Architect Victoria / Edition 3 / 2022

Australian Institute of Architects Victorian Chapter Level 1, 41 Exhibition Street Melbourne, VIC 3000

ABN 72 000 023 012

The 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.

Design for all life

32 Guest editorial

Stanislav Roudavski 38

Who sees the rainforest? Matthew Darmour-Paul, Sophie Canaris and Danielle Celermajer 44 Sharing cities with nature, by design Kylie Soanes 48

Designing custom homes for hollow-dwelling animals Dan Parker 52

Animal-aided design Wolfgang W Weisser and Thomas E Hauck 56 Creating an underwater garden

Foreword

02 Victorian Chapter State Manager Daniel Moore

03 Victorian Chapter President David Wagner

Architecture

04 Arthur by Oscar Sainsbury Architects

Nikita Bhopti 10 Balfe Park Lane by Kerstin Thompson Architects Phillip Pender

Katherine A Dafforn, Laura Airoldi, Melanie Bishop, Tim Glasby, Alex Goad, Emma Johnston Aria Lee, Mariana Mayer-Pinto, Emily Ravenscraft, Annie Tennant and Maria Vozzo 60 Homes as evolutionary gardens Rob Dunn 63

Probiotic architecture Richard Beckett 66

Profile

76 Architect at Home Benjamin Shields 80 Office of the Victorian Government Architect Sophie Patitsas Architecture  and planning 82 Guest editorial Loren Adams 85 It's time to unsettle our settler-colonial disciplines Matt Novacevski 89 Skin deep Helen Rix Runting

94 Apartment design guidelines as architecture

Allan Burrows and Arjuna Benson 100 What if poets, philosophers, and storytellers wrote our building and planning regulations?

Loren Adams 102 Outerspatial: working through and with technologies that encircle us Charity Edwards 106 The good, the bad, and the ugly Frank Lloyd Wrong of Ugly Melbourne Houses and Yuchen Gao and Yiling Shen of F*** Marry Kill 110 Ronald McDonald’s arts district Anthony Carfello 113 What is worth keeping, and who decides?

18

La Mama Theatre Rebuild by Meg White with Cottee Parker Architects Phillip Pender 26 Autumn House by Studio Bright Nikita Bhopti

Caring as Country Bawaka Country, Laklak Burarrwanga, Ritjilili Ganambarr, Merrkiyawuy GanambarrStubbs, Banbapuy Ganambarr, Djawundil Maymuru, Kate Lloyd, Sarah Wright, Lara Daley and Sandie Suchet-Pearson 72

Violent architectures

Paula Arcari, Fiona Probyn-Rapsey and Hayley Singer

Loren Adams, Caleb Lee, Felicity Watson, Kerstin Thompson, Aimee Howard, Rebecca Roberts, James Lesh, Cristina Garduño Freeman, Michael McMahon and Jack Isles 118 Beyond Heritage Michael McMahon and Jack Isles

Architects consider all manner of animalia in the habitats they create. Whether it's the reduction of glass to prevent bird strikes, external planting to support insects and amphibians, or edible landscaping at street and roof level, these features can also increase a building's energy efficiency, improve indoor environment quality, and foster community engagement. In addition, planning regulations aim to enhance the interface between our buildings and raise the minimum standards within our densifying urban environment. Architects and allied professionals are constantly working to produce better built outcomes beyond what has come before, which is proven yearly in the Australian Institute of Architects awards program. Many practices innovate well beyond regulatory requirements or their client's brief, and the profession sets the highest standard for building design in the construction industry through the continued delivery of excellently performing buildings.

It's also fascinating to read in this edition of AV how built environment professionals critically assess the value of various design initiatives. Such as the democratisation of the design process, extending architecture processes beyond the barriers of tradition, and the importance of satire, where some editorial mediums allow criticism of architectural style without being professionally callous.

Whatever the medium or scale, this edition’s themes reflect the appreciation of our neighbours. Institute members understand and value respect, which is why our code of conduct is so important. It not only shows Institute members want to support the community, but they want to support their fellow members as well.

Managing editor Emma Adams

Guest editors

Stanislav Roudavski Loren Adams RAIA Grad.

Editorial committee

James Staughton FRAIA (Chair) Elizabeth Campbell RAIA

Laura Held FRAIA

Thomas Huntingford

Yvonne Meng RAIA

John Mercuri RAIA

Justin Noxon RAIA

Associate contributors

Nikita Bhopti RAIA

Elizabeth Campbell RAIA Phillip Pender RAIA Grad.

On the cover

Arthur by Oscar Sainsbury Architects

Photographer: Rory Gardiner

Creative direction Annie Luo

Publisher Australian Institute of Architects Victorian Chapter 41 Exhibition Street Melbourne, Victoria 3000 Printing Printgraphics

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Designing for all, and planning, have implications across all scales. On a micro scale, we all want buildings that benefit us physically and mentally, and on the macro, a built environment in harmony with our surroundings.

Victorian State Manager Daniel Moore RAIA

Set among blackened tapering steel columns supporting a magnificent tracery of stained glass, our 2022 Gold Medallist Sean Godsell presented an eloquent AS Hook address to his home town crowd in the Great Hall of our national gallery. The presentation was a journey through space and sculpture, sharpened by a technical appreciation of material and construction detailing that was a joy to experience. Sean’s dedication and contribution to the art and discipline of architecture and his respect for our environment, both built and natural, is inspiring and reminds us that we need to continually strive to communicate the important role architecture has in our community.

The last three months have seen the profession, at least the regulation of the profession thrown to the wolves, with a state government determined to disempower the Architects Registration Board of Victoria (ARBV) from being able to properly regulate architectural services and provide the consumer protection it is charged with providing. In early July we found significant changes to the composition of the ARBV proposed within a lengthy omnibus of legislation called the Building, Planning, Heritage Legislation Amendment (Administration and other matters) Bill 2022. The legislation most notably removed the mandatory requirement for architects to be on the board and assigned the appointment of the chairperson and deputy chairperson to the purview of the minister, rather than being elected by the board itself. These provisions would have significantly reduced the standing of the profession, not to mention the impact it would have had on the examination of candidates for registration and the accreditation process of architectural education. The intent was bewildering and the nonconsultative process quite without transparency. A significant campaign run by the Australian Institute of Architects together with the Association of Consulting Architects has resulted in the legislation lapsing for this parliament. My thanks to all the members who made the argument to their local representatives, not just about the inappropriateness of this legislation but also about the real contribution architecture makes to the living standards that our community enjoys. My thanks also to the politicians, both crossbench and in opposition, who did recognise the wrongful nature of this legislation and opposed or who sought to amend.

Victorian Chapter President David Wagner FRAIA

September also saw positive regulation reform with the national adoption of NatHERS 7 stars energy efficiency for all new residential buildings, both individual and multiple. New Livability Standards were also adopted to enable housing to be more physically accessible to all of us, in particular those with physical ailments. We should recognise the great work that our members specialising in these areas have contributed to make these standards part of the upcoming 2022 National Construction Code. As these works have demonstrated, regulation can raise the standards of our built environment. It is my intention to provide CPD opportunities in these areas for our members, in particular in the pursuit of a sustainable environment which figures as one of our most urgent issues. Our profession is demanding, but we should be reassured that we make an incredible difference to peoples’ lives. As a young aspiring student, Sean Godsell recalled asking his architect father, “what is the most important characteristic to be a successful architect?” To which the response was “stamina”. It is a characteristic I see in abundance across our profession as we continue to produce and promote high-quality work despite often challenging circumstances, and it is important that as a profession we encourage and support each other in this pursuit.

Arthur Oscar Sainsbury Architects

Words by Nikita Bhopti

A central deck is not only Oscar Sainsbury Architects' solution to the site’s flooding overlay, but a core part of their resulting design. Oscar’s aspirations for his family home result in a tailored renovation that leans into the use of timber and embraces passive solar ambitions.

Planted within a pocket of residential fabric in Fairfield is Arthur, Oscar Sainsbury Architects’ tactical renovation to an existing Federation home. Sitting long across it’s sloped block, the semiattached brick house is opened up to embrace the nature of its site. A welcome addition places itself within the garden, sitting comfortably among two large peppercorn trees. United through a central deck, the resulting home is both a crafted response to existing controls, and an invitation for the garden to reach into the family’s daily life internally.

The addition appears to be gently resting on a series of in-situ concrete steps, almost as if it has just landed in its riverside locale. Located near the Yarra River, much of the renovation was formed around a flood overlay. When asked how they navigated this challenge, practice director, Oscar Sainsbury shared how they used a central deck as a design solution. The deck became a bridging tool, allowing the existing home and the elevated addition to share the same floor levels. While tying both areas together, this north-facing deck also gifts the home two separate pockets of outdoor spaces. Oscar saw an “opportunity

Left: The central deck is not only Oscar Sainsbury Architects' solution to the site’s flooding overlay, but a core part of their resulting design.

Photography by Rory Gardiner

for a three-sided building with excellent access to light, cross ventilation and views to the garden”. With this, the deck began to become an integral part of how the living spaces within were carved out.

“Connecting the deck and the kitchen is a long timber bench that replaces the typical internal island bench. With the windows open, meals and drinks can be enjoyed with interactions from both inside and outside.” Oscar shared how their new timber and glass living pavilions open out to the landscape beyond on all three sides, with a “large sliding door adjacent to the dining table receding completely out of sight”. In-situ concrete steps, which double as seating benches, gently guide you down from the timber deck to the garden beyond, while consolidating the natural levels of the site and the existing built forms.

The highly distinguished material palette which is expressed across the complete home is a reflection of Oscar Sainsbury Architects’ very deliberate use of timber. Leaning into his experience working with timber, Oscar was able to deliver this project as an owner-builder. To simplify the build, the addition’s structure was primarily constructed with timber rafters and timber framing, with no steel. All structural elements were deliberately infilled with either glazing, timber cladding, or timber joinery, maintaining a restrained, yet bold material palette. Outside, we see locally sourced Silvertop ash cladding and a timber deck. The “continuity of materials inside and

out reinforce the project as a series of connected internal and external spaces”.

Among a few key considerations for the home was the aspiration to design for passive solar orientation, with no requirement for mechanical cooling. Instead, Oscar looked to “encourage active user participation with ceiling fans, cross ventilation and manually operated shading systems”, to allow his family to control the climate within the home. The “elevated nature of the addition afforded a few opportunities” as well, paired with “the three-sided nature of the addition also making cross ventilation easy”. Below the raised addition, bladder tanks were installed, to allow for rainwater collection.

The careful consideration of what existed on site, and what Oscar Sainsbury Architects chose to add to it exhibits a tactical approach to shaping a family home. Restraints such as a flood overlay and the sloped nature of the site were harnessed, and ultimately, developed solutions that presented the project with a unique series of design opportunities. Carefully preserving the relevant portions of the brick Federation house, we see it open up to a generous addition that unravels gracefully down its sloped site. The central deck, while addressing the flood overlay, also crafts various outdoor spaces, and weaves together the existing and new forms. Oscar sees this as the element that “connects the occupants to the generous garden landscape of the site, and ultimately to the broader environmental context of the Yarra River.

Nikita Bhopti RAIA is a registered architecture working at Sibling Architecture. A lead curator of New Architects Melbourne, Nikita is also engaged with multiple mentoring platforms as both a mentor and mentee. She is a regular contributor to Architect Victoria and TheDesignWriter

Balfe

Park Lane Kerstin Thompson Architects

Photography by Derek Swalwell

Words by Phillip Pender

Considered across the scales of the neighbourhood, building and apartment, Kerstin Thompson Architects’ recently completed Balfe Park Lane is a demonstration of medium-density housing that is contextual, amenable and lasting.

The project lies on a rapidly densifying section of Nicholson Street, where the facades of new developments jostle for attention above non-descript ground floors, unlike the quiet backstreets, light-industrial buildings and various housing types typical of Brunswick East. Balfe Park Lane is an exception that demonstrates a more tactful introduction of density. Kelley Mackay, director of projects at Kerstin Thompson Architects explains that the project was “designed to be an exemplar in medium-density housing, aiming to lift the bar on the quality of apartment living, with mutual benefit between residential development and the surrounding neighbourhood.” This consciousness is evidenced by the quality of Balfe Park Lane’s public realm, communal spaces and dwellings.

The project derives from an overarching precinct structure plan enabling development through the rezoning and consolidation of small, low-rise light-industrial lots. Despite this consolidation, strategies embedded in the precinct structure plan have been captured in the development, which has improved connectivity and permeability while maintaining

Previous page: The building’s flush and proportionate public-facing facades reference the scale, rhythm and materiality of the neighbourhood. Photo by Leo Showell.

a fine grain. A new bluestone laneway established by Moreland Council along the site’s western boundary travels between Balfe Park and the development’s terrace-style apartments, continuing along existing rear lanes toward new retail at East Brunswick Village. With car access limited to a crossover at the development’s northwestern end, a stoop, steps, seats, and porches populate the edge of the park interface. Similarly, Nicholson Street and Balfe Park have been connected via a publicly accessible arcade that cuts through the development, past a hospitality tenancy, a multipurpose communal room, lobbies and shared stairways. The building’s flush and proportionate public-facing facades reference the scale, rhythm and materiality of the neighbourhood, with planters, seats and niches built into their width.

Kerstin Thompson Architects’ response to the challenging L-shaped infill site balances regulatory and yield requirements with the articulation of massing, minimisation of walls on boundaries and maximisation of communal space, light, cross-ventilation and views. Mackay explains that “the scheme relied on challenging the interpretation of and finding the gaps in planning controls. However, it was supported because of the mutual benefits that the alternate interpretation afforded.” The arrangement of four distinct yet interconnected buildings on the site defines the arcade and a courtyard and terrace at the site’s northern end. Each building has a clear sense of address and a limited number of dwellings per floor. Their slimness allows for dual-aspect apartments connected by open stairs and walkways. A rooftop garden extends the communal space offering. Communality and privacy are mediated by thresholds that have been populated with personal belongings.

In contrast to conventional developer-driven housing, each dwelling has been designed for built quality and longevity. The development provides a diversity of dwelling types including nine two-level terraces and a collection of two, three and fourbedroom apartments. Their interiors are efficiently planned, yet retain the spatial looseness required to accommodate varied usage. Moreover, their high compliance with Livable Design Standards ensures the accessibility and adaptability required for residents ageing in place. Brick floors, timber-ceiling linings, and built-in joinery form a hard-wearing yet warm backdrop, accented by textural terracotta tiles and decorative security screens.

Phillip Pender RAIA Grad. BEnvs, MArch is a project officer at CityLab with architectural experience in residential and multiresidential projects.

Above: Brick floors, timber-ceiling linings, and built-in joinery form a hardwearing yet warm backdrop

Balfe Park Lane

Practice team

Kerstin Thompson (Creative lead)

Kelley Mackay (Project director & design architect)

Scott Diener & Martin Allen (Project lead & associate)

Anne-Claire Deville, Sophie Nicholaou, Marwin Sim, Hilary Sleigh, Margot Watson, Keith Little, Tamsin O’Reilly, Darcy Dunn (Project team)

Builder

Aspekt Construction Group

Location

77-83 Nicholson Street, Brunswick East Wurundjeri Woi-Wurrung Country

Consultant/Construction team

du Chateau Chun (Building code consultant)

Fontic (Project manager)

JAZ Building Consultants (Building surveyor)

JAZ Building Consultants (Access consultant)

Marshall Day (Acoustic engineer)

Mordue Engineering (Structural engineer)

NJM Design (Services engineer & ESD)

Openwork (Landscape architects)

Orbe Fire Engineering (Fire engineer)

DH Planning (Planning consultant)

One Mile Grid (Traffic engineer)

Urban Design (SJB planning)

Quantity Surveyor (Slattery)

La Mama Theatre Rebuild Meg White with Cottee Parker Architects

Photography by Glenn Hester

Words by Phillip Pender

Welcoming openness, free expression and processes of change, the project embodies the optimism and goodwill of the community that it has re-homed.

In 1967, the independent theatre La Mama was established in a 19th century ex-printing workshop. In 2018, the iconic brick building and its culturally rich spaces burnt down, damaging over fifty years of place-bound history. Meg White, who has had a 25-year-long involvement with the theatre as a set designer and performer, was selected as the lead architect for reconstruction, with Cottee Parker Architects providing documentation and construction services. Meg White led an inclusive and cathartic design process that drew on workshops and private written responses to define the brief.

Meg reflects that “it was essential to acknowledge the great tragedy of the fire while celebrating and harnessing the incredible opportunity for growth and evolution. The aim was to restore the old building, while greatly enhancing its technical operations, facilities and accessibility, as well as creating additional support spaces for staff, artists and patrons.”

Tasked with capturing the identity and idiosyncrasies of a meaningful cultural space, the La Mama Theatre Rebuild by Meg White with Cottee Parker Architects illustrates how challenges bear opportunity and how constraints prompt creativity.

Below and left: The restored original building has new rehearsal space, a green room, a kitchen and a mezzanine breakout space.

The original building houses a carefully restored theatre with greatly improved technical facilities, a green room, a kitchen and a mezzanine breakout space. A new twin building housing administrative and rehearsal spaces references the gabled form, brickwork, and fenestration of the original. The pair are linked by an external bridge, stairs, lifts and a series of outdoor spaces that form areas for informal or programmed engagement between staff, performers, patrons and the public.

“The theatre is in the everyday, the architecture aims to respect and support the multitude of daily activities of this little village. The design desires to speak to La Mama’s philosophical stance of being open; open to all. Making the theatre accessible to staff, performers and patrons”

Despite the narrow site's heritage and planning constraints, the new scheme balances intimacy and openness. A public forecourt addressing Faraday Street is adorned by a planter bench, native trees and a mural by Gumbaynggirr artist Aretha Brown. Steps roll out from the new building inviting sitting or performance. A sliding gate opens to join the forecourt to a raised central courtyard. Within the characterful courtyard is a small box office kiosk and a heritage-listed water closet partially dismantled to act as an announcing platform.

“La Mama has a long history of artists telling their stories outside of the theatre, in the courtyard, the car park, or even the back lane. Wherever people can come together can become a place of sharing stories it was a very conscious decision from the outset to enhance the opportunities for artists to have non-traditional theatre spaces.”

Rather than using the rebuild as an opportunity to expand the main interior theatre, its tight original dimensions, windows, doors, internal stairs, hatch and fireplace were reinstated. The space speaks to the value of peculiarities and intimacy and the way in which constraints and affordances prompt creativity.

“The biggest challenge is to make additions that will make things better but not lose the ad-hoc chaotic magic that is so fundamental to the La Mama experience.”

While some of the ruggedness of the pre-fire site was irrecoverable, the new scheme celebrates the personal, the handmade, the reclaimed and the reinvented. Salvaged bricks, fencing iron, charred beams and floorboards restored by hand ground the building’s character in its past. Murals both old and new, handmade lights, sinks and chair covers and gardens planted by friends lend an authentic sense of place that will continue to be built upon.

Phillip Pender RAIA Grad. BEnvs, MArch is a project officer at CityLab with architectural experience in residential and multiresidential projects.

Below: The new scheme celebrates the personal, the handmade, the reclaimed and the reinvented.

La Mama Theatre Rebuild

Practice team

Meg White (Design architect with Cottee Parker Architects, documentation & construction services)

Consultant/ Construction team

Caitlin Dullard (Client representation & project management)

Rob Cooke (Client representation & project management)

Gjm (Heritage & interpretation consultant)

Philip Chun (Building compliance, certification & accessibility)

Relume Consulting (Theatre consultant & architectural lighting

Wsp (Structural engineer)

Wsp (Civil engineer)

Wsp (Services)

Ethos Urban (Planning consultant)

Tim Stitz (Fundraising manager, Rebuild La Mama campaign)

Allan Willingham (La Mama architectural history)

Glenn Hester Photography (Project photography & timelapse)

Sweet Creative (Donor & heritage signage graphic design)

Rider Levitt Bucknall (Cost consultant)

Eloise Kent & Nicola Leong (Model makers)

Moray & Agnew Lawyers And Thompson Geer (Legal support)

Strategic Outcomes Consulting (Scheduling)

Land Surveyor (Landair surveys)

Durran Bricklaying (Heritage bricklayer)

AM Precision Carpentry (Carpenter)

James Clayden (Artist: feature pendant lights, copper & bluestone vanity, mural)

Aretha Brown (Artist: entry wall mural)

Builder

Chroma Group Pty Ltd

Paul Devlin (Project director)

Brady Engert (Project manager)

Ryan Cornelius (Site manager)

Omar Ameer (Project coordinator)

Location

205 Faraday Street, Carlton, Melbourne

Wurundjeri Woi-Wurrung Country

Above and right: Salvaged bricks, fencing iron and charred beams and floorboards restored by hand ground the building’s character in its past.

Autumn House Studio Bright

The gardens of Autumn House are not only instrumental in gifting the clients the tranquil home they desired, but also act as an offering of urban generosity to the laneway and street. Described as two restorations and an addition, Autumn House integrates new and existing heritage elements within the addition, creating a home that “engenders the cohesion of spirit that a new house should have”.

Words by Nikita Bhopti

Photography by Rory Gardiner

Nestled among a series of single-fronted Carlton North terraces, a familiar single-storey terrace sits quite traditionally in the top corner of the site. To its south, is a deep garden –a humble surprise, giving this quiet residential street a break from the customary blockade of terrace walls. Autumn House stands proudly as an exercise in “negotiating the need for refuge, retreat and privacy” while crafting moments that engage generously with what is beyond.

A series of carefully placed elements fill the site around the existing Victorian terrace, which was previously renovated in the 80s by architect Mick Jörgensen. The extensively reconfigured interior by Jörgensen sees brick walls bagged, floors paved in brickwork, clear finished timber ceilings, and an expressed central fireplace – all elements that Studio Bright describe as “quintessentially earthy Elthamesque 80s” that were “much loved and referenced in the new addition”. When speaking with Studio Bright about the project, they described it as “two restorations and an addition”, with the team working to define, refine and respect the existing features and gestures, and yet integrate them.

Sitting within a heritage overlay, the new portions of the building maintain deep setbacks from the street, and are “intentionally quiet along the heritage front, with the existing Victorian restored and celebrated”. A bold brick garden wall peels off the Victorian terrace, and wraps towards the laneway, forming both the boundary wall for the ground floor of the addition, while enclosing the main garden space and mature elm tree. Above, a wedge-like mesh structure rests on the bold brick plinth, housing the main bedroom, ensuite, and a balcony looking onto the garden below.

When talking through their design process for the facade walls, Studio Bright shared how “all thresholds to the courtyards and outdoor spaces are porous and defined by operable glazed doors and windows”. There was a “strong desire to renew spatial respect for the mature elm tree in the middle of the site, and to recreate the lush and private secretgarden feeling experienced in the existing house”. Internal planning around the tree embraces its canopy, “bringing the seasonal beauty of the tree into daily life”. These internal curved geometries reflect onto the curved brick laneway facade, softening the way the addition presents itself to its neighbouring context. The wedge-like structure above is dressed in a mesh system that encourages climbing planters to clad the walls of the home over time. Studio Bright saw this “garden offering to the laneway” as a humble gesture to the neighbourhood, while

Right: Internal planning around the tree embraces its canopy and creates a lush and private garden.

“further elaborating the visual allusion of the secret garden” beyond. Additionally, the garden screening also aims to work towards “filtering light and muting the immediacy of neighbours” for the private spaces within.

The clients desired a home that gave them a “calm refuge and retreat” from their busy lives. Their new home sees several key relationships shaped particularly around fostering modern-day family life. Living spaces are configured to draw in the north sun, while ensuring surveillance onto the variety of intertwined garden spaces, to watch the clients’ twin girls explore and play. The plan unravels across the site, giving the home two uniquely generous pockets of green space for hosting large celebrations of family life. The much loved Jörgensen lounge and bedrooms within the existing Victorian terrace see carefully crafted outlooks to the Elm tree, while their raw timber-lined ceilings and red-brick floor remain. Courtyards and balconies allow new bedrooms and living spaces to “relate to open space outlooks beyond; the shady elm tree, the secluded roof terrace, the sociable herb garden on the street”. Studio Bright believe it is these relationships that “enrich living possibilities”.

Autumn House stands as a virtuous celebration of its site’s context. This project presented Studio Bright with a rare instance of a single-fronted Victorian terrace on a double-width site, partnered with two laneway frontages and a centrally-sited mature elm tree. Their considered response is both generous to the surrounding streetscape, and the family life held within. The existing 80s Jörgensen renovation is integrated seamlessly into the fabric of the new family home, while the addition is craftily balanced with the studio’s generous ambitions for the garden and the broader Carlton North community.

Nikita Bhopti RAIA is an architect working at Sibling Architecture. A lead curator of New Architects Melbourne, Nikita is also engaged with multiple mentoring platforms as both a mentor and mentee. She is a regular contributor to Architect Victoria and TheDesignWriter.

Autumn House

Practice team

Melissa Bright (Director / design architect)

Maia Close (Project architect)

Rob McIntyre (Director for design realisation / architect)

Emily Watson (Associate)

Annie Suratt (Associate)

Pei She Lee (Graduate of architecture)

Consultant / Construction team:

Meyer Consulting (Engineer)

Eckersley Garden Architecture (Landscape consultant)

Builder

ProvanBuilt

Location Carlton North Wurundjeri Woi-Wurrung Country

Right:

The gardens of Autumn House are not only instrumental in gifting the clients the tranquil home they desired, but also act as an offering of urban generosity to the laneway and street.

Left: Described as two restorations and an addition, Autumn House integrates new and existing heritage elements within the addition.

Design for all life

Guest editor, Stanislav Roudavski

They are in control of real riches: energy, oxygen, and nutrients, rather than abstract dollar amounts. Importantly, nonhuman lifeforms innovate. All have forms of subjectivity, all communicate and process information, many have lasting cultures. All are successful, simply because they have survived Today, millions of lifeforms experience humancaused extinctions. In most cases, complete remediation is impossible but remarkable improvements are accessible and morally imperative. Engagement with nonhuman clients and collaborations can be challenging. They cannot read project briefs or assess drawings. Many live cryptic lives. Few have any commitment to human projects. Some actively resist surveillance or intrusion. However, these challenges should not prevent action. On the contrary, they reveal opportunities for improvements in ethics, politics, aesthetics, cultures, and technology.

To give some examples, design projects of our Deep Design Lab at the University of Melbourne investigate practical approaches to interspecies justice. For example, we have explored designing for nonhuman capabilities,1 built habitat structures

that take inspiration from arboreal termite nests as shown on the next page, proposed smart systems to minimise environmental light pollution, 2 initiated a reconsideration of smart cities in more-thanhuman terms,3 and developed tools for more-thanhuman heritage.4

We find that more-than-human approaches to design can be compatible with human needs, creatively liberating and ethically upstanding. Every architect needs a client, but not all clients are rewarding. A powerful prince or a rich corporation might have the capacity for large-scale construction but an aversion to go beyond conventions or little commitment to the interests of others.

How does the collaboration with nonhumans relate to the current debates about the role of design? Many see human designers as the purveyors of progress. Designers support development and enable growth. Yet products of human ingenuity including writing, cities, and agriculture have enabled the global damage exacerbated by the ecological imperialism in recent history and the extractive economies of today. Techno-optimists advise further expansion through

In many design situations, animals, plants, fungi, and bacteria are better clients than humans.

These nonhuman beings live diverse, interesting, and grossly under-explored lives, making research exciting and new discoveries easy.

deep-sea mining, geoengineering, extra-terrestrial manufacturing, and settlements on Mars. Design rooted in existing systems performs at large scales, but is it successful?

Unfortunately, many impacts of design are catastrophically destructive to life. Design rationalises, streamlines, standardises, and simplifies. It also extracts, pollutes, and induces excessive consumption. Geodiversity, biodiversity, cultural complexity – the richness of life on Earth and with it its wellbeing – diminish as a direct consequence of many current design practices.

Design’s negative impacts have led to shifts in thinking. In densely populated Europe, a growing impulse is to abstain from new building and to reuse instead. The commitments to energy efficiency and forms of greening are also growing. But is mitigation enough? Will it be possible to reverse the obliteration of life by tweaking the extractive systems that – after all – are working as intended? Evidence shows that improvements within business-as-usual will not suffice.

Instead, we endorse a substantial restructuring of societies in more-than-human terms. A common way to argue for the importance of nonhuman life is to highlight the usefulness of biodiversity, the interconnectedness of all ecosystems, the moral worth of nonhuman beings, or the suffering induced by human actions. These reasons are significant, and we rely on them in our projects.

In addition, we propose that designing for and with nonhuman beings is the most exciting, rewarding, intellectually challenging, and consequential approach to creative practice. At the Deep Design Lab, we investigate ethical foundations and practical methods of this approach.5 We understand design as preparation for future events that can involve but does not require humans. All living beings can self-design and affect others, acting as niche constructors and ecosystem engineers. Human-driven forms of design produce huge effects but remain a component within this picture. The following diagrams position this approach visually. The aim of design is in redirection from business as usual towards a preferable destination. Our first diagram shows this by building on existing discussions of future cones.6 These cones do not acknowledge that preferences diverge, sometimes dramatically, between different clients. In the context of limited knowledge and vested interests, the dominant control by any one group – and humans increasingly wield excessive powers – will harm the outsiders. To counter this, we argue for

nonhuman participation in all forms of governance, including design.

Today, non-anthropocentric design is rare. Our second diagram extends the comparison of attitudes towards the environment7 by linking degrees of human bias to design frameworks. Here, the Unrestrained section contains worldviews that permit environmental exploitation. Attitudes within the Shallow section accept that humans have some ethical responsibilities towards nonhuman life and consider future human generations. This section remains clearly anthropocentric and includes current frameworks such as sustainable development goals, nature capital, nature-based solutions, and ecosystem services. Positions within the Intermediate section allow the exploitation of the environment and its nonhuman inhabitants for serious human needs. They also presume that humans know best and can find solutions to emerging problems. Finally, the worldviews within the Deep section accept that some issues can be more significant than even the most serious human concerns. These attitudes also acknowledge significant limitations of human knowledge and prefer to aim for just processes rather than predefined destinations. This ecocentric position deserves more attention from designers and motivates the work of our group.8

We are far from alone in the effort to support nonhuman life. The articles herewith attest to the growing interdisciplinary interest towards more-than-human concerns. Matthew Darmour-Paul, Sophie Canaris, and Danielle Celermajer open the conversation by discussing visual experiences of birds and linking them to forms of social engagement that can lead to flourishing. Kylie Soanes expands on this invitation by discussing many opportunities for multispecies living in urban environments, appealing to the powers of interdisciplinary collaboration and citizen participation.

Furthering this argument, Dan Parker outlines an inclusive design approach that aims to help arboreal wildlife. His technical platform makes current evidence and technology accessible to a broad range of human stakeholders. Wolfgang W. Weisser and Thomas E. Hauck provide further context to forms of design that see nonhuman lifeforms as clients. Their framework includes the needs of urban animals as represented by human scientists and the evidence they collect.

Left page: A prosthetic habitat-structure for the powerful owl in the System Garden, the University of Melbourne. The project and photo by Deep Design Lab.

Katherine A Dafforn, Laura Airoldi, Melanie Bishop, Tim Glasby, Alex Goad, Emma Johnston, Aria Lee, Mariana Mayer-Pinto, Emily Ravenscraft, Annie Tennant, and Maria Vozzo describe a practical example of such science-based approach to cohabitation in application to urban water edges. They frame their approach as gardening under water. Continuing with the theme of gardening as a strategic concept for cohabitation across scales, Rob Dunn’s article discusses the role of microbial life and the evolutionary implications of artificial environments, with consequences for design.

Extending this theme into the realm of architecture, Richard Beckett discusses probiotic and bio-receptive approaches to architecture as a path towards better environmental and human health. Complementing approaches informed by science and engineering, Bawaka Country including Laklak Burarrwanga, Ritjilili Ganambarr, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Banbapuy Ganambarr, Djawundil Maymuru, Kate Lloyd, Sarah Wright, Lara Daley and Sandie Suchet-Pearson emphasise the importance of close relationships with places. Such relationships call for sources of knowledge and wisdom that extend beyond science, incorporating practiced behaviours and the law of Indigenous communities.

Finally, in a stark and important reminder, Paula Arcari, Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, and Hayley Singer recast design and architecture as sources of large scale, relentless and intentional violence towards nonhuman lives and especially animals. In contrast with approaches that emphasise opportunities for cohabitation in urban spaces, this article insists on elimination of practices that normalise and institutionalise killing and suffering.

The articles herein represent a significant statement that would not be possible without the contribution of the Deep Design Lab members, the generosity of the contributing authors, and the vision of the journal’s editors. In formulating the topic for this issue, the journal posed a range of open questions. What can humans learn about their own needs by designing for and through the senses of other animals? How can humans communicate with nonhuman clients? What creative opportunities emerge from encounters with clients that live in the air, in the water, or deep in the ground? What would design for all life look like? How can it be fair? The articles highlight some directions, but any substantial improvements will require a major reconsideration of design theory, education, and practice. We hope that you will join us in this effort.

Dr Stanislav Roudavski is an academic at the University of Melbourne, who designs for animals, plants, rivers, and rocks as well as humans. His research experiments contribute to knowledge by using scientific evidence and advanced technologies in concert with cultural, political, and historical studies.

Top right page: Diverging preferences in design. Time flows from left to right. The darker green shows probable pasts as defined by known historical facts. The lighter green outlines the zone of conjectures informed by incomplete information. The lighter shades of grey indicate less likely futures as extrapolated from current practices. The squares suggest that preferable futures of different clients never coincide but always overlap. Diagram by Deep Design Lab.

Bottom right page: Attitudes towards nonhuman life and design. The range is from the anthropocentric attitudes on the left to the ecocentric attitudes on the right. The white texts highlights examples of design practices. The deep green region on the right is most important but today the shallow approaches are much more common. Diagram by Deep Design Lab.

Notes

1 Parker, Dan, Kylie Soanes, and Stanislav Roudavski. 2022. “Interspecies Cultures and Future Design.” Transpositiones 1 (1): 183-236. https://doi.org/10/ gpvsfs; Parker, Dan, Stanislav Roudavski, Therésa M. Jones, Nick Bradsworth, Bronwyn Isaac, Martin T. Lockett, and Kylie Soanes. 2022. “A Framework for Computer-Aided Design and Manufacturing of Habitat Structures for CavityDependent Animals.” Methods in Ecology and Evolution 13 (4): 826-41. https:// doi.org/10/gpggfj.

2 https://vimeo.com/stanislavroudavski/intelligent-lighting 3 https://vimeo.com/stanislavroudavski/sentience

4 Roudavski, Stanislav, and Julian Rutten. 2020. “Towards More-than-Human Heritage: Arboreal Habitats as a Challenge for Heritage Preservation.” Built Heritage 4 (4): 1-17. https://doi.org/10/ggpv66.

5 https://wiki.deepdesignlab.online

6 Voros, Joseph. 2003. “A Generic Foresight Process Framework.” Foresight 5 (3): 10-21. https://doi.org/10/d2bj4h.

7 Sylvan, Richard., 1985. A Critique of Deep Ecology: Part 1. Canberra: Australian National University; Andrew Vincent. 1993. “The Character of Ecology.” Environmental Politics 2 (2): 248-76. https://doi.org/10/dtx3m; Hultgren, John. 2018. “21st Century American Environmental Ideologies: A Re-Evaluation.” Journal of Political Ideologies 23 (1): 54-79. https://doi.org/10/ggvp8h.

8 Roudavski, Stanislav. 2021. “Interspecies Design.” In Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene, edited by John Parham, 147-62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Who sees the rainforest?

Words by Matthew Darmour-Paul, Sophie Canaris and Danielle Celermajer

In The World Interior of Capital, Peter Sloterdijk describes the Crystal Palace, the central feature of the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, as emblematic of a new socio-technical order.1

Using technologies such as cast iron, glass and serial construction, the gardener and builder Joseph Paxton designed an immersive interior that was thermally separated yet visually connected to its environment. As the palace was reinforcing an imperial project in iron and glass, it was also growing a particular kind of human: the modern liberal subject, at home in a frictionless interiority, safe from the messiness of the outside.

This dual conditioning of built environments and human subjectivities was replicable through the ability to build identical glass boxes anywhere within the empire. From leadlight windows to curtain walls, glass production has transformed the way privileged humans build as well as their understanding of natural processes and themselves.

When one of us (Danielle Celermajer) and her partner came to design and build a house in an intentional multispecies community in southeast Australia 2, one of their aspirations was to create the experience of immersion in the rainforest canopy. Even with the best intentions to create a flourishing multi-species community, the design process did not fully capture all the stakeholders. The design outcome incorporated large windows wrapped around an upper room that gave the human occupants the impression of being suspended amongst the trees. From the outside however, the windows that reflected the rainforest beyond proved lethal for birds. Birds also had the visual experience of immersion in the rainforest in which they made their lives and into which they flew. But this time the reflected rainforest stunned, injured, or killed them. Despite Danielle and her partner’s intention to be attuned to the multispecies world in which they lived; they recognised the windows’ visual duality only when birds started to fly into the glass.

The structural elements between panes of glass once served not only as visual reminders of labour and technological skill, but also allowed the glass to have a material quality – to be present in space. This meant that the birds could see and recognise the glass, or at least not misrecognise it as sky or forest. The impacts on birdlife of extensive glazing in cities and developments on the edges of nature reserves is well documented, and shocking – billions die each year. 3 Part of the problem is that glazing is conceptualised, designed, and built exclusively for the human inhabitant.

Previous page and next page: A window with strings visible to birds in Escarpment House, by Virginia Kerridge Architect, photo by Matthew Darmour-Paul.

Above: BIRDSEYEVIEW, exhibition by Feral Partnerships, San Mei Gallery, Brixton, London 2022. Photo by the authors.

In the case of large glass windows (and glass doors), modifications to Australian building regulations have been made to increase the safety of children and humans with impaired vision. The latter was a response to the Disability Discrimination Act (1992), which was an outcome of long-term advocacy by people with disabilities to ensure that their existence was not the occasion for injustice. Activists insisted that their experience should be formalised through changes in the built environment. What would be an equivalent process in relation to birds? How can birds advocate within institutions where the rules of participation exclude them from the outset? Does the sound of their bodies crashing into a window count as political advocacy? To suggest that it ought to might seem far-fetched, but part of the advocacy that led to the development and adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities involved people mounting actions to bring the public’s attention to how the existing built environment disabled them. The question becomes, should privileged humans in control of regulatory standards pay attention to birds’ advocacy? Doing so would require both a dedicated attentiveness to birds’ lifeworlds and a broader shift in frameworks of justice, which in the west systematically exclude beings other than humans.4

Another of us (Matthew Darmour-Paul) recently opened an exhibition with his collective, Feral Partnerships, on various design objects that formalise the presence of birds amidst human houses. Items as diverse as swift and sparrow brick houses, a kingfisher tube, a woodstone house martin nest, a wagtail and dipper nest box, a barn owl nest box for buildings, s bricks, and window alert decals were brought together into a single space. 5 The review of practice in preparation to the exhibition made clear that there is no shortage of discrete attempts to care for birds at the edges of human houses. Back at Danielle’s home, humans found a simple solution to the otherwise lethal glazing: a series of strings draped over the windows that move with the wind and signal to the birds: this is not the rainforest. However, most of these design solutions lack a social agenda rooted in multispecies justice. Consequently, their authors are unable to galvanise a movement toward infrastructural change. To conclude, designs unaccompanied by new social protocols fail to challenge the often-lethal

status quo. It is necessary to simultaneously create prototypes – new structures that accommodate previously unrecognised bodies – and reimagine protocols – sets of rules for social engagement that can support flourishing of multiple species. Some of the most promising alternative models include convivial conservation,6 degrowth,7 and half-earth socialism,8 to name a few (to the interested reader, all are worth exploring in the context of design). The social challenge is at the heart of a design based ecological project, building new images, objects, and spaces, in part to unbuild dominant societal narratives.

Matthew Darmour-Paul is a researcher and designer based in Sydney, Australia. His work explores architecture’s entanglement within political ecology, ruralisation and the financialisation of nature. He is a cofounder of Feral Partnerships, a collective focused on re-claiming architectural knowledge in an age of rapid biodiversity loss and species extinction as spatial practices in the pursuit of multispecies flourishing.

Sophie Canaris is an architect working at Dunn & Hillam Architects. She has delivered arts and community projects in Sydney, regional New South Wales, and London with a focus on sustainability and adaptive re-use. She sits on the Emerging Architects and Graduates Committee and the Built Environment Committee for the New South Wales chapter of the Australian Institute of Architects.

Danielle Celermajer is a professor of sociology at the University of Sydney, deputy director of the Sydney Environment Institute, and lead of the Multispecies Justice project. Her latest book, Summertime (Penguin, 2021) calls for recognition of the multispecies harms of the climate catastrophe. It was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for nonfiction.

Notes

1 Sloterdijk, Peter. 2013. In the World Interior of Capital: For a Philosophical Theory of Globalization. Translated by Wieland Hoban. Cambridge: Polity. 2 Celermajer, Danielle. 2021. Summertime: Reflections on a Vanishing Future. North Sydney: Hamish Hamilton.

3 Klem, Daniel. 2009. “Avian Mortality at Windows: The Second Largest Human Source of Bird Mortality on Earth.” In Proceedings of the Fourth International Partners in Flight Conference: Tundra to Tropics, edited by Terrell D. Rich, Coro Arizmendi, Dean W. Demarest, and Craig Thompson, 244-51. McAllen: Partners in Flight.

4 Celermajer, Danielle, David Schlosberg, Lauren Rickards, Makere StewartHarawira, Mathias Thaler, Petra Tschakert, Blanche Verlie, and Christine Winter. 2020. “Multispecies Justice: Theories, Challenges, and a Research Agenda for Environmental Politics.” Environmental Politics 30 (1-2): 119-40. https://doi.org/10/ ghd4fd.

5 See the links to these examples in the online version of the article https://feralpartnerships.com/ https://www.birdbrickhouses.co.uk/brick-nesting-boxes/nesting-boxes/ http://www.vivarapro.co.uk/WoodStone-kingfisher-tunnel http://www.vivarapro.co.uk/KN-HZ-03-Kunstnest-Huiszwaluw http://www.vivarapro.co.uk/NK-GK-02-Nestkast-grote-gele-Kwikstaart https://www.barnowltrust.org.uk/barn-owl-nestbox/owl-boxes-for-trees/ https://actionforswifts.blogspot.com/p/fireproof-s-bricks.html?spref=tw https://www.britishbirdfood.co.uk/other-accessories/protection-and-security/ window-bird-alert-wild-bird-food-feeders-and-accessories

6 https://convivialconservation.com/

7 D’Alisa, Giacomo, Federico Demaria, and Giorgos Kallis, eds. 2015. Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era. New York: Routledge.

8 Vettese, Troy, and Drew Pendergrass. 2022. Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change, and Pandemics. London: Verso.

Sharing cities with nature, by design

Words by Kylie Soanes

As an urban ecologist, I specialise in the science and practice of nature conservation in cities. This strikes most people as unusual. Surely, nature conservation happens out in nature, not among the pigeons and bin chickens? But cities support a surprising diversity of native plants and animals – if you’re paying attention.

In 2021, an urban citizen-science project known as the City Nature Challenge recorded a whopping 1,187 species in eastern Melbourne alone, spotting tawny frogmouths, satin moths, leopard slugs, and golden wattles galore. Even rare and protected species call cities home. Our recent research shows Australians share their cities with more than 300 threatened plants and animals, with Melbourne hosting 46 treasures, such as the golden sun moth, growling grass frog, and charming spider-orchid. These species can survive in the most unexpected urban places, from roadsides to golf courses, even airports.

With numbers like that, the urban jungles are the perfect place to combat the biodiversity extinction crisis while re-engaging humans with nature. Of course, city-living is challenging –especially when those cities weren’t designed for you. Yet still, nature persists. Imagine what could

Previous page: A wide range of native species call cities home, photo by Kylie Soanes.

Left: A rope ladder built across the Hume Freeway allows the endangered squirrel glider to cross safely, photo by Kylie Soanes.

be achieved if we designed deliberately with nature in mind? Take the swift parrot. Each winter, these critically endangered birds migrate from their breeding grounds in Tasmania to warmer feeding grounds on the mainland. Flocks are often sighted gorging on the flowering gums popular in city parks, backyards, and streetscapes. It’s an excellent example of how urban environments provide important resources for threatened species. Unfortunately, there’s a catch. After negotiating the treacherous journey across the Bass Strait, approximately 2% of the already dwindling population die every year after colliding with windows and buildings. Imagine if taking advantage of urban resources didn’t come at such a cost?

Another urban wonder is the teddy bear bee. Not only is this aptly named fuzz-ball extremely charismatic, but its unusual method of ‘buzz pollination’ – using intense vibrations to shake pollen loose – is essential for native plants like flax lilies and guinea flowers. Teddy bear bees thrive on urban gardens: but they need somewhere safe to nest. Like many Australian bees, they do not form hives but are ‘solitary nesters’, burrowing tunnels in bare soil and clay. But natural materials such as these are scarce in cities, removed in favour of sleek lines, impenetrable surfaces, and tidy open spaces. Sometimes, simple solutions do the trick. The squirrel glider (the sugar glider’s stockier cousin) is an incredible aeronaut, soaring from tree to tree with the help of a skin fold between front and rear limbs. But many roads are a gap too far. To solve this problem, we worked with road agencies and engineers to design ‘rope ladders’ and ‘stepping-stone poles’ over the Hume Freeway, allowing gliders to cross safely. My PhD research evaluated their success, with wildlife cameras recording more than 10,000 possums and gliders using the structures. Combining engineering with ecology allowed us to design and test novel approaches, and such structures are now widely adopted.

Novel interventions for nature in cities are on the rise – from insect hotels embedded in walls, pollinator gardens on roadsides, floating wetlands in city rivers, even artificial perches to replace lost trees. However, efforts are still largely constrained to pockets of ambitious practice, with ecologists and designers often working to solve problems from their separate silos. How can we make such interventions more common, more mainstream, more functional? By bridging disciplinary divides between ecology and design.

These disciplines bring complementary skills to the problem at hand. Ecologists can provide

insights into the species – their needs, habits, and risks, while designers bring frameworks and tools for  translating those needs into structures that better mimic the complex geometries, organic materials, and thermal properties of nature, providing broader opportunities for life in cities. By joining forces, the fields could develop entirely new solutions that could not be imagined in isolation. So, in your next project, can you find some space for a teddy bear bee, provide safe passage for swift parrots, or a refuge for the growling grass frog? We have an opportunity to make cities better habitats for humans, and for nature. It will be tragic not to take it.

Dr Kylie Soanes is a conservation biologist at the University of Melbourne’s School of Ecosystem and Forest Sciences. She previously led the Shared Urban Habitat Project through the National Environmental Science Program working with industry and government to develop a strong evidence base for urban nature conservation.

Notes

Ives, Christopher D., Pia E. Lentini, Caragh G. Threlfall, Karen Ikin, Danielle F. Shanahan, Georgia E. Garrard, Sarah A. Bekessy, et al. 2016. “Cities Are Hotspots for Threatened Species: The Importance of Cities for Threatened Species.” Global Ecology and Biogeography 25 (1): 117-26. https://doi.org/10/f76nk2.

Soanes, Kylie, and Pia Lentini. 2019. “When Cities Are the Last Chance for Saving Species.” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 17 (4): 225-31. https://doi. org/10/ghdcq7.

Soanes, Kylie, Michael Sievers, Yung En Chee, Nicholas S. G. Williams, Manisha Bhardwaj, Adrian J. Marshall, and Kirsten M. Parris. 2018. “Correcting Common Misconceptions to Inspire Conservation Action in Urban Environments.” Conservation Biology 33 (2): 300-306. https://doi.org/10/gfsp37.

Soanes, Kylie, Caragh G. Threlfall, Cristina Estima Ramalho, Sarah A. Bekessy, Richard A. Fuller, Georgia E. Garrard, Karen Ikin, et al. 2020. “Conservation Opportunities for Threatened Species in Urban Environments: Report Prepared by the NESP Clean Air and Urban Landscapes Hub and Threatened Species Recovery Hub.” Australia: Clean Air and Urban Landscapes Hub.

Taylor, Lucy, Kylie Soanes, Cristina Ramalho, Cecily Maller, Kirsten Parris, and Caragh G. Threlfall. 2020. “Urban Biodiversity Conservation: Lessons from Environmental Managers in Australian Cities.” Australia: Clean Air and Urban Landscapes Hub.

Threlfall, Caragh G., Kylie Soanes, Cristina E. Ramalho, Abhilasha Aiyer, Kirsten Parris, and Cecily Maller. 2019. “Conservation of Urban Biodiversity: A National Summary of Local Actions.” Australia: Clean Air and Urban Landscapes Hub.

Designing custom homes for hollowdwelling animals

Words by Dan Parker

The housing crisis – a problem familiar to many architects – affects nonhuman beings too. The shortage of tree hollows is one of many examples.

Globally, thousands of bird and mammal species depend on tree hollows for sheltering from weather, hiding from danger, and raising young. Most of these animals cannot build their own hollows. Instead, they rely on cavities made by woodpeckers, termites, or decay-causing organisms. A tree planted today will not support suitable hollows for decades or even centuries. Urgent action is needed to support hollowdwelling animals while trees regenerate and mature.1 Human-made hollows, such as nest boxes, can offer some respite. 2 But conventional nest boxes encounter issues that parallel the shortcomings of modernist approaches to human housing. Standardisation and mass production make objects cheap and easy to produce but limit opportunities to adjust designs for local conditions. Resulting shapes, materials, and performances of such artificial replacements differ significantly from that of tree hollows. Consequences can be severe when nest boxes overheat,3 break,4 or fail to attract target species.5

Trained in architecture, I now work with ecologists and designers to overcome the limitations of artificial hollows. Within the interdisciplinary research group, Deep Design Lab, my research pursues habitat-creation projects that respond to local ecologies and cultures. Makers of artificial hollows are increasingly interested in such approaches. For example, recent nest-box designs from the Wildlife Safe Havens project feature artworks by local and Indigenous artists. Other artificial hollows try to look like the arboreal termite-nests in nearby forests. Our research shows exciting opportunities to develop innovative artificial hollows by adopting computational approaches from architectural design.6 Until now, these approaches required technical expertise and specialised tools, making them unfeasible within community-led projects.

In response, we are developing the prosthetic hollow configurator: a publicly accessible tool that helps people design custom homes for hollowdwelling animals. The configurator aims to bridge the gap between two challenges: developing wellperforming hollows and encouraging communitybased conservation. While online configurators usually aim to sell products such as furniture, Bee Home by Space 10 offers a precedent for how such platforms can serve both humans and other animals. Using opensource technologies, online configurators allow anyone to customise designs to suit their unique circumstances.

Want to install a hollow in your local park or backyard?

Step 1 Design:

Select a target species that lives near you, adjust the shape according to personal preferences, and enter the size of the host-tree for easy installation and stable attachment.

Step 2 Manufacturing: To build the hollow yourself, enter the dimensions of materials you already have, or select one of the listed materials. The configurator will provide recipes to make organic materials and an augmented-reality template on your smartphone to guide assembly. Alternatively, download the 3D model and connect with a local makerspace to have your hollow built professionally. The configurator lists several digitalfabrication services to help you find an option that suits your time constraints, budget, and other requirements. Each selection you make updates estimates on costs, manufacturing times, lifespans, wastage, and the carbon emissions.

Step 3 Deployment:

Select from installation and monitoring options. These include microclimate sensors, cameras for observing animals inside the hollows, and periodic hollow-inspections by professionals.

This project is an outcome of international collaboration between researchers, industrial partners, land managers, and local councils. We are installing prototypes in the field and testing the platform with communities in southeastern Australia and northern Italy. Feedback from this testing will inform continual refinement of the configurator’s algorithm. At the moment, the configurator provides designs for two species: the powerful owl (Ninox strenua) and the boreal owl (Aegolius funereus). More sites and species are coming soon.

In the near future, you will be able to upload site-specific data to automate the design of hollows. Using software already available on smartphones, you can 3D scan the host-tree to create a custom-fitted hollow. Machine learning makes it possible to optimise hollows based on 3D scans of habitat structures like tree hollows or termite nests.

This workflow is in active testing. As it stands, the configurator provides a preliminary but practical tool that sets out to benefit morethan-human communities. It supports participatory

design practices and encourages community engagement. For example, its interface is suitable for hollow-building workshops with school children and local friends-of-nature groups. The availability of do-it-yourself and professional options makes the benefits of computationally designed hollows more broadly accessible.

This project is significant as an example that can work for other sites, species, and habitat structures. If you would like to use our techniques or work with nonhuman clients who could benefit, please get in touch.

Dan Parker is a designer and researcher in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne. His PhD investigates innovative design approaches that can support coexistence between humans and other animals in urban environments.

Previous page: Boreal owl (Aegolius funereus) looking out from nesting hollow, photo by Gary Schultz, Alamy.

Left: Design, manufacturing, and installation of a prosthetic hollow using the online configurator. Top: Installation of a prosthetic hollow for the boreal owl (Aegolius funereus) in northern Italy. Top-middle: Design of the prosthetic hollow on the configurator's webpage. Bottom-middle: Assembly of the prosthetic hollow using the configurator's augmented-reality guide on smartphone. Bottom: Rendering of the prosthetic hollow with a soil-based material from the configurator's recipe list.

Notes

1 Manning, Adrian D., Phillip Gibbons, Joern Fischer, Damon Oliver, and David B. Lindenmayer. 2012. “Hollow Futures? Tree Decline, Lag Effects and HollowDependent Species.” Animal Conservation 16 (4): 395-405. https://doi.org/10/ f47v3m.

2 Goldingay, Ross L., David Rohweder, and Brendan Taylor. 2020. “Nest Box Contentions: Are Nest Boxes Used by the Species They Target?” Ecological Management & Restoration 21 (2): 115-22. https://doi.org/10/dxdq.

3 Griffiths, Stephen R., Kylie A. Robert, and Christopher S. Jones. 2022. “Chainsaw Hollows Carved into Live Trees Provide Well Insulated Supplementary Shelters for Wildlife During Extreme Heat.” Wildlife Research. https://doi.org/10/ hzk7.

4 Lindenmayer, David B., Alan Welsh, Christine Donnelly, Mason Crane, Damian Michael, Christopher Macgregor, Lachlan McBurney, Rebecca Montague-Drake, and Philip Gibbons. 2009. “Are Nest Boxes a Viable Alternative Source of Cavities for Hollow-Dependent Animals? Long-Term Monitoring of Nest Box Occupancy, Pest Use and Attrition.” Biological Conservation 142 (1): 33-42. https://doi.org/10/fqpr7n.

5 Lindenmayer, David B., Mason Crane, Megan C. Evans, Martine Maron, Philip Gibbons, Sarah Bekessy, and Wade Blanchard. 2017. “The Anatomy of a Failed Offset.” Biological Conservation 210 (Part A): 286-92. https://doi.org/10/ggb53b.

6 Parker, Dan., Stanislav Roudavski, Therésa M. Jones, Nick Bradsworth, Bronwyn Isaac, Martin T. Lockett, and Kylie Soanes. 2022. “A Framework for ComputerAided Design and Manufacturing of Habitat Structures for Cavity-Dependent Animals.” Methods in Ecology and Evolution 13 (4): 826-41. https://doi.org/ 10/gpggfj.

Animal-aided design

Words by Wolfgang W Weisser and Thomas E Hauck

Humans have always lived near other animals, not only when they were ranging the Savanna, but also when they founded the first settlements, or started to live in cities.

It is only in the last hundred years or so that humans systematically separated themselves from nature, not only in thinking, but also physically. An increasing body of evidence now suggests that this separation is not good for humans because it results in a lack of ecosystem services provided by nature as well as in detrimental effects on human health and wellbeing. These effects include an increased risk of allergies, asthma and psychological damage. In contradiction to the common practices of separation, humans have a deep desire to be close to nature. For example, renderings produced for architectural design competitions are often populated by animals (mostly with positive connotations), like singing birds, butterflies or picturesque waterfowl. The city is, however, still commonly perceived as a place for humans only, whereas the supposed place for most animals is in the wilderness outside the city. Consequently, most human planning procedures and architectural design only consider the needs of humans. Because most people nowadays live and work in the city, urban nature is the only nature they experience in their day-to-day lives. Thus, an important way to increase human contact with nonhuman life forms depends on the expansion of urban nature and this implies a need for changing the way we design our cities.

Making nature an integral part of urban planning means going beyond current paradigms by framing other organisms as stakeholders of urban planning and architecture. This requires taking the needs of other organisms seriously and carefully planning for their requirements such as food and shelter. Such planning is important because today’s dense cities cannot provide these resources without design.1 For example, it is not sufficient to hang a nest box and hope that the bird will find enough food. Similarly, if we want a particular bird near our house, we need to design planting that fulfils the needs of this species, otherwise it may not be able to survive in our vicinity.

Animal-aided design is an approach that makes animals integral to the design process. Animalaided design focuses on the needs of species and aims to integrate these needs into landscape architecture and urban design, to enable new ways of viewing and experiencing urban nature. At the beginning of the design process, humans choose target species to become stakeholders. There are many ways to select such species, in cooperation with all human participants in the planning process, including the developer, client and authorities.2 Once target species are selected, designers must become familiar with their lifecycles and requirements, prepared in the form of species portraits with data relevant to planning by biologists. Taking their needs seriously allows us to view the building project through the eyes

of these animals. Designing with lifecycles of nonhuman organisms requires creative solutions that can meet the requirements of animals as well as humans, ideally in a synergic manner. For the designer, the requirements of animals set not just the constraints for the design, but also open possibilities. For example, a dust bath for a bird can be realised in many ways, along a footpath, on a flat roof, or as a separate element in the open space. By designing for both humans and wildlife, the architect also has the task to define forms of future co-habitation between humans and animals.

A world in which animals become an integral part of design challenges humans to think about and define their relationship with nonhuman life. What does it mean to coexist with a beaver if one respects the fact that beavers need to fell trees, eat the wood, and build dams? What do such life habits mean for future designs of parks and gardens? How can we integrate multispecies approaches at the scale of a city quarter or an entire city? Animal-aided design is one of several recent approaches that aim to bring ecological knowledge into architectural design. Casting animals as stakeholders of design processes can help to overcome the long-standing dichotomy between humans and nature that for so long limited appreciation and design of cities.

Wolfgang W Weisser is a biologist and a professor for Terrestrial Ecology at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, where he met Thomas E Hauck with whom he developed the animal-aided design method. His biological research focusses on the effects of land use on biodiversity, with special attention to insects.

Thomas E Hauck is a landscape architect who co-founded the planning office Polinna Hauck Landscape+Urbanism and co-holds the professorship for landscape architecture and landscape planning at the Vienna University of Technology.

Previous page: Sparrow flies out of a facade quarter in an AAD project in Munich, photo by Samuel  inter.

Right: Graphic by AAD and Sophie Jahnke.

Notes

1

Apfelbeck, Beate, Robbert P. H. Snep, Thomas E. Hauck, Joanna Ferguson, Mona Holy, Christine Jakoby, J. Scott MacIvor, Lukas Schär, Morgan Taylor, and Wolfgang W. Weisser. 2020. “Designing Wildlife-Inclusive Cities That Support Human-Animal Co-Existence.” Landscape and Urban Planning 200: 103817. https://doi.org/10/gg73mt.

2 Apfelbeck, Beate, Christine Jakoby, Maximilian sHanusch, Emanuel Boas Steffani, Thomas E. Hauck, and Wolfgang W. Weisser. 2019. “A Conceptual Framework for Choosing Target Species for Wildlife-Inclusive Urban Design.” Sustainability 11 (24): 6972. https://doi.org/10/gmkmq9.

Animal-aided design

Analysis and concept phase

• Project site's habitat potentials and restrictions

• Stakeholder values, concerns, usage requirements

Generalisation of results as best practice Carry results over to new project

Design and detailed planning phase

• Integrate target species requirements into the design

• Create tangible natural habitats

Error analysis and optimisation of the initiatives, if required

Basic Research D A C B

Monitoring and evaluation phase

• Measure ecological success for target and other species

• Stakeholder acceptance

• Effects on upkeep and maintenance costs

Execution and construction phase

• Carry out construction in a manner sensitive to the animal population

• Ensure correct implementation of initiatives through monitoring and targeted training of the construction companies

Creating an underwater garden

Words by Katherine A Dafforn, Laura Airoldi, Melanie Bishop, Tim Glasby, Alex Goad, Emma Johnston, Aria Lee, Mariana Mayer-Pinto, Emily Ravenscraft, Annie Tennant and Maria Vozzo

City skylines increasingly feature roofs and walls that are covered in foliage to trap stormwater and moderate internal climates. This approach to greening is now creeping below the waterline as ecologists and designers come together to co-create living seawalls.

Urban sprawl is no longer a land-based problem.

Sydney Harbour, like many coastal cities around the world, has sprawling structures extending below the waterline. These structures have modified more seafloor than is occupied by the world’s mangrove and seagrass forests causing widespread damage.

Humans design structures such as seawalls for protection of their assets or to support their activities, often with little thought for the habitats lost. These structures can result in ecological deserts, supporting little marine life or become dominated by invasive species. To improve their bioreceptivity, humans can instead co-design these urban structures with nature by blending ecology with innovative engineering.

The redevelopment of East Darling Harbour into Barangaroo is one of the most significant urban renewal projects to date in Sydney, Australia. It covers 22 hectares in total and spans 2.2 kilometres of innercity foreshore. The site was once part of the hunting and fishing grounds for the Traditional Owners of the land, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. The name “Barangaroo” recognises a Cammeraygal woman of the same name. From the 1800s to now, the site housed a mix of industrial and commercial uses until the current redevelopment into offices, dining, entertainment, and outdoor spaces.

Life underwater at Barangaroo has been stressful. The darkness cast by towering skyscrapers and noisy port activities have discouraged many of the fish that would have once lived along this foreshore. Prior to the 1800s there were sandy seafloors sloping upwards to rocky outcrops and swampy wetlands, but these natural habitats have gradually been replaced by an underwater concrete jungle of seawalls and pylons. This construction displaced the burrowing worms, shellfish and shrimp that used to live here. The new human-made surfaces provide poor surfaces for marine life, like seaweeds, oysters and barnacles to grow on, preventing their return.

Since 2015, scientists from multiple universities, state government agencies and the Sydney Institute of Marine Science have been working with designers from Reef Design Lab and architects from Lendlease to co-design a living seawall and an underwater garden at Barangaroo. We have created catalogues of the underwater habitats and species living there to inform the enhancements.

We installed nearly four hundred habitat panels at multiple depths that span Watermans Cove in South Barangaroo. Our panels mimic the rocky reefs and seaweed forests found naturally around Sydney Harbour and include features such as rockpools that trap water during low tide, providing protection from

heat to tiny crabs and worms. Other panels resemble the oyster reefs, seaweed roots, and sponge fingers that are key habitats for animals like snails, limpets, chitons, and fish.

To create these complex features, we used 3D-print moulds and then cast the panels in concrete which included upcycled industry by-products. At Barangaroo, we also enhanced the habitat panels with mixtures of recycled oyster shells sourced from Melbourne fish markets, or sandstone rock. The aim of this enhancement is to reduce our carbon footprint and improve the sustainability of the habitat panels.

A few months after the installation, we planted seaweeds to create an underwater garden and kickstart growth on the panels. The seaweeds are a native brown kelp species called Ecklonia radiata that we sourced in collaboration with the engineers, SMC Marine, who installed the habitat panels. SMC Marine maintain pylons at multiple locations, and we took the opportunity to harvest kelp for transplantation to Barangaroo from pylons scheduled for removal. Kelp was collected and planted to create the garden at Barangaroo on the same day. An advantage of sourcing kelp already living nearby Barangaroo is that it has adapted to local conditions and so is more likely to survive after planting.

The underwater garden is now 18-monthsold and teeming with life that will eventually be self-sustaining for decades. The shallower panels are visible at low tide, but the deeper panels lie below the waterline to support the animals and plants that can’t live out of water. Tiny fish have moved in and taken up residence, baby seaweeds are growing on the panels. We will continue to garden the site for the next four years by monitoring and removing any weeds (invasive species) with support from Infrastructure New South Wales.

The underwater garden is part of the Living Seawalls project that is bringing marine life back to built structures in coastal cities and continues to grow with over 1000 habitat panels installed at more than 16 sites worldwide. Our living seawalls support up to 36% more biodiversity than traditional seawalls1 and the mosaic of designs provides a variety of homes for unique species.2 This project demonstrates that all marine constructions can and should consider benefits to humans and nonhuman species.3

Katherine A Dafforn is an environmental scientist recognised for her contributions to understanding and managing urban impacts in marine systems. She completed her PhD and joined Macquarie University in 2018. She is co-founder of the Living Seawalls project, which is based at the Sydney Institute of Marine Science.

Laura Airoldi is professor chair in ecology and deputy director of the Chioggia Hydrobiological Station at Padova University. She is listed among the top Italian Scientists and in 2019 and 2021 was recognised as a Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher. Her research focus is biodiversity conservation and restoration of urbanised marine environments.

Melanie Bishop is a coastal ecologist with over 15 years of experience researching temperate ecosystems of Australia and the US. Her team's research addresses how these ecosystems operate and respond to change. She is co-founder of the Living Seawalls project, which is based at the Sydney Institute of Marine Science.

Tim Glasby is a principal research scientist with 30 years’ experience as a marine ecologist working in temperate marine systems, having been employed as an academic, environmental consultant and a government researcher. His research on marine urbanisation, impact assessment and invasive species is internationally recognised and has influenced numerous researchers and government policies.

Alex Goad is a designer and artist based in Melbourne. Alex completed his Bachelor of Industrial Design at Monash University in 2013 where he developed MARS - Modular Artificial Reef Structure. The project won multiple awards and led to Alex starting Reef Design Lab to continue this work.

Emma Johnston is the deputy vice chancellor (Research) at University of Sydney. She heads the Applied Marine and Estuarine Ecology Lab and has led major projects for industry, government, the Australian Research Council and the Australian Antarctic Science Program on the ecology of human impacts in marine systems.

Aria Lee is a marine ecologist and invertebrate biologist. Her research has focussed on understanding the biology and facilitators for invasive species in urbanised coastal areas. She is the program manager for the Living Seawalls project at the Sydney Institute of Marine Science.

Mariana Mayer-Pinto is a Scientia senior lecturer. She obtained her PhD in Marine Sciences from the University of Sydney, 2009 and holds a MSc in Zoology from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She is co-founder of the Living Seawalls project, which is based at the Sydney Institute of Marine Science.

Emily Ravenscroft is a development manager. She is passionate about placemaking and enriching life between buildings with thoughtful urban planning, quality building design, landscape and public art. Emily has worked in design, construction and property for 20 years, and has experience across sectors, as an architect, project manager and development manager.

Annie Tennant has a Bachelor of Architecture from UNSW and a Master of Urban Design from the University of California Berkeley. She has over 20 years of experience in property, construction, design and development. Annie is on the Landscape Architecture Advisory Panel for the UNSW Landscape program and is an MS Angel.

Maria Vozzo is a marine ecologist with research interests in marine urban ecology and habitat restoration. Maria is currently a research fellow at CSIRO. Her work is investigating methods to scale up marine habitat restoration. She was previously the program manager of the Living Seawalls.

Previous page: Fish housing on an artificial structure, the Living Seawalls project, photo by Aria Lee.

Acknowledgements

Funding from Lendlease, Infrastructure NSW, NSW DPI and the Australian Research Council LP140100753. We also thank Anita Mitchell for her contributions to the project.

Notes

1 Bishop, Melanie J., Maria L. Vozzo, Mariana Mayer-Pinto, and Katherine A. Dafforn. 2021. “Volvo Cars Australia: Sydney Institute of Marine Science ‘Living Seawall’ Biodiversity Assessment.” Sydney: Macquarie University, Sydney Institute of Marine Science, University of New South Wales.

2 Bishop, Melanie J., Maria L. Vozzo, Mariana Mayer-Pinto, and Katherine A. Dafforn. 2022. “Complexity–Biodiversity Relationships on Marine Urban Structures: Reintroducing Habitat Heterogeneity Through Eco-Engineering.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 377 (1857): 20210393. https://doi.org/10/gqr2fz.

3 https://www.livingseawalls.com.au/

Homes as evolutionary gardens

Words by Rob Dunn

The body is a home; it is a house structured by the architecture of bones, skin and organs; a house filled with denizens. Thousands of species, including bacteria, archaea, fungi and even animals populate the human body.

Human life depends on many of these species. Scrubbed free of them, a human body would quickly begin to fail, first due to dysfunctions in digestion, immune health and mental health. Then due to pathogens (microbes on the skin are actually the first line of defence against pathogens). Scientists used to think that the human body possessed only defences against microscopic life. We now know it to have many more attributes that work to favour life than to discourage it. The body is, at once, a home and a gardener. It simultaneously seeds some species, weeds others, and works to foil the evolution of yet more dangerous forms.

The sophistication of our bodily home stands in contrast to the majority of houses humans now build. Over thousands of years, vernacular houses were built in ways that responded to the environment and its climatic conditions as well as to the species that were at hand. Where lions were present, houses were built so as to make them easier to defend. Where mosquitoes were present, houses were built to make it more difficult for them to enter bedrooms. These responses of houses to the living world tended to be modest and often focused exclusion, a trend that has accelerated with time.

Once it became clear that some small species could cause disease, attempts to exclude life more fully from houses ensued. These changes were carried out by public health specialists and architects alike. Some of the changes these individuals made to houses and human behaviour inside them were extraordinarily beneficial; these new designs would come to save hundreds of millions or even billions of lives. Changes to water systems, for example, prevented exposure to faecal oral pathogens. Similarly, facilities for hand washing reduced the spread of pathogens from person to person. Meanwhile, the advent of vaccines reduced the prevalence of a subset of pathogens and, in some cases (as with fish, pigs and chickens and apartmentdwelling humans) allowed beings to be housed safely in much higher densities.

Below: A snapshot of species of bacteria found and grown from individual human belly buttons (each Petri dish is one sample from one person). The different shapes and colours of colonies on different Petri dishes are different species of bacteria. The identity of species living on the human skin is influenced by the use of products, such as antiperspirant, but also by differences from one person to the next in their genes and, specifically, the ways in which those genes influence which foods human bodies provide to skin bacteria.

Yet, more broadly the changes we have made in our houses relative to the rest of life have tended to be maladaptive. Some of these maladaptive choices are global. For example, we have disconnected the styles of houses from their climates in ways that lead to greater reliance on air conditioning (and hence greater global warming and negative impacts on global biodiversity). Other maladaptive choices of humans are more local.

We now know that human mental health benefits from daily connection with nature. For example, children who grow up near large trees are less likely to suffer from anxiety and depression. We also know that the proper functioning of human immune systems requires exposure to a biodiversity of microorganisms, particularly during childhood. The absence of these exposures is associated with Crohn’s disease, inflammatory bowel disease, allergy, asthma, rosaceae and a vulgar, lurching, bestiary of other disorders, all of which are becoming more common globally. In addition, the acquisition of key gut and skin microbes requires exposure to relevant species (in Western societies, these microbes, including even the microbe babies rely on to digest mother’s milk, are being progressively lost). Yet, over the last hundred years humans have increasingly sealed houses ever more tightly and have, also, come to spend more time indoors.

As we look to the next century, I challenge architects to think about how to create homes, other buildings and cities that are more like our bodies, homes that continue to exclude dangerous species, but that also favour beneficial lifeforms, homes more like gardens. As I detail in my book, Never Home Alone,1 there have been successful attempts to garden the bodies of humans (to help, in essence, the work that our bodies are already doing). There have been far fewer attempts to garden homes. What would it look like to have a home that helps us to fend off pathogens but at the same time that favour species that benefit our wellbeing? What would it look like to have homes that were an everyday part of our attempts to be more sustainable, homes in which waste was recycled into energy sources? What would it look like to have homes that were covered with species that bring us joy and species that provide us services? These approaches have costs and potential dangers, of course. For example, a trade-off can exist between sealing a house tightly for energy efficiency and leaving it a little open to let life in. In addition, our understanding of such gardening is often limited. As one measure of this, most of the species currently living in homes have not yet been named by scientists, much less understood.

And our default approach has risks too. We risk creating generations that have not been exposed to the species they need to thrive. We also risk favouring species that sneak past our defences. The problem here is twofold. First, most of the household defences we create are often crude; they tend to kill all species rather than just those we seek to avoid. Second, such defences trigger evolution in the species we would like to keep at bay. Over the last decade our overuse of biocides – be they herbicides, fungicides, pesticides, or antibiotics – has increased. In lock step, the evolution of problem species immune to those same biocides has also increased. Given our current approaches, this contest between our innovation and their evolution is mismatched. They evolve more quickly than we innovate and, as a result, our default houses and cities are, increasingly, populated disproportionately not with beneficial species but instead with resistant problem species; this is the garden of our neglect, a garden of resistant roaches, resistant bacteria, and resistant weeds.

My sense is that there are architects here and there around the world taking up the challenge to create visions for buildings that embrace life and manage evolution in more thoughtful ways. But they're too few. The good news is there are models for what something like this might look like provided by nonhuman species that build homes such as ants and termites. Both ants and termites garden choice species on their bodies and use them to control pathogens in their homes. They also garden edible crops inside their homes. They have created underground homes rich with the life that benefits them. What would it take to imagine future cities rich with the life that benefits us, a future in which we garden constructed environments and, in doing so, engender our own wellbeing?

Rob Dunn is a Reynolds professor in applied ecology at NC State University and, also, the senior vice provost for university interdisciplinary programs. He studies the ecology and evolution of daily life, often with a focus on the remote human past and the remote human future. He has written more than a hundred and fifty scientific papers, many articles for general audiences and seven books, most recently, A Natural History of the Future

Note 1 Dunn, Rob R. 2018. Never Home Alone: From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets, and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live. New York: Basic Books.

Probiotic architecture

Words by Richard Beckett

Probiotic architecture seeks to conceptualise the building environment not as one that attempts to be healthy through its lack of microbes, but as one that is healthy through its microbiodiversity.

Research into the greening of buildings and infrastructure has predominantly looked to photosynthetic organisms on roofs and walls, validating them – in addition to their pleasant aesthetic – mainly through their contribution to the carbon reduction cycle.

A less discussed agenda of urban biodiversity relates to its fundamental and beneficial role to human health via symbiotic microbiota. Central to this is the growing medical research into the human microbiome and the contemporary understanding of the human as a holobiont. I use the concept of the holobiont as a justification for a new probiotic-design approach that challenges the long-held assumption that fewer microbes equals healthier spaces. In contrast to the modern conception of the human as an island that is biologically distinct from the nonhuman, the holobiont is a multispecies body comprising the host and its multitude of nonhuman microorganisms.1 These symbiotic microbes play a critical role in metabolic processes, immunoregulation and health outcomes. 2 Recent evidence associates the lack of microbial exposures in urban environments

with the rise in autoimmune illnesses in developed countries. These epidemics of absence 3 or diseases of missing microbes 4 frame microbes not as germs, but as a fundamental part of the human, a coevolved entanglement of cells and genes – old friends that we have failed to keep in touch with. 5

Probiotic architecture explores new ways to (re)integrate a diverse range nonhuman species into architectural structures. This approach considers larger plant species as well as other forms of life including bacteria, archaea, fungi and potentially even viruses. It seeks to conceptualise the building environment not as one that attempts to be healthy through its lack of microbes, but as one that is healthy through its microbiodiversity. In this way the building environment becomes analogous to an immune system – one which is

Below:

Probiotic ceramic tiles, embedded with B.subtilis – a soil derived microbe that can inhibit MRSA on the tile surface. Top left: Microscale image of porous ceramic material. Top right: microscale image of inoculated microbial communities growing in material pores. Bottom: Geometrical surface details of probiotic pores with porous and non-porous zones. Credit: Richard Beckett

protective but also welcoming to benign and potentially beneficial microbes. Consequently, probiotic architecture might be less concerned with ways to keep nonhuman matter out, and more interested in how to re-introduce microbes into buildings. By integrating habitat opportunities into architectural objects and the spaces they form, probiotic architecture can link microbial communities in the air, water and surfaces of buildings with the skin, nasal passages and gut of the human body, contributing to the health of the holobiont.

At the micro scale, designers can engineer materials to have porosity and chemical properties that encourage the growth of beneficial microbes. Porous ceramics and low pH concretes are among examples of semistructural architectural materials that can provide microscale niches for microorganisms. These materials can then be inoculated with spores and seeds of desired species or left alone for spontaneous colonisation.6

Avoiding uniformity, designers can distribute these materials in response to environmental conditions – including sunlight, shade, and humidity – that can support microbial growth. Here, geometry plays a role too. While smooth, flat dry walls limit growth, threedimensional textures can facilitate it. These geometries create varying microclimates that can provide protection, retain moisture, trap seeds, accumulate spores and shed them to other surfaces, assisted by air flow.

At the building scale, designers can plan program around horizontal-vertical transitions and slope angles to provide maximum favourable surface areas for biological growth. To support this objective, architecture can engage with large environmental datasets and the emerging sciences of the indoor microbiome including microbial sequencing of buildings and spaces. To work with large amounts of information, architects can use machine learning to maximise biologically receptive niches throughout a building.

In conclusion, a probiotic design approach requires a shift in paradigm that understands the beneficial role that microbes play towards human health. This will require design approaches that operates at multiple scales involving new material approaches, and new typological building programs that promote human-microbe entanglements. Here the criteria for success might depend on more microbes, not less.

Richard Beckett is an architect and Associate Professor at the Bartlett, UCL. His research operates at the intersection of computation, biofabrication, and microbial ecologies in buildings and cities. His research on probiotic design won the RIBA President’s Research Award in 2021. He has built numerous projects and has been exhibited internationally including Archilab – Naturalising Architecture, The Pompidou Centre, and Nature –Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. @richard.p.beckett

Notes

1 Margulis, Lynn. 1991. “Symbiogenesis and Symbionticism.” In Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary Innovation: Speciation and Morphogenesis, edited by Lynn Margulis and René Fester, 1-15. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

2 Belkaid, Yasmine, and Timothy W. Hand. 2014. “Role of the Microbiota in Immunity and Inflammation.” Cell 157 (1): 121-41. https://doi.org/10/f5xpd3.

3 Velasquez-Manoff, Moises. 2013. An Epidemic of Absence: A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases. New York: Scribner.

4 Blaser, Martin J. 2014. Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues. New York: Henry Holt.

5 Rook, Graham A. W., Charles L. Raison, and Christopher A. Lowry. 2014. “Microbial 'Old Friends', Immunoregulation and Socioeconomic Status.” Clinical and Experimental Immunology 177 (1): 1-12. https://doi.org/10/f57c2k.

6 Beckett, Richard. 2021. “Probiotic Design.” The Journal of Architecture 26 (1): 6-31. https://doi.org/10/gjfqqx.

Caring as Country: attending to the agencies of Country

Words by Bawaka Country Including Laklak Burarrwanga, Ritjilili Ganambarr, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Banbapuy Ganambarr, Djawundil Maymuru, Kate Lloyd, Sarah Wright, Lara Daley and Sandie Suchet-Pearson

“They are not voiceless, you know. Animals, that is. But then neither are rocks or winds, tides or plants. They all speak. They all have language and knowledge and Law. They send messages to us; talk to us and to each other. All we have to do is listen; listen and then act”.1

Come with us, here at Bawaka. We invite you to sit on the sand to listen, to attend to Country, to animals and plants and all the beings that belong here. We will share with you some Yolŋu ways of relating to Country from north-east Arnhem Land. If you sit quietly with us, if you pay close attention, you might see for yourself some of what we mean when we say that animals, winds, plants, all the beings and becomings of Country communicate, know and act; that Country has agency. Country is here and in all places in Australia. Even in the big towns and cities waters flow, winds sweep between skyscrapers and Aboriginal people, kinship and connection continue. Now, we sit together on the beach at Bawaka and attend to bäru, listen to crocodile.

Let us introduce ourselves. We are four Yolŋu sisters, Elders, and caretakers for Bawaka Country, together with our daughter and four non-Indigenous academics. We have been a Collective for over 15 years, working together, each from her own place.

When we share knowledge, we do it together, as Bawaka Country. Bawaka Country is homeland. Bawaka Country is the land, the sky, the animals, the plants, the songs that make up Bawaka. They communicate with each other, send messages and shape thought and action. Bawaka Country is human beings, it is humans talking together, it is the sand and the water, the song of the wave on the beach. It is bäru, humans waiting for bäru, songs of bäru, knowledges and lives both independent and coemergent. So we speak collectively, as far as we can, as human and nonhuman, tangible and intangible, and everything in between.

We invite you to sit with us and attend to Country. Paying attention might require relating to and understanding the world in a different way. And once you do that, there is an imperative to respond and act in different ways too. For Yolŋu, humans are not separate from Country, from animals or plants, from roads or buildings, from the world in which they live. Humans are part of Country and are bound in relations of reciprocity and responsibility. Humans are Country, can speak as Country, and should act responsibly, as Country. We, human and nonhuman, relate to and care for Country as kin - we care as Country.2

To live and know the world in this way speaks to the core of who Yolŋu are. These are issues of Rom, of Yolŋu Law, held through the songspirals (also known as songlines) with depths that we only touch upon here. Yet these knowledges are practical too. Country speaks every day. Its agencies permeate day-to-day existence. What we speak of, what we do, where we sit, how we feel, all emerge from specific

and practical, as well as deep, respectful and responsive, interactions.

This is how Yolŋu think, eat, act, move, dream; this is what we do, who we are, our coemergent place in the world. The cold wind may move our yarn to a different place; it may bring forth different songs and conversations; we feel it in our bodies, it tells us to hunt and gather particular animals and plants; it brings us together around a fire. And it communicates to nonhumans too, who may migrate, who may begin to nest as bäru does.

We sit here on the beach watching for bäru. Bäru are deeply connected to the Yolŋu people of this land, they are in the paintings, in the dances, in the songs. We are looking now for Nike. This crocodile is part of our family, a protector of our land, Nike knows us, we talk to Nike and Nike talks back.3

We haven’t seen Nike for a couple of months now, not since before Christmas, not since the wulma season and the first thunder and lightning. We know that bäru can hear the thunder and then bäru know it’s time for nesting. They mate first and then work together to build their nests. Afterwards they sit there all of December, January, February, through the nice soft daytime rain until March when the eggs hatch. If any birds, animals, or humans go to their nest to steal the eggs, bäru get very angry.

As we sit on the beach, watching for Nike, we sit on a plastic mat, sometimes checking phones or googling what comes up in conversation.

" "

Above: Waiting and watching for bäru

At Bawaka and in Yirrkala, where some of us live, there are roads and cars, houses, and other buildings. There’s mining too. Sometimes when we talk about Yolŋu connections with Country people think only of animals and plants, things that fit in with mainstream assumptions about Aboriginal identities. We want to tell you that Yolŋu people have a living culture, and Country is always living, always emergent. So those roads, those houses, the sand in the cement, the cement itself, the bauxite that comes out of the mine, that’s Country too. They remain in relationship with Yolŋu people.

These relationships need responsible tending to ensure they remain healthy. Humans have responsibilities with and as Country, and to/with/as the built environment. Roads and houses need to be held in balance, accountable to Rom, the Law. What we are saying has implications for design and building across Australia, including urban regions. These places, towns, and cities are always also Country.4

It is important that practitioners find ways to come into better, more respectful, relationships with Country and Custodians in the places they live, work, create and build. We cannot say what better means, it will depend on the Country and the Custodians of each place. In every case, it is important to learn about the histories and peoples of that place. Practitioners should listen to the calls of that place and respond respectfully. A call might come from a Custodian offering learning through a book or exhibition, it might be a call to support more Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander practitioners in your field. The calls are many, but you need to be listening and prepared to respond.

Our message here resonates with the call of Gumbaynggirr story holder, Aunty Shaa Smith on mid-north coast New South Wales. She asks those involved in planning, design, urban infrastructure, and development:

“Does our work, the buildings we design or the processes we engage, speak to and support the songlines of the place, the people?” If we want to be creative people, we need to be aware of being destructive, and to be creative in ways that enable us to be in good relationship with Country.5

Being in good relationship takes time and we each need to learn what it means where we are. We all need to come respectfully into our relationships and know that we are part of our worlds. Here, we have been sharing with, at and as Bawaka. The messages from Country where you are will be different, held by the beings and sovereignties of that place. But what we can say is that there will be messages, there will be knowledges, there will be responsibilities.

Here at Bawaka, we are related; bäru, the sand, the fire, the wind and humans too; our Country that is us. The call of bäru, of Bawaka, is a call to respond with attentiveness, to take seriously Country’s agencies and to act accordingly. We know sometimes it is difficult to hear, to know; but there are specific protocols relating to different places that can guide us. Country is calling for you to respond, always from your place; calling for you to learn, be, do, understand, and attend in response-able ways.

The Bawaka Collective is an Indigenous-nonIndigenous, more-than-human collective led by Bawaka Country and including Laklak Burarrwanga, Ritjilili Ganambarr, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Banbapuy Ganambarr, Djawundil Maymuru, Kate Lloyd, Sarah Wright, Lara Daley and Sandie SuchetPearson. Also known as the Gay’wu Group of Women, the collective co-authored Songspirals: sharing women’s wisdom of Country through songlines.

Bawaka Country is the diverse land, water, human and non-human animals (including bäru and the human authors of this chapter), plants, rocks, thoughts, and songs that make up the Yolŋu homeland of Bawaka in North East Arnhem Land, Australia.

Laklak Burarrwanga is a Datiwuy Elder, Caretaker for Gumatj, and eldest sister. As such she has both the right and the cultural obligation to share certain aspects of her knowledge and experiences with others. She has many decades experience sharing this knowledge with children and adults through teaching, art and tourism.

Ritjilili Ganambarr is the second eldest daughter, a Datiwuy elder and caretaker for Gumatj. She works hard on health issues in the community and is passionate about working with mothers and children – teaching and educating them that strong mothers create strong children. She is a weaver and writer/illustrator.

Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs is a proud Yolŋu woman and leader. She has written six books. Her children’s books are written in Yolŋu Matha for use in primary schools as Walking Talking texts. She plays an important role in the bilingual education movement working with Yolŋu Elders to develop both-ways learning.

Banbapuy Ganambarr grew up at Guluruŋa. She is a bilingual student who completed her degree at Bachelor College through the Northern Territory University. Banbapuy is now a senior Indigenous teacher at Yirrkala School. She is an influential author, artist, weaver, and teacher.

Djawundil Maymuru is a Maŋgalili women, raised by a Gumatj elder. She is a Yolŋu mother and grandmother. She is a co-author of three books and works with Bawaka Cultural Experiences, a highly successful Yolŋu owned and run Indigenous tourism business.

Sarah Wright is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Newcastle. She works in the Philippines with subsistence organic farmers and is a member of the Bawaka Collective and Yandaarra, a Gumbaynggirr-non-Gumbaynggirr collective seeking to shift camp together to care for and as Country where she lives on Gumbaynggirr Country, mid-north coast NSW.

Kate Lloyd is Associate Professor in Human Geography at Macquarie University. Kate’s work focuses on several projects which take an applied, action-oriented and collaborative approach to research characterised by community partnerships, co-creation of knowledge and an ethics of reciprocity.

Sandie Suchet-Pearson is Associate Professor in Human Geography at Macquarie University. Her research is in the area of Indigenous rights and environmental management. She is a member of the Bawaka Collective and Yanama Budyari Gumada, a Dharug-non-Dharug Collective aiming to walk with good spirit in caring as Country in western Sydney.

Lara Daley is a research fellow in Human Geography at the University of Newcastle. Her research engages Indigenous-led geographies and ongoing colonisation in urban and semi-urban Indigenous/settler colonial contexts. She is a member of Yandaarra and the Bawaka Collective, two Indigenous-led collaborations focusing on Indigenous sovereignties and Indigenousled ways of caring for Country.

Right page: Watching bäru at Bawaka

Notes

1 Burarrwanga, Laklak, Ritjilili Ganambarr, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Banbapuy Ganambarr, Djawundil Maymuru, Sarah Wright, Sandie SuchetPearson, and Kate Lloyd. 2012. “They Are Not Voiceless.” In The 2013 Voiceless Anthology: The Year’s Best Writing on Animal Rights, edited by G. M. Goetzee, Ondine Sherman, Wendy Were, and Susan Wyndham. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin: 22-39.

2 Bawaka Country, Sandie Suchet-Pearson, Sarah Wright, Kate Lloyd, and Laklak Burarrwanga. 2013. “Caring as Country: Towards an Ontology of Co-Becoming in Natural Resource Management.” Asia Pacific Viewpoint 54 (2): 185-97. https://doi. org/10/gfst9p.

3 Burarrwanga, Laklak, Ritjilili Ganambarr, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Banbapuy Ganambarr, Djawundil Maymuru, Sarah Wright, Sandie SuchetPearson, and Kate Lloyd. 2013. Welcome to My Country. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

4 Marshall, Uncle Bud, Lara Daley, Fabri Blacklock, and Sarah Wright. 2022. “ReMembering Weather Relations: Urban Environments in and as Country.” Urban Policy and Research 40: 3: 223-235; Libby, Porter. 2018. “From an Urban Country to Urban Country: Confronting the Cult of Denial in Australian Cities.” Australian Geographer 49 (2): 239-46. https://doi.org/10/gdxwxj.

5 Smith, Aunty Shaa. 2019. “Caring for Country, Shifting Camp.” Landscape Architecture Australia, no. 162: 38-40.

Caring as Country: attending to the agencies of Country

Violent architectures

Words by Paula Arcari, Fiona Probyn-Rapsey and Hayley Singer

Architecture and design facilitate, modify, or improve existing social and environmental practices, and respond to, encourage, or script new ones. Goals vary, but sustainability is increasingly a key priority in the hope of securing liveable and just futures.

As critical animal studies (CAS) scholars from a cross section of disciplinary backgrounds – creative writing, cultural studies, sociology, feminism, geography, and environmental science – we understand a sustainable and just future as one in which structures, spaces, and materials that perpetuate exploitative animal practices no longer exist.

The design and development of new factory farms, slaughterhouses, meat processing plants, zoos, racing stadiums, and other animal-centred facilities, and improvement of existing operations in the name of efficiency, welfare, and/or increased transparency, continues largely unnoticed except in specialist and local media publications. More visible accolades go to those celebrating convivial multispecies relations through the creation or adaptation of structures that incorporate bird safe design strategies, wetlands, green roofs, tree canopies, microhabitats, noise, and lighting considerations, bioreceptive materials, nesting sites, corridors, and tunnels. These are just some of the strategies gaining prominence that mark a notable and positive shift in values. Unfortunately, this shift is occurring alongside the persistence of hostile designs that accidently or very deliberately deter, exclude, harm, and kill a range of nonhuman others.

The convivial animal-centric urban developments are hopeful. They go beyond narrow and enduringly anthropocentric conceptions of care that have emerged in urban design and planning,1 and point to future buildings and entire cities that recognise other animals as equal co-habitants. However, thus far, these considerations for urban nonhumans are largely limited to free-living and (some) commensal animals designated of value in terms of being ‘native’, iconic, cute, ecologically necessary, or otherwise useful to humans. These are the species people generally like to meet and encounter, or at least tolerate, but as we have pointed out in our analysis of urban rewilding discourses,2 there are animals we do not wish to meet or encounter, who remain invisible even in the heart of our cities. ‘Pests’, ‘ferals’, and other less desirable critters still present a categorical challenge to the scope of post-human or post-anthropocentric intentions – indicating where lines are clearly drawn – and tend to fair less well in multispecies endeavours. But even they do not fair as badly as the millions of highly commodified animals whose lives and fates are sealed in architectures that are not so much hostile as purposefully violent.

Slaughterhouses, ‘process’ at least 100,000 animals a day within Greater Melbourne alone, testament to the persistent and unsustainable constitution of edible animals.3 Also within Melbourne, over a million animals per year are used for research

in purpose built laboratories and research centres, supplied in part by local breeding operations for beagles, baboons, macaques, rats, mice, and rabbits. Melbourne Zoo (also encompassing Werribee Open Range Zoo and Healesville ‘Sanctuary’) and Melbourne Sea Life Aquarium, between then contain approximately 8000 animals. Horse-racing, grey hound racing, breeding, and its excesses further contribute to tens of thousands of unwanted, euthanised, and abandoned animals across our cities.

Within ecofeminist and Critical Animal Studies literature, such sites are described as “gulags”4 or “mills of brutality.”5 They are responsible for the routine mistreatment, abuse, injury, death, and “wastage” of massive numbers of animals. This is made possible by structures and practices specifically designed to facilitate the effective and efficient capture, containment, control, separation, isolation, disempowerment, movement, trade, physical harm, and death of nonhuman animals.

However, through a combination of design and narrative, these mechanisms are backgrounded at these sites so that human consumers are detached from the processes that deliver the associated “products.” The violence perpetrated at these sites or “shadow places,”6 and by the speciesist ideology that constitutes them (which designates animals as usable for food, entertainment, sport, fashion, research, and companionship), is not only physical but also psychological, cultural, epistemic, and ontological, meaning it distorts the experiential basis of an animal’s entire existence.7

Failing to acknowledge the violence inherent to these sites, or worse, fetishising it (as Jean Hillier notes in reference to the “authentic”

" "

Sites Practices

Slaughterhouses

Factory farms

Meat processing plants

Research laboratories

Racing venues (dogs, horses, other animals)

Equestrian events

Zoos

Petting zoos (that inforce animals as food)

Animal exhibits (dog shows, bull-riding events, rodeos)

Aquariums

Agricultural shows

Capture (hunting, poaching, trapping, theft)

Containment (cages, enclosures, crates, kennels, tanks, fences, etc.)

Training ('breaking', coercion, reinforcement)

Control (physical and psychological)

Separation, isolation and/or exclusion (from ecology, community, culture, kin)

Trafficking and trading (legal and illegal)

Breeding (captive, forced, selective, AI, genetic modification)

Physical harm (direct and indirect)

Killing (culling, slaughter, euthanasia)

Consumption (literal and visual/emotion — for entertainment, sport and companionship)

history on display at Melbourne’s Kensington Banks housing development on the site of the former Newmarket saleyards and abattoirs), reinforces the anthropocentric agenda that asserts human interests over those of other animals. Such violent architecture could be disassembled, demolished, or even repurposed in ways that serve as cautionary reminders of the suffering these spaces helped to mobilise – ways that pay dues to the “ghostly signals” of place, its “noisy silences and seething absences”, warn of dark pasts never to be repeated8, and above all avoid “aestheticized [and commodified] version[s] of history”9. This dis/reassembly would be undertaken within a more comprehensive framework of non-speciesist architectural principles, even of interspecies sustainability.10

Of course, change cannot happen overnight, but it will hopefully accompany the increasing unacceptability of the principles and practices that both constitute and support violent architectures. Just some of these architectures are listed in the accompanying table along with the violent practices enacted against animals they rely on and that in turn demand and shape a host of secondary sites, tools, devices, and design decisions.

One question that presses on us is: What might non-violent architectures, or architectures of sanctuary, look like especially for those commodified animals that we human animals have a duty to care for as the practices that currently prescribe their birth, life, and death are wound back? Bird safe building guidelines, and other measures, are a good start to diminishing the built-in violence that surrounds us, whether acknowledged or not. But we argue that we need to go further, much further. Now.

Paula Arcari is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow within the Centre for Human Animal Studies at Edge Hill University, UK. She has a PhD (Sociology) from RMIT University and holds two Master of Arts degrees, in Geography and Environmental Science. She is the author of Making Sense of ‘Food’ Animals: A critical exploration of the persistence of ‘meat’ (Arcari 2019).

Fiona Probyn-Rapsey is a professor in the School of Humanities and Social Inquiry at the University of Wollongong. She is the author of Made to Matter: white fathers, stolen generations,11 and co-editor of Animal Death,12 Animals in the Anthropocene: critical perspectives on non-human futures13 and Animaladies: Gender, Species, Madness.14

Hayley Singer is an associate of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, and an early career researcher and teaching associate at the University of Melbourne where she also earned her PhD in creative writing. Her fiction, non-fiction, poetry, scholarly writing, and book reviews have been published in Australian journals and anthologies.

Notes

1 Davis, Juliet. 2022. The Caring City: Ethics of Urban Design. Bristol: Bristol University Press; Gabauer, Angelika, ed. 2022. Care and the City: Encounters with Urban Studies. New York: Routledge.

2 Arcari, Paula, Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, and Haley Singer. 2021. “Where Species Don’t Meet: Invisibilized Animals, Urban Nature and City Limits.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 4 (3): 940-65. https://doi.org/10/gg5twt.

3 Arcari, Paula. 2019. Making Sense of “Food” Animals a Critical Exploration of the Persistence of “Meat.” Singapore: Springer.

4 Probyn-Rapsey, Fiona. 2018. “Anthropocentrism.” In Critical Terms for Animal Studies, edited by Lori Gruen, 47-63. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press; Wadiwel, Dinesh Joseph. 2015. The War Against Animals. Leiden: Brill.

5 White, Richard J., and Simon Springer. 2018. “For Spatial Emancipation in Critical Animal Studies.” In Critical Animal Studies: Towards Trans-Species Social Justice, edited by Atsuko Karin Matsuoka and John Sorenson, 160-83. London: Rowman & Littlefield.

6 Plumwood, Val. 2008. “Shadow Places and the Politics of Dwelling.” Australian Humanities Review 44 (March): 139-50.

7 Gruen, Lori, and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, eds. 2018. Animaladies: Gender, Animals and Madness. New York: Bloomsbury; Pribac, Teya Brooks. 2021. Enter the Animal: Cross-Species Perspectives on Grief and Spirituality. Sydney: Sydney University Press.

8 Hillier, Jean. 2013. “More Than Meat: Rediscovering the Cow beneath the Face in Urban Heritage Practice.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31 (5): 863–78. https://doi.org/10/f5d8x8; Nigel Thrif. 1999. “Steps to an Ecology of Place.” In Human Geography Today, edited by Philip Sarre, Doreen B. Massey, and John Allen, 295-322. Malden: Polity Press.

9 Gordon, Avery. (1997) 2008. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

10 Bergmann, Iris M. 2019. “Interspecies Sustainability to Ensure Animal Protection: Lessons from the Thoroughbred Racing Industry.” Sustainability 11 (19): 5539. https://doi.org/10/ggkcdt.

11 Probyn-Rapsey, Fiona. 2013. Made to Matter: White Fathers, Stolen Generations. Sydney: Sydney University Press.

12 Johnston, Jay, and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, eds. 2013. Animal Death. Sydney: Sydney University Press.

13 Human Animal Research Network Editorial Collective, ed. 2015. Animals in the Anthropocene: Critical Perspectives on Non-Human Futures. Sydney: Sydney University Press.

14 Gruen, Lori. 2014. “The Faces of Animal Oppression.” In Diversity, Social Justice, and Inclusive Excellence: Transdisciplinary and Global Perspectives, edited by Seth Nii Asumah, 281-94. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Architect at home: Nightingale Anstey with Benjamin Shields

Interview by Elizabeth Campbell

Photography by Kate Longley

Tell us a bit about your home and what the concept of home means to you.

Homes are complex places, and we expect a lot from them. It’s easy to forget the range of functions that they are often required to accommodate – sleeping, relaxation, meal prep and food storage, cooking, making art, home office, social roles… the list goes on. In smaller homes often these activities occur in only a few rooms, which can make things very tricky to manage and good design becomes very important.

Throughout my life, my concept of home – its feeling, and my relationship to it – has evolved with the changing elements that have been important at any particular time. When I lived in share houses, of most consequence was having a space of retreat and privacy, as well as a place to make music, so having a large secluded bedroom was key. This was what I associated with the feeling of home. I was usually less fussed about the communal and living spaces which felt very much shared. When I was older and living with a partner, art, music, and cooking were key activities and influenced

the entire house and my concept of home grew to encompass the living spaces too. Now with a family, the house is a family environment, one closer in feeling to the house I grew up in with my parents and sister, and the art and music components have moved offsite.

When I think of home, I imagine a place of respite and calm, a place for family and friends, with spaces that are built around meals and cooking, socialising and listening to music. Some of the traditional Japanese homes and accommodations that I have visited are among my favourite. With restraint and

a clear sequence of spaces they are very sparse by today’s standards. Often there is a deliberate and softened threshold that frames views to the garden or landscape. The necessities of contemporary living would make a space like this impractical for family, but the tranquillity of these spaces and the focus that they bring to the simple activities of everyday living are things I try to recreate in my own home and the houses we design at DREAMER.

I recently moved to a new home, an apartment in Nightingale Anstey. I live with my partner Sally, our five-monthold son Billy and our greyhound Homer.

Our apar tment has an L-shaped plan with two bedrooms near the entry followed by a left-hand turn into a hall that opens out into a long living space, looking out onto a north-facing balcony. We like the simple, implied zoning of the plan, the interaction between the living spaces and the separation of the bedrooms from the more public parts of the apartment. The apartment has a concrete ceiling as well as solid timber floorboards, both of which give a sense of texture and material that elevate the interior. It has hydronic heating, and the thermal performance is excellent. One of the unsung values of sustainable living is the comfort that high performing homes provide – there is nothing like getting up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and stepping out from your warm bed into a warm house – I could not go back to living in a poorly insulated home again.

How has designing for others impacted the way you live?

Designing for others has made me very conscious of my own preferences for living, and house/apartment design, in terms of detailing, functionality, outlook and planning. I expect this will also have an enormous impact on my approach when designing my own home. In addition, my experience as an architect certainly plays a huge role in the kinds of spaces I enjoy inhabiting, the way I like to use them, and of course in my decision to move into a Nightingale apartment in Brunswick. Travelling and visiting the homes of friends and colleagues have also had a great impact on how I like to live. The atmosphere and spatial feeling of an inspiring home have the most lasting impact for me. These experiential qualities set the over-arching parameters for how I’d like to live, with the functional detailing and design elements I have come to know through my work.

What do you choose to surround yourself with at home?

Sally is a teacher, illustrator and potter and we have quite a collection of her pottery around, as well as some of my photography and paintings from local artists. We have a couple of treasured vintage furniture pieces including a 70s Italian marble table, a set of 1980s Aero chairs and two antique Australiana timber chairs from the very early 1900s inherited from a great aunt.

We are developing a collection of Australian native plants including banksias, grasses and creepers. It's a challenge, as Australian plants can be difficult to manage in pots and we have had a couple of recent disasters.

Overall, in what ways do you think houses (single or multiple) can contribute to the wider context and the collective neighbourhood? More specifically, how does your own home do this?

Apartments and houses should be organised so that they encourage the occupants to meet and build community. This involves not just successful building and urban design outcomes but the intentional development of community through organised events and shared goals. I see apartment buildings and precincts like Nightingale Village as an opportunity to re-establish village living within our cities. Due to our cultural preference for owning property usually trumping our desire for community, we tend to move away from our communities so that we can live in houses that we own, and this makes it much harder for communities to develop. A successful village is far less common than it used to be.

While we have only been here for a few months, there is already a strong community developing in our Nightingale Anstey apartment building. We know most of the occupants by name and have shared food and tools, swapped and sold items and hung out socially. We’ve met people that I am sure will become lifelong friends. Our building is only a few hundred metres from Nightingale Village proper and we have a number of friends there too. Nightingale as an organisation puts in considerable effort to attract people from diverse backgrounds but who have aligned values. Once an occupant has purchased an apartment there are many opportunities created for residents to get to know each other, work towards a shared goal and start to build their community.

Benjamin Shields RAIA is the creative director and founder of the Melbourne-based practice DREAMER Lab. DREAMER Lab is a creative, design-led and values-driven architecture studio, working across multiple scales and building typologies.

Elizabeth Campbell RAIA 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

Nightingale Housing is a carbon-neutral, not-for-profit organisation working on Wurundjeri Woi-Wurrung Country. Nightingale Anstey by Breathe was completed in 2022 with 11 homes pre-allocated to Housing Choices Australia.

Benjamin Shields

Taubmans is committed to being part of the solution to Australia’s housing affordability crisis and the environmental challenges facing us all as a global community, with a mission to protect and beautify the world.

As a Principal Partner of Nightingale Housing, we are proud to support the Nightingale Housing team with the delivery of multi-residential projects that are environmentally, financially, and socially sustainable.

Nightingale Ballarat | Breathe |

Photographer: Kate Longley

Office of the Victorian Government Architect:

Confirming our value and impact

Words by Sophie Patitsas

An important legacy for any government can be seen in the quality and design of the public projects they deliver. As the largest procurer of design services, buildings and infrastructure in Victoria, the state government has significant influence and impact on the quality and long-term value of the places it builds for its community. Through our role as an independent advocate and adviser on good design, the Office of the Victorian Government Architect (OVGA) is critical in driving better design outcomes for the community.

This year’s 2022-23 State Budget outlays a record $184 billion in new and existing capital projects across several portfolios including health, housing, arts and culture, education, and transport infrastructure. Government infrastructure investment is projected to average $21.3 billion a year and averages $1.8 billion a month in 2022-23. 2

Meanwhile, OVGA’s recurrent core budget of $1.3 million per annum has remained relatively static since its establishment in 2006 when government infrastructure investment averaged only $4.9 billion a year. Inexplicably this year, despite the almost four-fold increase in annual infrastructure investment, the 202223 State Budget includes a 41.7% reduction in annual funding for the OVGA.

Even before the reduction in funding, the OVGA’s core budget had not kept pace with increased infrastructure

expenditure, and we have worked hard to service an almost exponential growth in demand for our services. To do this we have established partnerships across government that financially support us as an organisation – keeping the lines of communication and availability open with all departments who value our input. This complements our core funding as the OVGA seeks to meet demand. However, this model is not sustainable for a highly skilled and outcomes-focused team. It adds a significant administrative burden and sometimes compromises the very aspect of the office that is most valued –our independent voice.

The OVGA has not taken our role in government for granted. We have commissioned several reports that independently review our activities to demonstrate value and secure support. OVGA’s value is borne out in the most recent review of our activities – The Value and Benefits of the OVGA: 2021 Refresh by SGS Economics and Planning.3 In a stakeholder survey about contribution to design quality, 100% of respondents agreed that OVGA services helped advocate and drive design quality at a strategic or systemic level. When probed further as to how OVGA’s input helped achieve this outcome 94% agreed that the OVGA demonstrated a deep understanding of designquality issues as well as promoting creative and best practice approaches to achieving design quality.

“Their work behind the scenes is in many cases the difference between taxpayer money being used to build assets or future liabilities.”1

The OVGA holds considerable industry and public sector design expertise in its core team with experienced specialists in a range of disciplines including architecture, urban design, and landscape.

It is significant that our small team is embedded in most of government’s major project investments included in the 2022-23 State Capital Program. We provide practical advice on government’s ‘Transformational projects’ including the Big Housing Build, Suburban Rail Loop, Metro Tunnel, and the Level Crossing Removal Project. We are involved in all, bar one of government’s current list of Public Private Partnership projects7 including the New Footscray Hospital, Frankston Hospital Redevelopment, Geelong Convention and Exhibition Centre, Homes Victoria Ground Lease Model Projects, North East Link and West Gate Tunnel. In addition, we provide input to other public projects – including schools, justice facilities, cultural heritage projects, tourism, and national park attractions (including this year’s Victorian Architecture Medal winner), regional projects – and selected planning applications for which the Minister for Planning is the responsible authority.

This ability to engage in various ways across building types gives us a unique insight into the challenges of project design and delivery. The OVGA is exposed to a range of project planning and technical design issues, procurement processes, contractual methods, delivery modes and post-occupancy evaluation. This level of involvement across the investment lifecycle of projects ensures that our advocacy and advisory work is well informed, rigorous, and relevant.

OVGA’s publication Government as Smart Client (2021) is an example of advocacy aimed at driving design quality at a strategic level but informed by OVGA practice. The document accepts and explores the full range of building procurement methods deployed across government and provides practical guidance to enable a good design outcome to emerge regardless of the method adopted. The guidelines are also supported by case studies on past projects that give an overview of the project, the procurement method, constraints, and key steps taken to protect design quality through the process. It is one of the OVGA’s most successful advocacy initiatives – presented at conferences in both Canada and the United States – with other government architect offices across Australia seeking to replicate or adapt the work for their relevant jurisdictions.

Another ongoing OVGA concern, and instance of systemic reform informed by critical knowledge, is the quality of apartments. Our work in this area with the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning led to the Better Apartments Design Standards, looking to improve the liveability of apartments and neighbourhoods in Victoria. This initiative emerged from being exposed to poor quality residential developments that were coming to our office for peer review through the planning approval process. Seeing that the issue was systemic rather than isolated and, knowing the good work that New South Wales had done in this area through its State Environmental Planning Policy No 65—Design Quality

of Residential Apartment Development dating back to 2002, the OVGA initiated an awareness campaign in Victoria.

Better apartments has been an important design quality initiative for the state, however, as the recent Inquiry into Apartment Design Standards by Victoria’s Legislative Assembly Environment and Planning Committee found – there is still much work to be done.4 The OVGA’s submission to the inquiry advocated further improvements which are included in the committee’s final report. The OVGA supported the Australian Institute of Architects with site visits to precedent projects where the committee could experience well-designed apartments. The report contains 35 recommendations and 66 findings aimed at increasing the liveability of apartments in Victoria. Most of the recommendations align with the OVGA’s advice and evidence presented at the inquiry. The committee also recommends “monitoring the success of the Future Homes Program and student design competitions in promoting design innovation with a view to develop future state-wide apartment design innovation program” 5

The 2021 SGS report highlights that additional ongoing funding is needed to allow the OVGA to maintain, customise and expand its operations to keep pace with demand. A wellfunded office dedicated to driving good design outcomes sends a message that quality matters. It provides an authorising environment for an independent, frank, and fearless voice on good design. It enables a whole-of-government approach to achieving great outcomes for the Victorian community. An office focused on good design can also generate project savings, reduce risk, streamline delivery, and reduce long-term operating expenses. With the state election on the horizon, and at a time when government’s investment in health, housing, arts and culture, education and transport infrastructure is at a record level, support for the OVGA really matters and simply makes good sense.

Notes

1 Smith, Michael., 2022. "Penny wise, pound foolish: Victorians risk wasting billions", The Age, 11 May

2 Department of Treasury and Finance, State of Victoria, 2022-23. State Budget, Budget Paper No.4: State Capital Program: 2; 12-13

3 SGS Report - The Value and Benefits of OVGA: 2021 Refresh: ovga.vic.gov.au/value-and-benefitsovga-sgs-report-2018-2021

4 Parliament of Victoria, Legislative Assembly, Environment and Planning Committee, 2022. Inquiry into Design Standards: xxix

5 Hobbs, Emily., Andrew McDougall 2020. "Design still matters: government architects and economic stimulus" SGS Economics and Planning: sgsep.com.au

Sophie Patitsas is Principal Adviser, Urban Design and Architecture, Office of the Victorian Government Architect.

Architecture and planning: The vibe of the thing

Guest editor, Loren Adams

In this oft-quoted scene, a federal judge askes Denuto which section of the Constitution, specifically, the conglomerate has allegedly breached. And Denuto – who appears to know neither the contents of the Constitution nor how to read Roman numerals –replies, “There is no one section, Your Honour. It’s just the vibe of the thing.”

That the law has a vibe is a curious and perplexing suggestion. In The Castle, the vibe of the law is offered as a nonsensical proposition for comedic effect. But in this issue of Architect Victoria, I invite you to temporarily take seriously Denuto’s nonsensical lawyerly ramblings and join me in asking: what is the vibe of the law? More specifically, what is the vibe of planning legislation and regulation? And, what does this mean for architecture?

As a formalised statutory system, planning is a bundle of bureaucratic processes and documents that systematically interact to control the ways that land may (or may not) be used or developed. It is, of course, a settler-colonial construct. In Victoria, foundational rules and objectives for statutory planning are set out in the Planning and Environment Act 1987 (the Act). Across 600 pages of dense

legalese, the Act meticulously invents and then delegates power between proper nouns, along the way pointing to other clauses and sections within and outside of itself. Of this tendency, the writer and urban planner Timmah Ball (2019) laments that the Act “is lengthy and just as I grasp one section there is always another clause to the paragraph, which is disorienting”.

Under the Act, each of the 79 municipalities in Victoria has a singular instrument of planning control: a planning scheme. There are also two additional planning schemes for areas of high strategic importance that straddle or puncture across multiple municipalities, as well as a separate scheme for a curious cluster of three unincorporated islands that do not have any municipal government at all. The Victoria Planning Provisions (VPP) is a 1040-page siteless template for the creation of these planning schemes, which are required to be both performance based and discretionary. When the VPP gestates into a location-specific planning scheme, it swallows up other municipally relevant documents, too: policies, frameworks, strategies. The result is a family of 82 planning schemes bound to specific map-regions

In a fictional courtroom in the beloved late-90s Australian film The Castle, an ill-equipped local conveyancing lawyer, Dennis Denuto, makes an impassioned but clumsy defence for his clients’ constitutional right to keep their family home. Darryl and Sal Kerrigan’s home is one of four residential properties along Highview Crescent in Coolaroo that is under threat of compulsory acquisition by an ominous public-private conglomerate hoping to expand the Melbourne airport.

of Victoria and each calibrated to align with the strategic land use and development objectives of its location. But read together they are recognisably kin: 92,052 pages of familial likeness.

All these documents, of course, must then be accompanied by other documents to help us correctly interpret and implement the documents and all their incorporated documents. And so, there is a 150-page Practitioners Guide to Victoria’s Planning Schemes (2022) to assist planners; a 278-page technical guide, instructionally titled, Using Victoria’s Planning System (2015); a running total of 59 planning practice notes (PPNs) and 52 advisory notes (ANs) offering supplementary up-to-date guidance on specific topics; and a two-sided Planning on a Page cheatsheet. All these documents, conveniently colourcoded and sprinkled with three-letter acronyms to help us distinguish our MPS from our PPFs. All these documents, but what of the vibe? Where, amongst all these pages and clauses and acronyms, can we find the vibe of our planning system?

Alas, the vibe of planning cannot be located through a systematic unpicking of these proliferating documents. We must set down our forensic toolkits, temporarily suspend our solutionist tendencies, resist the urge to outsmart the system. The vibe is slippery and elusive. It is not contained neatly within the normative objects of planning in front of us, but drifts in and out of our periphery. It cannot be explicitly defined in a glossary of terms. And so, for this issue, I have pulled together a metanarrative of nine deviations and digressions, loosely bundled around the themes of planning and architecture. Along the way, perhaps we will discover the vibe of the thing. Or perhaps we won’t.

Planner Matt Novacevski kickstarts the conversation with a necessary reminder that both planning and architecture are settler-colonial constructs. This is the irreconcilable reality of our built environment professions. Architectural theorist and planner Helen Runting then takes us on a thoroughly entertaining romp through Melbourne’s inner north, gawking at that “odd form of decorative, diminutive, regulatory property fetishism” known as facade articulation. Along the way, she laments the conspicuous absence of architecture in Victoria’s planning system, noting “definite break-up vibes.”

On this point, practicing architectural designers Allan Burrows and Arj Benson disagree. They cite both the Better Apartment Design Standards and the subsequent Apartment Design Guidelines for Victoria to argue that planning now contains so much architectural content that there is very little left for architects to design.

From here, I coax you further away from the normative objects, subjects, and issues of planning, deeper into the periphery. I offer a glimpse at a possible world where an artificial amalgam of ecofeminists and poets co-author our building and planning regulations. Architect and educator Charity Edwards launches us into outer space, where privately owned satellites evade earthly planning controls and wreak havoc on Sky Country. Emerging designers Yuchen Gao and Yiling Shen are swept up in a conversation about populism, aesthetics, and the role of expertise in decision-making with Frank Lloyd Wrong, the anonymous pseudonym of a Melbourne-based architect and creator of the @ uglymelbournehouses Instagram account. Then, Los Angeles-based writer and educator Anthony Carfello takes us on a tour of another Ronald McDonald arts district, where cookie-cutter creative precincts offer little more than “counterfeit culture designed in the C-suite.” And a handful of local spatial practitioners gather around a student project by Caleb Lee to enact a seven-episode, collaborative written performance of the heritage policymaking process that asks: What is worth keeping, and who decides? Michael McMahon and Jack Isles conclude the issue by generously inviting us into Beyond Heritage –an Indigenous future building project, which pulls together emergent sensing and geospatial information systems with more than 60,000 years of First Nations data and knowledge.

Is it here, amid the unfathomable complexity and interconnectedness of Country, that I encourage you to pause before returning to that proliferating mess of clauses, codes, controls, standards, schemes, sections, provisions, policies, guidelines, regulations, legislation, and half-done planning applications on your own desks, wherever that may be. Just for today, try to resist the urge to unpick and outsmart and understand the slippery, elusive character of planning. Just for today, try instead to channel your inner Dennis Denuto.

Sometimes there is no one section, you see. Sometimes it’s just the vibe of the thing.

Loren Adams RAIA Grad. is a disciplinary promiscuous spatial practitioner. Trained in architecture and public policy, she is currently a Doctoral Fellow with the University of Melbourne Centre for Cities and teaches at RMIT. Previously, Loren led the Australian computational design team at Grimshaw Architects and was the inaugural coordinator of the Melbourne School of Design Robotics Lab. She began her career working as a fabrication specialist for blue-chip artists in Los Angeles.

It's time to unsettle our settler-colonial disciplines

Words by Matt Novacevski

I’m writing as a secondgeneration settler of continental European heritage on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri-Woi Wurrung peoples. The call of a yellowtailed black cockatoo has pierced the hum of traffic. The sound reminds us as architects, planners, designers, all practitioners of place –we need to talk about settler colonialism.

The violence of colonialism has reverberated across the globe for centuries and continues to be lived in the everyday. Now, the latest Intergovernmental Panel and Climate Change (IPCC) report has called out ongoing processes of colonialism for exacerbating both the impacts and the rate of climate change.1

In so-called Australia (and elsewhere), settler-colonial city-making professions including urban planning and architecture – have played a key role in instigating and enforcing the dispossession and attempted erasure of First Nations peoples. Soon after British ships arrived, planning got to work carving up ill-gotten land, imposing Euro-centric layouts and mass earthworks in an attempt to tame landscapes fit for Imperial expectations. Further subdivision then established markets in stolen land; another step in the attempted erasure of Indigeneity. 2

Next, architecture worked within and beyond these subdivisions to create grand structures of Imperial authority, legitimising invasion in stone. Our professions’ ongoing complicity in all this remains visible all around us: today, Melbourne’s Hoddle Grid is vibrant and cosmopolitan, but it is nonetheless built on drained wetlands of vital significance to the people of the Kulin Nations.3

As Munanjahli and South Sea Island scholar Chelsea Watego and settler-historian Patrick Wolfe remind us, settler colonialism is not a one-off event.4 Rather, settler colonialism endures. It is a series of ongoing systems and processes that seek to justify invasion by erasing Indigeneity; built on the foundational lie of terra nullius.

Upon this shaky foundation, our sister disciplines – architecture and urban planning – enable and accelerate the extractivism, exclusion, expropriation, and extermination upon which settler-

Above: Melbourne in 1838, from the Yarra Yarra. Colour lithograph print by Clarence Woodhouse. Reproduction courtesy of State Library Victoria. http://search.slv.vic.gov.au/primo-explore/fulldisplay/SLV_VOYAGER1657219/MAIN

colonial ‘progress’ relies. We see the consequences in dispossession, in trauma, in biodiversity decline, in ever more intense bushfires and floods – but also in ongoing acts of everyday exclusion. Settler-colonial urbanism is both insidious and enduring, and it happens in place. As architects and planners, we play a vital role in either its continuation or its upending.

Darug scholar, placemaker, and archaeologist, Maddison Miller, illustrates how we as settlers and urbanists need to learn to live and work in partnership with Country, rather than treating place as passive and ripe for exploitation.

“Our cities are located on unceded Aboriginal lands. Yet cities can feel openly hostile to Indigenous peoples. They don’t reflect our cultural values or sense of place. They ignore Country, bulldozing or building up the terrain in order to serve a colonial concept of what a city should be, rather than working in partnership with what Country provides.”5

Too often, the regulatory instruments of planning ignore the complexities of place, sanitise further destruction and, as we are repeatedly reminded, provide little recourse for First Nations communities.6 Contemporary building and planning regulations prioritise private property rights ahead of the wellbeing of place; they scarcely even acknowledge the vibrant, life-holding, nourishing terrain of Country.7 All the while, as practitioners we are forced to shackle ourselves to the wheel of extractivism; forced to ignore the broken beings we leave in our wake as though ignorant of the fact that very well may run over us, too.

Working in partnership with Country demands that we urbanists see ourselves as people of place and take up the responsibilities this entails. Our future – entwined as it is with this land – will be defined by the many choices we make, every day. We need to stop fortifying the false castles of our colonial-constructed disciplines: such self-indulgence only diverts time, energy, and resources away from our responsibilities to place; our shared responsibility to confront (and mitigate) the impending emergencies of climate change and biodiversity loss.

Years of experience has taught me that urban planning – itself a variegated discipline,

prone to disagreements – needs reflexive critique to make it accountable to place. Yet, across planning and architecture we waste energy firing gratuitous potshots across disciplinary parapets, finger-pointing while the systems we are enmeshed in stoke the fires of a world burning around us. This is not the time for disciplinary egotism or silos. Rather, we must turn the torch on our own disciplines, together.

Learning to listen, learning to care

As we shine the torch where it needs pointing, it becomes clear that working in partnership demands that we learn to listen to land, to water, and to each other. A vital plank for settler-practitioners like me is to learn to listen to First Nations knowledge that, as Palyku Elder Gladys and Professor Jill Milroy AM point out, comes from place itself over deep time.8 Time and again, in reading Indigenous scholarship, we learn that taking the time to listen and to relate is at the heart of being with this land. Recently I came across a beautifully written piece by Tagalaka author and cultural burning expert, Victor Steffensen, about a walk on Country with an old man, who reminded him that: “You have to take notice of Country, otherwise you will get lost.”9 Perhaps we settler-colonial professionals – operating in the wake of generations of wanton disregard for Country – have always been lost in this land.

Thankfully, we live in a time when First Nations writing and scholarship is flourishing, giving us ample opportunity to listen, learn, reflect, and learn anew. In a seminal piece, Korumberri and Waka Waka scholar Aunty/Dr Mary Graham advised white settlers interested in reconciliation and the cultivation of a more mature sense of Australian identity to:

“…start establishing very close ties with the land, not necessarily via ownership of property but via locally-based, inclusive, nonpolitical, strategy-based frameworks, with a very long-term aim of simply looking after land.”10

Care for its own sake eschews extractivism. Care is not focused on what we can take from land or how we can shape it for Imperial expectations of productivity. Rather, care asks what we can give to

place, pointing towards the ethics of reciprocity and interdependence that Country could teach us – if only we could learn to listen.

The radical act of listening, which I am working to continually cultivate in myself, provides the portal to move us from siloed disciplines of urban planning and architecture to people of place. It is here – with place and with deep listening – that we may take the first steps toward unlearning the stillviolent and still-insidious ways of settler-colonialism.

The yellow-tailed black cockatoo outside my window is another potent reminder that it is not just our lives at stake, but the future of life itself.

Matt Novacevski is a planner (yes!), writer, teacher, researcher, and advocate for place. He is currently completing his PhD at the University of Melbourne, looking at a post-colonial approach to the evaluation of placemaking practice.

Acknowledgements

I acknowledge that this work has been written on unceded Wurundjeri-Woi Wurrung Country. I pay my respects to Elders Past and Present, to Country and to First Nations around the world for their ongoing stewardship of place.

Notes

1 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, Summary for Policymakers. 2022. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGII_ SummaryForPolicymakers.pdf: 14.

2 Jackson, Sue., Libby Porter, and Louise C. Johnson, eds. 2018. Planning in Indigenous Australia: From Imperial Foundations to Postcolonial Futures. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group,

3 Johnson, Louise C., 2018. “Planning Melbourne” in Sue Jackson, Libby Porter, and Louise C. Johnson eds. Planning in Indigenous Australia: From Imperial Foundations to Postcolonial Futures. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group: 111-130.

4 Watego, Chelsea., 2021. Another Day in the Colony, University of Queensland Press: St Lucia; Patrick Wolfe. 2006. ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’. Journal of Genocide Research 8 (4): 387–409. https://doi. org/10.1080/14623520601056240.

5 Miller, Maddison., 2021. “The Future of Our Cities Is Indigenous”, Pursuit: Science Matters: https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/the-future-of-ourcities-is-indigenous.

6 See, for example: Austin, Sissy Eileen., 2020. “The Destruction of a Sacred Tree on Djab Wurrung Country Has Broken Our Hearts”, The Guardian: https://www. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/27/the-destruction-of-a-sacred-treeon-djab-wurrung-country-has-broken-our-hearts. Calla Wahlquist and Lorena Allam. “Juukan Gorge inquiry: Rio Tinto’s decision to blow up Indigenous rock shelters ‘inexcusable’”. The Guardian, Wednesday 9 December, https://www. theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/dec/09/juukan-gorge-inquiry-rio-tintosdecision-to-blow-up-indigenous-rock-shelters-inexcusable.

7 Pascoe, Bruce., and Bill Gammage. 2021. Country: Future Fire, Future Farming Port Melbourne: Thames and Hudson; Deborah Bird Rose. 1996. Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness. Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission; Ambelin Kwaymullina. 2008. “Introduction: A Land of Many Countries”. In Heartsick for Country: Stories of Love, Spirit, and Creation, edited by Sally Morgan, Tjalaminu Mia, and Blaze Kwaymullina. North Fremantle: Fremantle Press: 6-20.

8 Milroy, Gladys., and Jill Milroy. 2008. “Different Ways of Knowing: Trees Are Our Families Too.” In Heartsick for Country: Stories of Love, Spirit and Creation, edited by Sally Morgan, Tjalaminu Mia, and Blaze Kwaymullina. North Fremantle: Fremantle Press: 22-40.

9 Steffensen, Victor., 2019. “Putting the People Back Into Country.” In Decolonizing Research: Indigenous Storywork as Methodology, London: Zed Books: 224–38.

10 Graham, Mary., 1999. “Some Thoughts about the Philosophical Underpinnings of Aboriginal Worldviews.” Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology 3 (2): 105–18. https://doi.org/10.1163/156853599X00090.

It's time to unsettle our settler-colonial disciplines

I was making a left turn onto Lygon Street, towards East Brunswick, when my passenger, one of three founders of our Stockholm-based architecture practice, began to gesticulate wildly at a row of silver, waveshaped fins attached to the facade of a five-storey apartment building, exclaiming in surprise, “What is that?!” Our office does a lot of housing research, which often requires constructing big data sets and large archives of architectural drawings in order to analyse trends.

Skin deep

Words by Helen Rix Runting

Photography by Elizabeth Campbell

But turning the corner on that warm Melbourne autumn day, we didn’t need any fancy methodologies to identify this architectural phenomenon, writ large across the walls of the city. This very public gesture not only repeated itself across the facade of the adjacent building, where it shifted from waves to lines, but continued up the street and through neighbouring areas, jumping municipal boundaries: a city-wide supergraphic that the Victorian planning system refers to as “facade articulation”.

A deep, finegrained rhythm

Upon returning to Stockholm, unable to let go of this striking – and frankly rather strange – phenomenon, I started to dig. I studied urban design in Melbourne in the early 2000s, but at that time I saw this kind of language as self-explanatory.

Now I wanted answers. Facade articulation, I learnt, is buried deep within the Victoria Planning Provisions (VPP) and the municipal planning schemes that the VPP structures.1 It predominantly seems to come up in the schedules to the Design and Development Overlay (DDO) and the Development Plan Overlay (DPO) and sometimes in sections dealing with the detailed design of housing (54.06-1, 55.06-1, 58.06-1) or local planning policies. Its frequent use confirms that articulation is not just an arbitrary architectural trend; it’s a regulated requirement, mandated by the state, linked to the delivery of “building design and siting outcomes that contribute positively to the local context... [and] enhance the public realm.”

In Merri-bek (the soon-to-berenamed City of Moreland), facades are to be articulated in order to “achieve a good interface with and surveillance of the public realm, including maximising opportunities for active frontages” (15.011L); to “minimise visual bulk impacts as

seen from neighbouring rear secluded open spaces” (15.01-5L); to “provide visual interest,” “create a pedestrian scale at street level,” and “equitably distribute access to an outlook and sunlight” (Schedule 1 to the Activity Centre Zone, Precinct 10: Pentridge Village); to “break the visual bulk, and give rhythm to the development” (DDO5); to “add to the visual richness of the area” (DDO6); to “reinforce the prevailing fine-grain pattern of subdivision and buildings” (DDO18); and to differentiate upper levels “from the building’s street wall” (DDO19). Articulation is also invoked in DDO24, where “New buildings should adopt solid architectural expression that emphasises the street edge through the use of recessed balconies, framed elements and solid balustrades,” and at DDO29, DPO11, and DPO12, which repeat earlier formulations regulating grain, bulk, and surveillance.

In Yarra, articulation appears to be treated more neutrally than in Merri-bek: DDOs 25, 30, and 35 to 40 all reinforce that articulation (along with building siting, scale, massing, and materials) is an area through which design excellence can be achieved, rather than an aim in itself. In the City of Darebin, DPO12 describes articulation in terms of “punctured facades” wherein “floors should be distinguishable,” while DDO3, DOO16, and DDO17 usefully define articulation in terms of “a suitable ratio of solid and void elements” and “a well-considered combination of horizontal and vertical building elements,” also advocating for “the application of a limited palette of materials.” This latter point indicates that even articulation has its limits, something confirmed by the City of Yarra’s DPO15, where development should “avoid highly articulated facades above retained heritage buildings.” There can be too much of a good thing, it seems.

Articulation emerges, from this brief regulatory review, as an architectural operation that does a very specific job in Victoria. Firstly, articulation is a visual patterning that is achieved by manipulating solid-void and horizontal-vertical ratios within a volume or facade. Secondly, this operation is meant to induce a sense of the building whereby it is perceived to be both very interesting but also smaller than it is. Thirdly, articulation exists to materialise idealised historical property relations; in particular, its geometric logic should represent a fine grain – or tight – subdivision, regardless of the reality.

For architects, being asked to articulate a facade strikes me as a little bit like being asked to read your kid a long, corporate Annual Report as a bedtime story: it not only takes an interest in owning capital way too far, it’s also damn-near impossible when that bedtime story also has to both be extremely interesting and appear to be much shorter than it is. An odd form of decorative, diminutive, regulatory property fetishism is at work here – and it suggests a troubled disciplinary relation between

planning and architecture. This is the kind of task you would only give someone who you hope might fail.

An archiphobic absence

I look back through the three planning schemes on my desktop. Where is architecture, in all of this? I notice with some shock that the word “architecture” comes up only once in the VPP, where it is mentioned in relation to residential aged-care facilities (clause 16.01-5S). Australian critics often emphasise the fact that a limited percentage of buildings are designed by architects, but I can’t help but feel that the omission of architecture from the state-level provisions of the planning scheme is neither inclusive nor representative. Architecture’s regulatory absence has definite break-up vibes. Was architecture banished sometime around 1968, when the utopia that the two disciplines had envisaged for themselves failed to materialise? Had this wayward lover been struck from public record in the hope that redaction might produce catharsis? Once all contact between the two had ceased, monikers and pseudonyms had crept in to fill the ensuing gap – The One Who Cannot Be Named became “the form of settlements” (11.01-1S), “types of housing” (11.03-1S), “development” (15.01-1S), “the city, places and spaces and facilities” (15.01-1R), along with “building design” and “buildings” (15.01-2S).

What is architecture from the point of view of planning when read through these monikers – that is, in absentia? Scouring clause 15.01-2S of the VPP searching for indirect references, I learnt the following:

The building is an outcome of a process, the starting point of which is a site analysis.

The role of planning is to ensure that the building does a range of things.

The things that the building should do include supporting, enhancing, encouraging, responding to, protecting, providing, contributing to, and creating. These acts are to be performed in relation to the objects of “strategic and cultural context,” “properties, the public realm and the natural environment,” resource recovery, stormwater discharge, “the function and amenity of the public realm,” “personal safety, perceptions of safety and property security,” “landmarks, views and vistas,” “transport movement networks,” existing vegetation, and the “cooling and greening of urban areas.”

In addition, pursuant to Clause 16.01-1S as housing, architecture is to provide amenity and incorporate “universal design and adaptable internal dwelling design.”

From the POV of the VPP, architecture is what we might – in theory terms – call ‘performative’. 2 Rather than being something stable or static, architecture does things – it is what it does and it does what it is. When tangentially referring to the one who cannot be named, planning dreams of a discipline that protects the status quo, provides technical support to the environment, and creates security for people who already own property. It dreams of a lover with a decidedly neoliberal disposition, the total opposite of the digressive radical that architecture used to be. But is this the city it really dreams of, the photographic negative of architecture’s worst self?

It’s all about the optics

Is the building bulky? Is it interesting? Is it, or are those who might be within it, looking at me? And are they looking at me when I’m getting changed (voyeurism) or when I’m getting mugged (passive surveillance)? Does the building create richness? Does it have rhythm?

As any critical theorist will tell you, these are highly subjective and deeply normative judgements that are based on cultural and aesthetic preferences. The systems of classification that we use to answer such questions also classify us, producing us not only as differently racialised, classed, and gendered subjects, but also as perceiving ones. Perception itself, as historians of cybernetics like Orit Halpern remind us, is historically specific;and since the early twentieth century urban planning and design have acted as a key technology in formatting how we see, and what we can know about, the world. 3

Urban design in particular has had a rather damaging tendency to de-historicise and essentialise its knowledge base as natural, intuitive, or common sense, but – like architecture, education, or medicine –it is also a disciplinary project with a particular political orientation and history. And that history is increasingly being interrogated in terms of its support for a neotraditionalist agenda that sought to reframe the relationship between the planning and architecture disciplines, partially through the introduction of a series of constructed conflicts on matters that were seen as central to an emerging neoliberal political economy.4 Those interests converged on the optics of capitalist land development strategies and the control of externalities, fed through a rhetoric of choice and diversity, appropriateness, wellness, and amenity.

They ushered in a new world: one which itself is now appearing to disintegrate. 5

In light of the conditions of our historical present – the interface-saturated existence of postpandemic life, the distributive politics of a property market that is effectively closed to entire generations, and the need to conceptualise new, higher density cultures of living and building in times of climate crisis, perhaps new bedtime stories need to be articulated. Perhaps planning needs to get back together with their ex, architecture. I think, given all that’s going on, there’s a good chance that architecture is no longer the irresistible, irresponsible maverick that left planning high and dry in the vacuum left by the perceived failure of modernism’s social project, just as planning has likely outgrown its obsession with wealth, status, and the regulatory cold shoulder. With all that’s going on right now, perhaps it’s time to articulate the terms of a future together. This is a question that extends well beyond the facade and the property boundary; it would require a vision about how we might all learn to live together. Despite our differences.

Dr Helen Runting is an urban planner and urban designer working within the field of architectural theory and design. She is a founding partner in the Stockholmbased architecture office Secretary (www.secretary. international); a guest teacher at EKA in Tallinn; and a regular contributor to debates on urbanism, aesthetics, and housing politics.

Notes

1 Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning. 2022. “Clause 15.01-2S Building design (09.06.2022 VC216)”, in Victoria Planning Provisions, Melbourne: State Government of Victoria. np.

2 This term was developed by J.L. Austin and popularised in part through its use in gender studies through the work of Judith Butler. See: Judith Butler, 1997. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, New York: Routledge. For an account of how “performativity” might be understood within architecture, see: Katarina Bonnevier, 2007. Behind Straight Curtains: Towards a Queer Feminist Theory of Architecture, School of Architecture, Royal Institute of Technology, Diss. Stockholm: Kungliga tekniska högskolan.

3 Halpern, Orit., 2014. Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason Since 1945 Durham and London: Duke University Press.

4 As Brian Tochterman argues, “While Jacobs and Florida deserve credit for highlighting the vibrant and dynamic life of the city in the face of unmitigated sprawl and narratives of urban decline, the time has come for a reexamination or reconsideration of their work, if not a reassessment of the planning profession and its purpose in the twenty-first century.” See: Brian Tochterman, 2012. “Theorizing Neoliberal Urban Development: A Genealogy from Richard Florida to Jane Jacobs” in Radical History Review 112 (Winter), doi: 10.1215/01636545-1416169.

5 “And yet we can argue that the neoliberal system is dissolving. Neoliberalism has, in the end, been abandoned, but not because it has been defeated by progressive forces on the grounds of its cruelty, injustices and repeated speculative crises, of which that experienced by Sweden in the 1990s was the first. It has been abandoned because it was inadequate in meeting a pandemic,” writes Göran Therborn in a recent anthology (translation from Swedish author’s own). Göran Therborn, 2022.

“I systemskiftets avgångshall” [“In the Departure Lounge of a System Change”], in Bortom Systemskiftet: Mot en ny gemenskap [Beyond the System Change: Towards a New Community], Niklas Altermark and Magnus Dahlstedt, eds. Stockholm: Verbal förlag: 9.

In 2016, the Victorian government implemented the Better Apartment Design Standards (BADS) into the Victoria Planning Provisions (VPP) and all its planning schemes.1

Apartment design guidelines as architecture

Words by Allan Burrows and Arjuna Benson

Photography by Tom Ross

These were positioned as a corrective reaction to the proliferation of lowquality apartment stock that had been built in previous years – joining a host of other frameworks, regulations, and stratagems that collectively parametricise the formal constraints and potentials of our built environment. Although initially criticised by the Australian Institute of Architects for not specifying a minimum dwelling size and for not mandating the use of architects, our Victorian Chapter generally supported the initiative as a way to improve design outcomes. 2

This piece is not a lament for the diminished role of the architect. Rather, we want to speculate on the opportunities for architecture that might appear through an examination of the relationship between the architect and these modulating frameworks.

By 2021, the BADS had been revised and rebranded as the Apartment Design Guidelines for Victoria (ADGV).

Like BADS, the ADGV have statewide applicability: they are made actionable and enforceable through references within both the VPP and all its underlying planning schemes –specifically, through new clauses 55.07 and 58. While retaining a similar focus on quality design outcomes, these new guidelines became even more explicitly architectural in their remit. They included new guidance for external walls and materials, along with updates to the standards for open space (both communal and private), landscaping, and integration with the street.

It is here that we find ourselves wondering: with all these new mandated standards, what is left for us to design? And, if the design guideline has become a high-resolution placeholder for

Right: Breese Street by Milieu, designed by Breathe and DKO.

Above

Breese Street by Milieu, designed by Breathe and DKO is carbon neutral in its operation – no gas. Every Breese Street resident receives 100% GreenPower

architecture, what new design opportunities might exist for architects?

Of course, regulation as form is not new to architects: in the 1920s, for example, Hugh Ferriss rendered Manhattan’s setback envelopes as a series of moody, art-deco volumes.3 The condition that we deal with today, however, is vastly more complex and constrained. If we were to repeat Ferris’ analysis on the contemporary Melbourne apartment, we would need to illustrate a tangle of so many interlocking formal relationships and constraints that an x-ray of a near-complete building would emerge –a nearly-architecture.

How are we to conceptualise the nearlyarchitecture mandated by our current suite of apartment design standards and guidelines? The urbanist Keller Easterling uses the word disposition to make a distinction between the object forms and active forms of our built environment.4 For Easterling, the object form is the tangible content of architectural production: the building. The active form, meanwhile, is composed of all the immaterial forces, existing conditions, and interests that together shape the potential for the building to exist: this site- and object-specific potential is the building’s disposition. (Here, she draws a parallel with media theorist, Marshall McLuhan, who “highlighted the difference between the declared content of media – music on the radio or videos on the internet – and the means by which the content was delivered.”) Indeed, with the increased architectural specificity of the ADGV –coupled with the increasing financialisaton of housing – the active and object forms of new Victorian apartment buildings are becoming indistinguishable; the building has become closely coupled with the form of its disposition.

Consider any prospective site for midto high-rise residential development. Typically, the developer will have an idea of the net saleable area (NSA) required in order to make the venture profitable, even before an architect is engaged. The NSA can be thought of as a formula that is applied to the geometry of the site, resulting in a cellular three-dimensional volume that has been sculpted by planning limitations, such as setbacks and height limits. At this stage, the disposition of the project is explicitly formal, but this form does not have an author. Rather, it is an automated, volumetric consequence of the interaction of active forms. The role of the architect, then, is to leverage the potential of this active form to author some final object form: in other words, we must convert disposition into architecture. There are, in theory, many possible object forms that may arise from a

single, situated active form. In practice, however, the increased architectural specificity of these regulatory active forms has led to fewer and fewer possible object forms.

Where once the volumetric form of a feasibility study would barely resemble a building, the new design standards for apartments (ADGV) mandated in Clause 58 now provide an architectural structure. The National Construction Code (NCC) and Australian Standards – other active forms contributing to a building’s disposition – cannot script buildings through translation alone, but through the structure of clause 58, their logics can be embedded prior to design. An undesigned building template can now be generated in relative autonomy.

Some lines of causality in the apartment provisions are obvious: room depth and ceiling height are bound by ratio; the dimensions of the kitchen are bound to the living room; bedrooms must connect to the building envelope for daylight access. But some lines of causality are less obvious. A window, for example, has obvious contingencies with the envelope of the building, and is thus indirectly related to property size, scale, and orientation –along with the building as an economic composition (NSA). Where natural ventilation is required (40% of apartments per floor), the minimum and maximum distances between openings provide an additional layer of spatial configuration to the apartment over the programmatic layout. This plays a role in the location, quality, and – arguably – the cultural and market understanding of the bathroom, which is now a by-product of other provisions. The discrete habitable container of the apartment – now a relatively finite constellation of parts – is then strictly patterned across and bound to floor plates in response to noise attenuation and apartment diversity standards. A minor adjustment to a single apartment design now has traceable architectural consequences throughout the entire building.

Through this complex, parametric part-towhole relationship, the design of the object form of a building is preempted by the autonomous interactions of all the active forms at play – which over-constrain the building’s disposition, narrowing the scope of possible object forms. The legislative is now explicitly architectural.

This is not to say that our current (proliferating, tightly constrained) standards are not capable of producing good architecture: our experience is that good architects will always find a way to make good buildings, regardless of the constraints. But the increasing specificity

of apartment design standards does result in a tightening of constraints, giving good architects fewer and fewer possibilities for innovative or novel design. Similarly, for the minimally compliant projects that make up the bulk of our state’s housing stock, buildings become generic, physical manifestations of their regulatory dispositions.

This repetition of a generic apartment model reinforces assumptions about the ideal dwelling. Today, the open-living typology is practically uncontested – bedroom and living room dimensions assert their sub-architectural componentry, which in turn reinforces entrenched sociocultural expectations; the TV is protected by the standards, while the piano and the home office go unrecognised. Suddenly, everything is rounded to its average; nothing is exemplary.

For the discipline and profession of architecture, the increasing architecturalisation of design standards has far-reaching consequences – including a growing perception among property developers and so-called PropTech (property technology) companies that architectural production can now be wholly automated. In Victoria and elsewhere, software is already being used to accelerate land speculation and feasibility processes. Through these new platforms, possible development parcels can be instantly identified by inputting orientation, size, proportion, zoning, overlays, proximity to public transport, and other spatially calculable considerations; design optioneering can be automated by manipulating desired NSA, building height, and other parameters – even architectural style. In theory, the automation of certain broad-strokes massing and feasibility analyses could free-up time (and budget) for architects to re-allocate elsewhere in a project. In practice, though, the co-opting of these tools by property developers only serve to maximise profits for developers while further minimising the architectural scope of work.

Rather than fretting about the automation of our profession, we see an opportunity here for the role of the architect to expand; to encompass designing the active form of a building, rather than just its object form. It is easy to imagine that the computational logics underpinning existing BIM and parametric software could be adapted and redeployed to also test variations of our design standards and guidelines (active forms), in addition to our buildings (object forms). Here, we suggest that the ADGV might be a useful pilot, given that it already closely calibrates a building with its disposition.

Perhaps software could allow us –architects, designers, planners, and spatial practitioners – to see (and manipulate) the spatial and formal consequences of different variations to design standards, guidelines, and codes. Perhaps standards need to be reimagined as dynamic and adaptive design tools, rather than static instruments.

What might this achieve?

Perhaps we would begin to see better interoperability and balance between spatial legislation, architecture, and property development. We suggest that the feasibility process might become a more equitable venture between these disciplines.

Perhaps we would be better placed to test the efficacy of design standards in real time, and then update our rules in response to feedback. We suggest a rapid-prototyping approach to planning, so that issues can be quickly corrected.

Perhaps we would be able to pilot novel and innovative housing models in isolated circumstances, without compromising the integrity of the wider planning system. We suggest that computational approaches could be leveraged to identify opportunities for calculated risk – the results of which could feed back into the wider system.

Perhaps we would even be able to implement multiple versions in parallel. We suggest that the simultaneous governance of a series of different (but complementary) generic models could allow for controlled heterogeneity in our cities. And perhaps these shifting, adaptive standards would help the broader public build greater critical literacy about both planning and architecture – culminating in a more productive and expansive discourse. We suggest that the ongoing implementation of dynamic planning controls would encourage broader public debate about the formal and spatial consequences of planning-as-architecture, as citizens could see new buildings spring up in response to new standards or clauses.

Apartments in Victoria are only one example of growing rifts and tensions between the competing interests of capital, regulation, and design in the built environment. By contemplating the relationships and power structures between object forms and active forms, we suggest that architects may conceive of new ways to affect the city – but this demands

a close, critical engagement with our present condition. As design standards and guidelines become increasingly architectural to safeguard quality design outcomes in minimally compliant projects, those of us with architectural expertise must become more involved in policy-making processes. Perhaps, rather than lamenting our diminishing roles, it is time – as Easterling suggests – to expand the role of the architect, to encompass design of the active forms of our buildings, in addition to their object forms in a manner where the interplay between them becomes a subject of our design.5

Allan Burrows RAIA Grad. is an architectural graduate at John Wardle Architects. He has led design studios at the University of Melbourne and RMIT University, researching architecture as a consequence of, and an agent within, interdisciplinary systems and institutions.

Arjuna Benson RAIA Grad. is a graduate of architecture, currently working at Sibling Architecture. He is a tutor at RMIT and has also taught at the University of Melbourne. Through his work, he is interested in the junctions between architectural speculation and reality.

Notes

1 Department of Environment, Land, Water & Planning. 2016. Better Apartments Design Standards, State of Victoria.

2 Australian Institute of Architects. 2017. “AIA Comments on New Design Standards for Vic Apartments,” ARCHITECTURE & DESIGN (blog), May 9, 2017, https://www.architectureanddesign.com.au/news/new-design-standards-aim-toimprove-liveability-in.

3 Ferriss, Hugh., 1929. The Metropolis of Tomorrow. New York NY: Ives Washburn.

4 Easterling, Keller., 2014. Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space New York, NY: Verso: 13-14.

5 Easterling, Keller., 2021. Medium Design: Knowing How to Work on the World Verso Books: 38.

Today, the open-living typology is practically uncontested – bedroom and living room dimensions assert their sub-architectural componentry, which in turn reinforces entrenched sociocultural expectations

" "

What if poets, philosophers, and storytellers wrote our building and planning regulations?

Words by Loren Adams

What do you do when your world starts to fall apart? The anthropologist Anna Tsing goes for a walk – and if she’s really lucky, she finds mushrooms. For Anna, mushrooms in unexpected places are a reminder that hope can sprout from even the most ruinous landscapes: they are little fungal “pleasures amidst the terrors of indeterminacy” 1 – at once ambivalent about the circumstances of their existence and determined to exist anyway.

Like Anna, I also go for a walk when my world is falling apart. But since I trained as an architect and not an anthropologist, I do not look for mushrooms: I look for regulatory anomalies in the built environment. My mushrooms are the architectural remnants that make visible the authority of invisible overlays. They are the out-of-place insertions, the uncomfortable adjacencies between objects and spaces and programs that do not ordinarily coexist. My mushrooms are the planning scheme violations – inadvertent, opportunistic,

or vindictive – and their counterparts: the glorious acts of so-called malicious compliance, where an architecture hamstrung by bureaucracy becomes dissident through meticulous obedience.

Volumes contort around restrictive covenants; an unpermitted rooftop terrace is cloaked by a parapet-turned-balustrade; clusters of gleaming towers pull back from ramshackle holdout dwellings in uneasy compliance with overshadowing regulations. These anomalies are a reminder that hope can sprout from even the most monotonous cityscapes: they are little architectural “pleasures amidst the terrors of indeterminacy,” at once brilliant and strange. They are determined to exist – to flourish – in the cracks that form between the competing demands of finance, regulatory compliance, and whatever is left of design intent.

Sometimes, Anna accompanies me on these walks. In my Speechify textto-speech app, a robotic Gwyneth Paltrow reads me The Mushroom at the End of

the World while I wander the streets of Melbourne’s inner-north and beyond, foraging for traces of regulatory anomaly. The cyberneticist Donna Haraway is with us too, making trouble and kin in the voice of a cartoon wizard (“Narrator, British Male”).2

To be clear, though: I have never met Anna Tsing or Donna Haraway. I know them only through their writing, but –perhaps because I am enamoured by their prose – I consider us conceptual friends. And, because we spend so much time together, walking, they have prompted in me a question: what might the world be like if Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway co-authored our building and planning regulations? What if regulations were written by other non-technical writers, too: poets, philosophers, storytellers, choreographers, artists – all my closest conceptual friends? It was from these questions that my Regulatory Nonsense project first emerged.

Regulatory Nonsense

In Regulatory Nonsense, I rewrite building and planning codes, standards, legislation, and regulations using a suite of bespoke natural language bots that I have trained on carefully curated datasets of poetry, fiction, and descriptive prose. 3 I can, for example, create an artificial amalgam of Anna Tsing, Donna Haraway, and other ecofeminist conceptual friends – and then use this to rewrite Victorian building waste and landfill regulations (WasteNotWantBot). I can also create a synthetic cacophony of classic Los Angeles-based writing – throwing together works by Joan Didion, Eve Babitz, Mike Davis, and Helen Hunt Jackson, with screenplay transcripts like Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Chinatown, and the Thom Anderson documentary, Los Angeles Plays Itself – and then use this to rewrite the Los Angeles Zoning Code (LaLaBot). I can even use the playful, anti-ergonomic writings of Madeline Gins and Arakawa to perform a kind of algorithmic séance that resurrects two dead spatial practitioners, so that I can ask them about stairs (BloopBot). Through an alchemic mix of fine-tuning text, prompt strings, and a handful of other numeric levers, my bots gift us regulatory clauses that are poetic, ambiguous, nonsensical, and always gloriously self-assured.4

Sometimes, the bots mandate that architects must drive a “great acceleration machine” that gets “fully airborne.” Once, they named “some early modernist architects such as Carlotta Baba, Antonio Banderas, Jean Paul Sartre and others.”

To WasteNotWantBot, the city is “a milky sponge, a milky sponge, a milky sponge,” while LaLaBot insists that “movement through the cityscape must be a process of unfolding events.” There are also stairways with “a trajectory like a boat, or something,” doors “leading to other worlds,” and an inclusive zoning system “where at least two people can stand in front of the public at a given time and know precisely where they're standing and what they're doing.”

In this speculative environment-world where regulatory decision guidelines are (re)invented by a clumsy, poetic artificial intelligence, we can no longer rely on counts and measurements to inscribe clean thresholds between compliance and noncompliance. Instead, I imagine an architect acting out a compliance dance for a stair that is “a sort of lowering-down-into-nothingness,” her black turtleneck muddied after “travel(ling) on webbed feet across open terrain at night.” And I wonder: what did she learn – about the world,

about architecture, about herself – during this mandated muddy jaunt?

I also wonder: what if our building materials were “merely extensions of thought”? What if form-based zoning produced “urban form (that) encourages users to gaze skyward, then move higher, higher up, higher still, until they reach a point where they can see the entire city”? What if there were no maximum planning envelopes anymore, only a requirement to prove that “the city ends as if the luminous scaffold had once taken form, in a subtle envelope”?

Lately, these are the (impossible) questions I bring with me on my walks and to my classes, so that my students and I can forage for traces of regulatory anomaly and opportunity, with all our conceptual friends. Together, we do our best to operate – and to flourish – in the cracks that form between the competing demands of finance, regulatory compliance, and whatever is left of design intent. After all, the bots are here to remind us that: “The people who live in the ruins are the ones who have to face the consequences of what we have done.”

Loren Adams RAIA Grad. is a disciplinary promiscuous spatial practitioner. Trained in architecture and public policy, she is currently a Doctoral Fellow with the University of Melbourne Centre for Cities and teaches at RMIT.

Acknowledgements

Noon van der Silk contributed vital technical assistance (and enthusiasm) during the early stages of Regulatory Nonsense WasteNotWantBot was commissioned by Dreamer Architects for “A New Normal” exhibition at Melbourne Design Week in 2021. See: Loren Adams, Regulatory Nonsense: WasteNotWantBot, video artwork, 1920x1080px, 2021, https://vimeo.com/528606166. LaLaBot was commissioned by Anthony Carfello, Wendy Gilmartin and Nina Briggs for the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture & Urban Design “Every. Thing. Changes.” summer exhibition in 2020. See: Loren Adams, Regulatory Nonsense: LaLaBot, video artwork, 1920x1080px, 2020, https://everythingchanges2020.org/Loren-Adams.

Notes

1 Tsing, Anna., 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins Cary, NC: Princeton University Press.

2 Haraway, Donna J., 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene Cary, NC: Duke University Press: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/ lib/unimelb/detail.action?docID=4649739.

3 For an expanded technical explanation of this work, see: Loren Adams, “Poetry, Ambiguity and Nonsense in Regulations: A Triptych of Natural Language Bots for the Built Environment,” in The Routledge Handbook of Architecture, Urban Space, and Politics, ed. Nikolina Bobic and Farzaneh Haghighi, vol. 2: Ecology, Social Participation, and Marginalities, Routledge, Forthcoming.

4 For more information about this trptych of bots see: https://www.lorenadams.me

What if poets, philosophers, and storytellers wrote our building and planning regulations?

Outerspatial: working through and with technologies that encircle us

Words and illustration by Charity Edwards

Planning for the future?

It is well understood by architects and planners that urban processes extend beyond the boundaries of the city. For instance, Melbourne is sustained by grains from the Wimmera-Mallee wheatbelt, fruit orchards throughout the Murray-Darling Basin, and milk sourced from the Gippsland dairy farming region. There is, however, little discussion of less obvious forms of urban processes – the geographer Matthew Gandy reminds us cities are simply one example of urbanisation1 – and especially those that direct our view away from the Earth’s surface. In fact, what we call urban extends into hinterlands and, significantly, the atmosphere above: up there an array of satellite equipment, monitoring systems, and sensing

instruments operate around the globe, and increasingly structure conditions down here.

A decade-long drive to expand entrepreneurial opportunity off-world2 has catalysed the growing density of satellites entering low Earth orbit (LEO): a geocentric envelope 2000km above the planet’s surface, which satellites can circle through in just over two hours. 3 This intensification reveals challenges including distorted astronomy, collision risks, and damaged environments, while research also shows proliferating orbiting artefacts cause actual harm to Sky Country, and Indigenous and First Nations communities’ ability to share knowledge of the stars with future generations.4 Failure to respond to such concerns is emblematic of planning for the future that proceeds with little consideration of plural worlds and lives entangled with technologies.

Space, beyond a particular limit

In Australia, planning for LEO rests almost entirely with Federal infrastructure policy and property developers providing new home owner/occupants with access to broadband markets. 5 At a global scale, the United Nations Office of Outer Space Affairs argues such technologies are key to creating resilient cities, although they reduce relations between space, outer space, and technologies “to pinpoint structures and reference points for cadastral and urban planning purposes.”6

In researching orbital space’s symbolic and material consequences for those on Earth, media sociologist Jennifer Gabrys argues our planet is not simply an object to be translated via devices, but an environment always becoming through and with technologies that encircle it.7

Given the intensifying use of spaces outside what is usually considered urban, we should be obliged to more carefully consider where these serve cities and urban development. Revealing contacts between objects and others in this zone allows re-making relations to technologies across the planet. How, then, to take outerspatial concerns into account?

Orbital urbanisation

First, when encountering convenient software and design products made possible by these technologies, we must remember they are also instruments of planetary commodification and control. Planners often focus on smart cities but it is the technological capture of Earth landscapes that prefigures all urban transformation. 8 Indeed, sensing networks become critical where technologies are able – or enabled – to escape oversight. Global observation capacity has grown rapidly since the 1957 launch of Sputnik I but media scholar Lisa Parks argues this stems particularly from policy changes under US President Clinton, who made militarygrade satellite imagery available for commercial sale. 9 A lucrative combination of broadcasting reach and networked computation has prompted radical new urban activities, ranging from remotely policing civil society to land consolidation for real estate speculation.10

Massive re-ordering of space is made possible by LEO observation. Increasing coverage in now-crowded orbital space, companies like SpaceX exploit diminishing returns from very low Earth orbit (located 100km to 450km above Earth) to station over 10,000 satellites. Their short-lifespan satellites supply global communications and cloud computing capacities required to integrate urban planning, remote working, and virtual governance deemed necessary for city recovery during the ongoing pandemic.11 SpaceX has launched more than 2700 satellites to date,12 and while concerns have been raised about impacts from orbiting artefacts and their signal pollution,13 such discussion is absent from urban planning.

Disturbingly, there are no international agreements to police space debris collision risks or mitigate violence done to dark sky environments already under pressure from light pollution on Earth. Cumulative emissions from rocket boosters threaten our planet’s ozone layer by adding hydrogen chloride and alumina directly into the atmosphere. Troubling too, is research indicating end-of-life mega-constellation satellite removal scatters

uncontrolled levels of atmospheric aluminium, akin to geoengineering experiments. Also worth noting is that Starlink deorbits are designed for five to seven years after launch, meaning nearly two tonnes of material will soon re-enter Earth’s atmosphere every day. 14

Plural worlds, entangled plans

Entrepreneurial visions aside, there are real implications for lives experienced on Earth due to these ongoing technological changes and as orbital urbanisation reinscribes patterns of settler-colonial violence into the plural worlds of Indigenous and First Nations communities. As a non-Indigenous architect and beneficiary of uneven power structures embedded in/on stolen land, I am indebted to the work of Bawaka Country 15 and others who describe obligations between Sky Country and beings who reside there, and Indigenous cosmologies that reject the separation of Earth from outer space as yet another fiction of terra nullius logics. Indeed, Yolŋu see sky modifications by orbiting sensing networks as supreme acts of erasure: damaging relations throughout the cosmos by disrupting dwelling places of their kin, curtailing existing knowledges, and ultimately, restricting possible futures to be imagined by all:

“Land, Sea and Sky Country are all connected, so there is no such thing as ‘outer space’ or ‘outer Country’ –no outside. What we do in one part of Country affects all others.”16

Conventional planning processes reliant on understanding an enclosed Earth through the creation of boundaries and maintaining hierarchies of control are already at a disadvantage when attempting to consider interconnected regions and material flows, let alone the re-making of worlds in relational terms.17 Architects could, however, reassert their historical capacity to work amongst farreaching entanglements (simultaneously in-between, across, and beyond multiple disciplines, systems, and technologies) to help dismantle distinctions between ourselves and objects both here and up there. Viewing the problem of orbital urbanisation simply as a need for new enforceable regulation

Outerspatial: working through and with technologies that encircle us

beyond local planning or the nation-state reinforces colonising practices of coding and classification which continue to externalise dispossession, climate change impacts, and biodiversity loss from urban development. Kānaka Maoli scholar, architect, and urbanist James Miller and architectural historian Eric Nay remind us Indigenous knowledges cannot “be ‘curated’ by Western ontological systems” when re-situating stewardship and care within design and planning.18 Building actual competencies for practice in the service of others requires bringing the study and profession of architecture – the co-making of worlds – and its supporting infrastructure back into clear relation with the cosmos.19

The concerns highlighted here offer no easy answers and the usual “technological solutionism” 20 of urban debates are themselves a legacy of industrialised problem-solving that risk displacing Indigenous ways of knowing and world views. 21 Instead, as orbital urbanisation increasingly conditions our lives on Earth, relational approaches beyond the limits of planning are demanded –and require embedding in education, practice responsibilities, and professional development. Current outerspatial policies only enable proliferating visible craft and signal pollution, which escalate space debris risks, disrupt scientific observations, cause harm to environments, and inscribe settlercolonial violence and extractive practices into the dark sky. Beyond careful oversight and ethical regulation, it is imperative that mounting low Earth orbit intrusions are understood, mitigated, and mediated with respect to plural worlds and entangled lives – for us to work explicitly with and through the technologies that encircle us – before their current trajectories are fixed and all our futures made final.

Charity Edwards is a practicing architect, researcher, and lecturer at Monash University Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture. Her research highlights the impacts of urbanisation in remote and off-world environments. She is co-founder of The Afterlives of Cities research collective, which brings together expertise in architecture, digital fabrication, astrophysics, and speculative fiction to recover futures in space.

Previous page: The illustration No Outside Worlds merges archival images from early Earth sensing technologies, recent photographs of Starlink constellation tracking from very Low Earth Orbit polluting the night sky, geostationary orbit diagrams, global positioning system objects, satellites under construction, communication towers, and the Melbourne CBD skyline to underscore the extraplanetary nature of contemporary urbanisation.

Notes

1 Gandy, Matthew., 2014. "Where Does the City End?" in Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization, ed. Neil Brenner, Berlin: Jovis, pp 86-89.

2 Cringily termed ‘Space 2.0’.

3 Since 2010, the scale of global broadband demand and reduced space launch costs have allowed a new generation of networked satellite systems to enter the market and exploit the hitherto marginal LEO zone. Those new players include the Starlink telecommunications mega constellation < www.starlink.com >, although SpaceX is just one of several commercial start-ups planning to launch more than 65,000 satellites in the near future.

4 Finnegan, Ciara., 2022. "Indigenous Interests in Outer Space: Addressing the Conflict of Increasing Satellite Numbers with Indigenous Astronomy Practices", Laws 11, no. 2: 1-19.

5 Australian Parliament., 2020. Telecommunications Amendment (Infrastructure in New Developments) Bill 2020, C2020B00172 Canberra, ACT, pp 1-15, https://www. legislation.gov.au/Details/C2020B00172

6 United Nations’ Office of Outer Space Affairs., 2022. “Sustainable Development Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities”, https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/ ourwork/space4sdgs/sdg11.html

7 Gabrys, Jennifer., 2016. Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

8 Edwards, Charity., and Brendan Gleeson, 2020. "New Orbital Urbanization" in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Futures, ed. Robert Brears, Cham: Springer International Publishing.

9 Parks, Lisa., 2005. Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual Durham, USA: Duke University Press.

10 For remote policing, see: Delf Rothe and David Shim, "Sensing the Ground: On the Global Politics of Satellite-Based Activism" Review of International Studies 44, no. 3 (2018): 414-37. For real estate speculation, see: Rajji Sanjay Desai, "Afterlives of Orbital Infrastructures: From Earth’s High Orbits to Its High Seas" New Geographies: Extraterrestrial 11 (2019): 39-45; Carsten Juergens and M. Fabian Meyer-Heß, 2021. "Identification of Construction Areas from VHR-Satellite Images for Macroeconomic Forecasts" Remote Sensing 13, no. 13: 2618.

11 World Economic Forum, 2020. “Shaping the Future of the Internet of Things and Urban Transformation”, https://www.weforum.org/platforms/shaping-the-futureof-the-internet-of-things-and-urban-transformation.

12 “Live coverage: SpaceX launches 53 more Starlink internet satellites”, Space Flight Now, 2022, https://spaceflightnow.com/2022/06/17/falcon-9-starlink-4-19live-coverage/

13 McDowell, Jonathan C., 2020. “The Low Earth Orbit Satellite Population and Impacts of the SpaceX Starlink Constellation” The Astrophysical Journal 892, no. 2: 1-10.

14 Boley, Aaron C., and Michael Byers, 2021. “Satellite Mega-constellations Create Risks in Low Earth Orbit, the Atmosphere and on Earth” Scientific Reports 11, no. 1 (): 1-8; Sylvie Durrieu and Ross F. Nelson, "Earth Observation from Space – the Issue of Environmental Sustainability" Space Policy 29, no. 4: 238-50.

15 Bawaka Country, including A Mitchell, S Wright, S Suchet-Pearson, K Lloyd, L Burarrwanga, R Ganambarr, M Ganambarr-Stubbs, B Ganambarr, D Maymuru, & R Maymuru, 2020. "Dukarr Lakarama: Listening to Guwak, Talking Back to Space Colonization" Political Geography 81: 1-19.

16 Bawaka Country: 2.

17 Escobar, Arturo., 2018. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds Durham, USA: Duke University Press.

18 Miller, James., and Eric Nay, 2022. “Ontological Upgrade: Indigenous Futures and Radical Transformation”. SPOOL 9, no. 2: 65-76, https://www.spool.ac/index.php/ spool/article/view/206.

19 For the collective learning and unlearning required, see: Casper Bruun Jensen, 2022. “How to Deal with Cosmoecological Perplexities: Artscience, Critical Zones, Pluriversal Politics.” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 8, no.1: 189-198.

20 Morozov, Evgeny., 2013. To Save Everything, Click Here: The Follow of Technological Solutionism New York: PublicAffairs Books.

21 Akama, Yoko., Penny Hagen and Desna Whaanga-Schollum, 2019. “Problematizing Replicable Design to Practice Respectful, Reciprocal, and Relational Co-designing with Indigenous People” Design and Culture 11, no.1: 59-84.

The good, the bad, and the ugly

A conversation between Frank Lloyd Wrong of Ugly Melbourne Houses and Yuchen Gao and Yiling Shen of F*** Marry Kill (Melbourne Buildings Edition).

Frank Lloyd Wrong (FLW):

I think about aesthetics a lot, particularly ugliness. From the moment I rise in the morning from my gold-plated Bolivian rotating home theatre Evian-filled waterbed, all I think about is ugliness and aesthetics. For me, ugliness is endlessly fascinating and engaging with it in a format like Instagram can be confronting and hugely enjoyable. People get very violently passionate about what ugliness is, what it isn’t, and who gets to decide. Unfortunately, this endless postulating has made me very, very confused, and I find myself mostly asking the question: is aesthetics dead and does it really matter?

Yuchen Gao and Yiling Shen (YG + YS):

Aesthetics is definitely alive – probably more than ever. In fact, it’s one of the easiest ways for the public to engage with the architecture of their cities, by making a judgement call about whether these buildings are ugly or beautiful.

This focus on aesthetics, or Instagrammafication of architecture, has negative consequences – for example, certain celebrated projects photograph well in key areas, but are not functional, built well, or the design of the rest of the building is neglected. However, on the plus side, social media also offers an accessible way for the general public to see images of good architecture, and to join in on discussions on what good architecture is, something that @ uglymelbournehouses does so well.

With our project F*** Marry Kill (Melbourne Buildings Edition), we were interested in the social media of architecture, embracing both the surfacelevel, aesthetics-focused aspects of it, as well as its amazing properties of accessibility and levelling the playing field when it comes to discussion. For the project, we created a platform similar to familiar dating apps, where instead of swiping on singles in your area, you swipe

on 55 chosen buildings in the Melbourne CBD, with an option to comment on why you liked or disliked a certain building. Each of these buildings had their own dating profile, which went into detail about the history and design strategies that went into the design of the building.

By getting people to swipe left or swipe right on buildings, it gathered information about how the public felt about the buildings of their city, as well as encouraging people into the discussion who would normally not be engaged in conversations about architecture. We felt that there was a huge disconnect between the way architects talk about architecture, and the way the public speaks and thinks about architecture. With the lack of post-occupancy analyses done by architects after jobs, and insular awards that are given by architects to other architects, it felt to us that the industry is extremely disconnected from the people who use these buildings

The good, the bad, and the ugly

on a day-to-day basis. By creating a platform that was easy-to-use, fun and playful, it resonated with people who usually feel intimidated to engage with architectural commentary, or simply have never considered it.

What we learned through our F*** Marry Kill experiment was that, although discussion of aesthetics was the easiest way to enter the conversation when discussing the architecture of our city, the memories that people had in certain spaces, their historical legacy, and their environmental sustainability were all factors that, in some cases, had more sway over whether someone liked or disliked a piece of architecture, rather than only aesthetic concerns.

In terms of aesthetics, the public preferred  older buildings, as well as buildings that told a story, such as the William Barak Building. Colourful buildings such as the Pixel Building were rated higher than we anticipated, with people commending them for being fun and exciting to walk past. Brutalist buildings were mostly hated on, with people saying they felt cold, similar to a prison, and just plain old boring.

Do you get a difference of opinion between designers and non-designers on @uglymelbournehouses and with the FMK project?

FLW: Well the big advantage in Australia is that absolutely anybody is allowed to design and build their own house so everyone is an expert in their own way. What this means is you don’t have to spend several years at university specifically studying how to design buildings properly and you are still completely qualified to design them. It’s a great advantage. Unfortunately, we don’t apply this theory to dentistry or brain surgery which is a real pity, as I’ve seen some people’s teeth and experienced some people’s brains and frankly both professions have a lot to answer for. It’s clearly not rocket science,  or is it?

Uglymelbournehouses is a fantastic forum for seeing how much everyone knows about buildings and design, everyone, everywhere always knows what they like and that they could have done a lot better themselves. It’s is a hugely sarcastic, mean-spirited, fun-loving enterprise and everyone has a very different take on it, whether they are designers or not. My main aim has always been to get people to engage with what is built in their city and question it. Also if I can use canapés, roller discos, robotic pizza ovens and Tuscan vacuum cleaner hairpieces as descriptors then that helps enormously.

YS + YG: We definitely had a big difference in opinion between designers and non-designers, especially when it came to aesthetic concerns. Many architects love Brutalism, and other Minimalist pieces of architecture, but we found that this really didn’t rate highly with the general public.

The project was really targeted towards non-designers, and we had a lot of people tell us afterwards that they learned so much about architecture and Melbourne by using our website. It was great to hear all the discussion and debate on our exhibition opening night, where one architect told us that the rankings (determined by how often each building was swiped right on) were all wrong!

Are architects and planners the arbiters of taste in our buildings? Should they be?

FLW: Being taste judges and exercising their aesthetic muscles is fundamentally what architects love to do, the bad ones, the good ones, and all the ones in between. Although architecture can often be dangerously close to stylistic accountancy the essential role of the architect is to have casually neat haircuts, a really great selection of retro coffee percolators and the ability to decide what looks really good and then try and make a building out of it. However, the problem with buildings is that everyone else has an opinion too, particularly people who don’t have neat haircuts and this makes architects go slightly insane. Admittedly this happens very slowly over a very long period of time until they get to a point where they can’t remember what looks good anymore. Then they just design everything to look ironically ugly, just to piss off all the haters (mostly their parents). This happens at around 65 to 70 years of age but is sometimes seen in 25 to 30 year-old architects, and a lot of the other ages in between, and has been noted in some architects just after birth (prior to their first haircut). Using irony is really important in architecture as it makes it a lot easier to justify making something that looks ugly. If people call it ugly, you can just simply accuse them of not understanding the concept of irony. After that you can simply roll your eyes and continue reading your 1986 Encyclopedia Britannica.

The issue of irony is where the most violent collision between planners and architects occurs, because planners have actually never heard of irony (unconfirmed). Despite also having casually neat haircuts they are often incredibly serious and insist on all buildings being very, very, symmetrical and having awfully large setbacks that can sometimes extend into the outer stratosphere. If an architect

mentions irony most planners will just stare angrily at their fantastic selection of highlighter pens.

YG + YS: Although architects and planners are professionals who have studied and researched buildings and perhaps have more of an idea of how they should look, there is definitely a problem of insularity, where each group share ideas in an echo chamber, dismissing what others (the people actually using these buildings) think of these decisions. We wanted to open up the conversation of taste and beauty to those who have less of a say in how our cities look. We think it’s a two-way street – architects and planners can learn from the opinions of those who use these buildings, and by learning more about how these decisions are made in the first place, the general public can also learn about how their cities are designed.

Is there a way to tell what’s beautiful and what’s ugly?

FLW: Gosh, now that’s a doozy. Perhaps some sort of spreadsheet with some numbers should be used. Surely there must be a way of getting a definitive answer. However, as a person who has explored the concept of ugly since 1976 on Instagram, I have basically come to the conclusion that I have no idea what ugly is and who is capable of deciding. I have developed a sort of ugly PTSD.

People say to me, “Frank, you total bastard. What’s Melbourne’s ugliest building?” and I just end up mumbling incoherently for hours, which apparently when recorded and played backwards sounds alarmingly like Kenny G’s stunning cover of Toto’s Africa on a harpsichord. You do the maths. Interestingly though, before 1980 when computers ( ie the internets) were invented most people really had no opinion on architectural aesthetics, except for a couple of German academics and Brad Pitt. Basically, everyone trusted wholeheartedly what architects decreed and the whole concept of ugliness had no relationship to architecture whatsoever. If you called a building ugly in 1979 people just assumed you were wearing your pleated double-breasted knitted tweed disco jumpsuit too tightly and kept their distance. Everyone agreed if an architect had designed it, it must be beautiful.

However, the moment the first email was faxed, people who weren’t architects started acting like they knew everything about how to design buildings (except for Brad Pitt) and subsequently the McMansion was born, coincidence? I think not.

Now, 40 years later, we are basically a society of architectural design experts. Walk into any suburban home in Melbourne and you are sure to find Barbara Streisand’s stunning design manifesto My Passion for Design and a framed computer printout saying “If Designing is Wrong I don’t want to be right”. I have copies of both displayed in my Neo mock-Georgian roller disco ensuite.

YG + YS: It’s funny you joke that we’re a society of architectural design experts, because we feel like designers often immediately dismiss the tastes of the general public as wrong. When, isn’t democracy a case of majority rules? It’s interesting to take it even further and think about a website where the general public can vote on buildings and that’s how buildings make it through planning. We’d probably end up with developers making a whole heap of bots to vote and end up with an even uglier city though.

What do you think of the idea that all planning regulations end up just being majority rules? The most popular get built and the least popular get booted? What kind of city do you envisage that creating?

FLW: I think this could be the single most important planning policy revision we could see in our lifetime or anyone else’s lifetime, like totally ever. Perhaps some sort of town planning public trial may be in order. Once a month everyone gathers in the nearest village square to eat a wide selection of canapés and all new planning permits are displayed by the town crier. We then either throw rotten fruit at them (not including the canapés) or release them to the nearest streetscape. Let’s not forget in Medieval times they absolutely loved public trials and they all lived in pedestrianised urban paradises with access to services, public transport and rather fetching hats. Yeh ok, there weren’t many functioning ensuites and no-one even had a home theatre, but clearly there’s a link.

YS + YG: If the data we collected has any say, it would end up creating a city dominated by Victorian revival buildings with huge green lawns on every CBD street. Every second building would be a theatre, and Brutalism would be banished on pain of death. Regulations are about minimal compliance, but what we see as the benefit of F*** Marry Kill is that it uses data collection to learn more about how people really feel about their buildings – not just their height, edges, shapes, and the tangible, but realising

The good, the bad, and the ugly

how important it is for people to have spaces that create memories and feel deeply entrenched in the cultural identity of a city. By looking at these opinions from the public, it allows architects and planners to get a macro-level view of how people respond to our built environment, and perhaps use this to inform regulations and individual design decisions in the future.

FLW: Yes I agree the more knowledge architects have about how much people hate or don’t hate them, their haircuts, their coffee percolator collections and their buildings can only be beneficial and for the greater good.

Frank Lloyd Wrong is a senior executive amateur content delivery professional @uglymelbournehouses, an outbound marketing and non-sales platform that attracts customers by reviewing ugly house imagerybased material. A renowned obsessive perfectionist and workaholic, Frank writes achingly romantic 17th century classical French Provincial industrial poetry and sculpts uncannily realistic impressions of 1980s sit-com cast members in genuine faux marble. On Sundays he religiously hunts for ugly houses in the outer suburbs of Melbourne with his three Irish Wolfhounds: Pikasso, Monnet and Provinciale.

Yuchen Gao & Yiling Shen are two young designers undertaking the Master of Architecture at RMIT University, while having worked in the industry for several years. They recently created and delivered F*** Marry Kill (Melbourne Buildings Edition) for Melbourne Design Week 2022, leading a team of 10 web designers, web developers and architectural students to create the web app and exhibition. The idea of F*** Marry Kill was also a finalist for the Fishermans Bend Innovation Challenge, organised by the City of Melbourne and pitched to a panel of judges and audience last month.

Ronald McDonald’s arts district

Words by Anthony Carfello

In May of this year, I joined a group of artists and designers in Aalborg, Denmark, for a discussion about the rebranding of their city from industrial centre to creativity hub. Organised by the f.eks. platform, we talked about how this rebranding had produced so many of the exact things found in any other urban area that has used arts and culture to stimulate an economic boost.

Even as a Californian visiting for the first time, the sanitised street art, factories turned into venues and studios, and name-brand architecture with adjacent condominium construction were all familiar to me as run-of-the-mill markers of newly curated space. It was appropriate then that our conversation took place in a McDonald’s restaurant in the centre of town.

Prior to gathering that day, the locals had been in extended dialogue with each other and with municipal representatives about the artwashing that was and had been happening amid what the region’s tourism and hospitality industries frame as the rejuvenation of Aalborg.

What is artwashing? Since the term was first popularised by the journalist Feargus O’Sullivan in 2014,1 artwashing has been applied to a number of pre-existing practices that have accelerated with both rampant

gentrification and the expansion of the art tourism and luxury real estate markets. Like greenwashing2 and pinkwashing3, artwashing is about using something’s assumed virtues to mask nefariousness – from vacuous murals being plastered on the sides of glistening speculative developments to polluters, profiteers, and the generally anti-democratic using private collections and museum donations to launder their reputations.4 Most commonly, artwashing tactics use the presence of artists and galleries to attract frenzied property investment to previously neglected urban neighbourhoods, a process that has played out in cities internationally.

Beginning in 2016, these tactics faced a vital – and largely successful – campaign of community resistance by residents of Boyle Heights in Los Angeles.5 The fight was publicised widely as gallery openings were protested and the gentrifying ventures subsequently

closed. Nevertheless, many willing pawns were simply redeployed to other areas of the city to repeat the script.

Other money-magnets are sometimes at work prior to (or in parallel with) artwashing: music venues, clubs, coffeeshops, fancy restaurants, and so on. Regardless, the instruments and products of artwashing, like other components of gentrification, are agonising in their monotony: if it’s not the same whitewall galleries designed by the same boutique architecture practices, it’s the same gut-rehabbed factories turned into studios and co-working spaces, or the same Bilbao-effect art museums by the same fading starchitects. In the context of American cities, where housing is subject to laissez-faire exploitation, rent increases and social cleansing are concurrent with the unaffordable new buildings that follow once the area is dubbed an Arts District. And globally –from Los Angeles to London; Melbourne to Milwaukee – these methods work bottom-up with individual real estate agents and top-down with business consortiums, planners, governments, and tourism bureaus. Either direction results in consumptioncentred marketing that sells a carbon-copy, imagined artistic lifestyle to those who do not make art. Those who do were already priced out.

It’s this overwhelming repetition that brought us to a McDonald’s. In his 1993 book, The McDonaldization of Society, sociologist George Ritzer updated the German theorist Max Weber’s writings on bureaucracy and described how the rationalisation at the core of the business model of the ultimate American enterprise had spread throughout industries and become a key characteristic of the globalised world.6 We poured over a Danish translation of Ritzer’s work while considering the features of the fast-food franchise alongside those of artwashed space. Two key components of McDonaldization are efficiency (food in hand as fast as possible) and calculability (ever-present quantification). Our group had no challenge finding analogous comparisons with the speed in which arts outlets can be established (a gallery and a mural can each appear within less than a week) and the revaluation and reappraisal of property (which is ongoing from the minute a neighbourhood is targeted) – not to mention the tax avoidance benefits that come with museum contributions in the US. Control, from uniforms to computerised systems that instruct human employees, is another of Ritzer’s defining attributes that finds its cousin in the increased policing, cameras, and defensive architecture that takes over the artwashed physical space. The socalled vibrancy is dulled by security.

Everything in a McDonald’s is essentially like the last McDonald’s one may have been in, from the experience of ordering to the placement of the logo throughout the space. Discussing this while swiping through photos of art galleries, lofts, and decorative street art from Aalborg, Miami, and a dozen other cities brought us again and again to Ritzer’s fourth category: predictability. The nearduplicate experience from location to location is one of the first things that comes to mind when thinking of McDonald’s, appreciated by some and loathed by others, but nonetheless quintessential. Looking at images of McDonald’s outposts worldwide that are considered to be unique because they inhabit atypical architectures for fast-food franchising and branding – such as Melbourne’s well-known art deco Macca’s in Clifton Hill – did not feel altogether that different for us than viewing new museum sites and expansions from the last twenty years. Sure, they have specificities, but the blue-chip collections and sheen of official culture quickly become routine from one to the next. No matter where a McDonald’s appears, one has somewhat been there before.

Prior to our meeting at the McDonald’s, I had spent days at Aalborg’s Nordkraft, a former power plant turned arts centre with the same aestheticised rawness I have seen in Denver’s RiNo Arts District, or Brooklyn’s DUMBO. Right across from Nordkraft is the Coop Himmelb(l)au-designed House of Music, dropped centrestage on the waterfront just like Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s ICA Boston or Heatherwick Studio’s Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town. Predictably, sleek, placeless housing was materialising nearby. Where does all this pricey banality stop? It likely does not cease in the years ahead so much as it mutates to become even more blatant and less site-specific, more Domino’s and less pizza napoletana. Developers and their sympathisers have already learned that they can be their own creatives, and use the symbols of art to do the trick just as well as any actual artists, galleries, and artworks: see high-profile examples such as Heatherwick Studio’s Vessel, a building-scale Instagram monument at the heart of Manhattan’s hedgefund neighbourhood of Hudson Yards that was paired with The Shed, a WeWork-style arts centre based in a building named for Bloomberg (mayor and corporation) and designed by, of course, Diller Scofidio + Renfro.7

Likewise, the artworld’s supposed cultural cachet already is being sourced elsewhere as real estate marketers pivot to embracing the restaurant industry’s even greater willingness to spearhead

speculation and generally more immediate accessibility to gentrifier incomes. Los Angeles’s Arts District, for example, is these days much more a costly dining destination for visitors than any place for studios or gallery entrepreneurs.8 Owners of post-industrial spaces are shortening – and likely soon skipping – the intermediate step of art attracting attention to disinvested areas’ and moving faster toward the condos or shopping or food hall phase: this has happened in the last decade in locations such as Chicago’s Fulton Market and Tampa’s Armature Works and is underway at Aalborg’s Spritten distillery, among so many other old brick buildings. Sculptures, street art, and upstart architects may still serve as flourishes, but they are to be needed far less as independent contractors.

Thus, the artists and architects who are uninterested in being easily disposable tools of accelerated neoliberal gentrification any longer might start to recall the power of refusal. Fifty years ago, in the aftermath of the late 1960s, both disciplines saw era-defining rejections of the practices and institutions that formed the status quo. From radical practices of post-studio art and post-building architecture, à la Italy’s Superstudio, to experimental education, such as the founding of the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCIArc) by those rejecting older, more formal models, the results were far more influential than lockstep cooperation could ever have been.

Hesitant practitioners today who are tired of being the “foot soldiers of capitalism” but immediately wondering where their stability might come from without the artwashing apparatus, might learn something from Boyle Heights.9 In the face of the multi-million-dollar real estate scheme that sought to artwash one of Los Angeles’s most culturally impactful barrios, Boyle Heights locals opted to organise; to demonstrate power and dismiss the notion of unavoidable acquiescence that so many artists and architects subscribe to. Area community organiser Leonardo Vilchis explains the reason for (and consequence of) community resistance and refusal as a strategy, rather than a politics of appeasement or compromise.

“The only way you can start this conversation is by saying no… And that’s terrifying because you’re a jerk who says no. But we have had more negotiations now since we’ve said no than if we had said yes.”10

Refusal is an opening, not an ending. Counterfeit culture designed in the C-suite does not really belong anywhere anyway and Boyle Heights

has continued to produce art uninterrupted despite having less galleries. Consider where your work belongs. All it takes is a meeting at the nearest McDonald’s to start envisioning something else.

Anthony Carfello’s editorial and curatorial projects trace how buildings, communities, and places are experienced and controlled. He is an adjunct instructor for Temple University's Los Angeles program. Formerly, he was deputy director of the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles.

Notes

1 O’Sullivan, Feargus., June 24 2014. “The Pernicious Realities of Artwashing” Bloomberg

2 “Greenwashing” generally means the implication of some product or activity being ecologically minded when such claims are misleading or entirely unfounded.

3 “Pinkwashing” was coined by author Sarah Shulman as a criticism of politicians and governments such as Israel’s using LGBTQ tolerance as justification for nationalism and xenophobia.

4 Recently, it has been suggested that the Saudi Arabian government has been attempting to artwash its reputation through large-scale, arts tourism initiatives in the Al-'Ula desert region, Desert X AlUla and the Wadi Al Fann, or “Valley of the Arts.” See Gareth Harris (2022) “Accessible to all or elitist artwashing? Desert X opens second Saudi Arabia edition,” Art Newspaper, February 10

5 Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. 2022. Boyle Heights Against Artwashing and Displacement, “Contra-Against the Artwashing of Boyle Heights,” accessed June 29 2022 https://artwashing.antievictionmap.com.

6 Ritzer, George., 1993. The McDonaldization of Society: An Investigation into the Changing Character of Contemporary Life, Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.

7 More or less Vessel is an arrangement of luxury staircases. Calls to dismantle or alter the structure have grown louder following several suicides between 2019 and 2021.

8 Fittingly, the most visible gallery in the area is Hauser and Wirth, itself a multinational chain business.

9 Pritchard, Stephen., September 13 2016. “Hipsters and artists are the gentrifying foot soldiers of capitalism,” The Guardian

10 Miranda, Carolina., October 14 2016. “‘Out!’ Boyle Heights activists say white art elites are ruining the neighborhood … but it’s complicated,” Los Angeles Times

What is worth keeping, and who decides?

Introduction by Loren Adams

Words by Felicity Watson, Kerstin Thompson, Aimee Howard, Rebecca Roberts, James Lesh, Cristina Garduño Freeman, Michael McMahon and Jack Isles

Illustrations by Caleb Lee

The Heritage Overlay is a spatialised argument for the “significance of the place”. Its presence upon a land parcel can trigger the statutory protection of something significant –something worth keeping – within that title boundary. In planning, the what, how, why of significance is slippery, contingent, and evidenced through idiosyncratic bureaucratic processes.

I am neither heritage expert nor planner, so whenever I am forced to contend with the complex and entangled issues of heritage, I find myself returning to two foundational questions: What is worth keeping? And, who decides?

I also find myself returning to an inventive student project by Caleb Lee from my Regulatory Nonsense: Wrong studio at RMIT last year. Frustrated by the “colonial facade as a stubborn monument of the past,” Caleb radically reimagined our bureaucratic processes of building preservation by offering each subsequent inhabitant of a home the opportunity to enshrine one new “clause of significance” within in a property-specific Heritage Covenant. When applied to a test site in North Melbourne, the resulting architecture quickly became a scrappy patchwork of personal significance –but it was scaffolded by a co-authored and perpetually incomplete statutory document outlining what is worth

keeping, according to those who had lived there.

Bundled together, my two big questions and Caleb’s pass-theparcel policymaking project became a springboard for this experimental article: a seven-episode, co-authored written performance of the heritage policymaking process. In the text to follow, a handful of spatial practitioners were offered Caleb’s project as a prompt, and then asked consecutively to mark-up and revise a short response to the questions, “What is worth keeping?” and “Who decides?”

Admittedly, the production timeline of this issue also dictated the rules of the game. Rather than fighting against our tight turnaround time, I chose instead to succumb to it, to tighten it further – instead of five weeks, why not five days? And so, the chain began with heritage expert and advocate Felicity Watson, who was tasked with composing the first response. As the first author

Above: Dwelling A (left) as a palimpsest of multiple successive occupants. Dwelling B (right) remains unchanged.

in the chain, Felicity occupies a curious position: she has no existing text to respond to, granting her freedom to set the tone, structure, and conceptual direction for future iterations – but she is also subjected to more instances of potential erasure. Felicity’s response was passed to beloved Melbourne architect, Kerstin Thompson for marking-up, whose revision was then passed to emerging architectural designer and artist Aimee Howard, who passed their revision to heritage stonemason and researcher Rebecca Roberts, who passed to urban historian Dr James Lesh, who passed to academic Dr Cristina Garduño Freeman, who finally passed to spatial practitioners Michael McMahon and Jack Isles of Beyond Heritage for one last mark-up before our submission deadline.

In this quick and imperfect experiment, First Nations people have the last word. The act of marking-up, crossing-out, and writing-over the work of another can be fraught, especially where asymmetrical power relations already exist. There is also, inevitably, a process of exclusion in curating a shortlist of contributors. This means that, as the rule-maker and shoulder-tapper of the game, I am the meta-decider. I am the one who gets to decide who gets to decide what is worth keeping, and who decides.

Kerstin Thompson AM LFRAIA is an award-winning architect, educator, and advocate for quality design in the built environment. She is Principal of KTA, Adjunct Professor at RMIT and Monash Universities, and a member of the OGVA Design Review Panel. In 2017, Kerstin was elevated to Life Fellow by the Australian Institute of Architects. She was appointed Member of the Order of Australia in 2022.

Aimee Howard is an artist, architectural graduate, and teacher at RMIT University in the School of Architecture and Design. Their practice is centred around post structuralist theory and ficto-critical methodologies for conceptualising alternative futures within the architectural profession.

Rebecca Roberts is a doctoral candidate with the Australian Centre for Architectural History, Urban and Cultural Heritage, University of Melbourne. Drawing on over twenty years’ experience as a stonemason, heritage consultant, and project manager, Rebecca’s research examines the role of traditional craftsmanship in maintaining enduring, adaptable, and resilient cultural identities through the preservation of the historic environment.

Loren Adams RAIA Grad. is a disciplinary-promiscuous spatial practitioner. Trained in architecture and public policy, she is currently a Doctoral Fellow with the University of Melbourne Centre for Cities and teaches at RMIT. Previously, Loren led the Australian computational design team at Grimshaw Architects and was the inaugural coordinator of the Melbourne School of Design Robotics Lab. She began her career working as a fabrication specialist for blue-chip artists in Los Angeles.

Caleb Lee is a recent graduate of architecture from RMIT. Among his other interests, his research explores how unorthodox preservation of individual narratives might contribute to our collective understanding of heritage.

Felicity Watson is a heritage expert and advocate, and currently the executive manager of advocacy at the National Trust of Australia (Victoria). With a multidisciplinary approach across heritage, history, and urban planning, Felicity is passionate about advocating for the contribution that heritage conservation makes to vibrant, liveable, and sustainable cities.

Dr James Lesh is an urban historian and lecturer in cultural heritage and museum studies. His research explores the theory and practice of heritage conservation in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. He has also published widely in Australian urban history.

Dr Cristina Garduño Freeman is an academic at UNSW, Sydney, focused on how people’s connections with places can inform architectural history, critical heritage, and digital humanities. Her monograph on Participatory Culture and the Social Value of an Architectural Icon: Sydney Opera House, was published in 2018 with Routledge. Before entering academia, she practised in architecture, landscape architecture and visual communication design.

Michael McMahon and Jack Isles are founding collaborators of Beyond Heritage, an emergent research project, design practice and initiative celebrating, recognising and supporting the development of Australian First Nations design as front line responses to the climate and biodiversity emergency. Currently, they are establishing an online platform to publish and share the numerous ways in which First Nations expertise can, and is, transforming the landscape of Australia’s zero carbon future.

Authors in mark-up order:

1 Felicity Watson

2 Kerstin Thompson 3 Aimee Howard 4 Rebecca Roberts 5 James Lesh

6 Cristina Garduño Freeman

7 Michael McMahon and Jack Isles

from authors

i Rebecca Roberts (4)

I quite enjoyed being nudged off-kilter by this playful opening of Aimee’s. It forced me to pay very close attention to which words I felt the authority to alter. And how. Yes, just like the heritage ‘process’. Who decides? The voice on the other side of the door? I concluded this voice was human and was compelled to remove the notion of a human voice for heritage.

ii Kerstin Thompson (2)

There is no place, no one, outside heritage.

iii Rebecca Roberts (4)

I felt justified deleting these words as I associate heritage with compassion, care, custodianship, and accountability.

iv Kerstin Thompson (2) Who is this 'we'?

v Kerstin Thompson (2)

Whose law? How to attend to (conflict between) many laws?

vi Kerstin Thompson (2)

Oh to be deemed significant... Significance an accretion of many insignificancies which eventually tilt towards ‘heritage’.

vii Kerstin Thompson (2)

Assess: a clinical word for attempts to appreciate the various attachments humans form with their situations.

viii Cristina Garduño Freeman (6)

But don’t get confused, the Burra Charter is a best practice guideline; it is influential and important, but it is not one of the many legal documents that control what is kept And really, heritage is about what is important to you, to your communities (we are part of many) and how this contributes to your identity through the practices and activities that help you maintain it. This also means that the same place or object or activity will mean different things to different people.

Knock, knock. Who's there?i Heritage. Heritage who? Heritage is about you. We are all surrounded byii I am heritage: Most definitions of heritage talk about, to and of the racially and environmentally extractive legacyies of the past, and what we will pass on to future generations. for Aanother that we want to keep in the present and for the future times, to share with and another other places and people We're not nice. We're not caring.iii What do we make of these sandstone, bluestone and concrete buildings: Country, aggregated, cut up, divided, trapped and traded? To make sense of this This idea of a legacy, has grown into the weiv The heritage experts profession have developed and frameworks and systems of criteria and thresholds to that guide assessment of what is worth to keeping is important about the legacy Australia and also codifiedy these rules them into law.v This method of business is what keeps us alive. are founded on numerous legal and colonial fictions.

Here, in Australia, In our settler-colonial society To decide wWwhat is worth keeping kept is what is deemed significant vi –by expert heritage practitioners designations professionals whose assessmentsvii are limited to / and determined shaped by assess heritage places against guidelines rules guidelines we use such as the Australia ICOMOS Charter for Places of Cultural Significance, 2013 (the Burra Charter) that can be restricted by guided tours. such as the Australia ICOMOS Charter for Places of Cultural Significance, 2013 (the Burra Charter) which This which states defines that “cultural significance means aesthetic, historic, scientific, social or spiritual value for past, present or future generations.” viii These guidelines privilege certain values are founded on a law that and presumes a distinctive subject and an object. aAnd it views relations between these as separable. For another law lores they are not.ix

Every building in Australia is on unceded Aboriginal land. Every building in Australia is an aggregate of materials that are Country, will become Country. Let’s deconstruct our colonial notions of heritage and reimagine an equitable and

What is worth keeping, and who decides?

Notes

sustainable built environment with caring for Country at its core. Heritage is about respecting the past, present and future of Country, including everyone who has walked and will walk in a place.

So where does that leave us? With an imperfect system trying to keep up with our changing understanding of what heritage is, what it was and what it can be. This assessment, along with the views values of the property owner, landlord, relevant stakeholders and relevant communities and stakeholders, led to the beginnings of a master plan. This will usually always informs a planning decisions that affect heritage items. by a planner, councillor, or Minister, Prime Minister who decidesx wWhether a placexi is to be What is kept, changed, or destroyed. is the decision of a negotiation between authorised local, state, and federal government representatives communities, professionals, and authorities. who It is a This decision is final and often balanced justifiedy this balance between what heritage is to you and against alongside other objectives, social, economic, design & environmental priorities. like the need to develop new housing or infrastructure. But don't worry, there is one certainty. We need heritage; it brings us together and gives meaning to our lives.

Ultimately, Wwho decides the decision-maker does will not always value what is worth keeping. Though it has been said, this method of business is what keeps us them places alive.

Let’s think about history of the Country that we’re on. The responsibility that comes with this. Everything we design is made of County and will become Country. Today and tomorrow, when dealing with widespread climate transformations and a biodiversity emergency, First Nations culture, expertise and design represents a vital lifeline which, if given the chance, can catalyze paradigmatic shifts within our conception and design of the built environment. Raising the questions: What does First Nations design look like within the Australian continent? And how, in the pursuit of an equitable and sustainable future, can we move beyond our current conceptions of Heritage?

viii Michael McMahon and Jack Isles (7)

This reading of our built environment encourages the maintaining of colonial fictions: the literal paving-over of 100s of generations of First Nations people and their sites of significance. To reconcile place and people, we must move beyond limited and limiting concepts of heritage and instead be guided by our responsibility to connect with and care for Country.

ix Cristina Garduño Freeman (6)

I don’t understand this? Laws or lores?

x Kerstin Thompson (2) Yes, who decides?

xi Kerstin Thompson (2)

A person (Aotearoa); the river our blood ("water in the river, like blood in my veins" Ian Hamm)

Above: After three successive occupants, the backyard is a haphazard shrine to collective personal significance.

We are in the Anthropocene: a geological era characterised by measurable human impact on the Earth's geology; an era of increasing instabilities and scarcities, in which geopolitics and design are both shaping and shaped by the unpredictability of environmental fluxes.

Beyond Heritage

Words by Michael McMahon and Jack Isles

The climatological instabilities of the Anthropocene have prompted a cataclysmic destabilisation of anthropocentric preconceptions of an environment, beyond the remit of human influence. Crucially, this brings into question the socio-political industrial complex upon which the contemporary settler-colonial project was founded.

Like many settler-colonial societies, Australia’s colonial existence is typified by the suppression of Indigenous knowledge in favour of a Western science that is often co-opted by the mechanisms of capital growth. However, the escalating climate and biodiversity emergency calls for us to revisit these values. We are on the precipice of a social and cosmopolitical transformation – one which at its core must reconfigure a future divested from the extractive racial and environmental practices of our recent colonial past.

Imperative to this future is the need to shift away from the

historically Eurocentric conception of a natural and human world. Our world is an entangled network of human and non-human stakeholders: yet, the othering of places not considered to be urban has embedded and emboldened extractive actors and processes. Within First Nations ontologies, our entangled world is referred to as Country, which is all within a place: all landforms, waters, air, trees, rocks, plants, animals, food, minerals, medicines, stories, and significant sites; as well as all peoples – past, present, and future. Country is a cosmopolitical, intergenerational mixture of metaphysics, in which kinship and care remain the primary currencies of all social and environmental exchanges.

Those who care for Country cannot harm Country. Governed by caring for Country as a cultural responsibility, First Nations culture, knowledge, and expertise is vital to our reorientation towards an inclusive and sustainable

future; towards a cultural responsibility and an effective means of both transgenerational and interspecies communication. This notion of care must be embedded, emboldened, and supported within clean energy transitions if we are to reconfigure a sustainable and inclusive anthropogenic future. One in which First Nations culture, knowledge, and expertise may catalyse paradigmatic shifts within our conception and design of the built environment.

Towards Indigenous sciences

While Indigenous knowledge has been central to Australia’s colonial project through the (often uncredited) adaptations of First Nations culture into Western science, it remains largely auxiliary to Australia’s current environmental planning. The continued use of terminologies such as Indigenous ‘voices’ in place of ‘expertise,’ for example, illustrate the long-standing and continued colonial violence of scientific misattribution and misappropriation. Indeed, this is a violence that has been instrumental in perpetuating defunct preconceptions about the agency and value of Indigenous knowledge within contemporary technocratic environments and landscapes of design.

Importantly, First Nations knowledge has always been both scientific and technological. In a study,1 traditional stories – from across 7000 years – all referring to sea-level rise along the pre-colonial coastline of Australia were tested for empirical accuracy. For each of the 21 stories, the minimum water depth (below the present sea-level) depicted in the narrative was tested to be true. This was then compared with the sea-level envelope for Australia, considering the possible date range that these details could have been observed. Indeed, the findings verify the existence of an Aboriginal-led, transgenerational data network that spanned over 300 generations of continuous occupation. It is here that we urge a shift in thinking beyond purely historical interests in Indigeneity and towards the widespread recognition of First Nations technological expertise.

In recent years, projects such as the 10 Deserts2 and Fish River Fire have further exemplified the potential for First Nations-led environmental initiatives to transform the landscape of Australia’s zero-carbon future. The 10 Deserts Projects, for example, are a collaboration between Indigenous experts working throughout Australia's deserts,

instrumental in the conservation and design of an arid area roughly the size of the European continent. Similarly, the Fish River Fire project is an Indigenousled land management initiative, embedding Indigenous-based carbon sequestration and trading techniques within Australia’s local and international carbon markets.3 Projects such as these – of which there are many more in operation and development – have generated resources and strategies that, if engaged with in earnest, could inform how we think about and design our built environment.

Within the vector of environmental measurement, international interest continues to grow in incorporating Indigenous environmental knowledge and data within global information systems (GIS) and remote sensing technologies (Robbins, 2003).4 Such approaches promote dialogue between normative scientific and Indigenous worldviews, while also evidencing the efficacy and relevance of First Nations knowledge within both emergent quantitative environmental analysis methodologies and the design of sensory systems for mediating responses to the climate and biodiversity emergency. Additionally, increasingly ubiquitous inclusions of Indigenous perspectives and expertise within international reports – notably, the most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)5 – have marked an increase in global recognition of (and dependency upon) Indigenous expertise to provide politically efficacious and financially viable responses to the climate and biodiversity emergency. Indigenous-led initiatives in mangrove and coastal ecosystems, for example, demonstrate the critically important role that First Nations expertise can play in dissipating wave energy, lowering flood risk, and minimising coastal erosion.6

Collectively, these projects, studies, and reports offer ways to reduce both the volatility of financial insurance markets and the displacement of multispecies communities. We are hopeful that the sustained support of these projects and studies – along with the development of new Indigenous-led and cooperative projects – will prompt a burst of recognition for First Nations excellence and expertise, as well as the emergence of a new generation of First Nations designers, thinkers, and technologists. A vital step towards the establishment of a racially and environmentally inclusive future Australian continent.

Futures of care

What are the lessons learned from such projects and studies, and how can we better integrate Indigenous expertise into planning and design?

It must be noted that, while interest in First Nations environmental design techniques – and their capacity to provide low-impact, high-yield approaches to environmental management – have gained traction in recent years, comprehensive studies outlining the spatial, environmental, and socio-economic benefits within the fields of architecture, planning, and design are either difficult to access or, in some cases, conspicuously absent. Construction and planning related disciplines must urgently recognise and celebrate First Nations knowledge, expertise, and culture as both credible and vital frontline responses to the climate and biodiversity emergency.

Crucial to this process is a need to shift beyond heritage – and it is from this need that our project, Beyond Heritage, finds its name. We must shift beyond a purely historical interest in Indigeneity, so that First Nations expertise can co-create the invariably technocratic future of our cities and continent. And beyond an arms-length, referential treatment of Indigenous perspectives and people, towards the inclusion of First Nations knowledge and expertise, across all environmental management, built environment, and design professions and practices.

Beyond Heritage is an Indigenous future building project that aims to celebrate, recognise and support the development of First Nations design as front-line responses to the climate and biodiversity emergency. Taking the form of a platform and design practice, Beyond Heritage is also a call to centre intersectional, intercultural, intergenerational, and interspecies dialogues in planning and design. Dialogues which are critical bridges for discourse between both Western and First Nations spatial sciences.

Through Beyond Heritage, emergent sensorial systems and practices coalesce with the extraordinary depths of over 60,000 years of both data and knowledge. We believe that accessing, caring for, and expanding upon this knowledge is key to upholding the cultural rights and recognition of First Nations people as experts within the entangled fields of architecture, design, and environmental planning. And, we call for a collective shift towards new visual and spatial cultures which celebrate First Nations expertise as a foundation upon which to (re) build social and environmental resilience, within an increasingly volatile climate.

Michael McMahon is a designer, researcher and curator working between Australia and the United Kingdom. He is a descendant of the Bundjalung people of North-East New South Wales, Australia and his work investigates how Indigenous ontologies of land can inform the built environment. He holds a BArch from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) and a Masters of Arts in Architecture from the Royal College of Art, where he studied as a Roberta Sykes Scholar.

Jack Isles is a designer, researcher and curator based between Australia and Spain. Jack holds a BArch from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) and an MArch from the Architectural Association. His recent work has focused on the environmental agency of sensory technologies, and their application in resource management, conflict resolution and architectural design.

Notes

1 Lewis, Stephen., Craig Sloss, Colin Murray-Wallace, Colin Woodroffe, and, Scott Smithers. 2013. “Post-Glacial Sea-Level Changes around the Australian Margin: A Review” Quaternary Science Reviews 74:115-38, https://doi.org/10.1016/j. quascirev.2012.09.006.

2 10 Deserts Project. “About – 10 Deserts Project” Accessed 23, June 2022: https://10deserts.org/about/

3 Australian Government Clean Energy Regulator, 2016). “Fighting fire with fire in Fish River” www.cleanenergyregulator.gov.au/Infohub/Media-Centre/Resources/ erf-media-resources/fighting-fire-with-fire-in-fish-river.

4 Robbins, Paul. 2003. “Beyond Ground Truth: GIS and the Environmental Knowledge of Herders, Professional Foresters, and Other Traditional Communities.” Human Ecology 31, no. 2: 233-53. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/4603469.

5 Moggridge, Bradley., Gretta Pecl, Nina Lansbury, Sandra Creamer y Vinni. 2022. “IPCC reports still exclude Indigenous voices.” The Conversation, https:// theconversation.com/ipcc-reports-still-exclude-indigenous-voices-come-joinus-at-our-sacred-fires-to-find-answers-to-climate-change-178045

6 Beck, MW., Heck, N., Narayan, S., Menéndez, P., Torres-Ortega, S., Losada, IJ., Way, M., Rogers, M,, McFarlane-Connelly, L. 2022. “Reducing Caribbean Risk: Opportunities for Cost-Effective Mangrove Restoration and Insurance.” The Nature Conservancy, Arlington, VA.