An architect inhab its ever y home – ever y room and ever y space –in their mind, before the finished outcome. We walk ever y hallway, open ever y window and stand in ever y kitchen. We ask ourselves, over and over - do we feel welcome here? Would we enjoy working, living and being here? In doing so, we know that when the building is built and our clients move in, the answer to ever y impor tant question is already answered.
‘Living Architecture’ showcases the role that architects play in making a difference to their clients’ lives and provides useful insights into the process and experience of working with a design professional.
The Coombs House | The Mill Design | Photographer: Kasey Funnell
Social Housing
Australian Institute of Architects
Victorian Chapter
Level 1, 41 Exhibition Street Melbourne, VIC 3000
ABN 72 000 023 012
Victorian Chapter and Editorial Committee acknowledge and pay respect to the Traditional Custodians of the lands on which we live, work and meet across the state: Barengi Gadjin, Bunurong, Dja Dja Wurrung, Eastern Marr, Gunaikurnai, Gunditj Mirring, Martang, Taungurung, Wadawurrung, Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung, Yorta Yorta.
Kennedy Nolan, Kosloff Architecture
Facilitated by Gemma Savio
Architect at Home: Nick Harding Interview by Elizabeth Campbell
Guest editors Daniel Moore and Thomas Huntingford
Alternative pathways: A conversation
Rory Hyde, James Taylor, Michael Whit tingham
Architectural photography
Derek Swalwell, Ben Hosking, Dianna Snape, Elizabeth Schiavello, Tatjana Plitt, Tess Kelly, Tom Ross, Martina Gemmola, John Gollings, Peter Clarke
your histories: A conversation with Cruz Garcia, WAI Architecture Interview by Adrian Fernandez
Amelia Borg, Kushagra Jhurani, Peter Elliott
Sarah Hurst, Kimberley K. Hui, Gumji Kang
Jacqui Alexander
Managing editor
Emma Adams
Guest editors
Eli Giannini
Daniel Moore
Thomas Huntingford
Editorial committee
James Staughton (Chair)
Elizabeth Campbell
Laura Held
Thomas Huntingford
Yvonne Meng
John Mercuri
Justin Noxon
Sarah Lynn Rees
Associate contributors
Nikita Bhopti
Elizabeth Campbell
Phillip Pender
On the cover
Calk House | Mani Architecture
Photo: Jack Lovel
Designer
Felicity McDonald
Creative direction
Annie Luo
Publisher
Australian Institute of Architects
Victorian Chapter
41 Exhibition Street
Melbourne, Victoria 3000
Printing Printgraphics
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Contact Wayne Egelton
wayne.egelton@architecture.com.au
+61 2 9246 4055
Acknowledgements
Bill Krotiris photo by Chris McConville
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This edition provides wonderful examples of how great architecture and considered design create spaces that are calming, providing occupants with an awareness that everything within their internal setting simply feels right.
Nick Harding’s description of how children by virtue of their indoor activities immerse in spaces, and Alex Lake’s of “supporting the rituals of a young family” with thoughtful composition and “remarkable proportions” resonate that designing from the inside out is key to the creation of considered and calming spaces. These projects recognise the everyday improved amenity that comes with engaging an architect. Summed up by the Mani Architecture team as the “love and joy good architecture and properly designed spaces” bring to their clients.
In recent weeks the Institute has engaged with its members to discuss and review internal quality of spaces in the context of multi-dwelling projects. Members contributed to these forums with their intimate knowledge on this subject, to assist the Institute in its submission to government in response to the Victorian Parliament – Legislative Assembly Environment and Planning Committee’s Inquiry (into Apartment Design Standards). There was rigorous debate around shifting away from a one-dimensional approach to better apartments (demonstrating minimum area/plan dimensional requirements) and moving towards a three-dimensional approach. Amenity has much to do with volumetric compositions and proportions. Within our recommendations we advocated to government to better understand and appreciate a clear vision of apartment living as a mainstream housing choice, as housing is steadily becoming out of reach for young families.
Apartment living should be considered first and foremost as people’s homes, as against an asset class or investment. We made recommendations to government and industry on how important it is to create liveable, sustainable, and inclusive communities for people who live in apartments with respect to all types of households and at all ages and stages of people’s lives.
Victorian Chapter President
Bill Krotiris FRAIA
As we begin another year, this edition is one that is full of hope and purpose for the profession. The role of the architect and architecture is so important in contributing to a sustainable and meaningful society and our skills can be applied in a variety of positive ways in achieving these aims. From charting how to start your architectural career, to designing a standalone house, to creating social and affordable homes, the range of articles provides insights into what I believe at its best, is a noble profession.
Of particular note is the opportunity for this generation of architects to champion and protect good design outcomes. Architects have the unique position of providing strategic leadership to navigate complex stakeholder engagement across government, contractor, consultant and community groups to help achieve better homes and places for future generations. The tension of time, cost and quality are ever-present for practitioners; however, the long-term horizon of these projects and their support of our community provides an even higher duty of care to ensure they maximise their positive potential for the occupants both now and in generations to come.
The current COVID pandemic has clearly illustrated, through extended periods of lockdown, the importance of the fundamentals of our home environment – from public landscape surrounds through to nurturing private balcony gardens, from daylight and natural ventilation to the need for temperature control and acoustic privacy. Our spaces need to be flexible, sustainable, accessible and empowering – centred on the homeowner and focused on their wellbeing. Good design can be achieved through distilled thought and care into layout and detailing. In particular, the next generation of housing must embed effective environmental considerations into every aspect of the design to address climate change right now.
A special thanks to our contributors and guest editors Eli Giannini, Daniel Moore and Thomas Huntingford. Wishing you all the best for 2022!
Victorian State Manager
Tim Leslie FRAIA
BoardGrove Architects
Photography by Rory Gardiner
Words by Phillip Pender
For the National Gallery of Victoria’s 2020 Triennial outdoor program, BoardGrove Architects designed a collection of transient pavilions situated in the gallery’s Grollo Equiset Garden. Drawing on their diverse experience, BoardGrove designed a novel response that skillfully responded to the project brief.
While most small practices sharpen their teeth within the residential sector, BoardGrove Architects’ portfolio consists of a broad range of project types, from furniture to speculative villages. This is informed by Holly Board and Peter Grove’s combined experience working across various sectors and practices in Melbourne and London.
“Starting small with a variety of projects was our aim. From this we would build knowledge and experience along the way, developing a small studio that was agile and creatively diverse in scale and typology.”
This repertoire is founded on a common ambition “to create a strong and specific human experience.” The pavilions demonstrate this ethos; a celebration of lounging, socialising, dining and absorbing art and nature as a collective public.
The project called for an architectural response to accommodate socially distanced communal meals and the management of groups for two events that occurred as part of the Triennial festival. The brief originally asked for individual picnicking pods for groups of five people for the Summer in the
Multiple pavilions sit close to the NGV restaurant providing increased capacity for a socially distanced outdoor dining experience.
Garden event and a larger dining area for the Triennial Extra event. Notably, this had to be achieved within a tight seven-week timeframe for design and construction.
“Once we started working through the design, we became concerned about the logistics of delivering two totally separate installations with such a short design and delivery program. We started thinking about whether we could design something that was able to adapt to serve both events without doubling up on materials, fabrication and costs.”
In response, BoardGrove challenged and expanded the brief, seeking to address constraints efficiently while also deeply considering both the user experience and the future environmental impacts of the structures themselves.
“In the early stage of designing the pavilions the concept for an adaptable structure and the ambition for an evocative experience that evoked memories of camping emerged. This set the framework for the design to evolve. Camping evokes a feeling of escape partly due to the editing down of what is necessary to shelter you and keep you comfortable, partly the immediacy of the environment in which you are present. This drove the expression and material choices of the pavilions.”
The pavilions comprised of a series of reusable components fabricated off-site and speedily assembled on site. Timber stud A-frames, reminiscent of the triangulated facade of Roy Ground’s gallery, were attached to raised timber pallet platforms and draped with a translucent removable canvas held in place by rope. The project took on a design-build nature, with strong collaboration between the architects, builders, manufacturers and others involved in the event.
Situated among mature trees, garden beds and artworks, the site-responsive pavilions maximised the utility of their surroundings. The canvases provided shade and diffused light, with dappled shadows of foliage and branches animating their surface. At night, low-hanging pendants illuminated the platforms. The pavilions simultaneously provided a sense of elevation and enclosure yet also immersion in the surrounding scene. Their capacity to be inhabited or furnished in various ways lent an atmosphere of playful informality. Linear flat-pack dining tables designed by BoardGrove and chairs borrowed from the Gallery could be arranged to orientate users in “the theatre of the evolving installation”.
Holly Board RAIA is co-director of BoardGove Architects. Phillip Pender (BEnvs, MArch) is a Project Officer at CityLab with previous architectural experience in residential and multiresidential projects.
Varying seating configurations and types offer places to sit, rest and picnic in the garden.
BoardGrove Architects
Project team
Holly Board, Peter Grove
Consultants
Structural Engineer: Paul Conole Engineering
Project support, implementation and co-ordination: NGV
exhibition design team
Building Surveyor: Surveyed by Nicholas
Access Consultant: Architecture and Access
Builder
CBD Contracting Group
Location
National Gallery of Victoria International, Southbank
Country of Traditional Owners: Woi Wurrung Country
Suppliers
Roofing
Canvas roofs: EH Brett, Waxcon
Furniture
Triennial Extra Custom Tables, Waiters Stations, Maître D
Station: designed by BoardGrove Architects, made by Individual
Design and Construct
Picnic Tables: Hospitality Furniture Concepts
Chairs: Hub Furniture Colos Piazza chairs
Lighting
Sphera Maestro LED, Sphera Flai table lantern
Furnishings
Floor cushions: Ikea Froson Duvholmen
Richmond House Therefore Architecture
Photography by Rory Gardiner
Words by Nikita Bhopti
Jessica Lillico
Director Alex Lake shares how Therefore has spring boarded into residential architecture from a prior base of commercial work – “an atypical direction given most small practices begin with residential work”.
Adorned in a creeping Ficus pulima, the double-fronted, twostorey facade of former Mills & Dowling Tinsmiths is right on its Richmond footpath boundary. Behind this, we find Therefore’s extension – a crafted two-storey volume that “supports the rituals of a young family within a series of indoor and outdoor rooms”.
Building from the proportions of the existing heritage dwelling, the new volumes are purposeful subtractions and adjustments, unfolding across the length of the site. By extending the existing central circulation path deeper through the spine of the site, Therefore harnessed the double-fronted nature of the block, and created an indoor living area to the south, and an outdoor one to the north. The traditional backyard is relocated along the side of the home, enveloped in heritage walls and contemporary glazing, instead of fencing.
The addition references the prominent use of brickwork found on site by adopting an oversized local brick. Being randomly cut and stitched together by hand, these brick walls, much like the sheer heritage walls of the existing dwelling, retain a monolithic, yet tactile sense. Director, Alex Lake, talks of the “principles of composition and remarkable proportions” that are maintained, while “allowing the complexity of town planning and heritage regulations to be observed with relative grace”. The placement of considered screenings, openings, and level changes are all crafted around the existing site’s intricate requirements.
The north-facing courtyard opens up to the kitchen and dining areas via large sliding doors.
Stylist
Richmond House is a responsive and sincere alteration to a bold heritage dwelling. Having built a name for themselves in the hospitality realm of architecture, Therefore put forward a unique pathway towards establishing themselves as a residential practice, with projects such as Richmond House.
With their growing engagement across a number of commercial typologies, it was Therefore’s commercial clients that formed the base for their initial residential commissions. Having designed two cafes and a pub renovation for the clients of Richmond House, this project is an example of how an enduring client and architect relationship can eventuate into new opportunities for a practice as a whole. “Our first residential commission came from an existing connection in the hospitality industry”, states Alex Lake, sharing how Therefore have since inverted, with “residential work recently becoming the primary focus of the practice”.
“We’re enjoying the iterative nature of residential work, as various ideas from our first few projects begin to reverberate within a larger number of commissions and we can begin to polish particular ideas while charting the connections between the various projects.”
Recognising that commercial projects “require a particular combination of diligence and creativity which is not always seen in residential work”, Alex Lake also notes how similarly, “the formidable presence of tradition in residential architecture can
provide a sharp focus which is difficult to execute in commercial work”. For this reason, all members of Therefore are encouraged to work across each project type and engage with all phases of the design process.
Embracing their initial passion for hospitality projects, while burying their feet deep into residential work, Therefore find themselves in a uniquely inverted position in the world of small practice. Richmond House, along with several other recent projects, exhibit Therefore’s crafted translation of previously explored principles into what is becoming their own residential language. They remain a small, client-focused studio – aspiring to polish particular ideas while “consolidating their experiences as an emerging practice and to continue learning”.
The living room with in-situ
Alex Lake RAIA is the director of Therefore studio. Nikita Bhopti is a registered architect working at WOWOWA Architecture. She is a lead curator of New Architects Melbourne, and is also engaged with multiple mentoring platforms, as both a mentee and mentor. She is a regular contributor to Architect Victoria and The Design Writer.
concrete ceiling.
Richmond House
Richmond House
Practice team
Alex Lake, Mark Allen, Ben Shackleton
Consultant team
Contractor: Locbuild
Landscape: Urban Horticultural Solutions
Landscape architect: Acre
Structural and civil engineer: Meyer Consulting
Building surveyor: Building Design Compliance
Quantity surveyor: Plancost
Land surveyor: TGM
Geotechnical engineer: Hardrock Geotechnical
Energy rating: BEAC
Location
Richmond, Victoria
Country of Traditional Owners: Woi Wurrung Country
Suppliers
Roofing
Heritage galvanised roofing in true oak deep profile from Revolution Roofing
Trimdek roofing in surfmist from Lysaght
In-situ concrete from Hanson
Walls
Krause emperor brick in ghost from Robertson's building products
Concrete block in ivory by Adbri masonry / GuardIT
In-situ concrete from Hanson
Heritage walls and ceilings in white set-hard plaster
Bathroom
Mutina Mews industrial tiles in fog and lead from Urban Edge Ceramics
Custom towel rail in brass by Jason Blake
Floors
Solid US oak floorboards finished in Rubio Monocoat
Mutina Mews chevron tiles in ink in entry from Urban Edge
Ceramics
Door and windows
Heritage facade timber doors and windows by Carrison Brothers in Porters riverstone
Steel windows by Amore Engineering in Porters riverstone
Internal doors in Dulux ice queen
Window furnishings
Curtains in Mokum Satori stonewash oyster 810 and timber plantation shutters in Dulux ice queen from A/P Shutters and Blinds
Furniture
Outdoor table and benches by Hay from Cult
Dining table by Studio Henry Wilson
Dining chairs by Stolab
Mattiazzi stools from District
Ligne Roset sofa
Furnishings
Rugs, main living and heritage living by Halcyon Lake
Emily Ellis white speckled planter from Pepite
Painting by Seth Deigo Birchall Went A Courtin'
Lighting
Dining pendants by Muller van Severen from Valerie Objects
Dining lamp by Oluce from Euroluce
Kitchen pendant by Archier
Bathroom wall lights by Flos in opal glass from Euroluce
Bedside lamp by Muuto
IBL downlights from Light Project
Calk House Mani Architecture
Putting strong relationships with their clients at the forefront, and remaining bonded with their projects after completion, the Mani Architecture team are “reminded on how we have changed our clients’ lives for the best”.
Founded in 2014, Mani Architecture is an all-female practice based in a large Coburg North warehouse. They operate confidently under honest and profound reassurance from past clients and the post-occupancy lives that their completed projects continue to share with them.
After designing her parents’ home in Preston, director Sara Tonini started her own practice at 27 years of age. Coming from a background in commercial architecture, this family project marked the starting point for her passion towards residential architecture. Starting her own residential practice is something Sara describes as a “no brainer”. Calk House is one of Mani’s new build projects – a family home, designed for Sara’s sister Trish, her husband and three young children.
Sited on a sloped block, the existing house had no connection to the site, and was missing any form of relationship to the garden and surrounds. Sitting much higher than ground level, the backyard remained isolated, and became the domain of the client’s dog Harlie.
Calk House aimed to meaningfully place a family home filled with colour, texture and natural light. The challenges of a sloped site were harnessed, resulting in stepping floorplates, which framed separate zones of the house, such as the parents’ retreat, the living space, and the kids’ areas.
Cleverly designed joinery uses the split levels to give privacy and function to the living space.
Photography by Jack Lovel
Words by Nikita Bhopti
Adopting a split colour scheme, the front two-storey form of the house is clad in black weatherboard, with interiors painted in dark and moody colours. Stepping into a lower single-storey form, the clients invited the bricklayer of the original home back to re-lay some of the cream bricks for Calk House. Capped in a white weatherboard trim, the new home references the white neighbouring weatherboard homes, while also consolidating both the new and existing features of the house that previously occupied the site.
While delivering a home for a family member is typically associated with having its challenges, Sara Tonini describes the experience as painless, with many positives to share. Sara’s sister “had a deep understanding of architecture and the architectural process”, which meant that conversations, challenges and decisions during the design and construction phases were easily addressed. Communication around fees, services, timelines and processes became “a breeze”. With her sister’s trust in Sara, Mani Architecture operated with more freedom through the design phase than most practices typically would. Additionally, Sara’s “strong relationship with her sister” positioned her with a unique insight and “deeper understanding of the brief”.
This did however bring with it the challenge of ensuring Sara’s brother-in-law was part of all decisions and communication, as the sisters “would often spend nights on the phone talking all things Calk House”. Sara formed “an emotional connection to the design and delivery of the project”.
“Family dinners would include conversations about Calk House”, blurring the line between her work and personal life. However, being constantly reminded of “the love and joy good architecture and properly designed spaces brings to their clients’ lives” is something that Sara claims as being “something else –it’s special”
Calk House has become a “great marketing resource”, with many of the family’s visiting friends becoming Mani Architecture clients. Sara also shares how having access to Calk House has been invaluable when wanting to take current and potential clients through a Mani Architecture project. Along with new visitors, “the Mani ladies still get to enjoy the home now and get to see the joy they have brought the family”.
Through Calk House, we can see how a client’s “insight into architect life” can largely impact the design and delivery of a project. With Mani Architecture describing it as “a home to love and live their best lives”, Calk House gives its occupants a uniquely crafted home, built on a deep understanding of the brief and trust. It stands as a positive and fruitful example of how architects can work with family on their forever homes.
Sarah Tonini RAIA is co-director of Mani Architecture. Nikita Bhopti works at WOWOWA Architecture. She is a lead curator of New Architects Melbourne, is also engaged with multiple mentoring platforms, and is a regular contributor to Architect Victoria and The Design Writer.
Calk House
MANI Architecture
Practice team
Sara Tonini, René Lieu
Consultant team
Land Surveyor: MAC Surveying + Mapping
Geotechnical: Arc Soil Testing
Structural Engineer: FC Design
ESD Consultant: ABS Ratings
Building Surveyor: Metro Building Surveyor
Builder Build Gronow
Location
Coburg North Country of Traditional Owners: Woi Wurrung Country
Suppliers
Roofing and cladding
Black weatherboard exterior cladding by James Hardie Colorbond roofing by Lysaght
Walls
Recycled cream bricks
Doors and windows
AAA Advanced Windows & Doors
Door hardware by Designer Doorware
Furnishings
Window coverings by Esenar Armadillo rug in living
Art by René Lieu
King Living couch
Fenton + Fenton side tables in master bedroom
Hale Merchantile French linen in master bedroom and office
Kitchen
Oven and cooktop by SMEG
Custom cabinetry by Laminex Franke and Abey
Bathroom
Rogerseller
Phoenix tapware
Lighting
Lights lights lights
Beacon lighting
Brunswick Lean-to Blair Smith Architecture
Photography by Tom Ross
Words by Phillip Pender Stylist
Jessica Lillico
Brunswick Lean-to is a discrete addition to a heritage-listed weatherboard cottage. The project draws upon the ubiquitous lean-to it replaced; a colloquial structure often overlooked or demolished in the event of an extension.
Blair Smith Architecture demonstrates sensitivity and depth of thought, addressing opportunities and constraints through siteresponsive spatial planning and the packaging of multifunctional elements in a robust, utilitarian structure.
The project highlights the capacity of a small practice to creatively respond to a tight brief, particularly when complemented by a forward-thinking client invested in the core ideas of the design. Referred to Blair Smith via two established practices, a simple napkin sketch of a small extension showed the client’s commitment to a vision contrary to the often-ill-conceived developments rapidly altering Brunswick’s urban fabric. Blair Smith describes the project as “an example of what I believe more people should take on. Our society is so driven by stretching ourselves to the limit in terms of resources and finances. The clients weren’t interested in achieving area, instead concentrating their modest budget on quality and an intensified mood over a smaller space.”
With a footprint of 51 square-metres, the low-slung addition retains a cohesive streetscape while cleverly engaging with the entirety of the site through permeable spatial planning and wellconsidered thresholds. The eastern side passage functions as a thoroughfare and secondary point of access to the home and backyard via a multi-purpose pantry and mudroom. The unusual placement of wet areas to the north was both an economic consideration and an opportunity to engage with the rear yard and western side passage. A planted threshold along the northern facade grafts the home into the backyard, which contains an edible garden and detached studio.
Across the project, cleverly resolved multi-functional elements and detailing do the heavy lifting. A gradually sloped projecting roof and angled ceiling and soffit taper to a thin edge. This deep eave, sliding timber screens and fluted glass doors control heat gain and overlooking from the neighbouring three-storey development to the north. The dark screens blend with a battened wall and stained timber window frames. All new internal partitions accommodate fixtures or joinery. Bookended by concrete masonry walls, these multifunctional features meld into a tight, robust and cohesive form with a distinct character.
The coherence of the built outcome is a testament to both the architect and client’s ideological commitment to the project’s core ideals. In employing an emerging practice, such clients may be rewarded with a generationally unique level of dynamism, curiosity, creative commitment and personal investment. Blair acknowledges that “the benefit of engaging a young practice for a prospective client becomes a moving target, because often practices are best suited to small commissions for only a short period. It is quite hard for lay people out there to find the right professional at the right stage in their career for a modest project.” This highlights the value of promoting early career architects, lowering barriers for prospective clients and recognising the integral role young architects play in their industry. Such smaller-scale projects present a particularly compelling outlet.
Blair Smith RAIA is the director of Blair Smith Architecture. Phillip Pender (BEnvs, MArch) is a Project Officer at CityLab with previous architectural experience in residential and multiresidential projects.
Masson for Light Tullyspot, Ross Gardam ‘Polar’ wall light, Ross Gardam Flare wall light. Euroluce Flos Mini Glo-Ball
Kitchen
Brushed stainless steel benchtop, Laminex Absolute Matte Black cabinetry, Sussex tapware, Bosch integrated dishwasher, Sirius rangehood with custom stainless steel surround, National Tiles white gloss tile splashback
Bathroom
Sergrigio Verdi tiles, National Tiles white gloss tiles, Sussex tapware, Rogerseller Catalano basin
Other: Interia joinery pulls
This page: Dark screens blend with a battened wall and stained timber window frames.
Social Housing
Guest editor: Eli Giannini
This form of residential architecture has been close to the profession’s heart since the problem of housing arose with the industrial revolution and found its answer at the end of the 19th century through the formation of industrial estates and at the start of the twentieth century with the modernist movement.
The background to the current state of social housing is eloquently described by Tom Alves’ essay in this edition, where he makes the point:
“social housing, by the very nature of its provision, allows for design-led higher density development, greater architectural input into housing design, and innovation in urban design, in a way that housing supplied by the market typically does not.”
This observation is close to my experience of working since the early 1980s on various projects for the Office of Housing, the DHHS, Community Housing Association and recently with the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing.
I have been fortunate to have experienced professionally the many progressive design outcomes that our government and its agencies have supported over the last 40 years. Starting with the rehabilitation of Office of Housing (OOH) heritage properties around the Emerald Hill Estate in South Melbourne which were lovingly refurbished by firms such as Allom Lovell, Williams Boag, Cox and Carmichael, Peter Crone, Peter Elliott and others to the work that the Office of Housing did under Bill Barlow’s leadership and the watchful eye of Jennifer Nichols and her colleagues and then to the re-visioning in the late 80s led by John Devenish which gave opportunities through in-fill developments to emerging studios such as Edmond & Corrigan, Greg Burgess, Norman Day, ARM and many others and supported the design renaissance of the post-modern period. And more recently through the economic stimuluses of Nation Building, post Global Financial Crisis, the Big Housing Build now and in 2020 during the COVID-19 crisis which have allowed greater architectural input into housing design as Alves points out.
One of the design advantages that social housing has over other forms of residential development is that it is not governed by the vagaries of the
marketplace. What the social housing commission demands of architects is another kind of invention. The examples Catherine Ranger has gathered for this issue are evidence of this and the commitment architects make to social and community issues. As Ranger points out the projects she selected are “symbolic of a greater value, and an opportunity to reflect on the importance of excellence in housing design across the whole of the built environment.”
The role of the expert client, often an architect, in this area is also not to be underestimated. As mentioned, learning from Bill Barlow and Jennifer Nichols in my early career has proved invaluable to our latter work. The expert client is able to steer the project toward the desired outcome. The OOH also had some very specific design controls which took the form of hefty manuals. These instructed how to plan a kitchen, how to allow rooms to be furnished in more than one way, how to keep down the costs of heating and cooling, what materials and fixtures to select and how extensively they could be used, how to ensure the interiors were efficiently and logically designed and catered for users of all abilities.
The useful instructions they imparted made up in part for the rigidity of the outcomes; hence, when MGS started to work in the community housing sector, we took the lessons we had learned from our statebased clients and broadcast them into this other sector. Our understanding of the typology contributed to the many successes the community housing associations we worked with were experiencing in delivering housing through the 25% to 75% split between community and state, a funding model that operated until the start of the Global Financial Crisis.
Since that time, state and federal funding of housing has been on a project-by-project basis and has tended to occur more as an economic stimulus measure eg Nation Building in 2005 and
solutions to the crisis by taking a big-picture view, engaging with private capital and thinking outside the traditional development model and across the publicprivate divide.
How do we build communities not just housing?
the Big Housing Build program in 2020, than as an ongoing function of government. The community housing sector which had built their executive and administrative capacity through the 80s and 90s through their reliance on the 25% to 75% funding model was decimated after Nation Building and returned to their other core business of tenant management.
The lack of regular funding and the uncertainty created by this situation as well as the social and demographic changes in our community have led to the severe crisis of homelessness today. Joshua Darvill, coordination, engagement and participation manager at Ozanam House speaks of the long waiting lists in our interview as does Arron Wood, former Deputy Lord Mayor of the City of Melbourne, in his interview with Laura Held. Both stress the importance of wrap-around services for people experiencing homelessness. They also look forward in hope to the promise of more housing announced in the current Big Housing Build program.
Camilla Burke describes Breathe’s approach working with Aboriginal Housing Victoria who are targeting their efforts towards housing for young people in employment and community areas. Their Reservoir project, under construction as we speak, provides accommodation for singles and siblings. Rob McGauran, picks up on the same point, that housing cannot be thought of as a standalone problem. He fleshes out the various scenarios available to government and the private sector to deliver affordability. While he points to the dire statistics, he is also optimistic that we can find first-rate
While we ponder various scenarios, we also discuss the work being done right now by the architects engaged through the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing. Katherine Sundermann and Simon Goddard look at the reimagining of the Housing Commission towers here and overseas. They ask the question: what kind of consultation is needed with the user and how do we build communities not just housing? They use examples of the adaptive re-use philosophy employed by Lacaton and Vassal, 2021 Pritzker Prize winners, to offer a model that may be useful in rethinking the redevelopment of our own housing estates.
Key to the consultation, to tailor designs to the end users, is also research and post-occupancy evaluations of recent projects. The Department of Families, Fairness and Housing commissioned an evaluation of the Ozanam House redevelopment which we also publish here demonstrating that social and community housing in order to succeed needs to be “designed using psychologically informed principles to provide service users with a built environment that is suitable for the diverse psychological, physical and social needs of people”. Their purpose in “evaluating the redevelopment is to build an evidence base to strengthen the connection between good design, practice and outcomes in homelessness accommodation.
Surely it is this research that architects need now to embed their specialist knowledge of design in this area.
Eli Giannini LFRAIA, principal MGS Architects, is the ‘G’ in MGS Architects. Over the last 30 years Eli has been responsible for the design direction of the practice and also winning numerous industry awards. Eli has promoted architectural design, theory and research through her practice, teaching, writing, exhibitions, and conference presentations and as eminent architect on various competition jury panels.
A timeline of social housing innovation in Victoria
Words by Tom Alves
Throughout the history of social housing in Victoria, government agencies and community housing providers alike, due to the unique features of social provision, have been able to experiment, demonstrate and influence housing and the urban environment in ways that are not typically available to market housing development and supply.
Masterplanned suburban estates
The earliest public housing estates in Victoria were used as opportunities to demonstrate the town planning principles of the early twentieth century Garden City movement, as well as to experiment with new dwelling types and density mixes.
Garden City in Port Melbourne was underway already as a government-led project when, in 1938, the newly formed Housing Commission of Victoria took over land acquisition and planning functions from the Metropolitan Town Planning Commission. The suburb was laid out in accordance with ‘garden city’ principles and construction of the houses, which had been financed and managed by the State Bank of Victoria from 1926, was also assumed by the Commission.
Newlands Estate (1940–1953) is another early large-scale suburban housing estate developed by the Housing Commission of Victoria, this time on greenfield land at the northern edge of Melbourne (near Preston and Coburg). Newlands Estate tested theories promoted by advocates of the Garden Suburb and New Town movements by incorporating a mixture of housing types and densities, including detached and semi-detached houses and walkup flats, combined with social infrastructure. In addition to dwelling diversity and density mix, small but accessible parks, street-based neighbourhood shopping centres, and a primary school were intended to foster a sense of community.
Factory production
After WWII, the Victorian Housing Commission pioneered large-scale factory production of housing in Victoria when it leased the former Commonwealth government tank factory, located in Holmesglen. From 1946, the Commission used this facility to increase new housing supply dramatically, producing 20 houses a week by 1950 (Housing Commission of Victoria 1951). By the mid-1950s, the factory was producing pre-cast elements for walk-up flats. Many of these comprise the estates that currently are undergoing renewal as part of the Public Housing Renewal Project (PHRP).
From the mid-1960s until the early-1970s, the focus of production at Holmesglen became the components for the high-rise towers that were to become the most recognisable output of the Housing Commission. The construction system for these typically 20-storey towers used mainly precast elements, with minimal in-situ concrete. 47 precast concrete towers were constructed on 28 sites around Melbourne, using a small number of plan forms that emphasise efficient circulation and the crossventilation of all dwellings.
‘Slum’ clearance
Although the Housing Commission created new suburbs greenfield sites, a major focus of the Commission’s work, and the impetus for its creation, was ‘slum clearance’ in inner-urban working-class areas (Howe 1988). Entire urban neighbourhoods were compulsorily acquired, and the land ‘reclaimed’. More often, land was redeveloped as public housing, but the Commission’s mandate also included the preparation of sites in former ‘slum’ areas for redevelopment by the private sector.
From the 1950s through to the 1970s, the Housing Commission demolished about 16 hectares of nineteenth century housing. Approximately 6 hectares of this was sold to private developers for the construction of flats (Crow 1990). Estates like Hotham Gardens in North Melbourne and City Edge in South Melbourne are the legacy of this policy.
Hotham Gardens (1959–1960) was the first estate of this type. Designed by a co-op of architects, including John Mockridge, and landscape architect Beryl Mann, it was an experiment in a different way of developing and owning apartments, and also included innovations in landscape design integration.
City Edge (1971–1974) by Daryl Jackson and Evan Walker is one of the later slum reclamation projects and is another important, pioneering medium density development.
While not themselves providing social housing, both projects were made possible by government intervention in the housing market – through both subsidy and planning – and provided architects with opportunities not otherwise available.
Urban infill
Growing appreciation of built heritage in the 1970s signalled the decline of the slum clearance program and a move in the early 1980s towards heritage precinct renewal through spot purchase and restoration of terrace houses, alongside new medium density urban infill development. In 1982, the newly elected Cain government’s Ministry of Housing brought in John Devenish, who had run the internationally acclaimed Woolloomooloo Redevelopment Project for the Housing Commission of NSW, to lead this new program.
Many new and emerging architectural practices at the time, like Williams Boag, Gregory Burgess, Edmond & Corrigan, Norman Day, Peter Elliott, Denton Corker Marshall, and Ashton Raggatt McDougall (to name a few) won commissions for social housing projects that contrasted strongly with the former era programmatically and formally, and alongside the growth of social housing in the suburbs too, played a significant role in the provision of new public housing.
Decline,
renewal, and the growth of
community housing
From the 1990s, significant shifts in federal policy – towards demand-side subsidies and increased targeting of allocations to those in greatest need –reduced both funding for new public housing supply and rental incomes for state housing agencies. In the ten years prior to the GFC, public housing funding was effectively cut by 30% (Lennon 2008). Meanwhile, existing stock was ageing and in need of refurbishment or renewal, requiring significant capital investment. In Victoria, which always has had the smallest proportion of social housing in Australia, this fell to about 3% of all housing.
During this period of overall stock decline, state agencies have sought to fund renewal projects by allowing private development to help release capital value from land assets (Nygaard et al. 2021). In a series of estate renewal projects throughout the twenty-first century to date, Victoria has become progressively more effective at achieving public returns in the form of more and higher quality public housing outcomes, notwithstanding the very real disruption to tenants’ lives.
Another feature of this period has been the modest growth of the community housing sector. Here, architectural commissions from housing associations and other community housing providers have achieved some of the best apartment and medium density developments in Melbourne and have been a site for design and planning innovation (Murray et al. 2013).
Social housing, by the very nature of its provision, allows for design-led higher density development, greater architectural input into housing design, and innovation in urban design, in a way that housing supplied by the market typically does not. Social housing is not constrained by the forms and processes of property subdivision that are intrinsic to market housing development and supply.
There is a significant role for design (architecture) in social housing that otherwise only pertains at the top end of market housing supply, but which is consistent with infrastructure. Consequently, social housing has played an important role in defining the culture of the built environment that is disproportionate to the scale of its provision. New provision is an opportunity to test and demonstrate ideas and achieve planning objectives that cannot be achieved as easily through regulation of the market alone.
Social housing providers, especially governments, have a responsibility to innovate and lead the market through demonstration. This can help to build market
familiarisation with different housing types, or forms, and builds industry workforce capability in delivering to higher standards and using new construction methods.
Notes
Burke, T., Nygaard, C. and Ralston, L. (2020) Australianhomeownership:past reflections, future directions, AHURI Final Report No. 328, Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute Limited, Melbourne, https://www.ahuri.edu.au/ research/final-reports/328, doi:10.18408/ahuri-5119801.
Crow, R. (1990) ThirtiethanniversaryofHothamGardensBlockE, unpublished paper.
Housing Commission of Victoria (1951) TwelfthAnnualReportoftheHousing Commission of Victoria, 1949-1950, Victorian Government, Melbourne. p.9
Howe, R. (1988) Newhousesforold:fiftyyearsofpublichousinginVictoria, 1938–1988, Ministry of Housing and Construction, Melbourne.
Lennon, M. (2008) AperspectivefromAustralia, in Cowans, J. and Maclennan, D. (eds.) Visions for social housing: international perspectives, The Smith Institute, London, pp 23, 19-28.
Murray, S., Bertram, N., Khor, L., Rowe, D., Meyer, B., Newton, P., Glackin, S., Alves, T. and McGauran, R. (2013) DesigninnovationsdeliveredundertheNation BuildingEconomicStimulusPlan—SocialHousingInitiative, AHURI Positioning Paper No. 155, Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute Limited, Melbourne, https://www.ahuri.edu.au/research/position-papers/155.
Nygaard, C., Pinnegar, S., Taylor, L., Levin, I. and Maguire, R. (2021) Evaluation and learninginpublichousingurbanrenewal, AHURI Final Report No. 358, Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute Limited, Melbourne, https://www.ahuri. edu.au/research/final-reports/358, doi:10.18408/ahuri51226.
Dr Tom Alves is head of development at the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI), where he runs AHURI’s Professional Services and is developing the National Cities Research Program. Tom has held positions at The University of Melbourne, RMIT University, and the Department of Premier and Cabinet, where he was acting director of the Victorian Design Review Panel. Tom previously worked at the Office of the Victorian Government Architect and led the development of Victoria’s Better Apartment Design Standards. He was lead author of the housing chapter for Plan Melbourne.
Edited by: Emma Baker and Lyrian Daniel
The impact of COVID on low-income renting households
The COVID-19 pandemic has provided a stark reminder of how tenants in the private rental sector often face insecure housing, high rents and poor-quality dwellings – things that certainly existed before COVID-19, but which were made more apparent with restrictions on movement and economic uncertainty brought on by the pandemic.
More than a quarter of all Australian households – some 2.1 million households – rent in the private rental market, which grew by 17% in the five years 2011–2016, more than twice the rate of growth of all households. For very low-income households (those in the bottom fifth of Australia’s income distribution) AHURI research published in 2020 (based on the 2016 Census) revealed there was a shortage of 305,000 affordable and available dwellings for rent across Australia. Indeed, 80% of very low-income private renter households were paying unaffordable rents, with the proportion even greater in metropolitan areas at 89%. In Melbourne in 2016 there was a shortage of around 62,800 affordable and available rental dwellings (a worsening from the 51,800 rental properties required in 2011).
AHURI has recently published findings from the Australian Rental Housing Conditions Dataset (ARHCD), a survey of 15,000 renters conducted during July and August 2020. The ARHCD provides a rich understanding of the housing conditions in Australia’s private rental markets and establishes a baseline to monitor rental housing conditions.
The survey presents clear evidence of increased stress and anxiety across Australia’s renting population, with almost half of all households surveyed reporting experiencing stress and anxiety as a result of COVID-19. When asked about the ways in which their living situation had been affected, about a third of tenants said they struggled to make ends meet or had skipped meals.
The broader financial hardship faced by many of the respondents was a strong theme in the responses: for example, the inability to save, cancellation of services and memberships, and reliance on charitable services.
Just over 60% of households experienced some change to their employment or income circumstances, such as reduced working hours, retrenchment, temporary lay-off, and reduced income. Roughly one in eight renters had accessed their superannuation in order to meet their living costs, and a third of renters had accessed their savings in order to make ends meet during the pandemic.
Around one in twenty (just over 5%) of tenants had received an eviction notice since the start of the pandemic, with just over half of these tenants actually being evicted. There were much higher proportions (6 to7%) of renters issued with eviction notices in Western Australia, New South Wales and Victoria, compared with roughly 3 to 4% in South Australia, Queensland and Tasmania.
One in three respondents had requested, or were planning to request, a rent reduction or deferral. Of those who had requested a rent change, 42% were granted a rent reduction, 17% entered into a rent deferral arrangement, but 30% had their request declined and 6% were still waiting to hear back.
Some tenants indicated that they hadn’t requested a rent deferral because they knew they would be refused, with example responses being “Got an email from them saying to not even bother and to remind us that if we fell behind, we would be breached”, “Real estate sent out letter at beginning of COVID-19 saying that late payment of rent and decreases will not be tolerated”, and “Scared to give them any reason to not renew our lease”.
Working from home during the pandemic was an issue for a number of tenants, with about one in eight reporting that their housing was not adequate for this purpose. When responses were graded by income, more than a third of low-income households (earning
Renters have been particularly vulnerable to the economic effects of the COVID
shutdown
less than $31,000 per year) reported that their housing was inadequate. The poor thermal quality of rental dwellings is also reflected in the fact that 29% of very low-income households (and 15% of higher income households) rated their rented home as being very cold.
When renters were asked about their future (in 2020) and whether they anticipated requiring additional government support in the next 12 months, approximately a third expected they would require further support, a further 30% were uncertain, and the remaining 40% did not expect to require further support. In addition, people who anticipated that they would need financial assistance in the next 12 months were almost six times more likely than other renters to report that their mental health had significantly declined as a result of COVID-19.
AHURI research serves to underpin policy development in Australia. Research highlights the importance of government-provided safety nets in Australia – though it also reveals significant cracks within the private rental sector from which many households are not able to rebound. Renters have been particularly vulnerable to the economic effects of the COVID shutdown, being generally less attached to the labour market than homeowners; having slightly lower incomes; and with a higher rate of employment in the industries most affected by the lockdown measures.
While policy responses may, in the short term, focus on protective mechanisms like eviction moratoriums during COVID, the systemic nature of the challenges faced by residents within the rental sector suggests that long-term recovery will be effectively realised through system-wide policy shifts.
Edited by Emma Baker and Lyrian Daniel
for the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI). Publishing over 20 peer-reviewed reports each year through a national network of university research partners, AHURI seeks to ensure that Australian housing and urban policy is informed by credible and independent evidence. AHURI provides professional services to government and industry stakeholders and offers a broad program of national events.
Social housing architecture
Facilitated by: Catherine Ranger
In considering the importance of architectural aesthetics in the design of social housing, it has been argued that architects have found more license to innovate in a context not bound by conventional market constraints, and that this often manifests itself most evidently in the appearance of the built outcome. Should social housing seek to stand out, or to fit in?
In drawing a cross-section of contemporary social housing projects in Melbourne and regional Victoria, I suggest that the answer is neither. These
projects stand out not because of their function, but because of their integrity. Their aesthetics are secondary to a robust, nuanced, contextualised design process. Naturally, they bring with them the flair of the many hands that crafted them, but this is secondary to concerns of sustainability, wellbeing and humanity. Some uniqueness in appearance is symbolic of a greater value, and an opportunity to reflect on the importance of excellence in housing design across the whole of the built environment.
Dandenong and Belmont Projects | Kennedy
Nolan | Country of Traditional Owners: Wadawurrung and Bunurong Country
A robust and economical building for Housing Choices Australia, these apartments deliver the benefits of good housing in a building which seeks to avoid the dispiriting and stigmatising visual cues of institutional architecture. The abstract compositions of the facades lend a civic presence not associated with an apartment block.
Playful super-graphic shapes of recessed balconies with deep shadow present a handsome exterior and imbue the building with personality. Despite being inexpensive to build, the building looks and feels different. It manages high standards of accessibility, amenity and sustainability but importantly is a place to live happily.
The interiors of the public and private areas aspire to make spaces durable and simple to maintain but to also provide residents a sense of dignity and domestic pride. Tough-wearing material choices are tempered by brick, timber and carefully curated tiled surfaces, colour is subtle and rich and concentrated for maximum effect.
In Geelong, these 29 one-bedroom dwellings are for predominantly ageing residents. Highenvironmental performance ensures comfort and low operational costs. The simple dwellings privilege connection to garden, Simon Ellis Landscapes provide residents with gardening options both passive and active – an approach generated from meeting and listening to future residents.
Photo by Derek Swalwell
St Albans Housing | NMBW Architecture
Studio in collaboration with Monash Urban Lab | Country of Traditional Owners: Woi
Wurrung Country
This project for Housing Choices Australia is a reinterpretation of the 6-pack flats built on quarteracre sites, albeit with a higher level of accessibility, landscape amenity and sustainable infrastructure. The building volume is generated by large 4-metre side setbacks providing deep root zones for canopy trees to grow, and considerations of view, shade and aspect for each apartment. Internally a loadbearing structure of core-filled blockwork provides the finished surface, with concrete floors providing a continuous step-free accessible plane. The central stair hall / lift lobby is naturally ventilated, with a generosity of space and view.
Externally, the mass of blocks and concrete is wrapped in a light, insulated skin of standard corrugated Zincalume. This neutral cladding reflects the sky (and future tree canopies) but is also carefully detailed to conceal the usual downpipes and paraphernalia of affordable construction. Each apartment has a generous external terrace with simple galvanized railings and Modwood decking flush with the internal concrete and built in planters for residents to use. Terraces are oriented to provide both refuge and prospect – allowing internal warmth and life to spill out and interact with the street. Any apartment within the complex can be used for fully accessible specialist disability accommodation, ageing in place, or just family living.
Photo by Peter Bennetts
WAYSS Youth Transition Hub | Bent Architecture | Country of Traditional Owners: Woi Wurrung Country
WAYSS for the Department of Health and Human Services provides homes and administrative support to vulnerable young people on the brink of homelessness. As social housing residents are typically removed from the design process, architects are well placed to advocate for their needs. These needs are more than just shelter. They include living in a home that is warm, safe and welcoming. A home that is familiar with respect to scale, form and materiality; that engages positively with its context and is not necessarily different from the rest. A home that is designed along passive solar principles, ensuring that it is comfortable to live in and affordable to run. A home that is surrounded by both private and communal open space that is light filled and wellappointed, providing a connection to nature and community, both on and beyond the site. These needs are universal.
Each dwelling at WAYSS has its own sense of address: a front garden, a gable roof and a built-in seat covered by a deep eave, transforming the entry into an open verandah; a place to perch outdoors within the protective footprint of one’s own home.
With all buildings focused around a central open space, the hub supports a sense of protection and community, encouraging residents to engage with one another while mediating their relationship with the broader neighbourhood.
Dwellings recognise the benefits that natural light, good ventilation and various degrees of privacy can have on personal wellbeing. Each home is designed in an L-shape to maximise the amount of northern light beaming in, creating light-filled living spaces and sunny private courtyards for every resident. Common areas are designed to create a sense of community and give the kids the opportunity to bond with each other while harvesting some leafy greens, enjoying a group barbecue, or sweating it out over a game of basketball.
Below: Photos by Tatjana Plitt
Living Carlton | Jackson Clements Burrows Architects | Country of Traditional Owners: Woi Wurrung Country
Master planned and sustainable, Living Carlton integrates social and private housing, public parks, community garden and pedestrian and bicycle pathways. The Living Carlton consortium led by Citta Property Group and Frasers Property has largely completed the development of three inner-city sites in Carlton covering 7.5 hectares with the project being undertaken in nine stages. As an architect within the consortium, Jackson Clements Burrows Architects (JCB) designed three projects: ALLURE at Lume in Stage 2, Apt in Stage 6, and Found in Stage 7.
JCB’s ALLURE comprises 50 social housing apartments and 42 private residences. Two six-storey buildings separate public and private housing yet are designed to be indistinguishable from each other. The buildings form part of a wider masterplan with the ground plane activated and connected through pathways and landscaping.
The facade is a mixture of natural and dark coloured precast concrete panels textured with circular recesses to create an abstract pattern derived from the ornate cast-iron balustrading common to the area, historically a cost-effective solution. JCB identified a strong connection to the Living Carlton development, whereby a cost-effective solution is animated by a simple inlay pattern with its own decorative reading.
Once in place, JCB further manipulated the pattern by reversing its background from black on white to white on black. This idea was extended throughout the materials of the building including the black steel balustrading and entry gates to provide a consistent overarching pattern. The patternmaking gesture acts as a unifying overlay and further blurs the distinction between the private and public housing typologies.
Photo by Jonathan Tamensky
Noble Park North Community Housing and Coburg AHV Townhouses | Schored Projects | Country of Traditional Owners: Bunurong and Woi Wurrung Country
Schored Projects have been designing and delivering social and community housing projects for a decade. They’ve become skillful in making these projects with small construction budgets deliver great amenities for residents and the wider neighbourhood.
The studio's design philosophy is to maximise positive design outcomes that cost little to no extra money. Here are their top two:
Sunshine – with thoughtful design analysis and considered site and dwelling planning, northern light can deeply penetrate internal and external living spaces during winter months and be controlled on hot summer days.
Borrowed landscape – smaller construction budgets sometimes result in a smaller dwelling area; however, internal space can be expanded by drawing the landscape inside. Deliberately designing fenestrations and private open spaces with views to borrowed neighbouring landscapes, including mature trees, parklands and distant hills, expands the space beyond its footprint.
Above: Photo by Anka Boychev
Below: Photo by Anthony McKee
90 Brunswick Street and Hawke & King | Six Degrees Architects | Country of Traditional Owners: Woi Wurrung Country
Housing should not be seen as private versus social, home versus service. Housing by definition, is the homes of those in our cities and towns. Certainly, the degree of ownership, cost and access, exists across a spectrum that includes public, social, community, affordable, key worker, market rental and private. But in all cases designers of housing should remember that these will be peoples’ homes.
In their work for the Department of Health and Human Services, now Homes Victoria, Six Degrees' approach was to try to provide warmth and familiarity in the materials, and where robustness is demanded, to be careful that this doesn’t compromise this approach. In the foyer of 90 Brunswick Street, where the resident community comes from numerous immigrant groups, the palette included bluestone, travertine, timber and stainless steel and the expression is that of a high-end residential apartment.
The fostering of community is another key aspect of multi-residential housing. At Hawke & King, key worker affordable housing is blended in with private apartments. Open walkways and shared communal spaces help foster integration of the whole community that lives there.
Below: Hawke & King by Six Degrees Architects. Photo by Greg Elms.
Rushall Crescent and Richmond Housing | Williams Boag Architects | Country of Traditional Owners: Woi Wurrung Country
The primary intention underpinning the design of the independent and assisted living units at the Rushall Crescent site was to nestle new accommodation within the unique architectural and planning setting of this state-registered historic place. Pragmatic in its resolution to provide the briefed amenity, the project also sought redefinition of the western street frontage using a repetitive architectural language independent of the various historic and at times romantic forms of the existing collection of buildings. Careful and subtle details in the new facility build on the visual richness of the existing and at times eccentric ambience to create and link an alternate mode of living among the collection of traditional but generally individual dwellings.
The central space of the Richmond housing development at the east end of Elizabeth Street was designed as the heart of the 207-unit development, providing a focus for connection with community and the attendant sharing of light and aspect. In contrast to the large standalone towers of the Richmond housing estate opposite, this development offers an environment where proximity to others hopefully enriches the day-to-day reality of living in a highdensity development while maintaining discrete distance and privacy. Views within the circulation zones both to the interior and to the outside beyond are animated by sunlight and provide an expanded context for residents.
Importantly, the coloured soffits to projecting balconies extend the residents ability to read the scale of their building and provide cues for identity.
Leith Park and Rushall Park | MGS Architects | Country of Traditional Owners: Woi Wurrung Country
Leith Park, one of the 2021 award winners in the Australian Institute of Architects Victorian Architecture Awards, and Rushall Park, a commendation in the same category, have many things in common: same client, same housing typology and beautifully landscaped surrounds. They also share the same architect and in fact almost an identical team as a number of MGS studio members were involved in the development of both projects. One thing the two projects definitely don’t share is the physical context, apart from the fact they are both in metropolitan Melbourne. The Rushall Park development is situated in an inner-city location with an outstanding heritage context while Leith Park is in a leafy outer suburb making the architectural response markedly different. Richly contextual, one historic, the other semi-rural, Rushall Park is sited backing onto a railway platform where Leith Park is dramatically undulating and contoured. Principally, each case would signify home to the individual and community from their own cultural and social context. Form, materiality and colour follow from the decision to say something specific in these projects that can be shared and understood by everyone.
Catherine Ranger RAIA is an associate director at MGS Architects where she leads the practice's design management. Her experience includes educational, institutional and social housing projects.
Above: Leith Park by MGS Architects. Photo by Jake Hartmann.
Top Left: Old Colonists, Rushall Park by Williams Boag Architects.
Photo by Andrew Latreille.
Bottom Left: Richmond Housing Estate by Williams Boag Architects.
Photo by Tony Miller.
Above: Ozanam House by MGS Architects
Photo by: Andrew Latreille
Ozanam House
Joshua Darvill, coordination, engagement and participation manager at Ozanam House provides a snapshot of the services provided, long-term sustainable outcomes and reassessing the needs of the community.
Interview by Eli Giannini
Photography by Trevor Mein & Andrew Latreille
Q: Tell us briefly how Ozanam House works. How does the provision of services interact with the provision of housing? Or is housing a separate issue managed independently?
They say the cure to homelessness is affordable housing, and this is particularly true in metropolitan Melbourne where the demand for housing far, far outstrips the supply. Ozanam House exists to support people who are at a crisis point in their lives because they have been economically disadvantaged from the provision of housing and have exhausted all their social and community connections. Hence Ozanam House is here to provide the interim support to address the issues and barriers that have prevented them from obtaining sustainable long-term accommodation. To catch people when they are at that real crisis point in their lives and give them safe and secure accommodation. By giving them support from the moment people arrive our primary goal is to help people leave and never come back because those issues no longer affect them.
Q: Are there statistics which you can point us to that give us the typical duration of that pointy end you’ve mentioned?
The average resident stays at Ozanam House for 103 days. However, the question about duration is difficult to answer because the clients are so
diverse. We support people who are entrenched in homelessness or come from an experience of longterm rough sleeping and marginal housing, and others who are first time homeless (through COVID, family violence, mental health or other factors) and have never had these experiences before. It is a very broad population which is becoming broader. For example, older females are an emerging cohort – many typically have not been the breadwinners for their families and are finding themselves homeless towards the latter part of their lives. We have had to adapt our practice and response accordingly.
Q: How does the walk-in service work in reality? How does it work practically?
There are several ways in which people enter the system. The practical pathways into accommodation support are generally through the Homelessness and Housing Access Points which are funded by the Victorian Government and run by not-for-profit agencies like VincentCare. Access points service local government areas, and we have an intake worker who collaborates with them to identify people in need, so that as soon as there is a vacancy we can prioritise depending on individual need and vulnerability. Typically, someone will go to an access point and undertake an assessment, however, Ozanam House also has a big intake directly from mental health in-
Ozanam House
patients units, police, hospital emergency departments and others in the community whom we come across that are not readily able to engage with homelessness services.
Q: Can you give us a snapshot of a day in the life of Ozanam House. What happens during the day or night?
We had to modify our services a lot during COVID. Pre-COVID, the Homelessness Resource Centre (HRC) was an open-access service where we opened our doors at 7.30am and offered our clients coffee, meals, social and recreational activities, health and treatment services and other supports. Through the pandemic, we have had to adjust to operate a more restricted, COVID-safe service – we offer meals and referral services through a window (the cafe/social enterprise courtyard on Flemington Road). There will be a point in the next couple of months when we are planning to reopen the HRC – as soon as we can safely do so.
Ozanam House is staffed 24/7; however, the majority arrive at about 7.30am. Staff do a handover, and the intake workers will then look at the vacancies for the day. We offer three meals to all our residents: breakfast, lunch and dinner. We have a commercial kitchen, staffed by a catering manager and cooks. We have two broad cohorts of staff on site: engagement workers, who manage the operational side of things, such as making sure people pay their service fees, managing critical incidents and running planned activities. We also have the support workers who manage the one-on-one case management with our residents – collaborating on case plans and working to identify the support our residents need to exit into longer-term sustainable outcomes.
Q: So, what is critical? If other housing providers want to adopt your model but are unable to provide the range of services available, what are the essentials/ fundamentals that are needed?
Fundamentally, we are a crisis accommodation service; however, the support component comes first. We are a program that offers support with accommodation attached. In other words, any viable model of crisis accommodation, which is geared towards achieving long-term sustainable outcomes, puts support front and centre and uses that as the foundation for the accommodation. We have been purposeful in ensuring the support component drives
the physical environment as well as the broader components of residential accommodation.
Q: So, for those whose issue is mainly affordable housing how much support is still required?
In the absence of affordable housing for people on lower incomes, which is really the status quo in Victoria, the support we provide is about maximising people’s earning capacity. For that cohort, the issue is strictly that they cannot afford housing, so we will help them find something through the homelessness service system that is affordable such as social or community housing, or support them to increase their income so they can afford housing in the private rental market.
Q: What lessons and potential positives have come out of periods of lockdown?
That’s a very good question! At the end of last year, we commented a lot on strength when we were reflecting on 2020. We highlighted the resilience of the clients we work with and the staff. If anything, COVID demonstrated that as a service and as a facility we are very capable at working reactively when the context changes.
The other big lesson for us in 2020 was the importance of making sure that in addition to support and accommodation, that we also offer people meaningful social and community programs that they actually want to participate in. Client-led ways for our residents to use their time. Part of our model revolves around participation. This is just as much about clients giving back as us offering activities and meaningful social and community programs that are driven by the client.
Therefore, 2020 was often about speaking with our residents and saying that we’ve all got a curfew, we only have four reasons to leave our homes, and there’s not a lot to do. So how can we make this time together worthwhile for you?
Q: So, was the lesson then about stepping back and reassessing what was essential?
Yes, that is a good summary. What are the real fundamentals and needs? How can we make Ozanam House more than the place that people come to when they have no other option, where typically, we are catching someone at their worst, most chaotic, anxiety-inducing or turbulent period of their life?
Left: Photo by Andrew Latreille
How do we make it a space that is also conducive to growth, betterment, and how do we make our service as positive an experience as we can?
Q: Have you received feedback from that time, or is this still to come?
We have actually done some work on that and periodically receive feedback. Recently we have had some really positive feedback, with 70% of residents agreeing or very strongly agreeing that they were very well looked after throughout the pandemic, that their experience was of a high standard, and the servicedelivery outstanding. So, the majority were very satisfied.
Q: Did they talk specifically about the sorts of activities that they found more helpful?
The information we have is quite general but what they found was that they were able to maintain a general semblance of structure and normality through the lockdown period.
Q: Can you please go through the recovery model which is at the essence of the services you provide? The notion that housing and recovery are strongly linked.
VincentCare’s overriding practice framework is called the Homelessness Recovery Model, which speaks to the fact that people typically come to Ozanam House in a state of crisis. During that pre-
recovery period, we spoke with our residents regularly about their goals. Through our involvement and engagement with the person, we seek to assist their recovery by surrounding them with the support they identify as needing. It is a very client-led process.
Through this period, we make sure that people are aware of what they are entitled to, and advocate for them when they are not getting it. Through a recovery-based intervention, we seek to lead people into a period of growth where they are sustained with housing and their crisis is stabilised so that when our support is finished they are then able to lead an autonomous, independent life in their community of choice.
Q: There was a lot of discussion about the provision of meals during the briefing stage of the project. Are meals also distributed to the wider community experiencing homelessness?
Currently the kitchen is used for cooking meals for Ozanam House residents and Homelessness Resource Centre clients. However, we definitely recognise the huge potential in this space.
Q: More specifically about the building now, can you tell us what works well and what doesn’t work? How could the design be improved?
In terms of things that work well, it’s the vast majority of things. The standard of amenity is exceptional – not just for crisis accommodation, but in general. It’s a well thought out building. Fixtures and finish are well above the standard. Aesthetically it is above and beyond any others of its kind, I think, what really impresses people from the start, the combination and the fact that Ozanam House is so far removed from people’s expectation of what crisis accommodation is.
It's a very dynamic space as well so it's constructed in a way that allows us to change the activity in the space. For example, one space is used as a meal service space and then last week, we converted the same area into a marketplace. Similarly, the space can be used for presentations, or you know I think it's got the latitude to be what it needs to be to deliver the services that we provide. The other thing is that the staff areas are well thought out and I imagine that I will never work in a space as good as this!
It is difficult to say what doesn’t work but it is in the type of work we do that we are presented with challenges, so no space is going to work 100% of the time for 100% of the people. There are little things that we say like: “we might want a CCTV camera here or there” but nothing major. We have never said “I wish this was different”.
Photo by Trevor Mein
Ozanam House
Homelessness and social housing
by Laura Held
Arron Wood, former Deputy Lord Mayor of the City of Melbourne, on how architecture and good urban design can have a positive impact on the supply of social and affordable housing.
Interview
Q.What is the best way forward for councils and governments to increase social housing in Melbourne and its suburbs?
The simple answer is to build more social and affordable housing. The 2016 census estimates 116,000 Australians were homeless. The Victorian Government has committed to building 12,000 new social housing units and that’s a really good start but the Council to Homeless Persons and provider Launch Housing have called for 10,000 units a year for the next ten years to really solve homelessness. All levels of government need to work in partnership with the private sector. Mandatory affordable housing targets are required for any new development and we must stop seeing the provision of housing as a cost only proposition. For every dollar spent, housing someone returns nearly triple the amount in community benefit through less interactions with the justice system, health system and allowing people experiencing homelessness to become part of society again.
Q.According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics there are approximately 25,000 people who are currently homeless within Melbourne. What services are required in addition to social housing to make positive changes?
It is critical that the appropriate wrap-around services are funded to ensure the ‘stickability’ of getting someone into housing. Someone experiencing homelessness may have complex issues that could relate to family violence, childhood trauma and abuse, drug and alcohol addiction, mental health conditions and chronic health issues. It really needs to be a holistic approach to helping a person mend themselves and it might take weeks, months, years and in some cases a person may require life-long support, and that is ok. The other important focus needs to be on those who are at risk of homelessness. Very often our attention turns to people sleeping rough, but this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to homelessness. This takes a very joined-up approach to issues like job insecurity, family violence, mental and physical health support and drug and alcohol addiction. I’m very proud that the organisation I now work for, the Kangan Institute, has a youth foyer where 40 young people who’ve experienced homelessness or are at risk of homelessness live on campus for two years while gaining a TAFE education. This initiative in partnership with the Brotherhood of St Laurence and Launch Housing can really break generational homelessness. I hope to see this model spread across TAFEs nationally.
Q.Have other Australian states or other countries been successful in providing housing models that could assist Melbourne in its planning of social housing?
I think Melbourne has learned a lot in the last four or five years. There are now a host of support services for people experiencing homelessness and it appears there’s a renewed appetite for investment in social and affordable housing. There has been a lot of exchange from cities across the world because sadly this isn’t unique to Melbourne. The Housing First model is being pursued by many cities around the world with a degree of success. Importantly though, it must also be relationship first. Each person must be seen as a person and not a number. This is vital to ensure the stickability of housing outcomes. I think the Don Dunstan Foundation approach to homelessness in Adelaide is definitely worth adopting. The Adelaide Zero Project is about an end to functional homelessness and I think it is the governance model that we could really learn from. Fundamental to success is all homelessness agencies, police, all levels of government, the private sector and community working together. Just as important is the agreement and understanding that homelessness is solvable. We can’t simply accept homelessness as the by-product of modern-day cities and towns.
Q.Do you feel that social housing and housing affordability are best addressed in unison with local councils, state government and federal government? Absolutely 100%. This huge structural, economic and social issue of homelessness can’t be solved by any one level of government alone. The best results in tackling homelessness are where all levels of government, homelessness agencies, police, community and the private sector come together behind a common vision and framework to end homelessness.
Q.You recently took part in a documentary on homelessness. What did you learn from this experience?
What I learned was that I didn’t really know anything about homelessness prior to the SBS series. In my role as Deputy Lord Mayor of Melbourne I knew what the drivers of homelessness were, the statistics, how many rough sleepers we had and what programs we had in place to support people experiencing homelessness. I thought I knew a lot. Within hours of being dropped off at night in the middle of Sydney with no money, phone, contact with family and no
Ultimately we need more social housing, but we must also help to re-build people.
" "
place to sleep for ten nights the impacts began. I was confused, scared, and the city took on a completely different feel. After a few days the lack of sleep, proper food and lack of purpose made me feel like I’d aged. I can only imagine what those impacts would mean for someone who was truly homeless. The mental and physical impacts were so pronounced that any idea that someone experiencing homelessness should just get a job is so far off the mark. They are just coping, surviving. However, the greatest impact for me was when I stayed a few nights in a park with Phil who was living out of his car. The emotional connection I had with him nearly broke me. My time with Phil hammered home the fact that he wasn’t just a number or a statistic. They aren’t them, they’re us and nobody deserves to be on the street. The other big learning was the many forms of homelessness. Whether that’s sleeping out of a car, in crisis accommodation, couch surfing or a boarding house. There’s so much homelessness we don’t see.
Q. During COVID-19 hotel accommodation had been provided for rough sleepers. Would it be possible to build upon this going forward, post-COVID?
I think the program to move rough sleepers into hotels was initially really successful. It wasn’t perfect and I think more wrap-around services are required to improve the model, but it was a step to show what is possible. The difficult part is what happens now and sadly some of those housed during the first COVID lockdown are back on the streets. We can’t let this
opportunity presented by COVID slip away and I’m holding out a lot of hope for Victoria’s Big Housing Build program, but there must be a relationship-first approach where a case management approach is taken. Ultimately, we need more social housing, but we must also help to re-build people. Mental health and addiction support, education, employment and support networks aren’t quick fixes, but if we get it right, they can mean real, long-term, generational change. I think hotels for homeless can be a stopgap, but it isn’t a long-term solution.
Q. What is your view on climate change in relation to homelessness and providing affordable housing in a sustainable way?
Ensuring social and affordable housing is the most sustainable. It can be really important. The last thing we want to do is get a roof over someone’s head that then costs them dearly in heating and cooling costs. A home that’s good for the environment is good for the hip pocket for those who can least afford high on-going costs and well-designed homes are healthier for people. Many studies are now showing how sustainable homes have better air quality and can have a big impact on mental health. I saw first-hand the impacts of the COVID-19 lockdown of the public housing towers in Flemington and Kensington when I volunteered packing food at the Mosque. We can and should do better. A beautiful, sustainable place that keeps the great sense of community I witnessed, is about respect in the end.
Arron Wood AM was elected in 2012 as a councillor to the City of Melbourne and as the Deputy Lord Mayor of Melbourne in 2016. From 2014 to 2017 he was a board member for Sustainability Victoria and in 2017 Chairman of the World Ecocity Summit Advisory Board. Arron is currently the Chief Industry Engagement and Education Delivery Officer for Bendigo Kangan Institute.
Laura Held FRAIA is the founder of Studio OneOne, a multidisciplinary practice that consults in awards, communications and project management, and an Architect Victoria editorial committee member.
Process over product
Social housing addresses a range of needs beyond the requirement for shelter, giving residents a sense of community, autonomy, security, and belonging. The right to a secure place to live has been recognised by the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights among other international instruments and is fundamental to physical and mental health and quality of life (United Nations, 1976 and 2005).
Words by: Camilla Burke, Faith Freeman and Olivia Peel.
Writing this article as non-Indigenous people, we recognise the infancy of our knowledge of First Nations being and culture. We acknowledge that our work draws on extensive First Nations’ knowledge and write from our experience working on this project. We are not experts in this field and continue to learn as part of a wider team working towards a common goal, the right to housing for all.
Breathe's Reservoir project comprises 14 oneand two-bedroom apartments that are to be built to support Aboriginal Housing Victoria (AHV)’s vision of ensuring “Aboriginal Victorians secure appropriate, affordable housing as a pathway to better lives and stronger communities” (AHV, 2020). The Aboriginal Community-led organisation supporting self-determination and managing over 1500 rental properties for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people living in Victoria has been our guide throughout this process, providing clear direction on culturally appropriate design.
Inadequate access to affordable and appropriate housing for First Nations Peoples is a complex and multi-faceted issue rooted in dispossession and dislocation, and one that requires action beyond architectural intervention alone. First Nations Peoples are disproportionately impacted by: housing
market failure; family violence and breakdown; institutionalisation; poverty of household material resources; and a lack of culturally appropriate mainstream housing services. The strength and resilience of First Nations Peoples to overcome such adversity is underscored by AHV’s determination:
“Our housing outcomes are the result of generations of exclusion and dispossession, and it will take concerted effort, partnership and investment over at least a generation to rebuild the platform of secure housing for our people. The change we need will not be built in a single budget cycle” (AHV, 2021).
According to Mana-nawoorn-tyeenmaar-takoort (Victoria’s Aboriginal Community-led housing policy framework), the number of First Nations Peoples in Victoria assessed by homelessness services is growing faster than anywhere else in Australia. Around half of those accessing homelessness services are under 25: a younger resident group with different housing needs, feeding AHV’s desire to explore multi-residential options. With a projected need of 5,085 additional social housing units for Aboriginal families by 2036, AHV recognised the need to significantly increase the amount of housing stock available and engaged Breathe to design their first multi-residential social housing project.
Above: Aboriginal Housing, Reservoir | Breathe.
The brief from AHV challenges the tradition of exclusively reserving large single dwellings to meet housing needs, recognising its limitations in an urban context. The brief instead poses an experiment in offering a variety of housing stock to the large First Nations population in Reservoir. On a site that connects its residents to good amenity through proximity to public transport, job opportunities and community services. In particular, the Aboriginal Community Services precinct on Bell Street and wider connection to community.
The project has been approached with rigour to deliver a high-quality building embedded with sustainable design principles and cultural sensitivity. High standards maintained by the project team, including all consultants, enabled us to work with agility to take this project from concept design, through planning to tender in an 11-month period. The City of Darebin’s support of the project through the planning approval process was integral to this outcome and reinforces the importance of government prioritising projects like this to address issues of homelessness.
AHV understands their tenants’ needs far more than we do. It was therefore essential for us to maintain a conscious act of listening and learning before acting. It was critical to check our biases and question design moves, such as the material reductionism and exposed services common to Breathe projects that AHV advised could be triggering for some clients with negative institutional experiences or simply be perceived as unfinished or cheap.
This departure from our typically raw material palette speaks to the importance of process and of listening more generally in social housing projects and projects relating to First Nations Peoples. Concealed services, cork flooring and warm joinery make up the interior finishes, creating a sustainable, natural, and trauma-informed space that is flexible enough for residents to appropriate and make their own. Integrating trauma-informed care into design processes and outcomes, linking the built environment, identity and psychological wellbeing to create non-triggering spaces that nurture wellbeing.
Budgetary constraints and maintenance concerns are another reality for social housing. Though challenging, these constraints posed an opportunity for creativity to design homes that don’t compromise quality or Breathe’s sustainability targets, while also remaining affordable and durable. Developing partnerships with generous suppliers was integral to this, particularly through a donation of carbon neutral bricks donated by Brickworks. The slender, locally made bricks enabled a high-quality masonry construction typically out of reach on low-cost projects. The synergy between Breathe’s sustainability approach, use of locally made products, and First Nations concepts of connection to Country was crucial to the project: connection to Country being one of seven of AHV’s guiding design principles (AHV and Greenaway Architects, 2016). Questioning the status quo on typical materials, including vinyl flooring (prevalent in social housing projects), allowed us to replace this with natural cork flooring tiles. Replacing a widely used material made from toxic chemicals (that off-gas into apartments) with a purely natural product.
The integration of a First Nations’ work into the built fabric marks a shift from designing for communities to designing with them. " "
One of the most exciting parts of the project is the collaboration with First Nations artist Tahnee Edwards – a Yorta Yorta and Taungurung woman, designer, and founder of Gammin threads – whose artwork will enliven the common spaces. After consultation and listening, we designed the common spaces raw and real; a blank canvas for Tahnee to create beautiful and culturally meaningful artwork. She’s been able to work directly onto exposed concrete and fibre-cement sheet bringing life to the materials. Tahnee’s work features graphic illustrations with a focus on typography applied with a mixture of painting, wallpaper decals, metal motifs and concrete etchings. Speaking of her work, Tahnee hopes to create a “fun and welcoming environment for people to call home, to take pride in their housing”. The integration of a First Nations’ work into the built fabric marks a shift from designing for communities to designing with them. We hope Tahnee’s work instils pride and ownership over the spaces for the residents; an aspiration for all projects at Breathe.
At this point, a few months into construction, we are acutely aware that we are only witnessing a tiny moment in this building’s life, and that the successes and failures of the project will be judged by myriad people over the years that follow. Looking back, we can distil four clear lessons – first, the importance of process over product; second, the need for unwavering high standards and rigour; third, creativity to make opportunities from constraints; and fourth, listening through genuine First Nations representation and involvement throughout the life of a project, a trait historically absent from social housing projects. These things colour the architect as creative, diligent, and humble. However, these skills are rendered useless unless there is genuine First Nations collaboration and leadership throughout the entire process – a process that needs to be controlled and determined by First Nations Peoples in pursuit of their right to housing.
Notes
Aboriginal Housing Victoria (2018), Submission to The Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System, ahvic.org.au/cms_uploads/docs/ahvsubmission-mental-health-royal-commission-ahv-formal-submission-1907
Aboriginal Housing Victoria (2020), ‘Mana-naWoorn-TyeenMaar-Takoort: Every Aboriginal Person Has a Home’, TheVictorianAboriginalHousingand Homelessness Framework
Aboriginal Housing Victoria, Media Release (27 May 2021), A Line in the Sand on Housing Outcomes for First Australians
Aboriginal Housing Victoria and Greenaway Architects (2016), Summary: ConsultationFindingsReport:28July2016
Commonwealth of Australia (1997), ‘Housing as a Human Right, National ConferenceonHomelessness,CounciltoHomelessPersons,AddressbyChris Sidoti,HumanRightsCommissioner, 4 September 1996.
John Fien, Esther Charlesworth, Gini Lee, David Morris, Baker Dough and Grice Tammy (2007), ‘Flexible Guidelines for the Design of Remote Indigenous Community Housing’, AustralianHousingandUrbanResearchInstitute, RMITNATSEM Research Centre
Stephen Long, Paul Memmott, and Tim Seelig (July 2007), ‘ An Audit and Review of Australian Indigenous Housing Research’, AustralianHousingandUrban Research Institute Queensland Research Centre
United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT) Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) (2005), ‘Indigenous Peoples’ Right to Adequate Housing: A Global Review’, UnitedNationsHousingRightsProgramme Reportno.7
United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner (1976), InternationalCovenantonEconomic,SocialandCulturalRights, Adopted and opened for signature, ratification and accession by General Assembly resolution 2200A (XXI) of 16 December 1966 entry into force 3 January 1976, in accordance witharticle 27.
Camilla Burke RAIA is an associate at Breathe. Faith Freeman RAIA is an architect at Breathe and project architect for the AHV Reservoir project. Olivia Peel RAIA is an architect at Breathe. Breathe acknowledges the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, the Traditional Custodians of the land upon which Breathe stands. We pay our respects to their Elders, past and present, and to all First Nations Peoples of Australia. We acknowledge their continued and unceded connection to Country and culture.
Left: Locally made carbon-neutral bricks donated by Brickworks. Photo: Kate Longley. Right: Artwork concept by Tahnee Edwards. Image courtesy of Tahnee Edwards.
Architect Victoria
Above: Old Colonists, Rushall Park
MGS Architects
Photo by Jeremy Wright
Investment in affordable housing quality: Why the industry should support it
Words by: Rob McGauran
We have seen many news stories pointing to the bounce back and now surge in house prices in our capital cities. With this, a host of public servants, politicians, residential property investors, and homeowners, sit back, content – another KPI met, clearly all is well in the garden. The low interest rates,
the decades-long incentives rewarding this investment are working. But are they?
Are we getting the housing infrastructure we need, in the locations and in the form and tenure required to build the Australia we need economically and socially?
The facts:
> Average capital city prices have more than doubled since 2003 outstripping wages growth.
> Career and income certainty in the last ten years has rapidly transformed, with COVID-19 bringing into sharp focus the vulnerability of many Australians to loss of income and with that eviction.
> Once rent and mortgage costs are deducted, the rate of increase in average equivalised disposable income of the top 10% of households was 2.7 times faster than for the bottom 10% (between 1988 and 2015), with more rapid gaps established since that time.
> Home ownership across the nation continues to fall with now more than a third in rental accommodation. In areas of high concentration of jobs around which our nation is dependent, rental levels are sometimes more than half of all households and the availability of appropriate and affordable housing is even more dire.
> Our capital cities, our regional cities, and our popular tourist destinations all report major shortages of affordable housing for lower income households, including the key workers on which the centres are dependent for their services.
> For these renters (many of them millennials), higher debts on graduation combined with less job certainty, lower rates of wages growth and higher household costs place households under enormous stress.
> Victoria has the lowest percentage of public housing in the country and while the unprecedented Big Build of the Andrews Government will introduce a welcome and massive investment of $5.3bn to replace old stock and build 12000 new homes, the increase only brings housing targeted at our lowest income households to a level like that in NSW.
Work MGS Architects undertook for the Inner South East group of councils with SGS Economics highlights a concerning shift. Nearly all the areas of Melbourne serviced by good public transport were severely, or extremely, unaffordable for single workers.
What is meant by affordable housing?
In recent years key changes in the Planningand Environment Act (the Act) have made the delivery of affordable housing a key purpose of planning and urban development.
The Act has also provided definitions of what is meant by affordable housing describing three categories, Very Low, Low, and Moderate Income. The income levels are regularly updated and reflect the circumstances of a broad range of Victorians' communities.
The opportunity
Twenty years ago, as part of a broader research project looking at the future of the Australian City, I sought to better understand models of scalable investment in diversified income households. It had become evident that a combination of market failure and government inaction was leading to major areas of social disadvantage, with consequential social and productivity impacts across the nation.
Subsequent visits to institutions, not-for-profit organisations, developers and governments in the UK, North America, Europe, and Asia suggested interventionist models in housing supply as key infrastructure was necessary to combat the absence of long-term thinking in the market. While not always consistently pursued, the legacy of these initiatives has seen:
– The growth of listed developers such as Countryside in the UK who have leveraged access to prime development opportunities through trusted long-term partnerships with governments in delivering diverse and inclusive communities.
– Large not-for-profit housing associations that are complementary to private supply chains, include the Peabody Trust and Clarion Housing Group in the UK with over 65,000 and 125,000 dwellings, and Paris Habitat in Paris with over 124,000 units, respectively.
– In the US, the growth of the REIT Market with housing representing approximately 20% of the total market by value and affordable housing the fastest growing sector. This has been supported by the development of a for-profit sector providing mixed market and subsidised housing with Winn having over 100,000 units including 55,000 subsidised units.
In contrast, while our largest organisations are growing, and the number of community housing dwellings more than doubled between 2008/09 and 2017/18 from 39,800 to 87,800 dwellings, public housing has decreased by 20,000 in the same period.
Self-evidently, we have much to do.
Faster support
In Victoria, the Minister for Planning has made available the Victorian Planning Authority and Development Victoria agencies responsible for fasttrack rezoning and approvals for the development of strategic sites, where the provision of affordable housing is a key attribute of the project.
By informing our clients of these opportunities to access fast-track arrangements, we have seen complimentary enhanced local support with consequential lower development risk and enhanced diversified funding opportunities – which has resulted in a series of projects being rapidly delivered.
Above: Rushall Park
MGS Architects
Photo by Andrew Latreille
East Village Bentleigh for the Abacus/Gillon/ Make consortium achieved approval for a project inclusive of an obligation of 5% affordable housing in the 3,000+ unit that also includes a high-performance public school campus and over 95,000 square metres of retail and employment space. New Epping for Riverlee, with the delivery of a private hospital, 151 affordable housing units and a major new 1,200 car park for Northern Hospital forming early stages of a project, will deliver more than 2,800 homes and 3,100 jobs and 5% affordable housing. Alphington Mills achieved a 5% commitment of the inclusion of affordable housing.
These projects reached the market in an expeditious timeframe, in contrast to other projects that languish as they seek to argue that they have met (minimum) necessary community benefit thresholds to warrant support.
Numerous opportunities are emerging for innovative ways to deliver both development opportunity and community benefit.
Increasing institutional investment in the sector is evident in examples such as the investment of Australian Super in the Assemble buy-to-rent model, the mixed tenure Nightingale Village, and the emergence of Ethical Investment Classes and groups such as Conscious Investment Management. Based on the overseas precedents, these early entrants are likely to secure significant early scaling opportunities from governments and investors seeking solutions to pressing needs.
The missing middle
While the increase in buy-to-rent markets is welcomed, most of its focus is the highest 20% of income earners. Equally the focus of government initiatives is the lowest quartile of income earners.
For much of Australia the biggest issue by numbers and productivity impacts will lie in the missing middle: that being affordable rental housing in areas of high employment concentration; and designed to enable careers to be started, developed, resurrected, or grown and families nurtured.
Our national success will, in large part, be dependent on the transformation of the Housing Investment Class (from what one professional colleague boasts is vanilla investor product for mums and dads and a global investment pool), to housing that is first and foremost configured as flexible highquality infrastructure for the country, and quality homes for our people (and that any of us would be happy to live in).
Access to high-quality development
Following overseas precedents, the state and local government have increasingly announced that they are seeking partnerships for major urban renewal sites where inclusion of affordable housing will be a key criterion for developer participation. These highly sought-after sites include the state-owned Arden Metro Precinct and the Fitzroy Gasworks. with high expectations for affordable housing inclusion.
Local government is developing strategies with similar aims. The City of Melbourne, Hobsons Bay, Glen Eira, Darebin and Moreland are among those with affordable housing strategies that develop expectations for developers and leverage their own land holdings.
In Banyule, the Bellfield site master planned by us for the council incorporated an affordable housing goal with Launch Housing nominated as the successful partner.
Delivering mixed tenure for communities of diverse means is not a new idea.
We have recently had the privilege of working with Old Colonists’ Association of Victoria, a notfor-profit aged care provider that has been providing mixed level asset tenure for Victorians for more than 150 years. Where high-net worth individuals occupy dwellings indiscernible in specification and layout from low-income residents.
We have been able to demonstrate how we can use lazy land to deliver affordable housing at locations in inner Melbourne over retail car parks and community facilities. This has led to an expanded research project at the University of Melbourne that has identified the opportunity to leverage sites in inner and middle Melbourne for a further 30,000 affordable homes, with most achieving acceptable infrastructure category rates of return.
We are similarly working with private sector, not-for-profit and listed company clients about how to better leverage their development footprints to diversify income, partner opportunities and deliver positive impact.
Affordable housing does not mean poor quality or bad neighbours
By prioritising local people with strong local connections, participating clients have seen the development of strong relationships between new residents and neighbours which strengthen communities.
Many in the industry have clung to outdated taxation incentives and models focussed on negative gearing, rather than the sophisticated and demonstrated capacity of our REIT sector. Unsophisticated research and the lack of design innovation has seen massive oversupply of approvals for units while amplifying chronic undersupply of essential housing, of the type needed by 60% of those
seeking rental accommodation in a locality.
Infrastructure Victoria has identified the need for a clear shared agenda of Affordable Secure Rental Housing as Key Infrastructure.
Without a shared agenda, they and other demographers and researchers point to a high likelihood that our cities and regions will see an explosion of misery, inequity and visible homelessness accompanied by frustration among industries of their inability to attract the best talent to areas of economic growth.
Progressive developers are acting now. As one commented to me recently, “if you are not prepared to embrace that we have a social contract with the community, then you will rapidly fall off the pace and be left the scraps”.
Rob McGauran LFRAIA leads the masterplanning, design advocacy and urban design discipline at MGS Architects. His areas of interest are around the themes of knowledge cities, inclusive cities, sustainable cities, creative cities, connected cities, and the buildings and programs that support these themes. Completed projects include a portfolio of award-winning urban, campus and precinct renewals and affordable housing, heritage renewal, mixed-use and local government projects.
He is a professorial fellow at the University of Melbourne, an adjunct professor of Architectural Practice and Urban Design at Monash University and a board member of Australia’s largest philanthropic community fund, the Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation.
Words by: Simon Goddard and Katherine Sundermann
Revisited: Some Aspects of Housing Overseas
In 1958, Victorian Housing Commission officials headed out on a global study tour. The goal was to find an urban cure for the slums in inner Melbourne. The report, Some Aspects of Housing Overseas, catalogued their lessons. This would become the blueprint for 47 Housing Commission towers and numerous two- and three-storey walk-ups.
LIGHTWEIGHT WINTER GARDENS AND BALCONIES TO IMPROVE THE AMENITY OF EXISTING TOWERS | TRANSFORMATION OF 530 DWELLINGS, BORDEAUX | LACATON AND VASSAL | ILLUSTRATOR: NATALIE KEYNTON
But if the towers were the answer, what was the question? It wasn’t about cost. The elevators made the tower apartments more expensive to build than their low-rise counterparts. The Housing Commission towers were a bold statement about quality of life, and how to provide it. Headstrong, tone deaf, ambitious, derivative. The towers signalled an era where modular building construction, cutting-edge vertical circulation and powerful public finances were aligned towards the singular noble goal of improving dwelling amenity for working class inhabitants and recent migrants. And now, with more funding available than we’ve seen in a generation, there is the will to reimagine these sites. Architects, urban designers and public servants have duly taken up the subject. But, how to frame the problem?
Turning around the tower
How did a country obsessed with the backyard conclude that these new innovative towers should include no private outdoor space? Built with posttensioned prefabricated technology, the Housing Commission stack-of-cards towers will be unlikely to collapse, unlike their equivalents in the UK. In the UK the panels are merely bolted together and have proven highly dangerous, as evidenced in the 1968 Ronan Point flats disaster, where four people died as a consequence of a gas leak. In Australia, the panels are tied together with post-tensioned cables, making them much more secure, but also fiercely resisting any attempts to be adapted.
In 2008 an architectural competition, Tower Turnaround, attempted to address the deficiencies of the towers. Well-detailed, cantilevered and costly – but with no balcony – the winning prototype pod by BKK and Peter Elliott Architects was a one-off. A solitary pod was added to the facade of a T-tower in Gordon Street Footscray.
Thirteen years later, Lacaton Vassal would win the Pritzker for a similar concept. Their innovation was to provide an inexpensive extension with undefined use, allowing residents to appropriate as they saw fit. The model has now been rolled out across four estates and over 600 dwellings. Our current tower residents have no balconies, which was brought into sharp relief with the COVID lockdowns. How can we turn this around?
Modernist dream, over?
Le Corbusier’s dream of towers in parkland, with no need for the messiness of streets and laneways arrived in Melbourne – 40 years late. A decade later in the 70s, the Carlton Association in an alliance with the unions put a stop to the slum clearance, halting the demolition of 200 acres of terrace houses in Carlton. Today, fences and ‘tenants only’ signs tend to keep people away from the grass and playgrounds between the buildings. Money has been found to add new homes to this prime real estate as the waiting list for public housing grows longer. Some have suggested that we take down the fence and share the open space.
Do we integrate the towers like Kings Crescent in London by Karakusevic Carson Architects? Or do we risk cementing in the underperforming towers, with forgotten residents looking down on high performing homes? If the towers were to reach the end of their structural life, what neighbourhood do we envision in their place? What shared uses do we build back, aside from housing, to create one community instead of two to lessen the social divide?
NEW APARTMENTS FRAME STREETS, INTEGRATING POST-WAR HOUSING INTO THE REST OF THE NEIGHBOURHOOD | KINGS CRESCENT MASTERPLAN | LONDON | KARAKUSEVIC CARSON | ILLUSTRATOR: NATALIE KEYNTON
Resident knows best
At ArchiPitch (March 2021), Mark Feenane from the Victoria Public Tenants Association told of a man, homeless for most of his life, who was distraught when he arrived in his brand-new social housing eco-apartment. The one thing he had been waiting for after many years on the streets – air-conditioning –wasn’t there.
With all the best intentions, social housing is at risk of paternalism. But how can we know best with such a diverse spread of occupants? At Îlink in Île de Nantes, future residents and business owners worked together for years to negotiate their future neighbourhood. Shared community gardens, event spaces and workshop spaces were negotiated, collectively preparing for the community life that will take place there.
Why not invite future inhabitants to participate in design, given their deep knowledge of how they would like to live? Given the complexities of these sites and their residents, how could a stronger community be built through the process of consultation?
This scale of investment promised hasn’t been seen since the Housing Commission was at its peak. The need is as great, and the level of ambition is as high. There is a generation of knowledge in social housing repair in northern Europe. What can be translated, and what risks repeating the audacity of the original plan? Given the high stakes, we should start by asking the right questions.
Simon Goddard is an independent urbanist, researcher and designer based in Paris. He has collaborated on social housing regeneration projects across France. Simon has work for public and private sectors, in Melbourne, Copenhagen and Paris, and projects have ranged from industrial design through to strategic planning, with a principle focus on urbanism. He approaches projects through careful analysis of context, and with special attention to human scale.
Katherine Sundermann RAIA is an associate director at MGS Architects, leading masterplan projects for universities, creative employment areas and housing precincts. She is also a studio leader at Monash University, helping inspire the next generation of public interest urbanists. Drawing on her experience working as an architect and urban designer in Australia, Germany and the Netherlands, Katherine is passionate about increasing housing diversity and quality in Australia, to help create more diverse and inclusive neighbourhoods.
ENGAGEMENT WITH INHABITANTS ALLOWED SHARED SPACES TO BECOME THE GLUE FOR THE FUTURE COMMUNITY | ÎLINK, ÎLE DE NANTES | EXPLORATIONS ARCHITECTURE | ILLUSTRATOR: NATALIE KEYNTON
Office of the Victorian Government Architect
Words by: David Islip
Faded photos of public housing projects from the early 1980s line the corridor walls of the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing, marking the time since the medium density infill housing program, led by John Devenish at the Ministry of Housing. The program became a crucible for new housing typologies as it pursued a policy of diversification through infill, opening up the opportunity to commission emerging practices.
Delivering public housing is a significant responsibility for government when, according to the Grattan Institute, at least 50 in every 10,000 Australians are homeless with “rough sleepers the most visible”, but they account for only 4% of Australia’s homeless (Coates, 2020). Housing fulfils many objectives, from basic shelter to emotional security as a safe refuge. For these reasons, housing is considered a fundamental human right under the Universal Declaration on Human Rights – subscribed to by the Victorian Government through the Victorian Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities Act.
In the 2020 State Budget, the Victorian Government announced a commitment of $5.3 billion to build new social housing – the single biggest investment in social housing in Victoria’s and Australia’s history. The package aims to boost the state’s social housing supply by 10% in four years.
A new government agency, Homes Victoria, was established to work across government and sectors to deliver this package and manage existing public housing. The program, called the Big Housing Build, will construct 12,000 new homes across metropolitan and regional Victoria comprising 9,300 social housing homes replacing 1,100 old public housing units that are no longer fit for purpose. The Office of the Victorian Government Architect (OVGA) has had
significant involvement in the Big Housing Build’s projects known as the Public Housing Renewal Program (PHRP) which will deliver 1,200 new public homes, including social, private, and affordable housing.
Procurement
Selecting a Public Private Partnership (PPP) as the preferred procurement method to deliver the Big Housing Build demands that government is a smart client. Research by the Association of Consulting Architects Australia shows that the cost of bidding typically costs the consortia 1% or more of the construction cost (Gorey, 2015). During the competitive phase, the impact on architects and the commercial terms on which they are engaged, can present considerable risk. Another key risk with a PPP is that it does not necessarily guarantee that the best design will be selected. The new edition of the OVGA’s procurement guide, Government as Smart Client, states that “the State may not get the best design team due to the commercial offer preferencing a particular consortium”. Further, as observed by previous Victorian Government Architect (2006–08) John Denton, “when it comes to choosing bids, money, not design, tends to win out” (Millar, 2008).
Knox Schlapp Housing Project, Port Melbourne. Peter Elliott Architecture and Urban Design, Ministry of Housing 1985. Photographer John Gollings.
PPP’s claim to bring greater innovation than standard procurement processes. Further documented evidence is required to support this notion. If innovation is requested it may reflect that the agency does not know what is needed, or that it is looking for new ideas and is relying on the market to research alternatives, precedent projects, or to investigate, evaluate and provide another possibility.
The rewards for the private sector, from a PPP, are considerable. The Kensington Housing Project completed in 2012 piloted a 50:50 social-mix model to inform future estate redevelopment projects in Melbourne via a PPP approach. Studies found that the private developers involved in the project collected net profits of more than 37 % (Shaw, 2013).
Masterplans
Masterplans for existing and future public housing estates need to be prioritised by government and committed to as a fundamental design exercise. An effective masterplan can have significant benefits when underpinned by an intelligent brief from the delivery agency and skilled consultants to inform the design process. Masterplans can de-risk the long-term viability of new housing and protecting public space when project delivery times and yield compete for attention. Masterplans are a critical part of any future work and cover project staging, latent conditions, audits, natural landscape systems, tenure equity, planning controls, car parking impacts and a long-term vision for more resilient and sustainable communities. A carefully considered masterplan that involves all stakeholders will protect future opportunities and avoid abortive works.
Design life
Designed and constructed in the 1960s, there are more than 40 high-rise towers at 20–30 storeys across 19 suburbs in Melbourne. Most are well beyond their projected design life of 50 years. The towers were constructed to the minimum required structural tolerances, raising the importance of audits across the existing housing stock to understand the potential for adaptive reuse and capture the benefits of embodied energy from a sustainability perspective. The risk of not getting the design fundamentals correct upfront, across orientation, function and form, can result in a legacy of buildings without the structural bones, such that any notion of a Lacaton Vassal style refurbishment is at best, tenuous. The towers remain an ongoing concern during the challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic and their suitability in avoiding infection among residents.
Smart client
Government can only act as a smart client when there is a commitment to design capability within the delivery agencies. Each delivery agency in government needs in-house design champions who will advocate and hold a consortium to account for the quality and scope of each drawing package. Equally, the profession has a responsibility to remember who the client is: the homeless. A client who may live in such a building for their lifetime because there is no other opportunity. The houses architects design must become their homes and avoid being dictated to by market forces, where the focus is on yield and return, rather than amenity.
It is critical that government delivery agencies provide leadership through detailed briefs and clear policy in defining what it means to be tenure blind. If housing projects are to be design-led, the profession needs to push back on the unreasonable demands of the consortium, articulate the unintended consequences of cost savings and challenge government agencies when faced with ambiguity.
Architects who can deliver detailed, accurate and fully scoped packages will avoid opening the door to cost savings that impact quality. The OVGA will continue to advocate for good design outcomes but it is only warranted by a project’s significance and our ability to influence it.
Whether the current program will leave an enduring legacy for Victorians, government and the profession to celebrate, is yet to be seen. The challenge remains, for a design-led housing program that ensures the best possible amenity for tenants, which is adaptable into the future.
Notes
Brendan Coates, Jonathan Nolan, and Tony Chen (2020), Tackling homelessness in Australia Submission to the Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs’ inquiry into homelessness in Australia, Grattan Institute
Ann Gorey, 13 April, (2015), Public Private Partnerships for Procurement, Association of Consulting Architects Australia
Royce Millar, July 26, (2008). Departing architect warns state to keep watch on its legacy, TheAge
Shaw, Raisbeck et al. (2013) EvaluationoftheKensingtonredevelopmentand placemanagementmodels,UniversityofMelbourne
David Islip FRAIA is Principal Adviser, Architecture + Urban Design for the Office of the Victorian Government Architect.
Certified Carbon Neutral: Kennedy Nolan
Facilitated by: Gemma Savio
Director of Architecture, Victoria Reeves sat down with the Australian Institute of Architects to discuss carbon neutral certification with a view to tackling more complex, and exciting, sustainability challenges.
Taking the practice carbon neutral was a very straightforward process. At Kennedy Nolan we understand being
carbon neutral as just a starting point for the much bigger impact that we can have as an operation.
Being carbon neutral implies a level of commitment and credibility. When we speak to consultants, suppliers and clients, it creates a dynamic that has influence. Since going carbon neutral, we find that we now ask the businesses we work with if they’re carbon certified and simply asking that question can be quite persuasive. In the 80s after everyone started buying recycled paper, we eventually reached a point where people just wouldn’t buy anything else – we hope that this is the kind of cultural change the carbon neutral movement will inspire. We often work with clients who are part of really big organisations and if they were to pursue carbon neutral certification it would be hugely impactful – we think carbon neutral is a good badge to wear.
We’re certainly conscious though that it’s not where we can stop. Once we were carbon neutral certified, our next goal was to deliver a carbon zero project. We recently won a competition for a building with a carbon zero target and we’re discovering that it’s much more complex to count the carbon in that context than it is to count the carbon in an office – so it’s an interesting challenge. The team at Kennedy Nolan are quite aware that much of our influence as designers comes into play when we’re specifying, so that’s what we’re focusing on now and the carbon zero process and audit is a good catalyst for that.
Taking your practice carbon neutral is a terrific and very manageable steppingstone to the more challenging areas that, as a practice, we’re all actually going to really enjoy taking on next. And those next steps don’t seem daunting –they seem essential and exciting.
Architect Victoria
Top: The team at Kennedy Nolan. Photo by Sean Fennesy.
Right: Research Primary School. Photo by Emily Bartlett Photography.
Left: Victoria Reeves, KN Director of Architecture. Photo by Derek Swalwell.
Top: The Kosloff Architecture team.
Left: La Trobe Library.
Right: Director, Stephanie Bullock.
Photos by Derek Swalwell.
Certified Carbon Neutral: Kosloff Architecture
Certified Carbon Neutral: Kosloff Architecture
Facilitated by: Gemma Savio
Director, Stephanie Bullock spoke with the Australian Institute of Architects about advocacy, sustainability and the value of impact-based decision making.
When we founded our practice in 2017, we knew that we wanted to be a B Corp – to make decisions that have a positive impact for our practice team, clients, suppliers, community, and the environment. Going carbon neutral was a high priority for us as part of that. In many ways this made it even easier to achieve carbon neutral certification because when
we were setting up the office, that goal helped drive a number of decisions.
For our first premises, we chose a co-working space that was already a B Corp so we knew that they would be transparent about their carbon footprint. We sourced our energy from a supplier who would provide net-zero energy and we hired a cleaning company that used environmentally sound products –working towards carbon neutral helped guide us and has shaped an attitude in our studio that is less about dollar value and more about long-term impact. For us, being carbon neutral is about operating in a way that reflects our values.
The time and the effort involved is very small compared to the benefit of doing it.
There’s a lot of support out there to assist architects in taking their practice carbon neutral. Once we decided on which consultant we wanted to work with for offsetting, we had access to the tools that made the process very straightforward. In terms of time, we’re currently calculating our carbon footprint for the last financial
year and it’s something that most people in the team can do very efficiently.
We look at our environmental impact in the running of our business and in the work that we do with our clients. In both of these areas we’re mindful of making decisions that support environmental and social sustainability. Working primarily on public projects, a large part of our role is advocating for the most responsible outcomes.
Our clients range from those with very high ESD standards to those who don’t yet have a framework in place. One of the first questions we ask clients is: What are your aspirations in terms of environmentally sustainable design? In instances where they don’t have a clear answer, part of our role is to educate them on best practice and establish the value of achieving low carbon, or carbon zero buildings. It’s really important as architects that we can walk the talk. We can’t tell clients that we want them to achieve the highest possible standard if we aren’t doing all that we can in our own businesses.
Architect at Home: Nick Harding
Interview by Elizabeth Campbell
What does the concept of home mean to you?
A house is a place, home is an experience – knowing I can escape the world outside when I need a break; watching my kids Harry and Viv do their best to tear the place apart; sharing moments big and small with family and friends; building memories over time, through routine and tradition.
How would you describe your home?
Calm. This is the feeling we wanted
to evoke, and it is the word that comes up again and again when people visit our home. It’s also ideal in its proximity to both nature and culture.
Architecturally, we wanted to test whether a 150-metre-square house with 5 x 8-metre rear yard could become our spacious family home. On a relatively modest footprint, the key gesture was to borrow space from both the courtyard itself and the nearby Yarra River and Abbotsford Convent precinct. The coalescence of
kitchen, dining and courtyard into one outdoor room defined the design process and, ultimately, lived experience in the home.
How do you choose items to fill your space with?
For the most part it has been a very organic process.
Right now, Harry and Vivi's lives dominate. The front two rooms are theirs – one shared bedroom, one playroom – so ideally the worst of the chaos is in that
Nick Harding
Above: Nick Harding's home Ha Architecture
Photo by Dan Hocking
Above: Nick Harding's home
Ha Architecture
Photo by Dan Hocking
section! But of course, their belongings spill down the hallway and beyond.
I’m fortunate to have personal connections with some talented local photographers, and we have a growing collection of beautiful shots by friends including Dan Hocking, Kristoffer Paulsen and Kate Ballis. In a small inner-city home, a framed photo is like a window to the imagination.
Indoor plants help build the association with the natural environment and connect inside and out. A hanging planter above the kitchen island cements this as very much the heart of the home. Elsewhere, the living room shelves house our favourite books – as well as a few decorative objects from the Jam Factory in Adelaide, my hometown.
What role do materials play within your home?
Within a small home, robustness and tactility are very important to me.
Precise joinery was required to make the living, kitchen and dining area both functional and attractive. To help deliver the outdoor room effect, we used a deep green stain that echoed the tones of the native garden and existing olive trees.
Moving upstairs, heritage concerns ensured the main bedroom needed to be very contained. It’s an intimate loft and, to me, felt very much like a boat cabin — so we saturated the experience in natural timber to create an intimate sleeping compartment.
Finally, the kitchen is celebrated with bold granite that is both functionally bulletproof and visually relaxing. The volcanic river stone aesthetic is not for everyone (we call it pastrami!) but, once we developed the custom colour for the joinery, it was a last-minute decision that brought everything together.
You talk a little bit about designing from the inside out, why do you think this is an important way of approaching a building, especially a home?
Too often people end up squeezing their lives into an architecturally designed box. Surely design should unfold organically around the experience, not the other way around.
In a home that is 4.8 metres wide there really is no choice: it is essential to design around ergonomics that make a space work. I tested many, many options to deliver our brief, and even then, we did compromise. In some ways there was not much architecture involved – just a second-storey extension with one west facing, 5-metre-wide facade. This project called for a very internal strategy where the exterior was driven by the interior planning.
Design from the inside out also involves a considered approach to orientation, passive design, and outward views to nature. The latter is especially important. My friend Fran Hale from Peachy Green helped us create a native garden space that is both as green as possible and functional for the kids. The side lightwell is a modest but important outlook, providing natural light and ventilation to the secondary rooms.
At Ha_arc we believe bigger is not better. With creativity and precision, you can often resolve an outcome that delivers everything required in much less space than you imagine. This approach is increasingly important in an ever-growing city like Melbourne.
How do you approach sustainability within your own home?
We approach sustainability with a sense of urgency and ambition! It was exciting to see what we could achieve when designing our own home. We aimed for the maximum possible outcome, assuming that as owner occupiers we would be there for 20 years.
To us, maximum achievable sustainable design is assumed in every project – so we embedded it throughout the old and new house. Key features are east and west-facing external sun-
shading; well-sealed, double-glazed windows and thorough insulation; concrete slab for thermal mass; hydronic heating with electric heat-pump; a 3.3-kilowatt solar array that consumes the entire north-facing roof; openable windows for natural ventilation, and ceiling fans. Across a small footprint of 150 metres-square, thermal comfort was achieved with no air-conditioning required.
What role do you think the home has within the wider context of the neighbourhood?
Hopefully it doesn’t stand out too much! The goal was to preserve the heritage character of the row, with the rear extension blending in as seamlessly as possible. In a modest way, I think our home demonstrates respectful contemporary design within strict heritage control – and also small footprint living that relies on adjacent community amenity.
Nick Harding RAIA is principal of Ha Architecture.
Elizabeth Campbell is a project architect at Kennedy Nolan with broad experience across single and multi-residential, cultural and commercial projects. She is a researcher, writer and contributing editor of Architect Victoria.
Early Career Architecture
Guest
editors: Daniel Moore and Thomas Huntingford
With a minimum of five years at university and 15 years emerging in practice, an architect's early career is a serious portion of a person's life, with more than a third of the Institute being members of SONA and EmAGN.
Over the past two years early career architects have been thrown into the unknown. The traditional career path of graduating, getting a job, finding a mentor, developing skills in an area of interest and using those skills to create a new practice or contribute to an established one, has seemingly become less and less common. Instead many graduates are creating new careers in architecture that we've never seen before, making it difficult even for seasoned architects to provide advice for getting through this much uncertainty, particularly at the early stages of a career. But there's no doubt that the trials students, graduates, and young practices are going through now will inform the profession for the foreseeable future. The aforementioned traditional career path still holds for many people who can achieve the first step of getting a job. Getting practice experience from a registered architect is part of the registration process. The formula of starting on a career path in architecture with a mentor to guide you is uncomfortably close to the first steps of Joseph Campbell's hero's journey theory. In Campbell's seminal text The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), he outlines a 17-step narrative theory present in storytelling throughout history. Campbell's monomyth outlines the process by which a protagonist overcomes adversity to become a person with higher abilities. Architects have been using the words "transition" and "pivot" extensively during the pandemic, and transition is a solid theme in Campbell's work. While it's good advice to be flexible during challenging times, it will be interesting to see how far away from the profession people want to move, and will they want to find a way back. Critics of Campbell believe the hero's journey is too general and can't be applied to the vast array of morals/lessons that stories try to convey. Many young architects tried to put career plans in motion during the pandemic, but the outcomes were not always like a fairy tale.
In the 2021 season of Malcolm Gladwell's podcast Revisionist History, they break down classic fairy tales in a three-part episode called The Little Mermaid. Gladwell points out that until the 17th century, traditional myths and fairy tales resolved with less poetic-justice endings than we see now. Fairy tales were often about bad things happening to good people and vice versa. We’ve seen a lot of fantastic work produced by early career architects over the years, but much like pre-enlightenment stories, the pandemic has heightened an indiscriminate reduction of opportunities in traditional early career pathways.
It is a brutal reality check for everyone who isn't at the very top of the pack. But maybe this will help curb the cognitive bias the Dunning-Kruger Effect presents in our profession. The basic principle being that a person with little experience in an occupation overestimates their ability, and a person with high skills tends to underestimate their talent. It's an intense learning curve, but everyone working in architecture has faced this throughout their career. After asking some colleagues where they would place the beginning of the Dunning-Kruger effect graph in a person's architectural career, everyone had a different answer: beginning an architecture degree, when you start a practice, once you've graduated, or once you've had kids.
The fact that many people see a correlation between the Dunning-Krugger graph and multiple transitions in an architect's life suggests there's no straight trajectory between incompetence and mastery. As we finally get to a high level of understanding in our chosen field of expertise, we realise how much more there is to know. Like the ancient serpent symbol of Ouroboros eating its tail in the process of eternal cyclic renewal of life, death, and rebirth, it seems that an architect's career is an ongoing process of metamorphosis. Who knows
This realisation advocates for being broadly curious and seeking opportunities to learn wherever you find them
"
how people not working in architecture practices will maintain the proprioceptive skills required to convert drawings into the built form. Perhaps then the correlative nature of design thinking suggests that we should embrace the Dunning-Kruger effect and, in fact, seek it out. Particularly, in the early stages of a career, the more 'mount stupids' peaked, the better, as they aggregate to form the knowledge base from which an informed designer can draw.
This realisation advocates for being broadly curious and seeking opportunities to learn wherever you find them, from interests outside of the profession to the everyday pragmatics of starting in practice. By focusing clearly on what interests them and stressing less about the knowledge they think others value, early career architects can forge an inherently fascinating and valuable approach to design.
The contributors herein illustrate the array of challenges, initiatives and achievements architects at all levels have had in their early career. This collection includes articles from some of the most successful architects in the state, young architects forging new careers, and graduates introduced to the workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic. If architects can take anything from Campbell and the hero’s journey, it’s that every story has a moral. Each article in this edition has a moral, and we encourage the reader to discover what message lies behind the actions in the text.
Daniel Moore RAIA is a registered architect and director of the architecture and creative practice Open Creative Studio. Daniel is the immediate past cochair of EmAGN Victoria, a curator of New Architects Melbourne, and the host and co-producer of Hearing Architecture and the New Architects Podcast.
Thomas Huntingford is SONA President elect for 2022 commencing his tenure in 2023, and an editorial committee member. He is an architecture assistant at Kerstin Thompson Architects.
Alternative pathways: A conversation
Interview by Thomas Huntingford
Rory Hyde, associate professor of architecture at the University of Melbourne, and James Taylor and Michael Whittingham co-founders of Forum collective, spoke with Thomas Huntingford about the opportunities for students to follow their own path in architecture and apply architectural thinking outside of architecture.
Thomas Huntingford (TH): What do you think the key skills to take away from architecture school are? As in, if you were going to chase down specific things to help pursue a broader approach to architecture, what would you try and get out of university?
Rory Hyde (RH): This is interesting because it comes to the question of ‘What is architecture?’ One of the things that I think we've been mistaken about is that architecture is designing buildings. I would say it's one way to apply our thinking, but it doesn’t define our core values.
If you were to zoom out and look at what really effective architects do, you see a process of engagement – synthesis – vision.
Engagement is about understanding all the different stakeholders, and making sense of their different, conflicting interests. Whose agenda are you serving? How can you serve a broader public agenda that may be in conflict with that? Synthesis is about taking all of these inputs, wrapping them together in a way that acknowledges this complexity. And vision is about presenting this as a story that everyone can get behind, a proposition that shows a way forward and brings everyone along.
There's a thread through architectural criticism at the moment which is resistant to the idea of the visionary. I think this comes from a backlash against starchitecture and the excesses that’s led to. But I think that's actually really core to us. You could think of it as the ability to plant a flag up ahead, and then to encourage people to follow you towards it.
Finally there is the architect’s pragmatic capacity. Not only can you plant the flag up ahead, but you can chart the technical path to get there. This requires the ability to marshal lots of different kinds of information from different specialists and experts, understanding budgets, engineering, HVAC, landscape, climate, you name it. We need to have all those specialisms in order to produce a concrete outcome, which is a building.
So, I guess what I'm saying is, what happens if you take the building away, and you're left with that set of skills – being engaging, synthetic, visionary, pragmatic – that I think is what is core about architecture. And once you’ve abstracted our skills in this way, you can begin to imagine how to apply those skills to many other challenges, reimagining the architect as a kind of multipurpose problem-solver. For me that's where it gets super exciting.
James Taylor (JT): Personally, I've found, finding a pathway and an understanding, whether it's through education or in a workplace, can be framed around how things are done. Within the context of education, I feel like things are less pragmatic than what they could be. I like to consider that process in simple terms. A lot of what I've experienced has been made complicated for the sake of the process of designing.
Michael Whittingham (MW): It's interesting, once you get into a practice you realise the importance of the critical and conceptual thinking learned at university. The importance isn't about technical skills because you pick all that up when you actually start working in a practice. In hindsight, I value conceptual thinking being taught much more.
RH: That’s right, and it’s this conceptual thinking that is the engine of the designer. You often see graduates who have developed their own voice in school, immediately go off to work in a practice, and they take on all of that practice’s way of thinking; they echo them. And after ten years of doing that, they decide to start their own practice, and then they've forgotten what it was that drove them in the first place. How do we allow graduates to maintain their voice and their vision? Even while they are, as Michael said, learning on the job, the technical elements
needed to run your own practice. What’s referred to as a kind of ‘slash career’ – the stuff that you're doing in the margins being so important as a way to keep your own voice. Even as you're working for someone else.
JT: It's like everyone could benefit from taking on the process that you write about Rory, the ‘plus.’ Getting outside of architecture. Because architecture is whatever you want, however you want to draw it. I think it's about listening and reading broadly and drawing and applying that knowledge. In the example of someone working for someone else for 10 years and then wondering who they are after all that time, it's almost that they're missing that plus. An avenue to have that output and apply their own thinking and test their own ideas.
TH: Is that what drove you to start Forum, and do you think you've held on to that as you've moved into practice?
JT: I think it was identifying that piece that we spoke about, the ‘what are we doing?’ So, we wanted to create this avenue to discuss with others, test ideas, talk about our individual work, perhaps outside of architecture, whatever it was. Forum would be an avenue to work on something together as a group, or just go ‘great, I appreciate your feedback, I'm going to keep going and work on it myself.’ But really it was just literally a forum. It was a place for conversation and then sometimes projects would come out of it and other times it was just a space to meet weekly and discuss.
MW: It was almost to take charge and create an initiative for ourselves to move away from the institutions that we felt we were framed within. There's the ability for us to come together and work on these projects and talk to each other as a group, separate to that.
TH: After graduating, do you think there's still this opportunity for people to strike their own path. Does it inevitably lead to some sort of slash career as you've mentioned Rory or are there other ways of breaking the mould and pursuing things with architectural skills?
RH: That's a tricky one. It's all tangled up in questions of what you're able to do. As Dan Hill says, ‘you have to start by starting’. No-one’s going to ask you to do the thing you want to do. The only person who can do that is you. So, if you want to be a curator, then you need to hang an exhibition in your living
room with your friends. I'm really interested in what's the lowest rung on the ladder. So, if the top rung of the ladder is curating a major exhibition at the Tate Modern or NGV, the bottom rung is the one you do with your friends in your front room, but it's on the same continuum. It's on the same ladder, the person who didn't do that exhibition is not on that ladder.
JT: As simple as it is. That's fantastic advice. You can just start by starting, makes sense.
TH: What skills do you think you can look to acquire from working in other fields that are valuable to creating one's own path?
MW: I would say having the ability to talk to people and being able to organise groups of people. I worked in hospitality for 10 years and in hindsight, being able to talk to different people was really beneficial.
James, you worked at the NGV and did your own construction and furniture making.
JT: Yeah, that was framed through going to art school, but it was an interest in actually just making things. It was that idea of start by starting. When I went to study graphic design, I just wanted to paint. So, I never did what I was supposed to be doing. I just painted instead. I kept on studying in different areas and in doing that, making things turned into an interest in furniture. This never directly came into what I was doing during art school, but I got asked to assist someone in making some of their work, that turned into a job as an assistant and working as an artist assistant for different artists around Melbourne. Essentially doing carpentry work, by no means have I ever been trained in any sort of fine furniture work or anything like that. It's just a practical, slow burn, this sort of evolution of learning things as you go, and then reapplying that into your own work or the next project for someone.
TH: What do you think there is to learn from being in traditional practice, apart from the practical skills mentioned. What is it that you should be trying to take away?
RH: I've done this in two ways. I did years and years at BKK learning the nuts-and-bolts of sketch design and documentation, presenting to clients, detailing, the whole lot. Then I went to the Netherlands and I worked for MVRDV for a couple of years. They only do sketch design and design development, then hand it over to another practice to do the detailing.
So, what you learn there is very different. I remember one day Winy Maas was doing this presentation and we've made this model and done all these drawings and he's just changing the design as he speaks, picking up the blocks and moving them. I asked him afterwards, ‘what was that about?’ And he said, ‘all architecture is persuasion’.
I just thought that was an amazingly honest description of what we do. There’s a cynical version of this, of course, where you deploy this persuasion to hoodwink your clients into building your fantasies. But on the other hand it openly acknowledges that what we do is about people, about communication, about navigating the complexity of different perspectives.
I learned a lot of that persuasion from working in museums. They're hugely complex political environments with lots of different departments, and as a curator, you need to persuade all these people to come along with you.
TH: So, should graduates strike out and find this alternative path and how does that carry forward into practice?
JT: I think it's almost more important for graduates and people 10, 20 years into their career and beyond to continually question themselves and their application to something.
Without that, you're not finding the why and you're not recognising the people around you as much.
MW: From my experience, having additional things that I'm doing on the side, that I'm interested in, has definitely been encouraged and people want to hear about it more.
Rory Hyde, is associate professor in architecture at the University of Melbourne. He has co-hosted a radio show, worked in museums and on installations in parallel to working in architecture. His recent book Architects After Architecture: Alternative Pathways for Practice, co-edited with Harriet Harriss and Roberta Marcaccio, explores the application of architectural thinking outside of architecture.
James Taylor and Michael Whittingham, are the cofounders of Forum collective, a group of students and graduates exploring alternative ways of applying architectural thinking. James is also a graduate working at Plus Architecture and runs a design practice focusing on furniture, objects and spatial design. Michael is a graduate at Kerstin Thompson Architects.
Architectural photography
Facilitated by:
Daniel Moore
A photo essay of architectural photography. Daniel Moore asked established architectural photographers about their first memorable project, finding their way into the profession and/or working with early career architects.
Derek Swalwell
Fullerton Hotel in Singapore
Shooting for design firm Ong and Ong Pte
When I started out I always had the intention of working beyond Australia. Singapore was close, I canvassed myself there by email for probably about a year before meeting some architects. I managed to secure a good list of practices, who would book me for back-to-back jobs. I am looking at heading back in early 2022 after a long break due to COVID.
Ben Hosking House A
Kate Fitzgerald of Whispering Smith
Having lived together in a cold Carlton share house in our early 20s while studying, myself at RMIT and Kate at the University of Melbourne, we had little idea that we’d be collaborating over 10 years later, as both colleagues and good friends.
Dianna Snape Aesop, Doncaster
Russell and George
Early architecture is where a lot of the magic happens – small budgets, eager architects and big ideas. A trusting collaboration between architect and photographer often produces profound outcomes and if you’re lucky some lifelong friendships. Ryan’s design for Aesop Doncaster was the beginning of a revolution in retail design with brands like Aesop engaging budding architects to transform their stores into destinations.
Elizabeth Schiavello Court House
Michael Carr Architects
Stephen Reed Landscape
Designed by Philippa Carr alongside Michael Carr, Court House was Philippa’s first project as a registered architect following her time working in France.
Working closely with Brett Thompson of Surf View Builders, who provided guidance and support throughout the project, Philippa gained invaluable knowledge of the end-toend residential construction process and came to understand first-hand how a positive and reciprocal relationship between architect and builder can deliver excellent outcomes onsite. It was a wonderful collaboration to be a part of.
Tatjana Plitt
Mihaly Slocombe
This image is from a Mihaly Slocombe project I shot in 2015. It is etched into my memory because it is such a simple detail-shot that ended up being the most successful of that shoot. It became an inspiration image we referred to on subsequent photoshoots. Working together over the years, we have built an image reference library of sorts, a kind of common language. I feel quite nostalgic about this image; we were at the earlier stages of our practices at the time and it’s been a lovely experience growing up together.
Imperative in early career architecture is the championing of bold vision from the outset, and the encouragement and nourishment by your architectural family. This project by Zoe Diacolabrianos of WOWOWA Architecture is the perfect example of that philosophy, and I am here for it.
Martina Gemmola Keano WOWOWA Architecture
Tess Kelly
Type St Apartment Tsai Design
Instantly you know that this is an architect who has something unique to offer the Australian architectural scene. It’s incredibly exciting to see that this is the level that they are thinking and producing within their first solo projects.
Type St was the first project I photographed for Jack. It is not an elaborate project in the sense of material and scale but rather a highly considered, practical, fun and functional response to a 35 metre-square apartment. With hidden features and convertible spaces, the clever small footprint project is humble and refreshing.
John Gollings
In 1979 I was on the awards jury for student projects. Peter McIntyre was the jury chair, Roger Wood, still at university, was the student representative, and Norman Day was getting established as a writer and critic via Robin Boyd’s office. I was ex-architecture school, coming to architectural photography via advertising work with a new narrative style and compositional strength.
This photo is prescient, we were young and enthusiastic, but worked courageously and creatively, following our own intuition and history has borne out the value of that approach.
Tom Ross Overend
Placement Studio
Speaking to Steph Kitingan: seeing your ideas, trapped so long as just that, finally realised. At first seeing bricks and timber, then absorbing how the place feels, compared to how you hoped it would feel.
Peter Clarke Arco
Branch Studio
A detailed image of a Branch Studio project is an expression of their understanding of the whole. These moments are fundamental to their exploration of materials and space.
Nurturing excellence
by: Daniel Moore
Edmond & Corrigan has employed an incomparable number of young architects who have gone on to have prolific careers with their own practices or as sole practitioners. Daniel Moore asked practice director Maggie Edmond some questions.
Daniel Moore (DM): How did you mentor earlycareer architects during that phase? Was there a characteristic that you could see in your employees that let you know they were heading in that direction?
Maggie Edmond (ME): They were breathing in the air. Students observed and worked on the design process, built the models, and met the clients. It was a very democratic office. There was no receptionist, anyone could pick up the phone and take messages; everybody knew what everyone else was doing. We didn't have a hierarchy or an office management practice manual. Peter had worked in very significant architect's offices on the east coast of the US, where he picked up some incredible experience. It wasn't any one architect in particular that he was invoking. He could turn the dial and instantly change his attitude
Interview
or approach. But most importantly, he had no fear. He saw that the architect's role and charisma was something to be respected and applauded. So when it came to mentoring the students, they just breathed it in and sensed it. The message comes out in the design.
DM: What do you think is essential for people who one day want to start their own practice? Should they experience as much as possible at multiple practices or get exposed to a lot within a single practice?
ME: The more diverse the experience, the better. The reality is that all architecture offices are different. If someone wants to work for only one practice, then they need to expand their horizons and emote with others. Young architects should share their experiences and ideas as if they were the architects themselves. Many years ago, senior architects educated the juniors through an apprenticestyle system. Students would work in an actual architectural studio environment, on real projects, with practicing architects teaching them. I think that's what the students working in our office obtained; an apprenticeship experience – working and studying part-time. An ability to understand the application of what they are learning at the university is important about working while you study.
DM: You have an awe-inspiring list of apprentices who've had impressive careers. Have you ever thought about why they've all gone on to do so well?
ME: I think Peter encouraged them. There were architects who had worked in the office as students who opened their own practices, who would return and discuss with him the work they had done. He had the ability to inspire, encourage, and make them feel the he was following their careers. A kind of nurturing, which they initially held on to! Once you get on the right path, there's no looking back. But I also have to mention passion. I think being passionate is an essential part of being a successful architect. Whether expressed or not. Architects want to design buildings of renown and enjoy their work being experienced and discussed. There's a bit of passion in ego and a bit of ego in passion. It's hard work and it's long work. In our office this was combined with employees who showed ability before they even started to work in the office; then by giving them a pair of roller-skates, they went out and took on the world.
Maggie Edmond LFRAIA is the principal of Edmond & Corrigan, one of the most prestigious post-modernist firms in Victoria. Maggie’s work has been highly awarded across multiple typologies over the decades. Some of her work includes RMIT Building 8, the VCA Theatre Building in Southbank, and the Fairfield Amphitheatre.
Edmond & Corrigan Alumni 1975-1992
Source – Cities of Hope: Australian Architecture and Design by Edmond & Corrigan, 1993
Paul Abraam
Nicholas Andrew
Geoffrey Barton
Nigel Bertram
David Beynon
Rob Bienvenu
Peter Brew
Ann Butler
Dean Cass
Larry Cirillo
David Craven
Gerald Curran
Paul DeMillio
Antony Dimase
Marc Dixon
Elizabeth Earle
Anna Ely
Brendon Farrelly
Nigel Fitton
Selina Fong
Ann Gallon
Philip Goad
Sean Godsell
Deborah Havelka
Allen Hicks
Paul Hope
David Hunt
David Johnson
Ian Johnson
Peter Kinsella
Ann Lau
Alexandra Lawlor
Richard Lee
Richard Leonard
Don Ling
Wilson Ma
Andrew MacDonald
David MacDonald
Ian McDougall
Simon McKeown
Peter Malatt
Grant Marani
Michael Markham
Robert Mirams
Paul Morgan
Michael Ng
Patrick Ng
Zvonko Orsanic
Adrian Page
Anthony Parker
Michael Phillipson
Christopher Pykel
Jonathan Sarfaty
Andrew Shaw
Gerry Tibbals
Francesco Timpano
John Valmas
David Walker
John Wardle
Andrew Weldon
Peter White
Christopher Wood
Roger Wood
Marie Yahiro
Arthur Yue
Building a folio
Words by: Jo Foong, Foomann Architects
We fell into our practice with little planning, much optimism and a dose of imposter syndrome. Our first project was to blame; a friend was starting a cafe and bar in a beautiful art-deco building on Carlisle Street and we were doing the fit-out. With the promise of a prominent built project on the horizon, we felt sure that we were on our way (spoiler: we were pretty wrong).
It takes a leap of faith to engage an architect. The stakes are very high. When a client approaches a build, there’s a good chance that the fear of disaster is underpinning every decision and there’s a very good chance that if they’re seeking an architect, then they will select one that provides them with confidence. A portfolio of built works is the most straightforward way for an architect to demonstrate their capability and message, but it’s not the only tool required or available.
The idea of Foomann Architects started during the years Jamie and I spent together at the University of Melbourne. With a similar approach to design and study, we always sought each other for input and feedback. Graduating in 2005, we were biding our time for an opportunity to collaborate and we didn’t have to wait long. In 2007 a friend starting a hospitality venture was seeking a designer and wanted the right fit. In us, he had found people who would care about the outcome as much as he did.
Despite being so early in our career, leaving the security of full-time employment for the uncertainty
Above: Canning Street Foomann Architects
Photo by Eve Wilson
of private practice didn’t feel daunting. We had few expenses and little to lose. We set ourselves up at Jamie’s mum’s house (thanks again Zorita) and continued to work part-time at our old jobs, freelance for other architects and sessional work at university. We never discussed a strategy, but with our one project growing in scope to include a live music venue and a two-storey rear extension, we knew we were lucky.
The majority of our current projects have come through connections and referrals developed through our practice. Although publicity and our portfolio provide some inquiries from outside this network, for us the primary purpose of the folio is as a tool to convince people from within our broader network to contact and engage us. Before any architect develops their own folio of built work, they have to find other ways of getting the message across. Your previous work experience will provide a level of credibility depending on how long you were there for. When we started Foomann as young as we did, we recognised that we had limited credibility and poor salesmanship, we were relying heavily on the success of the bar as our launchpad.
Our bar project was tracking as hoped. Following favourable feedback from the preliminary meeting with the council planner, the client had
the confidence to progress our design. While we continued through the process, with guidance from a senior architect, the context in which our proposal was located was changing. In 2007, alcohol abuse was an issue that made daily headlines. Although we perceived it as a faddish media pre-occupation (soon to be replaced with other illicit substances), the narrative was punctuated with high-profile, alcoholfuelled and violent events. One such incident, very near our site, was perpetrated by drunk footballers on a minibus, driven by an off-duty Constable, who were yelling racial abuse at members of the Orthodox Jewish community and which culminated in an assault.
Back in 2007, all vested parties in the bar project were cognisant that we were lodging an application for a licensed venue at an inconvenient time. However, the statutory planner was supportive and the occupant capacity was modest. The offering was for a live music venue that required a liquor license and this was categorised as a nightclub. Nightclub is a term that would soon haunt us. After lodgement, the objections started with a trickle and developed into a torrent. The retiring ward councillor was not supportive and the incoming councillor used opposition to this new venue as a platform for their election. Through door-knocking and the plastering
Above: Ballantyne Street by Foomann Architects. Photo by Willem-Dirk du Toit.
of posters throughout the area, the fear of a new nightclub mobilised a huge contingent of opposition.
In 2021, many of our friends and colleagues are running excellent design practices. Our university contingent included a very strong group of designers, many now notable architects with growing profiles (too many to name). It’s hard to identify all the qualities that you need to get to that point, but one that definitely helps is hustle and when we started, our hustle was average to poor. It didn’t help that we looked like babies (no longer such a problem) and in retrospect, presenting yourself with humility is only a good idea once you have a folio of built work that speaks for itself. We now find it much easier to present ourselves with confidence (particularly Jamie who peacocks into every meeting). A few of our friends had swagger earlier in their careers, letting it be known that if they’re given the opportunity to design something, then they’ll do a great job. This is a winning attitude and the designs that they have produced justifies it.
As you may have guessed by now, the bar on Carlisle Street never materialised. As disappointing as that was, it was an enormously fun and interesting experience throughout the process and it did provide us with a platform to commence our studio. What we also now realise is that if it had been built, it
probably would not have accelerated the progress of our practice to the extent we imagined. With a few exceptions, credibility and range has to be earned and demonstrated over a longer period and multiple projects.
In 2007, in keeping with our level of experience, we managed to find three other projects with very modest budgets which the clients had confidence that we could deliver; an office fit-out, a residential interior and a bar kiosk. All were built and led to further work through repeat business and referrals. The little kiosk (Beer Deluxe) was a project that we were referred to by a more seasoned architect (a highly recommended source of project leads); the client and builder we were introduced to remain collaborators to this day.
Other practices have different trajectories and our objectively slowburn has ultimately suited us. We are a practice of four, including us two directors. For now, we think that staying small is our aim, allowing us to be selective about what we take on, which is an incredible luxury that we’ve never previously had.
Jo Foong RAIA is a registered architect and director of Foomann Architects. Jo is a certified Passive House Designer and an examiner for the Architects Registration Board of Victoria.
Above: Broadway by Foomann Architects. Photo by Willem-Dirk du Toit.
Write your histories: A conversation with Cruz Garcia, WAI Architecture
Interview by: Adrian Fernandez
WAI Architecture began with a provocation –What About It? This question has scaffolded everything they’ve done since 2008, allowing them to eschew what can be seen as a more traditional form of practice and instead pursue a multidisciplinary structure that encompasses writing, poetry, teaching, video work, rethinking pedagogical structures among standard architecture projects. Through this approach, they have analysed and challenged the profession's complicity in
perpetuating the oppressive structures that have marginalised many peoples and groups.
Today, with the profession learning to navigate the continuing pandemic and a long-overdue reckoning on racial oppression, Cruz Garcia of WAI Architecture discusses, among many things, their origins, dissatisfaction with conventional architecture structures, how they processed and worked through recent events, and how students today can adapt to, and approach such events.
Adrian Fernandez (AF): How did WAI begin?
Cruz Garcia (CG): Nathalie and I met just after graduation in 2008. We started working in Brussels, Belgium. Two weeks after we arrived in Brussels, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, so it was a very strange time and very shocking change from the neoliberal optimism of the late 90s – early 2000s. Working in architecture studios, we were very disappointed with the lack of critical thinking. So, we decided to start working together to try and develop a practice that engages with the questions we found important.
We moved to the Netherlands in 2009, lived in France for a short period, before moving to China for nine years. In China we worked with other architects while also developing our own practice. We were doing competitions, exhibitions and writing, all to try and find ways to develop the positions that were critical to us.
AF: I was looking at the zines that you and Nathalie worked on during the beginning of WAI, and there was this broad question of ‘What About It’ that you were exploring, which allowed you to analyse a wide range of issues and ideas all in one format. Has this initial broad cross-section of work filtered into the current projects of WAI?
CG: WAI, is more than an architecture studio, it’s a philosophy of asking questions. WAI means What About It? That was really present in the beginning, we were looking at architecture and how it presents to us, and how to question that through various forms of media. Then 2020 came, COVID happened, we opened Loudreaders, then the protests for George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, and we realised that there was a lack of published work in architecture that allowed us to address all this in a plain and simple way. We were looking at these architecture theory books and none of them talked about race, and there was a complete lack of care for the issues that were actually important to everybody. Because of this, we felt like we needed to do something, which became the Anti-Racist Education Manual, so if students wanted to question their faculty, they had a resource to look at.
We know that WAI is in a position that gives us privilege and power, and we tried to use it. Once we published it, it started appearing on Instagram and Twitter, and then syllabi, so it became a tool; however imperfect it may be. Before that, we published the Anti-Racist Architecture Manifesto, which was the first statement that we made, and what was really interesting is that it was being published beyond
architectural media. In Puerto Rico, it was published in a left-wing newspaper, and talked about in podcasts and shows. That was the intended effect, not just a disciplinary tool, but rather that architecture is oppressing us, and Black Lives Matter is about architecture, the architecture of the city, prisons, and policing. We had a chance to be with activists, who would say they know nothing about architecture, and that’s not true. All their arguments are about architecture, and the fact that we think we are talking about different things, that’s a problem.
AF: I want to mention a quote I read last year. In 1968, Whitney Young Jr gave a speech to the American Institute of Architects stating, “You are not a profession that has distinguished itself by your social and civic contributions to the cause of civil rights … you are most distinguished by your thunderous silence and complete irrelevance.” 53 years after this speech, do you think the profession has done enough to assuage this sentiment?
CG: As a profession, totally. In the Manual of Anti-Racist Education, we made this chronological map which takes Charles Jencks’ Evolutionary Trees of Architecture and centred it around anti-black regimes. Australia with the White Australia Policy, South Africa with Apartheid and Jim Crow in the United States. Just looking at those three, it covers nearly a century of the last 120 years. And that’s scary, because all the architecture institutions were created during these periods, and it tells you that we were never part of those discussions, they were not only made in spite of us not being there, but against us.
They were practising Jim Crow architects, Apartheid architects, White Australia architects, and this map makes it evident. You can see when these institutions were created, and place them in this timeline, so rather than making this invisible, like Jencks did, we centre it, we make it evident, and it shows, of course they don’t care, they are white supremacist institutions, and you can go to every single country and see this legacy. So I completely agree, it is a white supremacist, hetero-patriarchal discipline. That’s why there's so much resistance, because there is so much silence, so much complicity.
AF: How have these projects changed the way you approach your projects and teaching practices?
CG: All the projects influence, but they are also a reflection of all the practices, the practice of teaching, of relating to each other. The Manual in particular, it creates a guideline that allows you to intersect what you are teaching in a very particular way. If we take the spiral diagram which has antiracism, anti-ableism, trans-feminism, anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, ecological justice, it makes this visible, and is a good working tool to intersect everything we do through this lens. You cannot be anti-racist if you’re not trans-feminist, if you’re not anti-ableist. There are all these things that have been oppressing us, and people have been left out of the conversation. It doesn’t mean we are solving everything, but we are conscious that everything we are teaching, every project, everything is being intersected through that spiral.
AF: One final question, thinking about students and the future of the profession, particularly students
who graduated last year and graduating this year into a crisis, both the immediate aftermath of a global pandemic, but also a reckoning on race, gender and structural societal inequalities. Considering you graduated into a similar situation, that of the Global Financial Crisis, what advice would you give students?
CG: They will have to write their own history. History for us is very important. When we graduated in 2008, it was the 40th anniversary of 1968, so you find your parallels, be it the situationists, or the Black Panthers, and that you’re not alone in history. I feel like the generation now, on one hand, has it tough, but without making it too romantic, they also have a chance to be connected, to know what's going on everywhere, to stand in solidarity and be informed. That is really empowering, so how can they use that? If they understand Black Lives Matter, and ecological cross-pollination and taking care of each other during a pandemic (and after), what type of humans will be coming out of this crisis? That is really interesting, and has a lot of possibilities. Solidarity is fundamental, and how they challenge power and the status quo without becoming part of it. On one hand these are big challenges, but on the other, extreme opportunities.
Adrian Fernandez is an architectural worker whose interests lie in interrogating the many divides and biases that lie within the profession, through speculative projects and writing. He has written pieces for Gertrude Contemporary, Caliper Journal, Inflection Journal, PLAT Journal and for a zine.
How to get a job
Facilitated by: Thomas Huntingford
Early career professionals are often guided by a practice’s development guidelines. Many help by pairing graduates with an experienced graduate, registered architect, or even an architect who has achieved the highest levels of success in our industry. It becomes apparent that the practice of architecture is very different to studying architecture.
Amelia Borg RAIA
As we emerge from lockdowns and border closures in 2022 with a sprint towards increasing housing supply and delivering new civic projects, the industry feels extraordinarily busy. With this increased activity comes a demand for hiring new talent. While there may be an abundance of opportunities arising, it is always a daunting task looking for your first role as a student or graduate – no matter the state of the industry.
The biggest hurdle I hear from graduates looking for a job is that offices are always overlooking them if they have no prior experience. Applying for a position can be especially challenging if you have no experience within an office environment, and even more so if you are competing with other grads who have worked within a practice while they were studying. Gaining experience as a student within an office is a good way to counter this and can be mutually beneficial to both students and studios. However, this is not always practical for students who may have heavy study loads and other obligations.
There are plenty of other ways to focus on what makes you a valuable and attractive candidate. Graduates often have amazing design and visualisation skills, particularly in relation to image making, modelling, and understanding the latest software developments. Embrace and showcase these skills and highlight how they can contribute to the design process within an office.
Another common concern I hear from students or graduates is that they feel as though positions are often filled through existing personal relationships. Having a strong professional network will always assist in opening opportunities. This will be true for your entire career. A good way to strengthen your network is to be active within the architectural community. This may involve attending talks, lectures, events, and workshops, asking questions and being involved! Connecting through online platforms and over social media can be a way to build connections and find practices that might be a good fit for you. Even making strong connections within the environment of university including your lecturers, tutors or any guest critics you may meet will help to build your network.
You will have the most success where there is an alignment of values and outlook on architecture. We love it when we receive applications where there are clear synergies in design approach and thinking. Tailored applications that highlight why you think you would be a good fit are always great to receive and stand out. Demonstrate what you know about the
office, don’t just talk about what you offer, but how this could compliment the interests of the office
For us, it is all about approach, a good attitude, confidence in design and ability to communicate effectively in a team. We realise that students or graduates may take some time learning the ropes of a professional environment, and that is fine as long as they have the right attitude and approach. If an office says no once, it could be a matter of timing. Follow up with them in six months’ time to show you are keen. You could be the person they call next rather than advertising a position.
Kushagra Jhurani
The last year of my architecture masters was online, and that’s how we ended up graduating with no inclass thesis or meeting any of our professors. Indeed, there was a lot to learn while overcoming the stress of being at home. After applying for at least 200 jobs, I realised that during COVID, conventional methods might not work, and that I must reach out to the maximum number of people possible at the same time.
My colleagues and I were the first generation of COVID-hit graduates, and many of us were international students. When we started understanding how networking works, everything came to a pause. And I feel we missed out on building these contacts due to everything shifting online. The best skill to get a job currently is how you market yourself. For starters, what worked for me to get mentors and build up my resume for interviews was keeping my LinkedIn updated, getting certificates for learning or training in particular software, sending in entries for competitions, reaching out to people, and teaching Rhino with other software online.
I want to mention that you should select practices, not by their name but their people and work culture; you do not want to be stuck in your dream job and then not be able to follow your dreams. Know what you are good at and own that skill, even if you only know one software, be the best at it. Do not be shy about reaching out to your teachers, mentors, architects, and ask them to mentor you. There is no harm in networking on multiple occasions, though there is a fine line in communication that can often be misunderstood as nagging. You will always receive a response if you showcase your will and drive.
I have been lucky to have great mentors, guides, and teachers throughout my journey. But as I mentioned before, conventional methods were not working for me; lockdown made architecture offices
close shop, and door knocking was not the best idea during COVID. So, using my girlfriend’s advice and my architectural thinking, I decided to advertise myself on the major railway stations to reach out to maximum people. And I did it for weeks, with other methods and jobs already mentioned, so I wouldn’t say it was easy. It is tough to let your guard down and let people see through you. Eventually, it worked out for me, as someone found me at the right place at the right time, recognised my skills and honesty, which landed me a job as a Graduate of Architecture at Metro Trains Melbourne. Lastly, do not lose hope; better things are coming your way.
Peter Elliott LFRAIA
Peter Elliott Architecture + Urban Design
As a practice we have always employed architecture students, hosted international exchange students and work-experience placements. We enjoy having students and recent graduates in the office as they bring new energy and remind us of the importance of connecting the generations. In my own case I worked part time with two architecture practices as a student before starting my own practice upon graduation. I found the experience invaluable. For those who want to practice architecture it is critical to start to gather skills and experience as early as possible in parallel with studying. This is the best pathway to a job. Gathering experience as a student can take many forms beyond just working in an architect’s office. Some of the standout students that have come to us over the years have not necessarily worked in an office before, but had other life skills.
When it comes to developing skills I would encourage students to get involved and volunteer in as many ways as possible. If you can’t get a placement in a practice, then arrange to visit architect’s offices, building sites or into a factory where buildings are
made. Join a committee, or share a studio space with other colleagues. Try and get experience in a practice as a gap year between bachelor and masters degree. When I was studying in the late 1960s it was mandatory to take a year off after three years to gain experience. Students typically come with great graphic skills, which is handy, but those with good CAD and some building knowledge are most likely to succeed in the job market. Another avenue to broadening experience is to attend events and talks that happen around the town. Parlour, Process, Loop, MPavilion, Melbourne Design Week are all great ways to meet and converse with others across generations.
When it comes to considering which architecture practices you might want to work for there are obvious matters for consideration. Most students will have hero firms they admire for the quality of their architecture, the practice culture, or the personalities involved. That is a great starting point, but my advice typically is to take whatever job you can to begin with and don’t worry if it isn’t your first preference. There are always too many graduates for too few jobs so any opportunity should be embraced to get the magical two to five years post-graduation experience that is so sought after. Then you can focus on the direction you want your career to go in. There are things learnt in large practice you will not get in smaller studios and vice versa.
When it comes to networking, there will be many views about how best to go about it. I struggled with the concept as a young graduate. I think a more positive approach is to work hard at establishing good relationships and seeking out good mentors. In our practice we typically take on new students and staff by word-of-mouth recommendations. Sophia and Kate, our current Monash students, both recommend forming good relationships with your tutors who are often practising architects and full of ideas, tips and tricks.
Graduating from architecture
Facilitated by: Daniel Moore
The Emerging Architects and Graduates Network asked three practising architects about graduating from architecture and the current state of the early career architect in the profession.
Sarah Hurst RAIA
Graduating from architecture in 2009, the world was experiencing a global financial crisis, and with no experience or professional references, the challenges of finding my first job became alarmingly clear. Having studied in Tasmania and pursuing a relocation, I flew to Melbourne for any interview that remotely resembled a foot in the architecture-world door. Heritage consulting, statutory planning, even a role with the Victorian Chapter of the Australian Institute of Architects. Not to mention all the architecture practices I contacted that didn't reply. Having made endless attempts, my hunt turned from excitement and enthusiasm into a desperate trigger gun approach of just trying to get a job. I started leapfrogging from one interview to the next as practices began recommending new avenues and places for me to try.
After months of trying, one referral sent me to the door of Fender Katsalidis (FK) – a practice I'd been shying away from through sheer intimidation and self-doubt. But surprisingly, one Friday morning, I was offered a job to start the following Monday. I flew back to Tasmania, worked my last retail shift, and was back on a plane to walk into my new job first thing Monday morning.
In my first years working in architecture, a yearning for a different path surfaced. I was interested in following a more specialised career path in Interior Architecture. So after four years of working for the only practice that had given me a shot, I made the hard decision to leave in an attempt at selfreinvention in another sector. I found a new role with Mim Design – a practice I'd been in awe of – and boldly sent myself in its direction.
After 12 months of settling into my new role, FK asked if I would consider a return. Loyalty and affection lured me back, but this time I was returning in a different capacity. I was sure about pursuing interior architecture, and I hoped my relationships with FK would help me navigate a new role.
Returning to practice presented new and unique challenges. I was asking FK to see my value in a different area from what they'd known before. In truth, my employer was giving me a second go, but from my perspective, there was a feeling that it was my first go, just the second round of it.
Challenges come in re-inventing your role. There are interpersonal challenges in understanding and articulating what you want your position to be, and then further challenges come in having this implemented with your employer. A level of persistence and dedication is required, and in some cases, it can take a considerable amount of time to
realise your vision. But an industry mentor recently suggested that the opportunities and benefits in role redefinition can be overwhelmingly rewarding, compared with seeking out a new role with an entirely new practice. Leaning on your investment in professional relationships can be an excellent way to achieve your career goals.
Kimberley K. Hui
After graduation, I moved to Hong Kong to begin 2019 as a project coordinator of a design foundation specialising in public installations. Unfortunately, my excitement for what should've been my dream job rapidly declined as I realised that I wanted to become an architect. The romance of an overseas experience also faded when the work culture proved to be too cut-throat for me.
Four months after my initial move, I found myself flying back to Australia with a growing level of uncertainty. Having heard tutors boast about their international experience, I thought that the four months of late nights, industry networking, and intense teamwork would indeed wow future employers. I was wrong. As much as my experience appeared impressive, I severely lacked practical experience, and the practices I wanted to work for didn't have the resources to train me.
Three months into my job search, I turned to other avenues to demonstrate my dedication to the field. I revived my architecture blog, my podcast and returned to tutoring. I also went back to my previous retail job to learn about branding and achieve financial independence. The routine of teaching, writing, and podcasting about architecture kept me motivated to send out cover letters and sign up for any architecture-related opportunities.
Through desperation and determination, I eventually found myself CADing house plans with other hopeful graduates for Architects Assist and reviewing for architectural journals. Despite being commended for extending myself beyond architecture, I still struggled to accept the compliments because it wasn't the outcome I had hoped for after graduation. I wanted these to be an embellishment alongside becoming an architect.
By the end of 2020, with waning confidence, I decided that if I were unsuccessful by mid-2021, I would quit architecture and become an art teacher. Surprisingly, the ultimatum ignited a new found sense of peace in applying for jobs without exerting pressure on myself. Soon enough, one of the practices I had previously applied to offered me a virtual interview.
Excited but nervous, my peers armed me with words of affirmation, and some glitter eyeliner helped give me confidence before the conversation with the interviewers. They called an hour after the meeting, I thought to turn me down, but they offered me the job instead.
Though I didn't see it, the time I spent between leaving university and getting the interview helped craft my identity in the architecture profession. If I had never gone to Hong Kong, I might not have organised my plans well enough to start a podcast (and be shortlisted with Jina for the Bates Smart Award for Architecture in Media). If I didn't teach, I could've struggled when volunteering online. If I didn't keep a blog, I don't think I could write freelance confidently.
Job hunting is emotionally toiling and challenging, and there is an expectation to work in the field you've studied. It's disheartening when you don't land it on your first try. It may take numerous detours, rejections, and adversity to get there. But it'll lead you to somewhere you didn't know you needed.
Gumji Kang RAIA
In 2012, I graduated with my bachelor's degree majoring in architecture from the University of Melbourne. Hopeful of gaining some experience in architectural practices before starting my master's degree, I sent out hundreds of resumes. I received a handful of replies with encouraging notes, but unfortunately, they were all polite declines. Getting a student position in an architecture practice is rare now, but this does not determine your pathway when you can make the most of postgraduate studies and graduate work experience.
When I commenced my master's without any practice experience, I focused on building my practical skills, learning about technical detailing and honing my visual communication skills. During this time, I had an opportunity to join a design studio with NH Architecture, with Hamish Lyon and Dean Boothroyd as my tutors, infinitely influencing my approach and attitude towards architecture. Design studios are where you experiment, test design processes, and
learn more about architectural typologies beyond what you may be exposed to already. Every design studio expanded and challenged my knowledge and skills in dealing with various scales and typologies and concreted my interest in public architecture.
University presents a fantastic range of design processes taught by talented educators and is the perfect time to test and fail so that you can learn. You can seek help with detailing from a senior architect or discuss your career with a studio leader. Learning to connect with mentors is a necessary part of early career architecture. It's possible to find out how your mentors dealt with the challenges they faced while studying, which you might be facing now.
If you don't necessarily agree with or understand the process taught in the current design studio you're part of at university, that’s ok. You try another one. Many practices have established design methodologies and processes to navigate the complex nature of the profession. For younger architects, these processes are not immediately apparent. Still, we must be immersed in these wherever we can and learn how it can guide a project forward, no matter how long it takes.
Not long after I was registered, I worked as an in-house consultant for the state government to learn more about the framework for larger precinct projects. I was interested in how complex public projects were initiated, developed and eventually presented to the public. It was not a conventional studio environment, but it also meant that I had numerous occasions to sit on the other side, reviewing practices' work. I took this time to learn how other architects communicate their ideas and better understand the client-architect relationship in a commercial environment, learning about architecture away from conventional practice.
During this period of so many unknowns, it is vital to strengthen your trust in yourself and build your skillset day by day. It is easy to lose sight during the long journey in architecture, but there will be many more opportunities. Whether it’s your tutors, supervisors, senior architects, team leaders, project consultants, or industry mentors, there are many networks to collectively support a career in architecture.
Emerging Architect Prize
Interview by: Daniel Moore
Jacqui Alexander is a co-director of Alexander & Sheridan Architecture and a senior lecturer at Monash University, where she is also a PhD candidate. She studied a Masters of Architecture at RMIT and worked at Kerstin Thompson Architects for six years on projects including House at Hanging Rock, which Jacqui worked on from start to finish, as well as Aesop shops and the Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA). During that time Jacqui was also teaching a history and design studio at Monash University
early on when the Monash architecture course was established. She has also had a parallel career in writing and publishing, starting POSTMagazine as a student and working at MonumentMagazine. In 2021, Jacqui and Ben Sheridan were the Victorian recipients of the Emerging Architect Prize. With a diverse CV of research, publications, exhibitions, and built work, it’s difficult to understand how much Jacqui has achieved in the time that she has been emerging in the architecture profession.
Above: Supershared
Photo by Tobias Titz
Daniel Moore (DM):
The Emerging Architect Prize is a great initiative. How do you feel about the concept of "emerging" in architecture? Some people might look at the recipients of the prize, see that they've been in the profession for 10 plus years and think, haven't they already emerged?
Jacqui Alexander (JA):
Yeah, it's quite funny. I've been joking with some colleagues about what constitutes "emerging". I mean, it's such a slow burning industry. There's the glacial speed of architectural production and waiting for things to be built and I guess that's the thing… it's not really something that's easy to do on the side. So, if you're doing other roles and other bits and pieces, it takes a really long time to establish yourself. I think having received that award is nice, because it gives us confidence that the institute is happy to recognize different kinds of practices and contributions as well, because we're not purely an architecture practice in the traditional sense. I bring my architectural research to the practice and we're trying to steer the practice in a direction that does design research as well as architectural projects. So, it's a real honour to be recognized by the institute as a different kind of collaborative model.
DM: You were also involved with EmAGN a few years ago and you were sitting at the table with other people who had quite a lot of experience under their belt. Do you think there's a benefit to being in the EmAGN committee when you are a fresh grad or before you're registered, to sit down with people who have started their own young practices?
JA: Definitely, I remember that time vividly. I was co-chairing EmAGN VIC with Tom Morgan, who also works at Monash - he's now the program director for the Bachelor of Architecture. Thom McKenzie of Winwood McKenzie was on the board, and he received the Emerging Architect Prize in 2020. Stuart Harrison, Simon Knott and Michael Roper were on the committee as well. So, there were lots of us at different stages of our career and it was a really valuable time. It gave me so many insights into the world of practice, the challenges of starting out and different approaches. A lot of those people weren't just practising architecture in the sense of just making buildings, but they were involved in other projects too, for example Stuart and Simon ran TheArchitects show on RRR, and many members of the committee were really dedicated to creating a culture around
architecture at the time, which was super inspiring to me and I think has been a legacy of that period.
DM: What did you take away from that time when you thought about the trajectory of your own career?
JA: I had a new insight into the generosity of the architecture community, especially in Melbourne. There's also a generous culture in other states, but there was less going on, and Melbourne was very vibrant at the time. There was a real sense of culturebuilding within the architecture industry, but also a genuine attempt to reach out to wider audiences and position architecture’s role and value in broader society. That was something that I was really interested in, and something that Tom, Ben and the other editors of POSTMagazine were always pursuing through that project, so it was affirming in that way. But I also learned at that time that architecture is not just about making buildings. It doesn't have to just be about making buildings. Architecture is a profession where all sorts of activities are part of the culture, whether it's education, writing, advocacy, public lectures, or broadcasting, for me: it's all architecture.
DM: You've also been able to do exhibitions almost as a form of prototyping, which must be so informative for your built projects.
JA: Definitely. I think one of the threads of our practice has come through my specialised area of research, which is looking at how new forms of platform technology and digital media are transforming architecture. I'm interested in exploring how these sorts of technologies, spatial technologies, like GPS and smartphone technologies can start to have an innovative role within architecture. For example, there's a project that I designed at the RMIT Design Hub a few years ago called Supershared in collaboration with Timothy Moore from Sibling where I was looking at the possibility of working with spacesharing platforms to transform the city. We purposebuilt this little loft, which was quite a tiny little space within the Occupied exhibition, curated by David Neustein, Grace Mortlock and Fleur Watson. We listed this loft on a number of different sharing economy platforms at the same time, and then allowed people to book into the space and live and work in it for the duration of the exhibition, to create an unpredictable element to the show. But because the space had been booked on a whole variety of platforms, it created a situation where different groups of people arrived at the loft at the same time to perform different kinds
of activities, and there was this real intensification of the space that occurred through that process. It suggested that platforms can be used as a tool to rethink program, create hybridity and activate space in new kinds of ways.
DM: It sounds like there are interesting applications for social sustainability through the benefits of chance encounters.
JA: Yeah, those sorts of things. I can also see it could be a really useful tool in suburbs or regions that might need rejuvenation or could benefit from more foot traffic or greater densities. We can work with the time contingencies of these platforms to be able to use them short-term to stimulate activity and then switch them off again.
DM: It's great that you have the evidence to back up how well it works. There are also quite a few young practices who are kick starting their own aspirational projects. Have you started to develop your research projects into anything broader where you might put out an EOI or something to ask if there are any clients who'd like to back one of your concepts?
JA: We have been using speculative design as a vehicle to start those conversations. I think it's a really important point that you bring up because going back 10 or 15 years, there was a lot of interest in Melbourne during the GFC around unsolicited projects – I remember Rory Hyde talking about some of those potentials. I think that's one of the great benefits of the research side of our practice, because when you're practicing as an architect and you're running your own business, you're beholden to client commissions coming through the door, but through research projects you can undertake design work in a slightly different way that doesn't rely on clients’ ideas and you are at arm’s length from those commercial imperatives. You can pursue speculative ideas that are a bit more ‘blue sky’ and experimental.
DM: So, you can push the boundaries of
design in your research projects without needing to encourage a client to allow you to try something innovative?
JA: That's totally right. For me anyway, that research aspect really sort of starts to open up possibilities for a sort of civic practice and the idea that architecture doesn't have to be beholden to the market all the time. So, one of the projects that we've done along those lines is a project called Tenancy does not equal Title, which combines my research interests in alternative housing models, and also Ben's expertise in the design and delivery of multi-residential housing towards a model for decommodifying housing, based on a community land trust approach. So hopefully, that means that we'll be able to start to craft our practice in that kind of direction.
DM: You've had such a unique career in architecture so far and there are some really exciting projects still to come. Now that you're the Victorian Emerging Architect Prize recipient you can surely qualify as emerged now. What does winning the prize mean for you and your practice moving forward?
JA: The fact that we're an unconventional practice in the sense that I'm an academic practitioner, Ben's an architect, and we're stitching those approaches together has been a bit of an experiment. There are architects around the world operating semispeculative practices with one foot in academia and the other in practice. But here in Melbourne there are far fewer. So, receiving this award is a really lovely validation for us that we're moving in a good direction and that there's interest in our work. We're very honored and very happy to be the first collaboration to have received the award and hopefully when COVID is under control we can have an opportunity to share some more of the work that we are doing with the architecture community.
Generation Exchange
Words by: Sean Godsell
“Not to know what has transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge” – Cicero
Earlier this year, and for the first time in my practice, we determined a building contract. The project was a small residential addition – we still do them occasionally – and the client was a committed fan of the office. The builder struggled through COVID lockdowns but missed practical completion by a country mile. All the usual warning signs had been there months earlier, so we weren’t really surprised when work on site eventually ground to a halt.
We did all we could to help the builder over the line but to no avail. In the end, though still trading, he couldn’t get his sub-contractors to finish the job. My associate Hayley Franklin and I discussed what to do.
We came to the (by then inevitable) conclusion that the contract must be determined and a new builder appointed. More importantly we agreed that our client should appoint a solicitor and that they should terminate on our client’s behalf.
Other issues – defects, warranties and warranty insurance, finding a new builder, and so on were debated at length. Practice notes were read.
Eventually we had a game plan to take back to our client. Not long after agreeing on our strategy we ran into Peter Elliott in the city. Before COVID we would occasionally see Peter and the writer Joe Rollo at the Melbourne Wine Room for a pre-work coffee, interrupting their daily ritual to discuss tomato growing, the demise of the Carlton Football Club and other important things.
When we mentioned our problem project and the reluctant decision to terminate, Peter said immediately, ‘you should have your client appoint a solicitor and get them to handle the termination.’ We both smiled and agreed. Afterwards we discussed how reassuring it was to have such an experienced and eminent practitioner come to the same conclusion that we had. Peter’s five decades of exceptional practice was acknowledged a few years ago with the Australian Institute of Architects Gold Medal.
That chance encounter and brief conversation helped underline our position. The contract was mutually terminated, a new builder appointed, and our client loves her new house.
Generation Exchange is a mentoring program that connects our most senior architects with our emerging practitioners in an informal forum. In its own way Generation Exchange attempts to recreate casual encounters like the one I’ve just described. Our senior practitioners have won and lost a thousand battles. They survive not just to tell their tales but to offer reassurance and sustenance to their successors. Their stories and counsel are invaluable, and their experience has been gained over decades of dedication to our profession.
Each Generation Exchange session is loosely based around issues encountered in the day-to-day of practice – clients, builders, disputes, construction, running an office, mental health, equity and so on. Our first session entitled ‘Don’t Panic’ was held in July and five pre-eminent Victorian practitioners – Greg Burgess, Maggie Edmond, Ann Keddie, Max May and Peter Sanders – became our inaugural panel of wise elders, sharing their wealth of knowledge and
experience in practice with a (socially distanced) room of young architects, first in a panel discussion and then informally, over coffee and around conducively small tables, young practitioners had the chance to chat with their senior colleagues.
At the end of An American Architecture Frank Lloyd Wright offers advice to the young architect: “Build your first buildings as far away from where you live as possible!” The reality of practice can be confronting.
What Wright was really saying is that it takes decades, not days, to learn how to produce architecture. Early in our careers it is simply a fact that our ideas and aspirations are running well ahead of our ability to deliver them.
Navigating a way through this period can be daunting and the reassurance that there is an older generation of architects available to contribute their wisdom and knowledge to younger practitioners is welcome. As well as nurturing the profession, our service to, and role in the community is bolstered by the consolidated combination of youth and experience and our profession is more collegial and better for it.
Our agenda with Generation Exchange is to build a pool of senior architects drawn from diverse backgrounds, still practising or recently retired, who are ready, willing and able to share their experience with their younger colleagues.
In the rapid exchange of information that is now a daily reality of contemporary practice there seems to be little time for wisdom. Speed rules. Communication is dynamic. Considered correspondence remains an obligation of our profession yet the hourly deluge of emails that we all deal with in practice is anathema to this fundamentally important component of our practising modality.
It was fascinating to hear how much practice has changed in this respect since our panelists first began their working lives as far back as the 1960s. Carbon copies, typewriters and landlines were the order of the day back then. Now we Zoom. In the inaugural Generation Exchange we were privileged to hear stories from each of our panelists. The theme Don’t Panic was chosen because we have all had those moments in practice – ‘did I forget to?’ ‘Should I have?’ ‘I don’t know the answer to’ and so on and it was entertaining and reassuring for young practitioners to know that pretty much everything they are encountering at the start of their practising lives has been seen and dealt with before.
Ann Keddie and Maggie Edmond spoke of their roles as women in the profession. We learned that Pete Sanders had worked as a young architect in Le Corbusier’s office in Chandigarh and (Pritzker Prize
Above:
BH Bridge
Peter Elliott Architecture
Photo by Sean McPhillips
winner) BV Doshi allowed Pete to sleep on the floor of his studio. Max May began life as an engineering student and first wanted to be a civil engineer, and former Hawthorn footballer and Australian Institute of Architects Gold Medalist Greg Burgess spoke beautifully about the power of architecture and its capacity to touch the human spirit.
My life in architecture began early. My father David was a well-known Melbourne practitioner and I spent a fair chunk of my childhood on building sites and in his drawing office. A couple of months after I graduated from the University of Melbourne, dad was diagnosed with cancer and he died about twelve months after that, at the relatively young age of 56. I helped out on a few projects with him during that period when his health was failing. His wealth of knowledge was untold and his drawing skill, sublime. I think I probably drove him crazy with questions. ‘Hey, um, dad?’ ‘Hey, um, yeah’ he would reply. After he died, I had to wrap up a couple of his projects – minor in hindsight but at the time
quite terrifying – a dispute over the standard of paint finish in a small factory project, contract variations on a residential job, that sort of thing. My safety net was gone, and I realised how little I knew and how much there was to learn. There were so many more questions I wanted to ask.
If Generation Exchange provides support to our young practitioners, it aspires to do so in a parental way. Equally important, it is an opportunity to acknowledge and respect the voices of our most senior practitioners – to hear and learn from their stories and to thank them for nurturing and protecting our profession.
Sean Godsell FRAIA is one of Australia's most renowned architects. From his studio now based in Fitzroy, he has produced projects such as Vatican Chapel, Peninsula House, and the RMIT Design Hub, which continue to be some of our country's most influential and referenced modern projects.
Top left: Don’t Panic with Sean Godsell, Gregory Burgess, Maggie Edmond, Ann Keddie, Max May and Peter Sanders. Photo: Daniel Moore.
Top right: Maggie Edmond, Fairfield Ampthitheatre 1985. Photo: Andrew Middleton
Bottom left: Gregory Burgess NIKERI Deakin University 2013. Photo: John Gollings
Bottom right: Rattle House by Max May. Photo: David Parker.
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