Innehållsförteckning för September 2021 från Architecture Australia

Firstly, I’d like to offer my sincere congratulations to the winners in the Institute’s 2021 Chapter Awards program. In my previous foreword, I laid down my agenda to look beyond awards during my presidency; although this remains my aim, it is important to acknowledge the achievements of our members and to applaud the exceptional architecture that has been completed over the past 12 months. I’m particularly glad to see that many of the projects showcased within these pages reveal the best in sustainable design, and that many new or improved community spaces have been awarded this year. It was heartwarming to learn that this edition of Architecture Australia looks at architects being responsive to an increasing need that will, at some point, affect all of us: ageing. The subject of…

More a massive magazine than a book in the traditional sense, MMXX (Thames and Hudson, 2020) seeks both currency and reflection. Cataloguing 20 years of Australian architecture, Cameron Bruhn acts as author and editor, concisely writing on 59 selected projects and bringing in a strong set of diverse voices to contribute essays. He makes clear the link to Davina Jackson and Chris Johnson’s 2000 book Australian Architecture Now, but this and other books around the time sought currency rather than reflection in their attempts to capture a concise period. Given Bruhn’s stated attempt to survey a 20-year period, I came away thinking the book’s ambition was to offer a sequel to Jennifer Taylor’s Australian Architecture Since 1960 (published 1990) – which was itself a sequel, of sorts, to John Maxwell…

“Dementia” is the collective term for several degenerative brain diseases, with Alzheimer’s disease being the most common. Of all age-related conditions, dementia is perhaps the most tragic. It is the second leading cause of death in Australia – the leading cause among women – and 30 percent of people over 85 years currently live with it. There are about 450,000 people with dementia in Australia and, without a medical breakthrough, there could be 1,000,000 by mid-century. That’s the tragedy. The good news is that dementia is potentially curable and, for the vast majority of people living with the disease, it is manageable, with about 70 percent currently living at home (not in an institution).1 It is clear from evidence-based research that architecture and design have a direct influence on the experience of…

In March this year, the Final Report of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety called for fundamental reform of the aged care system. As architect Jan Golembiewski highlighted in his article for The Conversation (9 April 2021), the report unfortunately didn’t address the role that architecture can play in the implementation of the recommendations. He says that “only two of the 148 recommendations relate specifically to architecture, numbers 45 and 46: to improve the design of residential care accommodation; and to provide ‘small household’ models of accommodation.” Prompted by this omission, we invited Guy Luscombe, Sydney director of System Architects, to guest-edit a dossier for this issue of Architecture Australia on how we might envision a more age- and dementia-friendly built environment (page 51). During the past…

Alison Page and Paul Memmott have written this timely and powerful book as part of a First Knowledges series, edited by Margo Kneale, which brings together Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors in an act of reconciliation. Design: Building on Country (Thames and Hudson, 2021) draws on Indigenous knowledges to illuminate how design can become an expression of respect for Country, and how it can begin to “pick the scabs and allow country to breathe again” (page 17). It is a call to the design professions to accept and step into the obligations inherent in the now customary Acknowledgment of Country and to develop responsibility for this knowledge relationship. Page and Memmott outline the implications of practising what they call “New Australian Design” by linking a series of Indigenous-led-and-designed projects with knowledge…

Suburbanized cities, regardless of scale, face a common dilemma: how to increase both housing supply and diversity while maintaining an established low-scale leafy character. While greenfield and brownfield zoning continue to increase housing supply through establishing new suburbs, densification is provided in greyfield1 precincts through urban regeneration infill and in transit corridors via apartment developments. One intention of all these four strategies is the avoidance of intensification in established suburbs, leaving them to their business-as-usual housing model. This raises the question of what this “business” is, for the suburbs continue to see substantial change regardless of falling outside of infill policy. I call these established suburbs the “bluefields.”2 They are suburbs usually quarantined from strategic density and diversity increases: those with established character, where “blue” represents both the perceived immutability…

The statistics are stark: by 2041, the Greater Sydney region’s population of people over 65 years of age is predicted to reach more than 1.2 million, more than twice as many as there are today.1 Sydney benefits from a wide range of programs to support neighbourhoods and communities adapting to this social shift, including state government strategies and transport plans for seniors, a broad range of efforts led by the not-for-profit and social enterprise sectors (such as The Australian Centre for Social Innovation’s Homeshare, which enables older women to create safe and secure co-living situations), and two local governments (Liverpool and Lane Cove) that have been part of the WHO Global Network for Age-friendly Cities and Communities since 2014. But none of Sydney’s other local governments has joined this international…

New South Wales Interior John Verge Award Australian Museum Project Discover by Cox Architecture with Neeson Murcutt and Neille Award Carpe Diem Companionway by Collins and Turner with Geyer Award Smart Design Studio by Smart Design Studio Commendations Arbutus by Smart Design Studio; Barker College Rosewood Centre by Neeson Murcutt and Neille; Contemplation House by Virginia Kerridge Architect; Porous House by Possible Studio; Yallamundi Rooms at the Sydney Opera House by Tonkin Zulaikha Greer Architects Residential Houses — New Wilkinson Award Pearl Beach House by Polly Harbison Design Award Bunkeren by James Stockwell Architect Award Federal House by Edition Office Award Night Sky by Peter Stutchbury Architecture Commendations Cobargo Santa Project by Breathe; Contemplation House by Virginia Kerridge Architect; House Ngaio Palm Beach by Durbach Block Jaggers Architects; Mystery Bay…

Melbourne city is slowly coming back to life after months of lockdowns, on and off. Walking the streets of the CBD, I see people around, a tenuous return to the streets. As you walk west along Collins Street, you pass some of Melbourne’s best nineteenth-century mercantile buildings – the Block Arcade (1893), the former Melbourne Stock Exchange (1891), the former ES&A “Gothic” Bank (1887) and, across the intersection of Collins and Queen streets, the former National Mutual Life Association building (1893). These gothic and classical buildings are remnants of “Marvellous Melbourne” and the land boom that fuelled it. They are street buildings with a rich interplay of windows, doorways and ornamentation proudly exhibiting the commerce of the time. You need to walk down William Street to get a sense of…

Built on the land of the Arakwal people of the Bundjalung nation While the first phase of Habitat – a sustainable mixed-use “village” on the industrial outskirts of Byron Bay – came to fruition in 2017, the project was, in a sense, already some decades old. With this village, developer Brandon Saul (the entrepreneur who founded the Falls Festival) realized an idea that had been codified in local council zoning well before he purchased the land, shortly after the new millennium. The concept had benefitted from scoping visits to Scandinavia and early thinking by architect Rod Simpson around how to proceed. Easy Street, the third stage of five in the village development, is built to the design of local practice DFJ Architects, which is headed by Dominic Finlay-Jones, an alumnus…