for its innovative use of space and material, CHT’s work often features in architecture and design awards. The delivery of such successful
attitudes towards social housing. The buildings are also detailed and character-laden with the intent they will be lived in, loved and enjoyed by residents and accepted by the public as part of their community.
CRICOS provider: Monash University 00008C
CHT Architects’ body of work consists of highquality, distinctive buildings, which complement modern Australian life and respond to the aspirations of the people who occupy them. The practice has a particular interest in creating environments that help enrich people’s lives.
The James Cox PhD Scholarship in Architecture The Family of James Cox and the Plenary Group are delighted to offer a PhD scholarship in architecture, in the Faculty of Art Design & Architecture at Monash University. This is an exciting opportunity to pursue a program of architecture design research to develop Melbourne’s urban environment. The scholarship comprises a living allowance for up to four years and provision for a period of international research or placement relevant to the project. Candidates will normally have first class or second class division A honours in their prior studies and an outstanding folio of design achievement. The candidate may be embedded in a practice environment.
This scholarship is provided in memory of James Cox, founder of CPR projects, founding Director of the Plenary Group and visionary leader in public-private partnerships with a passion for outstanding design and practical outcomes in the development of the urban environment.
The scholarship will be awarded to a candidate whose imaginative and experimental idea/project, has demonstrable practical outcomes with significant social and community benefits.
For more information contact the Faculty Graduate Studies office on 03 9903 1837 or
[email protected] www.artdes.monash.edu/architecture/JamesCox
Australia
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China
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Applications close September 10, 2012.
Italy
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Message from the Office of the Victorian Government Architect State intervention in housing markets has played an important role in improving the health, well-being and life chances of many low-income households. Public housing provision was a centrepiece of the post-war welfare revolution and, during the first decade after World War II, almost 20% of all housing constructed in Australia was financed from the public purse. In addition to providing the housing security that enabled social mobility for many public tenants, direct state investment in housing played an important role in stabilising housing markets generally. It is important to note, however, that the dominant policy settings and state subsidies have always been geared towards home ownership (principally owneroccupation, although generous tax concessions are also available to investors in the private rental sector). Since the end of the Long Boom, public housing has been in steady decline on a number of fronts. For a start, despite the initial high levels of investment, public housing never became a very large sector, particularly in Victoria. While stock levels in some States and Territories exceeded 10% at their peak, the national average was never much higher than 5%. In Victoria, which provides the least public housing of all States, this has now fallen to about 3%. Investment in public housing has also declined significantly in recent decades. In the ten years prior to the GFC, funding for public housing in Australia was cut by more than 30%. With much of the public housing stock now more than fifty years old, a significant and growing proportion (about 15% in Victoria) is either in need of substantial maintenance and upgrade to achieve basic levels of amenity and environmental performance or has reached the end of its useful life and requires redevelopment. This will require significant capital investment and was the subject of an Auditor General’s report earlier this year. Meanwhile, the policy of targeting social housing allocations to those in greatest need (a requirement of Commonwealth policy) has reduced the State’s rental income, as the majority of tenants are now entirely reliant on welfare. This has had the additional effect of entrenching social disadvantage. Many public housing estates have become locations where multiple disadvantage and its associated stigma are rife, and tenancy management has thus become a difficult, sensitive and complex issue (and also expensive). Yet waiting lists remain
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long; some eligible households wait more than a year for access to what the Auditor General has described as ‘this vital public service.’ So where to from here and what is the role for Victoria’s architects? There are three broad answers to this question. First, good design will continue to be important to ensure that public housing provides the best possible amenity for tenants (as well as delight!) while also being resilient and adaptable for the future needs of the agency. State housing agencies have a long history of working closely with the architectural profession and pursuing design innovation. From early experimentation with pre-cast concrete construction techniques in the post-war decades to heritage precinct renewal through spot purchase in the 1980s, Victoria’s public housing agency has often been at the forefront of technical and policy innovation in the built environment. The program of medium density infill instigated by John Devenish and built by the Ministry of Housing in Melbourne in the early 1980s was the 2010 recipient of the Victorian Chapter’s 25 Year Award for Enduring Architecture. Numerous Melbourne architects – many then at the start of their careers – were given considerable design freedom with these commissions that provided them great opportunity and exposure. (Prior to this Devenish had led the internationally acclaimed Woolloomooloo Redevelopment Project for the Housing Commission of NSW.) A few years ago in this ‘message’, Jenni Calzini reported on two recent examples of design competitions for public housing renewal and upgrade projects: Dandenong Living Places and Tower Turnaround. The Living Places project, a competition won by Bent Architecture, is now complete and was reviewed by Jenni in the most recent edition of Architecture Australia. Sadly, the Tower Turnaround project (BKK Architects with Peter Elliott Architects, Taylor Cullity Lethlean, Robert Owen, Falcetti Engineers and Sense Architecture), which involved the remodelling of apartments in high-rise estates, has stalled after only one prototype was built and installed. It was, nonetheless, the recent Small Project Architecture Award recipient at the 2012 Victorian Architecture Awards. Second, the existing stock of public housing ‘assets’ needs to be stewarded very carefully, but imaginatively, to ensure this valuable legacy is maintained and, in this era of asset renewal, used to leverage a range of new public benefits
in the process. This process will also benefit from integrated design thinking. The State Government has many significant land holdings associated with its public housing stock. For each new generation of Victorians this is a wonderful inheritance and presents exciting opportunities. While growth in the capital value of the land can be (and is) used to fund estate renewal and redevelopment (by selling land to private developers), renewal of public housing can also be an opportunity to deliver a range of public policy objectives and assist the implementation of place-based strategic planning. Finally, as the State continues to be less involved in the direct provision of housing, we need to ensure that the provision of other forms of social and state-subsidised housing (as well as lowcost and ‘affordable’ market housing) is design led; and that these become new opportunities for architectural innovation and engagement. Several architects have been actively assisting community housing providers, Housing Associations and local governments to provide quality affordable housing for some time. Social housing constructed as part of the recent Nation Building program was another opportunity for innovation in housing supply and forms the subject of a new AHURI project (led by Monash University) in which the OVGA is a research partner. This project seeks to learn from this process and will use the findings to inform the development of models for the retrofit of Melbourne’s ‘greyfield’ suburbs. The OVGA has also been investigating how co-operative models of medium density housing development might be used as a means to improve both the affordability and design quality of denser forms of housing. Tom Alves Office of the Victorian Government Architect
President’s Message Jon Clements The past couple of months have seen another awards season pass and the quality of the entries and winning projects was again outstanding. The popularity of our awards scheme continues to grow and this year we had a record 236 entries and nearly 900 attendees celebrating at the awards presentation dinner. The awards program is continually evolving in response to feedback from members and the digital space is having a strong influence on the paths that we are now exploring such as the curatorial involvement of Monash University in this year’s Exhibition of Entries. Expect to see more changes to the awards scheme in the coming year as we continue a process of change and investigation. On behalf of all our members I would like to thank the entrants, jurors, sponsors, Monash University and in particular the dedicated staff in the Victorian Chapter that helped pull together such as successful program, which continues to promote the exceptional talent among our profession. Congratulations to this year’s award winners and we wish you all the best in the National Awards program, which will be announced in Perth in November. While we are all looking forward to warmer weather the Institute is busy building 41 Exhibition Street (we are now out of the ground) and preparations for next year’s National Architecture Conference, which will be held in Melbourne, are underway. The Emerging Architects Prize is now open (and close Sunday 9th September) and I would encourage you to identify suitable emerging architects for consideration. The Emerging Architect Prize
By
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has been developed to acknowledge an individual emerging architect’s contribution to architectural practice, education, design excellence and community involvement, which advances the professions role within the public arena. The National winner will be announced at the Australian Achievement in Architecture Awards in March 2013.
outcomes as a result of this excellent initiative. On the subject of government initiatives the Flinders Street Station Design Competition has been announced by the Office of Major Projects. I am sure many of our members will be preparing an entry in support of the preservation of this important Melbourne icon and we look forward to reviewing the outcomes.
This edition of Architect Victoria explores the important topic of Social Housing. The need for better quality Social Housing solutions is clear but the myriad of issues and challenges that we face in delivering these complex and challenging projects deserves more immediate consideration. Our state is currently undergoing significant population growth and our urban growth boundaries continue to expand. This is leading to an increased demand for more innovative Social Housing solutions. The Social Housing topics discussed in this issue expand on many relevant debates and we hope that social housing will be embraced as an important component of an integrated and combined community rather than being treated as separate and isolated communities as has been done in the past. In other news the Office of the Victorian Government Architect has now established the Victorian Design Review Panels (VDRP) with the assistance of the State Government. The panels have now been operating for a couple of months. Feedback from architects who have been reviewed by the VDRP has been very positive and we can we can expect to see improved design
Australian Institute of Architects Victorian Chapter Level 3, 60 Collins Street, Melbourne Telephone: 03 8620 3866 Facsimile: 03 8620 3864 Email:
[email protected] Website: www.architecture.com.au ABN: 72 000 023 012 Guest Editor:Catherine Ranger Editorial Committee: Cameron White (Chair), Larry Cirillo, Anna Jeffery, Josh McAlister, Dee Neville, Nita Prekazi, Reg Rippon, Brett Seakins, James Staughton, Luke Stokes, Matthew Secatore (SONA Rep), Alex Setmajer (SONA Rep) Magazine Editor: Alison Cleary Magazine Coordinator: Elycia de Guia Cover image:Detail of hoarding, Atherton Gardens Estate Redevelopment, Fitzroy (Bird de la Coeur and McCabe Architects). Photograph by Cameron White.
Jon Clements Victorian Chapter President
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