ARCHITECTURE OF INEQUALITY

WORDS TONE WHEELER

This year has seen the federal LNP, brown dogma in chief, self-destruct…The mood, the polls, the zeitgeist, the commentators (except Murdoch) all say the LNP are failing…you know there’s been a tipping point. Let me bell the cat. The Labor party will clearly win the federal election on 21 May. I’m saying by about 80 seats, with about 12 independents, leaving about 60 seats for the LNP.

I wrote that six months ago on palindrome day, 22/02/2022, in palindrome column 111, discussing political hope in ‘The Tipping Point of Sustainability’. I think it’s a more accurate prediction than any professional pollster I’ve seen; I’m adding psephologist to my CV. And now, as an expert futurist, let me continue (pulls tongue out of cheek).

INEQUALITY

Anthony Albanese, our new prime minister has promised change, not just on climate, but on integrity, equality for women, child and aged care, wages, employment and respect at work, energy and manufacturing and innovation. The constant line that runs through all these issues is inequality, our country’s single greatest challenge.

One area that needs change is inequality in architecture. Traditionally, and continually, architects are handmaidens to the rich. We delight in the big commission with the big fee, lavish houses win the architectural awards and prizes. More often than not, ‘design excellence’ is a euphemism for greater expenditure.

UNEQUAL DESIGNS

Here’s a homophonic example: two schools with similar names, and similar numbers, in Sydney; Cranbrook, a private all-boys school in the wealthy east; and Cranebrook, a co-ed school in the outer west. Cheese and chalk. Camembert vs chalkboards.

Cranbrook has just completed a vast indoor swimming centre on a prominent bend on New South Head Rd, designed by Architectus as part of an architecturally rich campus dating back 100 years. Whether it was actually paid for by fees or government grants is irrelevant: it’s the latter that has enabled them to build facilities that should be public, not private, behind walls of sandstone and glass. Cranebrook, in a lower middle-class area where 18% students identify as indigenous, has a harsher and hotter climate. It was designed in the late eighties, at the tail end of a flourishing of great public-school designs by the then active NSW Government Architects Office. Its pragmatic semi-circular layout is serviceable but is only getting an upgrade now after 30+ years (in a drawing by the work experience kid?).

Two more with a stark comparison: Blackwattle Campus in Glebe, another excellent design from the eighties, doesn’t deserve to have portables slammed into its gardens as a means of coping with expansion. Across nearby Wentworth Park is a new multi-story school designed by DesignInc, Lacoste & Stevenson and bmc2 architects – an example of public funding being put into buildings worthy of our society’s concern with education.

What has caused this disparity between school designs? In the first instance it is sheer

ABOVE Tone Wheeler.

greed, to expand the already overendowed school with ever more baubles, government funded. In the second, it’s confused priorities within the government itself, without a strong hand these are ad hoc design solutions without a vision. In both cases architects can play a role to reverse those directions within government.

GOVERNMENT SPONSORED GOOD DESIGN

In the past, progressive architecture was often in the hands of governments. Tom Uren, deputy PM in the Whitlam government, pushed the Woolloomooloo and Glebe estates and the DURD regional developments. Brian Howe, deputy PM in the Hawke era, invented the Local Government and Community Housing Program, known as LOGCHOP, that saw cooperative housing schemes built.

Rudd / Gillard / Rudd bought us the BER (Building Education Revolution) that transformed schools with halls and COLAs; an innovative housing program to build 20,000 new houses; and NRAS (the National Rental Affordable Scheme) for social housing subsidies, judged a failure by some economists.

For more than 100 years state Government Architects Offices (GAOs) have been leading quality through their designs for civic buildings like police and fire stations, schools, hospitals and housing. But this has dwindled in the last 25 years as outsourcing to the market became more common, which saw the GAOs likewise shrink in a vicious circle, to the point of being advisers rather than active players.

ARCHITECTS AND INEQUALITY

Architects can play a key role in addressing the current inequality. Crucially they can advocate for federal programs in housing, schools and hospitals that follow in the footsteps of the innovations of the three previous post-war Labor governments, and improved GAOs.

They can agitate for better, not bigger commissions, more socially and environmentally responsible, less glamorous and photogenic. To turn things on their head architects should the creators of the commissions, not the seekers. This reversal would champion architecture for the most, not the minority.

Architects can achieve some of this through advocating a change of direction by governments, and there is no more opportune time than now, with a new federal government dedicated to change, one that inherently seeks to address inequality. With a new zeitgeist it might be time to challenge the architectural inequality highlighted in our schools’ examples. How might this work?

Funding first. Julia Gillard introduced the ‘Gonski’ reforms as a means of leveling the funding based on need. It was never implemented properly in the nine years of the Morrison government. Now architects could agitate for Gonski to be implemented, not only in school funding and teachers’ pay, but for the quality of the buildings to be leveled up: for public schools to have better ventilation, better grounds, better accessibility and upkeep. That is, better architecture.

Design next. The architecture for the public sector must be equal or better than ‘private sector’ (often actually funded by the government). Architects should agitate for a greater role for the GAOs. They can demand design excellence for all public buildings, not ‘value engineered efficiency’, but healthy budgets for the best possible designs.

An excellent example is the recent DfMA (Design for Manufacture and Assembly), guidelines developed by the NSW Department of Education for all their new schools. This is the premium approach to prefab, but moreover the guidelines have a comprehensive approach to designing schools, starting with pedagogy, through teaching methods to the kind of spaces that are required.

THE NEW FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

The hope is that the change that Albo and the Labor party envisages will be across all walks of life. That they will address the inequality between our poorest and richest housing; between the impoverished public and the over-endowered private schools; between the overcrowded, under-resourced public hospitals, and the private clinics.

And finally, after lamenting the lack of architects in politics, we now have a friend at the table. Elizabeth Watson-Brown, an architect with extensive experience in private practice, has won the Ryan electorate in Brisbane for the Greens (as we wished). A practitioner in the best tradition of Brisbane regionalism, she is well aware of how good architecture can change lives. And the Greens want 50,000 social dwellings every year, for the next twenty.

Architects arise, advocate and agitate, you have nothing to lose (but those rich, undeserving and unappreciative clients).

Tone Wheeler is principal architect at Environa Studio, Adjunct Professor at UNSW and is President of the Australian Architecture Association.

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