Suburbia Reimagined: Ageing and Increasing Populations in the Low-Rise City 1138085510, 9781138085510

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Suburbia Reimagined

Worldwide, more and more people are living in cities, with suburbs conceived as appendages to the city, rather than being part of the city system, which is densely populated and offers a full range of services. But suburbs are not the city spread too thin, and in fact hold potential for a lived complexity as satisfying as that assumed to be available in inner cities. Just as the ecological function of wetlands was ignored by modernist planning, and swamps once-drained are now recognised as vital to water cycles, suburbs are increasingly recognised as part of a city’s wellbeing with their own alternative ideology and opportunities for urbanity and ecological sustainability. Suburbia Reimagined shows how such subdivision structures can offer new possibilities for sustainably integrating living between generations and between established and arriving migrant communities. The authors worked locally and internationally with university campuses, shopping centres, hospitals, airports, and other large entities spread through suburbia, to identify a broad range of suburban situations that have been modified to ensure that residents have a full access to amenities and services. The book addresses the history and design of suburbia, from the post-war soldier settlements of the 40s and 50s to the university hinterlands of Silicon Valley in order to reappraise the locked potential within such subdivision patterns. The authors propose a new model forward, examining case studies ranging from repurposed malls and railways for ecological sustainability to cul-de-sacs as social units and post-industrial factory conversions, ultimately showing the nascent patterns in suburbia that have the potential to support a rich life for all age groups.

Leon van Schaik is a Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology professor of architecture holding a design practice research chair. His publications include: Practical Poetics in Architecture (2015); Meaning in Space (2012); Procuring Innovative Architecture (2010); and Spatial Intelligence: New Futures for Architecture (2008). Nigel Bertram is a director of NMBW Architecture Studio and practice professor of architecture, Monash University. NMBW’s architectural work has been published and awarded across categories including urban design, housing, small public works and adaptive reuse of existing buildings. His previous publications include Furniture, Structure, Infrastructure (2013).

Suburbia Reimagined Ageing and Increasing Populations in the Low-Rise City

Leon van Schaik and Nigel Bertram With an epilogue by Shane Murray Drawings by Deborah Rowe and Helena Harry

First published 2019 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of Leon van Schaik and Nigel Bertram to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Van Schaik, Leon, author. | Bertram, Nigel, author. Title: Suburbia reimagined : ageing and increasing populations in the low-rise city / Leon van Schaik and Nigel Bertram. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2018. | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017059490| ISBN 9781138085503 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138085510 (pbk.) Subjects: LCSH: Suburbs. | City planning. | Urban elderly. | Sustainable urban development. Classification: LCC HT351 .V36 2018 | DDC 307.74—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017059490 ISBN: 978-1-138-08550-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-08551-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-11131-5 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon, UK

Contents

List of Illustrations Note on Contributor Acknowledgements Introduction

vii xi xii 1

PART I

Living Together

5

1

Ideas of the Suburb

7

2

Ideas of the House

23

PART II

Parts and Pieces of Suburbia

37

3

Renovations

39

3.1 Design Proposition

47

Single Houses

59

4.1 Design Proposition

68

Small Groups

79

5.1 Design Proposition

86

4

5

6

7

Larger Ensembles

100

6.1 Design Proposition

110

Streets and Cul-de-Sacs

115

7.1 Design Proposition

123

vi

Contents

PART III

Conflations and Combinations

129

8

The Missing Middle

131

8.1 Design Proposition

146

Suburban Engines

157

9.1 Design Proposition

165

Conclusion

179

Epilogue by Shane Murray Project Credits Index

185 195 197

9

Illustrations

All drawings and diagrams produced by Monash Architecture Studio, except where noted otherwise. 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5

Ideogram, Leon van Schaik, 2016 Melbourne City and Suburbs, 1956, 2000 and 2017 Case Study Houses, Los Angeles and US, Plan Types Small Homes Service, Melbourne, Plan Types Eichler Homes, California, Plan Types Merchant Builders, Melbourne, Plan Types (Architect Graeme Gunn) Fasham Builders, Melbourne, Plan Types Dickson Shopping Centre, Canberra, Diagram Tour Bois-le-Pretre, Druot, Lacaton and Vassal Architects, Paris, 2011 Alexander Miller Memorial Homes, Allen Kong Architects, Manifold Heights, 2011 Medieval Hall House, Diagram (Courtesy of James Mcadam) Kang Sleeping Platform, Diagram Box Bed/Dutch Bed/Closed Bed, Diagram Jefferson’s Alcove Bed, Monticello, 1769, Diagram FAB (Future Adaptive Building), Housebrand, Calgary, 2010 Tully Bathroom, Harrison and White Architects, Fitzroy, 2010 Dividable House, Shane Murray, Diego Ramirez-Lovering and Graham Crist, 2001 Network of Supported Aged Housing Spread Throughout the Rural Township of Jeparit, Laura Harper, 2004 Typical Suburban Retirement Village, Berwick, Melbourne Alexander Miller Memorial Homes, Allen Kong Architect, Castlemaine, 2011 Fairfield Hacienda, MRTN Architects, 2014

8 10 15 16 16 17 18 19 25 26 28 29 30 30 32 33 42 43 44 45 46

viii 3.6 3.7 3.8 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 4.10 4.11 4.12 4.13 4.14 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9 5.10 5.11

Illustrations Renovated Cluster Units, Monash Architecture Studio, Mallawa Court, East Devonport, 2015 Accessible Garden House, Monash Architecture Studio, Northeast Melbourne, 2017 Gym House, Monash Architecture Studio, Country Victoria, 2017 1940s Suburban House, Heidelberg; 2010s Suburban House, Truganina House in a Plum Grove, Kazuyo Sejima and Associates, Tokyo, 2003 House A, Office of Ryue Nishizawa, Tokyo, 2006 Pholiota, Marion Mahoney and Walter Burley Griffin, Heidelberg, 1920 Sorrento House, NMBW Architecture Studio, 2011 Lake View, Chiltern, 1870 (Courtesy Marika Neustupny) Garden House, Baracco and Wright Architects, 2015 Cité Manifesté Housing, Lacaton and Vassal Architects, Mulhouse, 2005 Infill Opportunities, Monash Architecture Studio, 2011 Infill Opportunities, Monash Architecture Studio, 2011 Infill Opportunities, Monash Architecture Studio, 2011 Infill Opportunities, Monash Architecture Studio, 2011 North Melbourne House, NMBW Architecture Studio, 2017 Core House, NMBW Architecture Studio, 2010 Nineteenth-Century Subdivision of Inner-Suburban Blocks for Terrace Housing 1960s and 70s ‘Six-Pack’ Flat Developments on Suburban Allotments Walk-Up Flats, Hanover Street, Fitzroy, 1965 Two-Bedroom Apartment, Hanover Street, Fitzroy, 1965 Family Apartment, NMBW Architecture Studio, 2013 Contemporary Subdivision of Middle-Suburban Blocks into Townhouses, 1990s–2010s Walk-Up Flats, Hanover and King William Streets, Fitzroy, Mid-1960s Landscaped Courtyard Between Building Elements, Hanover Street, Fitzroy, 1965 Gertrude Street, St Albans, Monash Architecture Studio, 2016 Gertrude Street, St Albans, Monash Architecture Studio, 2016 Gertrude Street, St Albans, Monash Architecture Studio, 2016

48–9 50–1 53–5 62 63 64 64 65 66 67 67 70 71 72 72 75 75 81 82 84 84 84 85 86 87 90–1 92 93

Illustrations ix 5.12 5.13 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7

6.8 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 8.7

Gertrude Street, St Albans, Monash Architecture Studio, 2016 94 Gertrude Street, St Albans, Monash Architecture Studio, 2016 95 Beverley Hills Flats, Howard Lawson, South Yarra, 1935–6 102 Cairo Flats, Taylor Soilleux and Overend (Best Overend), Fitzroy, 1935–6 103 Fabrik Townhouses, Brian Klopper Architect, Fremantle, 1989 104 Torbreck, Job and Froud Architects, Highgate Hill, Brisbane, 1958–60 104 Richmond Apartments, Brisbane Housing Company and MODE Architects, Bowen Hills, Brisbane, 2011 106 Vredenbergh Nursing Home, DAT Architecten, Breda, Netherlands, 2009 107 Sankt Antonius Community Centre and Housing, Lerderer Ragnarsdottir Oei Architects, Stuttgart, Germany, 2001 108 Rosella Avenue, Werribee, Monash Architecture Studio, 2016 111–13 Unpaved Streets Without Footpaths, Point Lonsdale and Sorrento 118 Suburban Cul-de-Sac Layouts: Heathmont, Melbourne, 1950s and Ferndale, Perth, 1970s 119 Five Dock Lineal Park, Neeson Murcutt Architects, 2007 121 Civic Suburb, Officer Woods Architects, 2011 122 Green Streets, Monash Architecture Studio, 2015 125 Neighbourhood shops, Monash Architecture Studio, 2015 126 Park Edge, Monash Architecture Studio, 2015 127 Rows of Adjacent Suburban Detached Houses in 1940s (Heidelberg) and 2010s (Truganina) 133 Typical Multi-Unit Single Storey Infill Development (Essendon/Aberfeldie, 1990s) 134 Typical Middle-Suburban Dual Occupancy Development on a Single Site (Ringwood 2010s) 135 Redcliffe Connect, Monash Architecture Studio and University of Western Australia, 2016 136–7 Elwood Flats: ‘Six-Pack’ Type Developments on Adjacent Suburban Blocks 139 Infill Opportunities, Monash Architecture Studio, 2011 141–3 ‘Fokus’ Remote Monitoring and Living Support, Weidewogelhof, Netherlands 145

x

Illustrations

8.8 8.9 8.10 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 9.7

Northern Suburb Infill Precinct, Monash Architecture Studio, 2015 147–9 Redcliffe Connect, Monash Architecture Studio and University of Western Australia, 2016 150 Water Body Corporates, Elwood, 2016 (Courtesy Andrew Wright and Kai Zhu) 152–3 Weidevogelhof, Pijnacker, Netherlands, DAT Architecten, 2011 159 Doncaster and Chadstone Shopping Centres, 1960s and Current Condition 162 ‘Chinatown’ Precincts in San Francisco and Melbourne City Centres 163 Monash University, Clayton Campus, 1960s and Current Condition 164 Beddoe Avenue Precinct, Monash University, Clayton Campus, Monash Architecture Studio, 2017 167–9 Beddoe Avenue Precinct, Monash University, Clayton Campus, Monash Architecture Studio, 2017 171–4 Beddoe Avenue Precinct, Monash University, Clayton Campus, Monash Architecture Studio, 2017 175–7 University of Cincinnati Masterplan, Hargreaves Associates, Cincinnati, Ohio, 2001 181

Note on Contributor

Shane Murray is foundation professor of architecture and dean of the Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture at Monash University (MADA). His combination of distinguished achievement in architectural practice, academic research and leadership is unique in the national context. As dean of MADA, Murray has forged a dynamic blend of practice-based research, cross-faculty and institutional research initiatives and a forwardfocused studio learning model.

Acknowledgements

This book is the outcome of an Australian Research Council-funded twoyear Linkage project grant (2014–16) led by Nigel Bertram, Shane Murray and Leon van Schaik, with industry partner, Housing Choices Australia, in particular Michael Lennon and James Henry. The book draws on design projects developed during this Linkage project and also incorporates previous related design research projects undertaken by the authors and collaborators in the Department of Architecture at Monash University, funded through the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) and the Institute for Safety, Compensation and Recovery Research (ISCRR). Architectural research assistants, Holly Board, Helena Harry, Byron Meyer and Deborah Rowe, have provided considerable input to the projects included in this publication. We are very grateful for their rigorous, creative and dedicated contributions. Deborah Rowe and Helena Harry developed the set of new and adapted drawings specifically for this publication. Shane Murray and Diego Ramirez-Lovering established Monash Architecture Studio design research unit (MAS) in 2008, with ongoing input from Catherine Murphy and Lee-Anne Khor. Nigel Bertram joined this collaborative research group in 2011. MAS engages in a broad range of projects, from the rethinking of design’s contribution to assisted-living environments through to major urban strategies. The MAS design research is interdisciplinary and collaborative, involving government, the development industry and local and international collaborators. Leon van Schaik, a close colleague from RMIT, was invited to join the team for this ARC Linkage project due to his previous work on spatial intelligence. The advisory committee for the 2014–16 ARC Linkage project comprised: Dr Judy Lowithan, Epidemiology and Preventative Medicine, Monash University; Emily Millane, Research Fellow, Per Capita; Marcus Willison, Real Estate Advisory Services, Ernst and Young; John Bruzzaniti, General Manager Development, Australian Unity; and Michael Deschepper, Chief Financial Officer, Wintringham.

Acknowledgements xiii Thank you to Laura Harper, Lee-Anne Khor, Geoffrey London, Catherine Murphy, Marika Neustupny, Rutger Pasman and Diego Ramirez-Lovering for input, suggestions, opinions and references gained through ongoing discussions and collaborations. The authors would like to thank the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at Monash University (MADA) for its support in the production of this publication.

Introduction

We are a team of architects based in Melbourne conducting research into housing. In this book, we share our work on reimagining suburbia, in particular with rapidly growing and ageing populations in mind. An advisory group, representing various housing agencies and housing economics institutes, supports our research. Our work aims to unlock the design potentials hidden in the physical structures of suburbia, qualities both hindered and enabled by the usual plot subdivisions. We have focused on a platform of a new poetics of dwelling. We develop newly designed ‘parts and pieces’—garden interventions, small extensions, new build designs—for rejuvenating suburban housing stock, a kit of parts readily deployed across suburbia on an individual basis. Then we look at small groups of houses and larger ensembles, aiming to increase pedestrian permeability and to optimise the use of spaces between buildings. Finally, through a designed and feasibility-tested approach, we propose the release of the dynamic potentials that reside in the interfaces between suburbs and large service facilities—in this instance a university— that are located in suburbia. And in conclusion, we map this process onto other differentials inherent in suburbia. Why are we doing this? As Australians, we have a deep historical connection to suburbia. Not only have all of us grown up in suburbs, and we nurture memories of that process, the idea of the suburb as politically organised space lies at the base of Australia’s early urbanisation. While our major cities are densifying at their cores at a remarkable rate, we want to find out what role suburbia—still where most Australians live and want to live—has to play in meeting the needs of a densifying and ageing population. Just as Australia pioneered suburban city living, we suspect that our findings will resonate with those working on suburbia everywhere. Worldwide, more and more people are living in cities, and those populations are ageing. Cities—whether ‘planned’ or ‘mushrooming’— are thought of as dense agglomerations of activity, offering at their cores, in a spatial simultaneity, a full range of services. These often vertically layered inner-cities have recognisable patterns. From the

2

Introduction

hinterland of suburbs, centres attract ‘empty-nesters’ and well-to-do, non-conforming minorities, but what of those who cannot or do not wish to move? So we ask: are there nascent patterns in suburbia that have the potential to support a rich life for all age groups? Our research suggests that these patterns do exist and our designs demonstrate how. Knowing that we are not alone in our suburbia-philia, we also seek to situate the instinctual local love of suburbia in the broader context of thinking about the city. For example, there is an emerging awareness that the city today, thanks to the information revolution, is no longer the hierarchical system with a culture-generating core and a culture-consuming periphery.1 Architects and planners—with few exceptions—act as if things are as they ever were. In this book, we make claims for the ‘everywhere is a centre’ city of the information age and provide designed examples of what this means for housing an ageing and growing population in suburbia. Working locally and internationally with aged-care NGOs, we have identified a broad range of suburban situations that have been (where we identify design exemplars by others), or could be (where we ourselves design proposals for a range of common situations) modified to ensure that residents have full access to amenity and service. Working locally and internationally with university campuses, shopping centres, hospitals, airports and other large entities spread through suburbia, we have identified new opportunities for leveraging amenity. We propose and demonstrate through designs both a distributed—acupuncture-like—strategy and a series of concentrated—jujitsu-like—tactics. Suburbs are not, in our view, ‘the city spread too thin’. They hold and can realise potentials for a lived complexity as satisfying as that assumed to be available in inner-city centres. Their poor reputation stems from a theory of origin linked to the city-in-miniature garden city movement. Suburbs were theorised as appendages to the city, not as part of the city system. Just as the ecological function of wetlands was originally ignored by modernist planning and swamps were drained— yet these are now recognised as vital to watercycles—suburbs, too, are increasingly becoming recognised as a crucial part of a city’s wellbeing. Their activities are no longer despised as a uniform dormitory monoculture. Suburbs have an alternative ideology and contain—locked up in their land subdivision structures, in their streets and street verges, and in their boundaries with infrastructure and large-scale entities— unrealised opportunities for urbanity and ecological sustainability. When the tidiness of the ‘city beautiful’ approach is rejected, the role of the suburb in integrating living between generations and their ability to be permaculture ‘urban forests’ is realised, the richness of living anywhere in a city is manifest.

Introduction 3

Our Methodology ‘If you don’t draw it, it cannot happen!’

We share an approach to research that was formulated 30 years ago as ‘in the medium of architecture itself’.2 The proposition, enunciated in the founding of a design practice research laboratory at RMIT, sought to create a research path that paralleled those in the history, sociology and environmental science of architecture. This was in the context of a faculty of the ‘constructed environment’ that contained departments of architecture, landscape architecture, interior design and of planning, social science and social work. The mantra was that the environment is culturally, socially and physically constructed. The grounding was thus a vigorous respect for what the different disciplines could most effectively contribute to the development of cities and regions. As architects, some of us served on the board of AHURI, the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, an organisation that sought to formulate and reform housing policy. We were privy to the work of policy writers and contributed our thinking about the possible physical outcomes of draft policies. Our own research trajectories commenced in the design practice research program that was initiated in 1987, a laboratory from which architects began to graduate in 1991. The laboratory invited practitioners with a notable body of completed works to enter into a critical framework in order to understand and provide evidence about the nature of the mastery that they had established through practice, to surface the tacit knowledge that supported their mastery and to become conscious of the ways in which they deployed their intuition when designing. This Melbourne-based research program has grown to include bases in Europe and Asia, supported in Europe by a €4,000,000 Marie Curie grant, and, through an Australian grant, now includes all Australian universities with architecture programs. The PhD program in architecture is housed within the model of creative practice research, as established and developed by Professor Leon van Schaik AO and others at RMIT over the last 30 years. The research examines what venturous designers actually do when they design. It is probably the most enduring and sustained body of research of its kind: empirical, evidence-based and surfacing evidence about design practice. It is a growing force in the world, with a burgeoning program of research in Asia, Oceania and Europe. The research question for everyone involved in this reflective practice research, despite differing titles, is the same: what is the tacit knowledge that enables a creative practitioner to practice? The methodology comprises of the following: forensic examination by candidates of their own existing creative products and comparison with some works from a defined community of practice; close observation of their own

4

Introduction

works-in-progress using diaries, mappings of the mental space drawn on during a project and of the processes used; documentation and analysis. Every six months, all candidates come together in a Practice Research Symposium to present their reflections, investigations and discoveries. Dissemination of the work post-PhD is through published PhDs,3 websites and books. And, of course, the program relies on peer-reviewed creative works as evidence, as well as the esteem that comes from being a curator or editor or instigator of creative practice events. A very substantial body of evidence about design processes has been created and this informs design practice and design teaching. It forms the backbone to the design work presented in this book. Our work in housing, conducted through the Monash Architecture Studio design research unit (established in 2008), is informed by extensive relationships with policymakers and housing managers, but is focused on discovering and promoting novel solutions to housing issues through the process of designing itself. The writing of good policy is crucial, but the material consequences of the written word are unpredictable and difficult to grasp without being tested through design. The real substance of this book lies in the designs that are presented through our drawings. These reveal what is possible if generally agreed desirable outcomes are tested through design; the designs in turn suggest modifications to the regulations that guide the implementation of policy. Such policy changes include redefining the nature and management of property boundaries, finding mechanisms to enable profitable collaboration between neighbours, rethinking the implicit censorship and value structure behind ‘city beautiful’ planning guidelines, and redefining ergonomic standards and accessibility principles to become more site-specific and performance-based. Thus, it is that Parts II and III are not illustrated, but are divided between text descriptions of our observations and intentions, and Design Proposals that test the intentions through design. These drawings should be read with professional attention. They contain the substance of our discoveries. Without these, we are in the presence of good intentions alone. We hope that readers spend more time savouring these sections than they would usually devote to mere illustrations.

Notes 1 2

3

Edward Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions, Wiley, 2003, Malden, MA. Leon van Schaik, ‘The Evolution of the Invitational Program of Design Practice Research’. In Leon van Schaik and Anna Johnson (Eds.), By Practice, By Invitation: Design Practice Research in Architecture & Design at RMIT, 1986–2011, sixpointsixone, 2011, Melbourne, pp. 15–35. For example: Nigel Bertram, Furniture, Structure, Infrastructure: Making and Using the Urban Environment, Ashgate Publishing, 2013, Farnham, UK; CJ Lim, Food City, Routledge, 2014, New York.

Part I

Living Together

1

Ideas of the Suburb

In our lived experience, city and suburb go together, much like ‘horse and carriage’. Maybe this was the general rule in the mid- to latetwentieth century. ‘You can’t have one without the other’ ran the refrain in the theme song to the television production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in 1955. This places the song in what most historians regard as the first wave of the age of the suburb, though in defining that age, none of them give the suburb equal weight to the city centre. The central business district is regarded as the prime mover. But, just as the absolute coupling of ‘love and marriage’, the theme of the song has come to be challenged and redefined, so we think the relationship between suburb and city postulated in the second half of the twentieth century needs a new look and is ripe for the emergence of new architectural forms. Historians we admire (we do not claim to be comprehensive in our citations, nor exhaustive, we simply offer up readings and precedents that have caught our imaginations) frame the project for us, even as we note their blind spots. In his 1998 book, Cities in Civilisation, geographer/town planner Peter Hall1 (1932–2014) begins a discussion of the suburb on page 965. There he asserts that the suburb ‘began in North America, the UK and Australia in the 1950s . . . and spread to all of Western Europe, even [our italics] Italy and Spain . . .’.2 We note the tone of surprise and we challenge the history. The suburb began much earlier than this. Architect and theorist, Mario Gandelsonas, looks a little more closely and argues that the ‘opposition between city and suburb’ emerges forcefully following the Second World War, even though, ‘in the US, suburbs can be dated to 1815 in Boston, Philadelphia and New York . . . as people pursued the symbolic “house in the country” . . .’.3 This urbanite dream of ‘a house in the country’ may be a peculiarly Anglo-Saxon ideal—or so argued Raymond Williams.4 He pointed out that every Frenchman dreams of living in Paris, while every Londoner goes to sleep longing to be in the country. Actual examples of this bucolic/urban ideal emerge in England shortly before they do in North America. Horace Walpole built Strawberry Hill, his dream country house, in Twickenham outside London, moving there in 1749. Once settled, his

Figure 1.1 Leon van Schaik: Ideogram Plotting the Topics Covered in this Chapter. This shows ideas of suburbs in two overlapping trees, with key theorists looking on from the margins.

Ideas of the Suburb 9 daily routine included an afternoon trip to the city centre, presenting an exalted ideal of suburban living. Walpole recorded beginning his day with a late breakfast, then directing works on his house and garden, departing in a ‘light carriage’ to go to his city centre club and return for dinner by four o’clock that afternoon.5 Thomas Jefferson—whose house dwells in the imaginations of so many of us, particularly the wall bed opening either to his study or to a dressing room—began building Monticello in 1768, arguably the apex of the North American ideal of a house in the country. European invasion and settlement of Australia began in 1788, but the way it was settled presents another challenge to the idea that suburban living began after the Second World War. Melbourne’s suburban culture has been celebrated and exported around the world through the TV series Neighbours (first broadcast in March 1985), corroborating the post-1950s view of suburbia, yet the ‘city’ of Fitzroy was subdivided in 1850, Melbourne’s first suburb.6 It had an eighteenth-century cast to it, in that it housed a complete range of income earners. Subsequently, more demographically uniform suburbs were the engines by which at the end of the nineteenth century, 80 percent of Australia’s population was living in the capital cities of the various colonies that were to comprise the Commonwealth of Australia. While the dream of a rural haven impelled northern development of the ‘garden city’ kind, in Australia the impulse was more political, driven by individual desires to be as independent of the state as possible. The equal rights ideals of the Chartists were forcefully exported to Australia after they were supressed in England, and lie as the usually unstated (Hugh Stretton is the exception) political bedrock at the core of our suburbia-philia. Such a love is unusual. As etymology alone indicates, cities and suburbs predate the English language, finding their origins in French and in Latin. Their core meanings are described in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary: city ‘2. a large town, spec. a town created a “city” by charter, esp containing a cathedral’; and suburb ‘1. a district especially residential lying immediately outside or (now) within the boundaries of a city’; ‘2. the parts about the border of any place, the outskirts’. Both words, city and suburb, come into the language in its Middle English form and in the same period (1150–1349). By 1350–1469 ‘a suburban’ means a resident of a suburb, and ‘outer suburb’ is in use. ‘Suburban’ meaning ‘of a suburb’ follows in 1600–59, well before Walpole made his move. ‘Suburbicarian’ and ‘suburbanity’ emerge in ‘M19’—1830–69 when Dickens was writing about suburban living; ‘suburbanism’, ‘suburbanite’ and ‘suburbia’ in ‘L19’ join them in 1870–99. ‘Suburbanise’ arrives in ‘L19’ too, while ‘suburbanisation’ arrives in ‘E20’ (1900–19). This verb is preceded by ‘the adjective suburban’ meaning ‘narrow minded, provincial’ (1800–29). None of this will surprise readers of English novels, many will recall in Great Expectations (1862) Charles Dickens’ description of Mr Wemmick’s suburban ‘castle’, a minute ‘republic of pleasure’7

1956 GROWTH BOUNDARY 2000 GROWTH BOUNDARY 2017 GROWTH BOUNDARY

Figure 1.2 Melbourne City and Suburbs. Overall extent in relation to Port Phillip Bay and Central Business District, 1956, 2000 and 2017.

Ideas of the Suburb 11 replete with tiny moat and drawbridge. So pervasive are the negative connotations of the suburb that a new book surveying the suburb in literature8 and richly noting Mr Wemmick’s creation ignores its lesson of individual fulfilment. The book concludes with a bleak dismissal of life as lived in the suburbs, claiming that they engender a ‘profound sense of placelessness’. ‘Surely,’ writes a reviewer,9 ‘there is scope for a more positive reading of (the suburbs)?’ Not in the minds of our English cousins, who are not praising Australian culture when they describe the country as a ‘desert surround by a suburb’.10 Nor in the mind of Australian architect and theorist, Robin Boyd, even though (as we shall see) he made significant contributions to the designing of houses in suburbia. The title of his 1961 book is The Australian Ugliness and it seems to be imbued with the same old-world disdain. Like so many Australian elites he was, as observed by cultural historian Paul Fox, torn between an allegiance to the old culture of England and the new culture of the US. While his disgust for suburban strips comes from his British heritage, his new-world allegiances brought forth his Clemson House (1959–60), which is all optimism and rethinking domestic order with, for example, a combined library/laundry room seeking to unify intellectual and menial chores. There are, we argue, rich continuities that such polemics conceal. The poison is hidden in plain sight in the language of the Oxford Dictionary of Architecture (ODA, 1999). The definition of ‘suburb’ begins benignly, if pleading a special case, as the OED etymology shows: ‘1. Residential areas the style of which evolved from “C19” ideals associated with the Arts and Crafts and Aesthetic Movements and with the Domestic Revival and Garden Suburb . . . (from 1877, 1906)’, but continues: ‘. . . though very often a travesty, based more on commerce than aesthetics’. In its second definition, the ODA describes ‘suburb’ as a pejorative term used by modernists to promote high-rise urban developments. Few new-world thinkers or urban theorists transcend this polemic, although some artists do, by looking hard at what is actually there, most notably Ed Ruscha in Los Angeles in the mid-1960s11 when he documented Sunset Strip (among other features of suburbia such as carparks and petrol stations) and Howard Arkley in Melbourne,12 who created a painterly language that presented the sublime innate in ordinary suburban houses in the 1980s and 1990s. Among urbanists, Mario Gandelsonas13 has a go at a positive account, using a term with a relatively new coinage, but as we shall see he is soon sucked back into the existential despair of ODA. The term he uses is ‘exurban, of or belonging to a district outside a city or town’ (1900–29) and it is followed by ‘exurb, a prosperous zone beyond suburbs’ M20 (1930–69). The latter surely describing Walpole’s Twickenham in 1750 . . . The relatively open fabric of exurbia excites transport planners and attracts major roads that circle cities and their suburbs. Often, like the North Circular Road (London, 1920s), these

12

Living Together

are surrounded by enterprises. Whereas in the US such roads are freeways and are called ‘Beltways’ linking nodes of concentrated urban activity, they form edge cities.14 Of these, there are dim resonances around Australian city cores as they swell. Melbourne covered 3000 square kilometres in the 1980s, 7500 square kilometres 30 years later. Exurbia is ever-receding to the horizon, suburbia filling its interstices. Before he gets sucked back into the usual architectural polemic, Gandelsonas, who has revealed through drawing more about the impact of the automobile on urban form than anyone since Colin Rowe15 and his students exhaustively documented the figure-grounds of pre-industrial cities of Europe,16 describes suburbia and exurbia as acting to ‘transform the entire territory into a field, a metaphorical garden (across which compete) suburb/centre city, residence/workplace) . . .’ (p.4). Unfortunately, by page 35, Gandelsonas is lamenting that this field is ‘neither about the architectural object nor about the plan’, thus echoing the ODA view that in suburbia ‘architectural quality (has) evaporated’. We suspect that this attitude stems from the twentieth-century history of eastern and mid-western cities in the US—‘ten cities that have suffered uniquely from the disappearance of work’ (Peter Hall, p.976). Cities that through catastrophic devaluing of their centres have lost their middle class and ‘dough-nutted’, trapping poverty ghettoes in a manner unknown elsewhere in the developed world. Maybe analysis is taking place at too high a level of abstraction. Would Gandelsonas have been so dismissive if he had examined what happens in individual homes and yards? We think not. And we argue that it is time that thinking about suburbs took a fresh look—as artists have done—at what is actually happening in suburbs. Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi’s Learning from Las Vegas17 pioneered such looking by architects, but the lessons were applied as a corrective to architectural designing, not to rethinking suburb/city interfaces. What causes the failure to look hard at suburban actualities? We agree with Mike Davis that it is middle-class fear,18 a fear of diminishing quality of life that drives elite attitudes to suburban growth. Not only are there threats to ‘downtown’ (pp.118–19)—threats that West Coast cities have weathered, as indeed have Australian and Asian cities—but new suburbs impinge upon established ones and, in Los Angeles, upset ‘Westside elites’ (p.105, pp.124–5). And these fears are shared by most of their professional advisers, fruitlessly opposing ‘sprawl’,19 a condition that is with us as long as populations grow. Energy spent stopping growth is, we argue, better spent channelling and enriching the elements within the ‘metaphysical garden’ that contains city, suburb and exurb. We have discovered that there are some precedents for a nonjudgemental approach, among architects who look with fresh eyes. Embracing the ecology of the 1950s suburb with a post-war liberation approach, Viennese-trained architect Victor Gruen invented three new

Ideas of the Suburb 13 ‘plants’ for the garden: the first planned open-air suburban shopping mall (Northland Centre, 1954); the first covered suburban shopping mall (Southdale Centre, 1956); and the first city-centre pedestrian mall (Fresno, 1964). Arguably, these innovations were hybrids arising from the crossfertilisation of European ideals with US actualities. Van den Broek and Bakema’s Lijnbaan (1949–53)—part of the post-war reconstruction of Rotterdam’s bombed-out city centre—was very similar to Gruen’s Northland Centre near Detroit. Another Viennese-trained architect, Richard Neutra, designed housing for communities created to service the war effort (Avion Village, Texas, 1941; Channel Heights, San Pedro, LA, 1942). These subdivisions, houses and community centres were arrayed with careful attention to gradients and protected drainage routes, using them as ‘green fingers’ in a way that is still best practice. Even in the less industrialised environment of Australian housing tracts, there are echoes of the ruthless attitudes to site that characterised the four massive Levittown (formerly Island Trees) tracts of the 1950s. Here as there, then, sites are bulldozed into submission, but here as there, an ‘urban forest’ phenomenon, consciously part of Johannesburg’s postwar strategy,20 comes into play as suburbs mature. This idea is echoed by Adelaide-based theoretician Hugh Stretton,21 an historian who argues for the positive (Chartist) political consequences of owning your own piece of land and whose concept of ‘permaculture’, a way of self-sustaining food growing on quarter-acre blocks, makes a strong argument for the sustainability of suburban urban form. Even though houses today cover 80 percent of the site, 50 percent of houses have solar energy arrays installed. Suburbs can be promoted as engines in an adaptive strategy for global warming. Stretton’s book was part of a wide shift in Australian culture, as writers for theatre began to explore suburban living; for example, Barry Dickens working in a milieu that included architect Peter Corrigan. By 2004, Canberra-based writer Marion Halligan is asserting that suburbia is a great achievement . . .22 While our education, like that of most architects, was coloured by a resolutely urban idea of housing, we have come to know that some architects and many merchant builders were not daunted by the polemics of the suburb. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City (1945)23 was a counter to Le Corbusier’s La Ville Radieuse (1942), yet Wright was ignored in Europe because his ideas seemed so particular to libertarian ideals and wide open spaces. And yet that vision predicts what has happened (to Hall’s surprise, as we have seen) across Europe in all its urban hinterlands. Peter Wilson, the Munster-based, Australian suburbborn and raised architect, has observed this movement and coined the term Euro-Landscape24 to describe what European theorists ignore, even as they drive through it. Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler—like Gruen, migrants from Austria—seeing suburbia with fresh eyes, designed dozens of houses

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meticulously tailored to suburban lots. The Case Study homes project of the magazine, Arts and Architecture, that sought innovative designs for houses ran from 1945 to 1966 and resulted in 36 influential designs. Among the designers whose work owes much to this US project was Melbourne-based architect Robin Boyd who, as well as designing frugal houses on difficult sites for young professional clients, set up and ran The Age Small Homes Service for the local institute of architects, with sponsorship from the local newspaper. Good design spread throughout the suburbs. At another scale of operation, between 1949 and 1966, master builder company Eichler Homes25 of Los Angeles built 11,000 exquisite houses, now collectibles. This architectural idealism in suburbia also happened in the UK as in the Span Homes phenomenon, and in Australia it was embodied in the designs of architect Graeme Gunn, working for Merchant Builders, and this approach continues today with master builder, Fasham. Studying our local suburbia, we have become fascinated by the borders between large-scale service utilities and suburban tracts. Ideas about different regimes of care arise. After Gruen’s architectural effort continued to be expended on shopping centres in the ‘metaphorical garden’ of the blurred city/suburb, notably the various Best centres designed in pop art mode by James Wines of Site architecture.26 Yet these have failed to endure. Only one remains, the one with the sliding fragment of wall that opens to reveal the entrance (Notch Showroom, Sacramento, California, 1977). Is this disappearing of the Best stores the ‘evaporation of architectural content’ at work? We think not and argue that it is the consequence not of an innate quality of suburbia but rather a failure in corporate thinking about regimes of care. Gruen’s inventions were the first to suffer this diminished understanding of the need for taking care. While the Lijnbaan in Rotterdam has been constantly refurbished and upgraded and has become a high-quality boutique village, Gruen’s Northlands was roofed in, its open spaces were covered over and it was gradually deprived of all its original amenities. Gruen famously denounced the poor imitations of Southdale that sprang up all over and that are now, never having provided the spatial delights of Gruen’s designs, in rapid decline in the age of online shopping. In the UK, too, there is evidence of a tailing off of the success of the big suburban malls, with a return to the specialist shopping streets. In Australia and the US, this does not apply to malls that have adopted the Selfridges approach that puts the quality of the experience of being in the facility ahead of everything else—see for example the Westfield malls at Shepherd’s Bush and Stratford East in London. More remarkable still, in terms of our positive vision of suburbia, is the survival and resurgence of double-storey, open courtyard shopping in Dickson Centre, Canberra, where the regime of care works with the initial concept, its inherent qualities may prevail through generations of use.

Case Study #1, J.R. Davidson

Case Study #20, Richard Neutra

Case Study #22, Pierre Koenig Scale 1:500

Figure 1.3 Case Study Houses, Range of Plan Types, Los Angeles, 1945–66.

House Plan 470-2

T2151 1955

ST 813 House Plan 470-4

ST 733 Scale 1:500

House Plan 470-5 Scale 1:500

Figure 1.4 Small Homes Service, Range of Plan Types, Melbourne, 1950s.

Figure 1.5 Eichler Homes, Range of Plan Types, California, 1950s and 1960s.

T1 The Terrace House

S2 The Studio House

C2 The Studio House Scale 1:500

Figure 1.6 Merchant Builders, Range of Plan Types, Melbourne, 1960s (Architect Graeme Gunn).

122 Rochester Road, Balwyn

1F

GF 157 Bulleen Road, Balwyn

9 Bamfield Street, Sandringham Scale 1:500

Figure 1.7 Fasham Builders, Range of Plan Types, Melbourne, 1970s–current.

Scale 1:1000

Figure 1.8 Versions of Open-Air Suburban Shopping Courtyards and Streets—originating with Victor Gruen’s Northland (subsequently filled in) and Van den Broek and Bakema’s Lijnbaan in Rotterdam (refurbished and upgraded) and the Dickson shopping centre in Canberra, thriving again with careful curation of businesses.

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That is one way of seeing it. There is, however, a specialist practice emerging in Europe and North America that repurposes abandoned malls as community centres, artists’ studios, educational facilities and so on. This could be seen as the emergence from the ‘post-work’ society of new regimes of care rooted in people’s desire to be meaningfully engaged in crafting their lives. Contemplating the suburbia that links Los Angeles to San Diego, it is all too easy to regard these facilities as islands in a formless soupy sea; indeed OMA, with Rem Koolhaas’ keen ear for a telling phrase, referred to a proposed project in Penang as being afloat in ‘a tropical soup’ (Penang Tropical City, 2004). Our research in Melbourne, running across 7500 square kilometres of exurbia and suburbia, revealed ‘dim resonances’ of well-known urban models (garden city, Radburn inversion, neo-rationalist new-town . . .) faintly discernible in the subdivisions of different tracts.27 Gandelsonas’ drawings reveal that there are breaks and fissures in the seemingly endless grain of the US grid city. Observation revealed that these were points of differentiation between socioeconomic groups and were also the locations of street-based services. Taking a bird’s eye view it is easy to regard what is seen as evidence of ‘placelesssness’, but as Terence Lee’s pioneering research28 into what he called the spatial schemata established in people’s daily routines revealed, people use journeys of all kinds, not for efficient expedition of functional tasks, but for the structuring of meaning in their lives. Most journeys involve deviations that include sites or scenes of personal interest to the traveller . . . Place is individually constructed and theoreticians should avoid sweeping generalisations about urban and suburban form. We see in the actualities of suburbia an emerging set of opportunities for one of the fastest growing areas of employment—caring for ageing populations. Rather than sprinkling purpose-made, single-function old age homes or nursing homes through the suburbs like Best shopping centres, risking supersession through shifts in taste and in modes of care, we propose an acupuncture approach in which sites are identified and jujitsu-like facilities of various scales and kinds grafted onto existing centres of activity, while the routes to and from these are also upgraded with people/pedestrian-friendly design. In this combination, the usually hidden ecologies of suburbia (disparagingly referred to by those who do not look closely as ‘the swamps and deserts of cities in need of draining or irrigating’) are nurtured and progressively enhanced.

Notes 1 Peter Hall, Cities in Civilization, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1998, London. 2 Peter Hall, pp. 965–6 (note that the term is only used near the end of this book).

Ideas of the Suburb 21 3 Mario Gandelsonas, X-Urbanism: Architecture and the American City, Princeton Architectural Press, 1999, Princeton, NJ, p. 30. 4 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, Hogarth Press, 1973, London. 5 TH White, The Age of Scandal, Folio Society, 1993, London, p. 101. 6 EME Cutten Trust, Fitzroy: Melbourne’s First Suburb, Hyland House, 1989, Melbourne. 7 The term comes from Marian Halligan’s book The Taste of Memory, Allen and Unwin, 2004, Crows Nest, p. 167. She derived it from Robert Hughes’ The Shock of the New, where he writes that a painting is a ‘republic of pleasure’. 8 Ged Pope, Reading London’s Suburbs: From Dickens to Zadie Smith, Palgrave McMillan, 2015, London. 9 Jacqueline Banerjee, Accidental Tourism, No. 5883, 2016, TLS London, pp. 5–8. 10 Diana Rowntree (1915–2008), architect and first writer on architecture for The Guardian. Her counterpart on The Observer was Ian Nairn. Also active at the time was Gordon Cullen, famous for his ‘Outrage’ column in AR. None of them were admirers of suburbia. This description was made in conversation in 1968. 11 Edward Ruscha, The Sunset Strip: Every Building on the Sunset Strip, The Getty Research Institute, 1966, Los Angeles, CA. 12 Edwina Preston, Howard Arkley: Not Just a Suburban Boy, Duffy & Snelgrove, 2002, Sydney. 13 Mario Gandelsonas, X-Urbanism: Architecture and the American City, Princeton Architetural Press, 1999, Princeton, NJ. 14 Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier, Doubleday, 1988, Toronto, New York, London. 15 Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City, MIT Press, 1978, Cambridge, MA and London. 16 David Grahame Shane, one of his students, pointed the way to Gandelsonas’ work through his analysis of the introduction of nineteenth-century transport systems into London’s fabric. Collision City c.1970. 17 Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, Learning from Las Vegas, MIT Press, 1972, Cambridge, MA. 18 Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, Verso, 1990, London/New York. 19 Robert Bruegmann, Sprawl: A Compact History, The University of Chicago Press, 2005, London. 20 William Kentridge, Six Drawing Lessons: The Charles Elliot Norton Lectures, 2012, Harvard University Press, 2014, Cambridge, MA, p. 77. 21 Hugh Stretton, Ideas for Australian Cities, The Author, 1970, South Australia. Kay Rollison, ‘Book Review: Ideas for Australian Cities, by Hugh Stretton’, The Australian Independent Media Network, August 11, 2015. Rollison writes: ‘Marked a sea change in attitudes to the centrality not only of cities, but also of the suburbs in assessments of national life.’ 22 Marion Halligan, The Taste of Memory, Allen and Unwin, 2004, Sydney. She writes in praise of suburbia: Here we can form a ‘republic of pleasure’, a parenthesis within the real world—a paradise. She cites (p. 166) another Australian author: (David) Malouf said that the real achievement of Australian writers might be in pioneering the experience of suburban man. 23 Frank Lloyd Wright, When Democracy Builds, University of Chicago Press, 1945, Chicago, IL.

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24 Peter Wilson and Julia Bolles-Wilson, Bolles+Wilson: A Handful of Productive Paradigms, Bolles+Wilson, 2009, Munster, pp. 60–7. 25 Kevin Alter, Modern Life: The Good Building, The Center for American Architecture and Design, 2003, Austin, TX, pp. 81–8. 26 James Wines, Marie Ange Brayer and Michael Sorkin, James Wines Site: Architecture in Context, FRAC Editions, 2002, Orleans. 27 Neil Masterton, ‘An Investigation of Melways maps 63 and 64’ in Leon van Schaik and Paul Morgan (Eds.), 38 South, RMIT 1991, Melbourne, pp. 50–2 28 Terence Lee, ‘A Study of Urban Neighbourhood’, PhD (Cantab), 1954.

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Ideas of the House

An iterative cycle characterises our age-friendly housing approach. We identify and analyse best practice precedents, building a defined knowledge base. Applying that knowledge, we create designs specific to local sites, regulatory conditions and stewardship regimes. Then, before implementing the designs, we reflect on the impact of our designs on the knowledge base. There are thousands of years of precedent to draw upon: seemingly organic clustering of cells—tents, huts and burrows—in Stone and Iron Age eras; courtyard house types from the Roman and Chinese empires; terrace houses, tenements and model villages from the agricultural and industrial revolutions; semi-detached and detached villas from the beginnings of the consumer society in the housing booms of 1930s England and in the tract houses in the US following the Second World War; and high-rise social housing from the era of modernism. Studies into typologies that distil the essential learning of cultures abound and are exemplified in Aldo Rossi’s identification of a ‘universal’ (post-Roman) language of classical form in housing units and in the vast infrastructures that came to be colonised by housing as they were abandoned. Prescriptions for contemporary housing design flowed from both (see single-family houses at Mozzo, 1977–9 and Monte Amiato Complex, La Gallaretese Quarter, Milan, 1967–74). Yet, finding precedents that apply to the suburbs of Australia is difficult. At first glance, our suburbs seem to be in the same lineage as those of the US, but this is a superficial likeness. The development processes differ. Historically, there has been little tract house building. Small operations completing one or two houses at a time were prevalent in much of the twentieth century. Land holding and subdivision patterns are different. Some cultural differences are hard for locals to discern. The Australian preference for locating the master bedroom adjacent to the front door strikes those familiar with suburban housing elsewhere as distinctly idiosyncratic. The history of this preference has not been established. Does it mark deeply held social mores? Is this the only embedded but unremarked

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characteristic of the local housing stock? Are these spatial arrangements suited to local adaptations to life in the information age? These questions have not been posed and the suburbs fill with new houses that conform to this distinctly Australian norm. As we map out a path of best practice, twisting between that which should be avoided and that to which we aspire, we—in the ancient but constantly renewed triad of our profession—draw on precedents that we must judge for their suitability for purpose, their durability and their potential for beauty—that meaningful correspondence of parts and the whole.1 Certainly, architects in other countries encounter similar un-argued spatial preferences. Perhaps this fact underpins a common move towards introducing redundancy—space that is not specifically tailored to any activity—when architects work to improve existing housing stock in Europe. Adding enclosed balconies around medium-rise apartments as Druot, Lacaton and Vassal did at Tour Bois-le-Pretre in 2011; and similarly blurring boundaries between external uses of space through creating landscapes in which storing mobility devices, sitting and playing outside, and growing plants are co-mingled in such a way that uses and functions are interchangeable, as is common practice in the Netherlands (see CPC Reitdijk in Groningen by Moniko Kira Architects). In Australia, NMBW Architecture Studio constantly seek to establish socialising catalysts by enabling existing ‘furnitures’2 such as veranda edges (making sure these are seat height from the ground),3 fences (making sure that there is a zone that can be invested with informal seating),4 bollards and tree stumps (again made to seat height, so that they can be both spatial dividers and socialising perch points),5 screens (suggesting rather than policing more private areas from more public ones),6 discarded sofas, benches and chairs (noting how these are spontaneously arranged into socialising groups and providing opportunities for such arranging). Here, as abroad, local exemplars free up internal plans, undoing the Architectural Graphic Standards7 tailoring of the twentieth century and creating spaces that contain utilities, but are not labelled or arranged to enforce specific activities. Of plans, NMBW write: ‘Flattening hierarchies and functional separations makes for more possibilities of different combinations and regroupings. Spaces without specific functions (or with ambiguous purpose) promote sharing and borrowing and hence interaction.’ 8 The aim is to move beyond single-purpose space design, embracing ambiguity. Local exemplars include the Alexander Miller Memorial Homes at Highton by Allen Kong, 2011, where existing single-function spaces have been turned into fan-shaped rooms capable of multiple uses. Other designs introduce redundancy by adding verandas (Alexander Miller Homes at Belmont by Allen Kong, 2011), while overseas (ADH Architects,

Scale 1:1000

Figure 2.1 Tour Bois-le-Pretre, Druot, Lacaton and Vassal Architects, Paris, 2011. Plan and section showing original multi-storey housing building with new ‘wintergarden’ semi-enclosed veranda spaces added.

NEW BUILD / ADDITION Scale 1:1000

Original Unit

Retrofitted Unit

Scale 1:300

Figure 2.2 Alexander Miller Memorial Homes, Allen Kong Architects, Manifold Heights, 2011. Existing single-function spaces have been turned into fan-shaped rooms capable of multiple uses.

Ideas of the House 27 Shiroishi Public Housing for the Elderly, Japan) shared decks unite units on an un-programmed plane. External space is moulded by unstated beliefs about what is ‘good’ and beneficial. Close observation through CABE9 and others has proved that wellbeing is enhanced (and recovery time is shortened in hospitals) by a person being able to look out into a garden, park or atrium.10 NMBW Architecture Studio have shown how in small towns slight but profound adjustments to existing structures and ‘furnitures’ avoiding prescriptive or gestural design can facilitate many modes of social interaction. Most of the good design precedents we are interested in are selected on the assumption that communal space is an inherent ‘good’ and that supporting a few standard human interactions is all that is needed. Some frequently cited precedents do not distinguish in their designs between landscapes that are more constraining than others. Often in housing designs, a highly tailored formal landscape unifies the external space, aesthetically tidy and easily managed, but usually this denies the individual urge to plant and shape external space. We have observed how in one carefully manicured Hanover Elderly Housing Estate in the UK, a lavender theme planting was disrupted, to the dismay of management and other owners, when a new incumbent ripped out the official planting outside her flat and replaced it with a collection of other flowering plants. At Cité Manifesté Ilot Schoette Housing in Mulhouse, France, Lacaton and Vassal provide every apartment with its own private ‘winter garden’ space, those on the first floor overlooking to some extent those on ground level, with all apartments overlooking a communal space beyond. The architects make no attempt to design or guide aesthetically the inhabitation of these spaces. A robust and varied clutter is evident. In this precedent, as in Klopper’s factory conversions in Fremantle, the architecture embraces liveliness and mess and manages it through changes in level that provide a range of sight lines between inhabitants. Rule-driven manicured neatness removes the possibility of activities and overlooking, which promote positive communal engagement. Regimes of stewardship skew designs, usually privileging tidy manageability. But such regimes are evolving rapidly as managers learn from new modes enabled by new technologies. An article in New Scientist11 describes what is happening thus: ‘Historically we have automated the workers, now we are automating the bosses.’ In other words, self-learning systems accessed and primed by a community are becoming a transparent selfgoverning possibility. Ways of monitoring the whereabouts and wellbeing of individuals are changing dramatically. Whereas in the twentieth century there was a reliance on daily intercom interrogations and dangling emergency pull cords, now smart phones that monitor an individual’s every step make awareness more discreet, but also more intrusive.

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Is there a general principle driving all of these trends? Where, as the archaeological records show, human ways of occupying space began by overlaying caves, standing stones and mounds with ritualised activity, with architecture being a matter of constellating cellular, single compartment huts or tents. Eventually, single volume halls emerged. These contained social differentiation furniture, such as daises, kangs, arasses, tapestries and screens. Spaces were then linked in enfilades in line or around courts with functions policed by ritual—see for example the tenth-century Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon12 in which there are detailed accounts of the management of screens and curtains to delimit interactions of a courtly and of an individual nature. For example, the three levels of raising ‘curtains of state’—open up a third from the floor indicating a willingness for random conversing, up two thirds indicating a particular person is invited, fully up for privacy—and the various volumes of the eighteenthcentury Chinese classic, The Story of the Stone,13 in which principal rooms

Figure 2.3 Medieval Hall House, Fifteenth Century (Courtesy James McAdam). All functions of daily life took place within a single space, with sleeping taking place on rush flooring or stuffed sacks around the fire. Social differentiation was achieved through furniture, such as daises, kangs, arasses, tapestries and screens.

Ideas of the House 29 containing kangs are reached through garden courtyards surrounded by lesser rooms. The introduction of the corridor transformed spatial arrangements, making privacy and specialisation of function possible.14 Modernism drove out ritual and replaced it with ever-more specified functions and space was shrink-wrapped around the atomised functions of living: rooms for sleeping, bathing, cooking and so on. Even studying was wrenched from the continuum of life and located in its own space, such as the Studiolo at Urbino (1468),15 whereas only decades before, a scholar like St Jerome16 kept what he was working on in a study carrel situated in a large space (in which prowled his lion!). Before the corridor, eminent persons dressed in the presence of all their retinue, but by 1468 the Duke of Urbino had a ‘Dressing Room’. Jefferson’s bedroom in a twosided cupboard or ‘thick wall’ at Monticello17 is an example of a throwback to medieval practice in western Europe, a time when beds were in a room-dividing cupboard or, indeed, in freestanding boxes (known

Figure 2.4 Kang Sleeping Platform, China. A raised brick platform at the end of the room is heated from below and provides radiant heat used for a variety of purposes during the day. At night, the warm surface has bedding added and becomes a sleeping space.

Figure 2.5 Box Bed/Dutch Bed/Closed Bed: various forms of furniture-like sleeping enclosures originating in late-medieval Europe and continuing in some areas until the nineteenth century.

Figure 2.6 Jefferson’s Bedroom with Alcove Bed, Monticello, 1769. An alcove space occupying the ‘thickened wall’ between two rooms—his cabinet (office) and bedroom (dressing room)—this small sleeping space was originally separated with folding screens and had an inbuilt closet above to save space.

Ideas of the House 31 as Dutch beds, box beds or closed-beds). The bed was accessed via hinged doors or curtains in a box raised off the floor on four legs and fronted with a wooden storage chest that doubled as a ‘seat of honour’ in the room in which it was situated. With the ‘Existenzminimum’ Frankfurt kitchen18 modernism delivered a machine for cooking in and minimum standards for every separate activity were promulgated over the following decades, with plans showing everything from how hangers fit into cupboards to the space taken by a wheelchair under the stairs. Ergonomics manuals gave the minimum dimensions for washing your face and not banging your elbows. Christopher Alexander19 followed up on this by identifying thousands of partial exemplars for each atomised activity in life. The house became a prescribing template. WG Sebald’s The Emigrants, a collection of narratives, talks of a ‘modern’ house that had a place for every function, including a telephone room: ‘. . . there was something distinctly creepy about all of it, and at times I feel quite definitely that it did steady and irreparable harm to me. Only once, if I remember rightly, did I ever sit on the window seat in the drawing room, which was painted with foliage and tendrils like a festive bower . . .’20 Postmodernism has removed any sense that a house can be ‘a machine for living in’ (Le Corbusier, Vers Une Architecture, 1923). As was said about the Carter/Tucker House (Sean Godsell Architects, 1997–2000): ‘not so much a machine for living in as a machine that someone is living in . . .’ (Lindsay Holland in an AIA awards jury report). Research conducted into ergonomic design has revealed the contortions to which people will go to avoid using ergonomically designed furniture as its design is intended.21 Romanticism resurgence reintroduces ritual and social form and, hyper-powered by social media, demands undifferentiated space in which to play . . . There is a sense in which our human trajectory of inhabitation has been a cycle from space defined through rituals that frame all of life’s thresholds (including our gradual understanding of the universe) towards a brief period—that of industrialisation—of extreme instrumentality in which ritual was foresworn and we constructed space as if it could be the template for our daily and intellectual life. Space shrink-wrapped to each atomised ‘function’ of our living. Just as we came to ‘timetable’ university spaces and now find that what we need to provide is unprogrammed space that can be invaded by students seeking a sense of shared purpose, so too has our approach to housing shifted. Our approach to urbanism, as indicated earlier, is also shifting. We have puzzled at the falling off in creativity of scientific groups when they are moved from their early ad hoc accommodation into purpose-made, tailored laboratories (MIT Building 20 is an example),22 laboratories tailored to past, often serendipitous success seemingly stifling future creativity. Learning from this, the most advanced university design today eschews

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highly programmed space in favour of places where students can meet and combine in pursuit of their studies as they see fit.23 Now24 we return to an understanding that what is happening, what we need to support, is an ever-changing ritual occupation of space, space that must be as unhindered by functional purpose as is feasible. And this applies inside and outside, and to the membranes between . . . What does this mean in terms of housing? As we have seen, the tendency is towards finding ways of providing undifferentiated space. Housebrand in Canada25 set out to provide clients who normally cannot afford architectural services with the spatial thinking that modernists Neutra and Schindler had established, only to find that these clients, as their lifecycles advanced, needed further reworking of their dwellings after 10 years. The next step has been to design space-dividing ‘furniture’— remember St Jerome?—that can be repositioned as needs shift. Housebrand’s new-build homes are now like the rooms in mansions that become occupied by families, who divide the space up with daises, kangs, screens and other furniture . . . An interesting local example is the green mosaic-tiled bathroom designed by Harrison and White for a family with a disabled member. The room is not properly described as a bathroom. It is a room in which numerous activities can take place. The shower is not immediately apparent. Below a capacious window that overlooks a garden court there is a long timber benchseat that invites occupation for reading, relaxing and conversing. Only incidentally is this a room in which ablution can happen.

Modular Storage Continuous Flooring

Adjustable Lighting Grid

Adjustable Layouts Sliding Walls

Figure 2.7 FAB (Future Adaptive Building), Housebrand, Calgary, 2010. Flexible plan with moveable, modular furniture storage units, allowing residents to easily reconfigure rooms as their needs change over time.

Ideas of the House 33

Figure 2.8 Tully bathroom, Harrison and White Architects, Fitzroy, 2010. An accessible bathroom rendered ambiguous and multifunctional. Accessibility here is seamlessly integrated into the existing house, through the use of colour, natural light and the combination and extension of requirements, such as grab rails and bench seat, to the point that they become multipurpose.

This principle is now applicable to all rooms. There are prototype smart kitchens on wheels (Trudgeon, Crowd Production and Anthony Kitchener) that can be moved from room to room, plugging into water reticulation and vacuum waste systems that run through a house as a spine (the most recent prototype was launched in 2015). What does it mean when we no longer design ‘storage’ spaces for walkers, prams,

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trolleys and buggies, but regard them as ‘furniture’ that can find their place in any room? Wealthy clients in Melbourne and Singapore have long demanded that they be able to park their trophy vehicles in full view.26 Far better surely to incorporate remote and inconvenient space that is dedicated to storage into the space that is used every day? As previously indicated, we have a close attachment to Japanese practice. Japanese house design, influenced by an ancient tradition in which rooms are not given designated uses, but are instead defined by the number of mats that they contain, size not function being what is modulated, continues to eschew spatial specialisation. Architect Kazunari Sakamoto names the rooms on his plans ‘Room 1, Room 2’ and so on. SANAA adopts a mat-distribution approach to the planning of buildings. House in a Plum Grove (Tokyo, 2010) is a subdivided single room, one air space, with activities spread through multiple alcoves and sub-rooms. In SANAA’s Stadtstheatre, Almere (Netherlands, 1998–2009), there is a scattering of rooms of different sizes with no apparent circulation or corridor hierarchy. Movement takes place through a sequence of lobbies, vestibules and courtyards, a series of interlinked rooms without corridors. Doors between spaces enable an infinite number of pathways through the facility. The twenty-first-century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa (2004), houses temporary exhibitions in a large circular space in which float a series of volumes of differing height and size. Everything here is corridor, varying in size not purpose. Merchant builder houses for Muji sometimes have no internal walls or doors.27 Historically and culturally, Japan has privileged ritual as the way in which spatial use is articulated. Paper walls lead to behaviours—as Sei Shonagon records— that mediate privacy ritually. This pre-modernism tradition persists and perhaps gives Japanese architects a paradoxical, ahead-because-standingstill advantage of other postmodern practitioners. The changes that we observe and advocate are not huge, but they do require—if you are not Japanese—a new mental space. One that the architects cited have understood. One that maximises envelopes and minimises compartmentalisation. These changes, as we have seen, can be quite small—the fanning out of a wall to release a small room from its uni-functional purpose, but these changes herald a hugely significant shift in the designing of housing today. Questions We Ask Of Our Designs Given the trend towards undifferentiated space that is made ‘functional’ or ‘ritualised’ by new technologies (smart apps and utilities) and by ‘furnitures’ (contemporary forms of daises, kangs,28 screens and moveable, acoustically sealable cupboard/unit dividers),29 and given the trend towards self-organising regimes of care:

Ideas of the House 35 • • • • • • • • • •

•

Have we maximised spatial indeterminacy? Inside and out? Can space be informally and unpredictably adopted? Are there triggers and clues that indicate that this is allowed? Are elements designed with multiple functions in mind (kerbs and bollards that encourage sitting etc.)? Have we minimised specialisation? Inside and out? Can spaces be populated with all known contemporary rituals? Is there sufficient ‘redundancy’ of space to allow for future rituals? Can spaces be reconfigured through deploying ‘furnitures’? If a dwelling is entered through a major room, can that room’s purpose be altered by the use of ‘furnitures’? If a dwelling has two major rooms, and is entered through one of them, can its purpose be swapped with the purpose of the other room through the use of ‘furnitures’? Have we obviated the need for ‘dead’ storage spaces inside the dwelling and outside the dwelling?

In Part II, we describe a nested series of design ideas that we have developed across a wide range of suburban situations. We drew on the thinking in this section.

Notes 1 Nigel Spivey, Far from Rome: Review of exhibition ‘The Grand Tour’, Nottingham Contemporary; Chatsworth House; Harley Gallery, Welbeck; Derby Museum and Art Gallery, until September 20, Times Literary Supplement, Sept. 4, No. 5866, TLS, 2015, London, p. 18. 2 Furnitures: the plural form is used here to indicate the design of multivalent objects designed or coopted through design changes to act as spatial definers and social gathering places. 3 Nigel Bertram, NMBW, Furniture, Structure, Infrastructure: Making and Using the Urban Environment, Ashgate, 2013, Farnham, UK, p. 91, image 7.4. 4 Ibid, p. 56–70, Appropriations, see images 5.3, 5.4, 5.6. 5 Ibid, p. 77, Elwood House, image of seat-height rock placed to guard a steel stanchion that is also a backrest. 6 Ibid p. 90, image 7.4. 7 First published by Wiley in 1932, superseded in the UK by the Parker Morris Report standards of 1961. 8 Ibid, p. 115. 9 See National Archive UK, 18 01 2011 snapshot of CABE website, Health and Wellbeing Case Studies. 10 Leon van Schaik, ‘Lady Cilento’s Children’s Hospital’, (online) Architecture Australia, 104, no. 3, May/June 2015. 11 Jacob Aron, ‘Automatic world: The technology behind bitcoin is creeping out into the real world’, Sept. 12, 2015, New Scientist, 3038, pp. 12–13. 12 Sei Shonagon, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, Folio Society, 2015, London (first published in English: OUP 1967).

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Living Together

13 Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone, also known as The Dream of the Red Chamber, Vol. 1, The Golden Days, Penguin, 1973, London. 14 Robin Evans, Translations from Drawing to Building, Architectural Association, 1997, London, p. 77. 15 Pasquale Rotondi, The Ducal Palace of Urbino: Architecture & Decoration, Alec Tiranti, 1969, London. 16 Saint Jerome in His Study, c.1470s, Antonello da Messina. 17 Circa 1800, Architectural features: alcove bed, open on both sides, joins the bedroom with Jefferson’s cabinet, or office—a hinged, double-door screen (not shown today) separated the two rooms when shut; a privy was located near one end of the bed, an early example of indoor bathroom facilities in America; the room features one of the house’s 13 skylights; closet over the bed utilised space efficiently and was accessible via ladder. 18 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, 1926. 19 A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction is a 1977 (OUP) book on architecture, urban design and community liveability. 20 WG Sebald, The Emigrants, Harvill Press, 1997, London, p. 210. 21 Lyndon Anderson, ‘Enrichment, a design strategy based on observation’, unpublished PhD, 2001, RMIT. 22 www.nytimes.com/1998/03/31/science/last-rites-for-a-plywood-palace-thatwas-a-rock-of-science.html?pagewanted=all and https://libraries.mit.edu/ archives/mithistory/building20/history.html http://clui.org/ludb/site/building20-site. 23 Leon van Schaik, Practical Poetics in Architecture, Wiley, 2015, London, pp. 172–92, discusses NMBW’s involvement in such designing. 24 Leon van Schaik, ‘Developing the Briefing for the Designing of the Learning Landscape: Reflections on RMIT’s Approach to Next Generation Learning Spaces International Perspectives on Higher Education Research’, Vol. 12: The Future of Learning and Teaching in Next Generation Learning Spaces, Emerald Books, 2014, Bingley, UK, pp. 243–66. 25 Leon van Schaik, Practical Poetics in Architecture, Wiley, 2015, London, pp. 50–8. 26 Nigel Bertram, NMBW, Furniture, Structure, Infrastructure: Making and Using the Urban Environment, Ashgate, 2013, Farnham, UK, p. 105. Fitzroy Apartments, non-hierarchical arrangement of glazed garage doors and apartment entries. 27 www.spoon-tamago.com/2014/10/13/mujis-new-prefabricated-vertical-housefor-city-living/ and www.g-mark.org/award/describe/41499. 28 Baracco+Wright house review by Melanie Dodd with photos by Erieta Attali: ‘Subliminal proto-dwelling: Garden House’, Architecture Australia, Issue 5, Sept/Oct 2015, pp. 66–71. 29 Housebrand, FAB House designs.

Part II

Parts and Pieces of Suburbia

3

Renovations

Preamble In popular culture, just as roads are long and winding, suburbs are leafy. The attraction of the suburb, of having a home in a suburb, lies in a deep sense of autonomy. Owning a home on a plot, a home around which the owner can walk, is—as Dickens describes so vividly—profoundly satisfying, no matter how illusory that ownership may be, given its usual basis in loan finance. Suburban homeowners like to think that they owe no allegiance to a landlord, to party-wall agreements with attached neighbours, to committees of management. They have secured a castle, a fortress against the society of the other. They are at home. And yet they find themselves trammelled with obligations. They pay rates, and their waste is collected, their water, gas and electricity are delivered in metred streams. Their access roads and—if they are fortunate—their verges, sidewalks and pavements are cleaned and maintained. Maybe they live in an area subject to a covenant governing roof shape and material, garden fencing and planting. Each accepted convention arguably builds what is called community capital.1 And yet, owners can come to resent these shared constraints and rebel against them in various ways. Trees are chopped down, fences are built, yards are filled with hoarded materials, verges are converted into parking areas or so subsumed into gardens that walkers are forced into the street. Christmas light displays grow to mammoth proportions, sparking emulation or protest. Amateur sculptures encroach on sight lines. And, most distressingly, not as a result of rebellion but of straitened circumstances, houses are let go, decaying into eyesores, eaves collapsing, grass un-mown, old cars abandoned. The illusion of autonomy is shaken. For none more than the elderly is this of greatest concern. The dreams established in their middle years fall apart before their eyes. Their ease of movement along sidewalks is impaired, parked cars block pavements, dogs are allowed to despoil the verges, favourite views are cut off by new fences. So while they may have bought independence, this was always in the context of an image of homogenous order, of a place that made them feel like a Hobbit in Hobbit-land.

40

Parts and Pieces of Suburbia

Dangers there may be, but you’d have to go looking for them in far-off places. As regulatory regimes change and the implied order that owners bought into changes or decays, unease sets in. And, even in the bestregulated suburbs, the implied order seldom takes into account the fact that owners grow older. They will always be able to drive to the shops. They will always be able to look after their pets. Things will stay the same. When they don’t, as they cannot, the stock response is to remove people to old-age homes, where a static environment is enforced, but in a very stripped-down manner. This is where design can play a role. What needs to be hardwired into the form of the suburb that can counter these entropies? Should the ‘city-beautiful’ controls that preserve the ‘look’ of a suburb be changed to include strategies that encompass the changing states of being? Think of suburban landscapes in-depth, not simply as drive-through scenery? It is in the tense realm of spatial expectations that are general to a suburb and individual to owner circumstances that renovation occurs. Renovations usually take place when an owner responds to the passage of time with a major overhaul or an owner’s needs change as family composition changes and frailties arise. In an apartment block or a condominium body, corporates manage sinking funds to cover maintenance and any substantial changes are policed. Yet in the suburbs, renovations below a certain scale are not governed by a general regime of care. Externally, they may inspire neighbourly emulation or violate unspoken norms and provoke anger. Internally, if forced by merely utilitarian concerns, they may violate an owner’s idea of their house. Here are some design case studies that negotiate these pitfalls.

Design Proposition Background Suburbs are in a constant state of modification and alteration. While this is true of all cities and urban fabric, in the suburbs the nature of the built form, landscape and ownership structure means that much of this is done by the occupants themselves. Backyard do-it-yourself (DIY) culture is a huge industry in Australia, with annual sales at hardware store Bunnings equating to around 25 percent of the total housing construction industry.2 The ability to modify one’s own environment is a key aspect of suburban culture and also part of what makes it so attractive. A freestanding house on its own plot of land, surrounded by garden space that can be dug up and planted; backyard sheds full of tools and spare parts; fences, awnings, letterboxes and gazebos—all these parts are lowcost and lightweight items that allow flexibility, self-expression and individualised character, without requiring permissions, negotiations or dealing with bureaucracy. This freedom, which defines a type of suburban ethos and behaviour,3 becomes necessarily modified at higher densities and in more visible locations, where one person’s works and actions are more likely to impact others.

Renovations 41 As well as the micro-scale landscape and furniture-scaled modifications of owner-occupiers, there is also extensive larger-scale renovation work carried out on suburban houses by small builders using conventional low-tech timber framing and brick construction methods, generally without cranes, site sheds or other complications. The ubiquitous backyard extension frequently involves modifications to the rear of the house to connect living spaces to a private garden, and the updating or expansion of wet areas, such as kitchen and bathroom. It may well include additional bedrooms, second living spaces and new ensuite bathrooms to allow guests or relatives to stay. It could involve an entire new level, turning a single-storey building into two. Mostly, this type of renovation work involves making the house larger. There is no reason, however, that it could not be diversified to include dividing houses into smaller sections or compartments, to allow greater flexibility and the ability to rent out sections to others. The rise of sharing platforms, such as Airbnb, is already altering the suburban fabric4 and the ‘granny flat’ or garage studio are becoming more commonplace and seen as an easy source of income for suburban landowners.5 Dividing existing large houses into smaller ones is one way of addressing the current mismatch between an ageing population wanting and needing to downsize in their own neighbourhood and suburbs full of large ‘traditional’ three or four-bedroom family homes.6 Shane Murray, Diego Ramirez-Lovering and Graham Crist propose the concept of subdivision as a type of future proofing for new suburban dwellings in their Dividable House prototype, where the plan of a standard single-storey house is arranged with fire-rated internal walls to allow easy future subdivision into two smaller units. A more extreme version of this need for the existing fabric to be realigned to a changing demographic exists in small rural towns, where the population is disproportionately elderly. A hypothetical project by Laura Harper slices up existing cottages and almost imperceptibly converts existing built form from single to multiple occupation. This is conceptualised as an expanded and unfenced ‘nursing home’, or supported living network spreading through the township, with walkable networks for residents and carers alike, fully mixed and integrated with the existing community. This project—a dispersed precinct of supported aged accommodation within the existing town fabric, retrofitted and significantly altered but still familiar—provides a model approach and an effective critique of the dominant suburban nursing home or fenced ‘retirement village’ model. The suburban retirement village exemplifies a ‘buffer zone’ mentality of separation that is unfortunately common throughout suburbs and reduces opportunities for chance encounters, adjacencies and physical contact with others. This buffer zone can take the form of a fence or security barrier, a physical setback, landscape or carpark. Hospitals and other large organisations sometimes justify the need for this type of curtilage or apron on operational terms and as allowance for future expansion.

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Parts and Pieces of Suburbia

Scale 1:1000

Figure 3.1 Dividable House, Shane Murray, Diego Ramirez-Lovering and Graham Crist, 2001. Plans showing base configuration (left); and after division into two dwellings (right). The initial condition includes prebuilt sections of fire-rated wall and plumbing to allow for easy subdivision.

Town planners use and require setbacks and physical separation to avoid addressing conflicts that might arise between neighbours—for aesthetic or use compatibility reasons, or both. However, the opportunity for exchange that exists and occurs on front porches, over fences and on boundaries between adjacent uses and owners is a fundamental social aspect of liveable cities and we argue is especially important for the elderly and those whose mobility is impaired or spend a large amount of their time at home. This position is backed up by studies looking at the mental health of the elderly, those living with disabilities and the ongoing rehabilitation potential of those who have suffered serious accidents and require daily support and assistance. These cohorts are particularly susceptible to social isolation and, in typical nursing home arrangements, have little opportunity for contact with others outside their own age group or immediate carers.7 The erection of fences and barriers around retirement villages is usually instigated as a solution to security concerns; however, the resultant ‘gated’ single-purpose and secure enclave could also be read as a type of domestic prison—especially for those occupants who do not have full agency or independence to come and go as they please. All this is well understood by architect Allen Kong, who has completed numerous housing projects for elderly and disadvantaged occupants. Kong places great emphasis on edge conditions and ‘in-between’ spaces outside the primary building envelope that, in low-cost suburban situations, often receive little design attention, are ignored altogether or deleted as easy value management targets to keep projects on budget. Kong quarantines budget for landscape and external works from the very

HOSPITAL

HOTEL

Scale 1:3000

Figure 3.2 Network of Supported Aged Housing Spread Throughout the Rural Township of Jeparit, Northwest Victoria, Laura Harper, 2004 (RMIT Architecture thesis project). The existing hospital – a de-facto nursing home for a markedly ageing population – is conceived as a home base for staff and a new network of paths and gates link this to adapted and refurbished existing dwellings in the town. The large timber houses are variously subdivided and adapted into smaller supported units or groups of apartments.

start of a project for this reason, and argues that these spaces require more design effort and are in some ways more important than the dwelling itself.8 His housing for Wintringham in Castlemaine provides frontyard spaces that are carefully scaled to obtain a nuanced balance

Scale 1:3000

Figure 3.3 Typical Suburban Retirement Village, Berwick, Melbourne. A fenced and secure compound separated from its surroundings. A single access point controls people entering and leaving.

Renovations 45 between sociability and privacy, visibility and a sense of security. Through devices such as low seat-height brick walls, changes in level, semi-enclosed veranda structures, lawn setbacks and paved covered areas large enough for tables, the front garden setback becomes a lively and occupied social space. This is in stark contrast to its usual buffer zone role of inert or purely decorative landscape separating private and public realms. Occupants here are given the facility to sit and watch passersby, or call out to someone they know, while still feeling safe and far enough away from the street and maintaining a degree of privacy. The way this is achieved—this balance between being separate enough but also connected—is nuanced and subtle. It’s the type of outcome that would be impossible (and absurd) to write a regulation for, demonstrating the value of careful, site-specific design.

Scale 1:1000

Figure 3.4 Alexander Miller Memorial Homes, Allen Kong Architects, Castlemaine, 2011. Covered veranda spaces are carefully set back from the street, allowing visual contact, but also a sense of privacy, encouraging inhabitation and use as ‘semi-private’ open space.

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Parts and Pieces of Suburbia

Scale 1:1000

Figure 3.5 Fairfield Hacienda, MRTN Architects, 2014. An external semiprivate room facing the street activates the front garden and is linked directly to north-facing kitchen and living spaces immediately behind. This model inverts the usual suburban pattern of passive frontyard and active backyard.

Architects MRTN have developed a related model in their Fairfield Hacienda house, with a kitchen and large outdoor living space facing the street, protected by a screen blockwork wall, but able to actively engage and communicate with suburban street life. This inversion of the normal formula of inert public front and active private backyard is not only socially transformative, but also provides a liveable and easily repeatable model for house blocks with a north-facing frontage. While these are new projects, lessons can also be applied when considering how to modify existing building stock. Many renovations to existing houses are to make them more accessible or suitable for elderly occupants and those living with a disability or mobility issues. For providers of social and affordable housing such as not-for-profit housing associations, the need to modify existing or inherited houses and flats is acute, as many of these were built 20 to 50 years ago to old standards and do not meet current regulations or expectations.9 Organisations such as the Transport Accident Commission spend millions each year on home modifications to allow people with a spinal cord injury or acquired brain injury to return home, with entry ramps and accessible bathrooms being the most common building works required.10 The existing suburban housing stock is largely inaccessible to those in a wheelchair or otherwise requiring assistance to get around. The retrofitting of suburbia to better integrate and include the needs of the elderly and disabled population is a real need and will only increase over time. If we want an inclusive city, we need to start with the one we already have.11

Renovations 47 How this is done is often purely pragmatic and aimed at solving physical access issues, but as noted above such modifications have unavoidable effects on image, personal identity and expression, especially on and in houses that have been lived in, modified and worked on over decades by the occupants themselves. Modifications to make bathrooms more accessible and the addition of ramps to gain wheelchair access to front doors frequently appear as ‘bandaid’ add-ons, and can be considered as a type of defacement of the house by occupants. Frequent complaints of modified bathrooms are that they feel and appear institutional or hospital-like, that people are embarrassed to have visitors use them, and that they can devalue the house if, for example, they take up the space of a previous bedroom.12 A more subtle and multivalent integration of function, image and impression requires careful design and an approach where each action seeks to satisfy multiple criteria. For example, a new ramped entrance can also increase opportunity for a place to sit or gather outside, or better integrate garden planting with the house; making a bathroom more accessible can also make it a more pleasant place to be for all household users, increasing light, openness and flexibility. The inherent modesty, privacy and small scale of such renovation projects to increase accessibility and flexibility mean that exemplar projects can be hard to locate; nevertheless, the strategic importance of small-scale adaptation that improves suburban fabric on multiple levels prompts us to start our discussion of the suburb at this scale.

3.1 Renovations: Design Proposition In order to test and develop these ideas, we designed renovations and alterations to some typical examples of existing suburban dwellings, each with a modest budget and restricted by operating rules of their housing agencies or funding bodies, but each also seeking to maximise the impact of small moves responding to highly specific site opportunities and idiosyncrasies of residents. In the suburb of East Devonport, northern Tasmania, a group of 1960s cluster apartments were considered appropriate in terms of size for elderly accommodation; however, they had barren external landscapes that had been subjected to vandalism and neglect, and little or no positive connection between private and public realm. Simple modification strategies were proposed to the internal layout to make the units more accessible and also modify the way they engaged with the front pedestrian accessway through the addition of lightweight porches and the ‘privatisation’ of fenced frontyards, subdivided from the undifferentiated shared lawn space and dedicated back to individual units. The veranda structures and low-fenced gardens are a type of lightweight and semipermanent ‘infrastructure’ to allow personalisation of this interstitial space, and to encourage its easy appropriation by occupants—to plant

Figure 3.6 (1)

Existing Condition

Existing Condition

Modified Condition

Figure 3.6 (2)

Figure 3.6 Renovated Cluster Units, Mallawa Court, East Devonport, 2015. Plans showing original internal layout (left) and modified layout (right), with accessible bathroom and kitchen, more efficient living area, plus space for a guest bed/couch. The bathroom can now be accessed without going through the private bedroom, making it more acceptable to accommodate guests. A new entry porch has been added to front garden side, with its small covered veranda making an interstitial space overlooking ‘privatised’ front garden.

Figure 3.7 (1)

5

1

4

3

Scale 1:300

Figure 3.7 (2)

Figure 3.7 (3)

Figure 3.7 Accessible Garden House, Northeast Melbourne, 2017. Site plan and detail crosssection showing new front garden terrace opening directly from accessible bedroom, providing semi-screened social contact to front footpath. Front ramp has also been widened to act as a place to linger, with additional drop-off space next to the car bay. The paving levels around the garage/gardening tool store have been raised by one step, allowing independent wheelchair access to this room and providing dual-height access to the rear ‘hills hoist’ clothesline (standing/sitting in wheelchair).

Figure 3.8 (1)

Figure 3.8 (2)

Figure 3.8 Gym House, Country Victoria, 2017. Refurbished floorplan and detail of garage gym platform. An accessible apartment is created as a subset of the original large house, with access through multiple existing openings to north-facing veranda space with raised deck level and enlarged bathroom with natural light from above. The large garage space is used as a semiexternal flexible space for gym and other sports rehabilitation equipment, directly connected to the interior zone and designed to be used with the garage doors left open.

Figure 3.8 (3)

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Parts and Pieces of Suburbia

what they like and decorate, or maybe contain a small dog or other pets. Over time it is hoped that the front gardens develop a rich and varied character, reflecting the personalities and idiosyncrasies of the residents (see Figure 3.6). In a middle suburb of northeast Melbourne, a double-fronted brick house is home to an elderly couple. They had raised their family there and developed attachments to the house and area over many decades. One of the pair—an avid gardener—recently became wheelchair bound due to a serious car accident. The house is on a relatively steep site, making wheelchair access from the house to the extensive garden beds very difficult, and had been modified with a fairly standard timber ramp at the front to allow entrance, and a new wheelchair-friendly bathroom inside, but was otherwise untouched. In order to reconnect the occupant with her garden, and to overcome the feeling of being ‘trapped’ inside the house, the owners were considering installing a second-hand elevator platform at the rear of the house. We suggested that this expense might be more strategically allocated and, rather than going to great lengths to take Yvette13 to the garden, why not invert the problem and bring the garden to her? A more economical and more accessible garden could be made at the front of the house, directly opening from her bedroom, with planters at the right height and a flat, trafficable deck surface. In the process of getting her hands back into the soil, being in this front garden meant that Yvette could also enjoy contact with passing neighbours, many of whom she knew from swapping garden cuttings over years. A series of other small moves were proposed as part of a ‘masterplan’ for the house, allowing staged modification of the property over time to make gradual adjustments and customisation of the areas surrounding the house, suiting the new state and capacity of its occupants and allowing them to maintain their active interests and neighbourly connections. Yvette is keen for her garden to eventually become a type of demonstration project that others in her situation can visit and exchange ideas. (see Figure 3.7) In a semi-rural suburb, a previously very active man and amateur triathlete suffered a stroke and became housebound in a wheelchair, with limited ability to process and interpret action on one side of his body. His existing house, although large, is on a steep block and has many small steps and changes in levels. A practical zone was identified within the large house to be fully accessible, leaving most areas untouched. Rather than providing a single ramped entry point to this zone from outside, we proposed to raise up a more extended area by just one step, using a timber deck supported directly on the existing concrete. This allowed David free movement at multiple points from his internal accessible zone to an external north-facing area, overlooking the steep garden. Another important part of the rehabilitation program—both physically and mentally—was use of the home gym equipment that David had previously

Renovations 57 used daily for training. The shed where this was located was now inaccessible, being up a steep hill, and there was no adequately sized or ventilated space to bring the equipment down into the house. As a solution, we proposed that the existing double garage space be partially occupied as a gym, in the manner of inner-city gyms that frequently use ex-industrial garage spaces. A raised timber platform provides direct level access from the house, and utilises existing windows for a view over the valley beyond. By lifting up the garage door, David can exercise in fresh air and maintain a strong connection to the smells and sounds of the external environment (see Figure 3.8).

Notes 1

Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone, The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Touchstone, 2000, New York. 2 Bunnings’ annual turnover in 2016 was A$10.6 billion. The value of the total housing construction market in the same period was around A$43 billion. Figures vary depending on methodology used. 3 For a comically accurate portrayal of Australian suburbia, its housing and do-it-yourself culture, see The Castle (Australian film, 1997, director Rob Sitch). 4 Jacqui Alexander, ‘Airbnb Urbanism’, in Future West (Australian Urbanism), 1, University of Western Australia, 2016, pp. 54–61. 5 This concept is also appearing in the apartment market, with ‘dual key’ apartments offering both internal household flexibility and a way of paying off mortgages, hence making bank finance more available to young buyers. Architects Nation Fender Katsalidis, working with Frasers Property, developed a dual-key apartment design, where the second, lockable bedroom usually has its own bathroom and cooking area. This option has been offered in up to 40 percent of apartments in some of their recent buildings. 6 The fastest growing household type in Australia is the lone person household (Australian Bureau of Statistics, Census 2011). 7 For an interesting discussion on social exclusion and housing needs of people living with disabilities, see Barbara Gibson, Barbara Secker, Debbie Rolfe, et al., ‘Disability and dignity-enabling home environments’, in Social Science & Medicine, 74, 2012, pp. 211–19. 8 Interview with architect Allen Kong, 2015. Referenced in Monash Architecture Studio, Best Practice Discussion Paper, Institute for Safety, Compensation and Recovery Research (ISCRR), 2015. 9 ‘Greyfields’ is a term used to describe existing residential housing areas that are ageing and underperforming in environmental, density and diversity terms. Refer to Peter Newton, Shane Murray et al, AHURI, ‘Towards a New Model for Housing Regeneration in the Greyfields’, 2011, Victoria. 10 Research undertaken by Monash Architecture Studio into home modifications and retrofitting by the Transport Accident Commission for ISCRR, 2015, Victoria. 11 The City of Melbourne’s Rob Adams states: ‘As 80 percent of the infrastructure that will exist in cities by 2030 already exists today, the larger challenge is how to reconfigure our existing infrastructure to achieve a sustainable future.’ (The Age, May 26, 2008). The need to focus on retrofitting and upgrading

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Parts and Pieces of Suburbia

existing buildings—and not just rely on regulation reform applying to new building—has also been recognised as essential for achieving real progress on sustainability and reduction in energy consumption. The City of Melbourne’s 1200 Buildings program was set up with this aim and provides incentives for owners of existing commercial buildings to upgrade their environmental performance. 12 Research undertaken by Monash Architecture Studio into home modifications and retrofitting by the Transport Accident Commission for ISCRR, 2015. 13 Names have been changed.

4

Single Houses

Preamble In popular culture, the idea of the house as a very fine place is enshrined in songs such as ‘Our House’ by Crosby, Stills and Nash 1970. We assume far too readily that all of us share a common idea of the house. When Hoover promised everyone a three-bedroom house with a car in the garage and a chicken in a pot on the stove, people in different countries could embrace this idea and could regard this as generic and self-evident as the declaration of human rights. Everyone knows what a house is. Yet, in research into self-build houses that were self-designed within some material and dimensional constraints, one thousand house plans were collected and no two were the same. There were several themes governing room relationships, all predicated on differing social histories in space. In the Anglophone world, less than 8 percent of housing results from a direct relationship between an architect and client. If fortunate, people live in architect-designed subdivisions or garden cities. In Europe and Asia, it is possible that more people live in an architect-designed apartment or condominium. There is very little literature about what happens to people when their internal idea of a house clashes with the form of the house that they come to inhabit. These clashes are documented by novelists, such as Willa Cather in The Professor’s House, which sets up an almost malevolent relationship between the protagonists, animate and inanimate.1 WG Sebald describes how an over-determined house, newly occupied by a character who grew up in a farmhouse, came to recognise that the new house with its telephone nook, turrets and bay windows was acting on her as a Procrustean bed. Tract housing in Australia, and house building in the main, is based on small-scale production, with completed houses funding investment in the next one built for speculative sale, and is based on a continent-wide pattern book of plan assumptions. Plans are almost all variations of one type, with a central entrance, a garage to one side, a master bedroom to the other and other rooms strung out towards a rear covered area labelled ‘alfresco’.

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Parts and Pieces of Suburbia

This term was in fact the subject of a copyright dispute, when the label itself was thought to have been part of the trademark of a tract builder. However, the case was dismissed. All of this chimes ill in a country in which 40 percent or more of the inhabitants of the major cities were born overseas, and carry in their mental space very different ideas of the meaning of ‘house’. Given the predominant housing stock, their major recourse is to subvert the plan intentions of standard house types. Migrants from the Indian sub-continent seek out large houses with entertainment rooms. These become the living rooms for older members of the family. Chinese migrants, however, prefer to purchase adjacent smaller houses, making multi-generational compounds. While the impact on tract builders is very slow in developing, architects are developing plans that are open to many different ideas of house and ideas of inhabiting. Arguably, this will become more important as our cities continue to grow through migration. Here we design test some of these new ideas of house form.

Design Proposition Background At its most basic, an urban house is a private space that can be separated and secured from the outside space of the city. This space might be a single volume, but it usually comprises a series of rooms and connecting spaces, some ‘wet’ containing services and some ‘dry’. Rooms and doors are devices within the house for separating activities that may be incompatible with each other, such as those that produce noise or mess and those requiring quiet or darkness. There is a great deal of cultural baggage surrounding the idea of ‘house’ in any era. In the contemporary Australian context, houses are bought, sold and valued based on the number of bedrooms and bathrooms they contain. Qualitative factors impact on this, but these two statistics are fundamental in defining house type in the public mind. The number of cars able to be accommodated is the third factor listed on real estate advertisements.2 This poses a challenge for those looking to alternative arrangements of space and more diverse definitions of ‘house’—as subtleties beyond these three primary marketing figures are not easy to communicate and may not impact at all on valuations. Floor area or overall house size is a factor, but the number of bedrooms and bathrooms provided can distort this in the overall monetary value and ability to sell with broad appeal in the marketplace. The 1940s brick double-fronted asymmetrical house perhaps still exemplifies the evolved form and image of the Australian suburban villa—in conjunction with its triple-fronted 1960s counterpart—but of course suburban reality is more complex and diverse than this. The

Single Houses 61 lineage of this version of the independent single family villa has been traced by others3 and many alternatives proposed—from economical post-war designs produced for The Age Small Homes Service to numerous courtyard, terraced and apartment models designed by innovative architects and builders, particularly in the 1960s and ’70s.4 Contemporary versions of the double-fronted villa type tend to have more wet areas (bathrooms, ensuites) for a similar number of bedrooms and also, radically, bring the car inside the primary house volume in the form of a double garage that has direct access to the interior, forming a type of ‘drive-in’ house, where it is possible to enter via remote control without getting out of the car and without ever walking through the front door or interacting with anyone on the way. Living spaces in the 2010s are commonly merged into a large open-plan zone, with direct access to a deck and small terrace-house scale external courtyard in place of a backyard. The front door is for visitors only. The single detached house will always have a role within the types of suburb we are investigating, so interrogating possible alternative organisations and living arrangements is a necessary part of our equation and a vehicle for recognising more diversity within what is sometimes categorised uniformly and generically. We have started with the ‘room’ as the base unit to allow a different scale of thinking to influence the whole. The following categorisation focuses on operation and spatial concept, rather than stylistic expression, construction method, material use or other contextual or cultural factors, all of which influence the final result. Flexible room configurations that provide useful models for rethinking single house typologies include the following: •

•

• • •

Single room house: one air space, no doors but ‘alcoves’; for example, House in a Plum Grove by Kazuyo Sejima and Associates, House A by Office of Ryue Nishizawa, Pholiota by Marion Mahoney and Walter Burley Griffin. Multiple room house: each room with two entry/exit points, multiple sleeping spaces; for example, Sorrento House by NMBW Architecture Studio. Multiple room house: functions not defined and interchangeable; for example, Lake View, Chiltern. No room house: just outer enclosure and furniture; for example, Garden House by Baracco and Wright. Warehouse shell: permanent enclosure and impermanent/flimsy interior; for example, Cité Manifesté, Mulhouse by Lacaton and Vassal.

Figure 4.1 (1) (left) 1940s Suburban House, Heidelberg. Site area: 690 square metres, built area: 113 square metres, site coverage: 16 percent. Main bedroom and living room face the street, shared bathroom, kitchen and laundry with direct access to backyard garden.

15m

3

(2) (below) 2010s Suburban House, Truganina. Site area: 325 square metres, built area: 170 square metres, site coverage: 52 percent (60 percent regulated maximum). Main bedroom with private ensuite and enclosed double-garage face the street, internalised kitchen and laundry, open-plan living areas to rear, opening to small deck area. The two plans are drawn at the same scale. Note the relatively unuseable ‘leftover’ nature of external spaces around the house.

25m

46m

13m

1940s Suburban House, Heidelberg

2010s Suburban House, Truganina

Scale 1:300

Scale 1:300

2F

1F

GF Scale 1:300

Figure 4.2 House in a Plum Grove, Kazuyo Sejima and Associates, Tokyo, 2003. In this multigenerational family house, all rooms are in a single air space, with separate alcove-like sleeping spaces without doors. The house has more ‘rooms’/ separate spaces than normal, with some functions occupying more than one space enclosure.

GF

1F

Scale 1:300

Figure 4.3 House A, Office of Ryue Nishizawa, Tokyo, 2006. All rooms are in a single air space, linear sequence of connected spaces, each surrounded by different scale open space. Use of each space is mixed and ambiguous, defined by furniture, pot plants and curtains.

Scale 1:300

Figure 4.4 Pholiota, Marion Mahoney and Walter Burley Griffin, Heidelberg, 1920. Sleeping alcoves/built-in beds spatially continuous with central living area, separated through curtains to modulate light and privacy.

Figure 4.5 Sorrento House, NMBW Architecture Studio, 2011. Multiple rooms, each room with two doors; multiple circulation routes and possible sleeping spaces, including attic and window bed. Room functions can join in with or be isolated from circulation space, through opening and closing of different doors.

2F

1F

GF Scale 1:300

Scale 1:300

Figure 4.6 Lake View, Chiltern, 1870. Multiple rooms with functions not completely defined, supported by a detached kitchen/wet area outbuilding. Equivalence in size, scale and configuration allows internal rooms in this house to be conceptually interchangeable.

1F

1F

GF Scale 1:300

Figure 4.7 (above) Garden House, Baracco and Wright Architects, 2015. No rooms as such – one large shed-like enclosure with ‘kang’-like bed platform and mezzanine furniture.

Figure 4.8 (below) Cite Manifesté Housing, Lacaton and Vassal Architects, Mulhouse, 2005. Warehouse-like enclosure with lightweight, non-loadbearing internal fitout able to be modified by tenant; fixed size, but number of rooms indeterminate.

GF Scale 1:300

68

Parts and Pieces of Suburbia

4.1 Single Houses: Design Proposition In order to test and develop these ideas, the Infill Opportunities project starts with an investigation of the suburban room. Room sizes of typical Australian contemporary suburban houses were analysed, with sizes tested against different activities and furniture arrangements—and also against achievable spans of economical construction types. A simple catalogue of rooms that were easy to construct was arrived at and the different ways that these rooms could be occupied through non-structural subdivision and alternative furniture arrangements was documented. Room sizes and arrangements were also checked in relation to typical middle-suburban allotment dimensions. Small Flexible Room: 4.5 × 6.0 Metres The proportions of this room and the relationship to service core and entry points allows for several occupations requiring larger, open-plan spaces, such as main family room, home office or small shop. It can be partitioned at various points along its length to accommodate smaller, separated uses, such as a semi-independent ground floor unit or bedsit. Large Flexible Room: 5.4 × 7.3 Metres The slightly larger proportions of this room permit both linear and transverse subdivision, enabling a quadrant of related uses. For example, children’s bedrooms and a play space might be configured together with access to suitable storage and a ‘messy’ wet area beside the core. Alternatively, this space could be a generous one-bedroom apartment. With secured independent entry points to the dwelling, opportunities exist to lease different areas and levels of the house. Compact Wet Area Core A range of core configurations was developed comprising different combinations of bathroom, storage, kitchen, kitchenette and laundry facilities. Cores can also expand if, for example, a larger kitchen is required. Vertical circulation is integrated into the compact core volume, which can efficiently extend servicing and stair access to every floor. The core can also be adapted to accommodate a universally accessible bathroom and domestic lift. Covered External Space: 5.4 × 5.7 Metres The provision of a covered external area allows a parking or vehicle drop-off space in the short term, but also provides shaded terrace space

7300 x 5400

6000 x 4500

FLEXIBLE ROOM

CORE

FLEXIBLE ROOM

CORE

Figure 4.9 Infill Opportunities, 2011. Flexible room types in comparison to typical suburban volume housing. The new room types are similar in size and proportion to the double-garage of a typical suburban house. Their size is determined in relation to typical suburban allotment dimensions and can be used as a single space or temporarily subdivided in different ways. Free spans are achievable using standard fabricated timber/composite joists.

1F

Sleeping Living

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Working/ Guest/ Teenager

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- STUDENT - SINGLE ADULT

- COUPLE - SINGLE WITH OFFICE

- COUPLE WITH HOME OFFICE - COUPLE WITH OCCASIONAL GUEST - PARENT WITH CHILD AND TEENAGER

- COUPLE WITH 2 KIDS

CORE + 1 ROOM 50M2

CORE + 2 ROOM 75M2

CORE + 3 ROOM 90M2

CORE + 3 ROOM 90M2

Figure 4.10 Infill Opportunities, 2011. Matrix showing different combinations of service cores and flexible rooms, to suit different household structures, from very small and simple to multigenerational and mixed-use. Room use is non-assigned and flexible.

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- DISABLED PERSON WITH LIVE-IN CARER

- COUPLE WITH 2 KIDS AND TEENAGER OR HOME OFFICE

- FAMILY WITH KIDS AND TEENAGER OR HOME OFFICE

EXTENDED FAMILY

CORE + 4 ROOMS 120M2

1.5 CORES + 3.5 ROOMS 130M2

2 CORES + 4 ROOMS 150M2

2 CORES + 5 ROOMS 175M2

9-11m Terrace Open Space Generous Flexible Room

Services Core

5.4m Covered Outdoor Space 5.7m 5.4m

Private Open Space (Terrace)

5.4m

4.9m

Garden Open Space

1F OPEN SPACE CONFIGURATIONS

4.5m

Covered Outdoor Space

Services Core

Potential Future Growth 9-11m

Private Open Space

Compact Core And Vertical Access

Flexible Room 2

Generous Flexible Room

Flexible Room 1 5.7m 5.4m

GF

5.4m

4.9m

ROOM CONFIGURATIONS, COMPACT CORE AND VERTICAL ACCESS

Figure 4.11 (above) Infill Opportunities, 2011. Diagrams showing three-dimensional relationships of the five basic elements and relationships of internal to external spaces. The basic two-level house is extendable by filling in the covered external space and/or adding a third level by extending the core with integrated staircase. Figure 4.12 (facing page) Infill Opportunities, 2011. Example diagrammatic use configurations within the same flexible room structure: couple with home office, study or guest suite; dividable house with shared laundry; large family house; accessible unit; couple with home office and independent ground floor studio; ground floor office or shop and first floor studio apartment/guest suite.

1F

1F

GF

GF

COUPLE WITH HOME OFFICE, STUDY OR GUEST SUITE

DIVIDABLE HOUSE WITH SHARED LAUNDRY

2F

2F

1F

1F

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GF

COUPLE WITH HOME OFFICE + INDEPENDENT GROUND FLOOR STUDIO Scale 1:500

LARGE FAMILY

ACCESSIBLE UNIT

Scale 1:300

DETACHED

ATTACHED

EMBEDDED

BOOKEND

SHARED

DISPLACED

Figure 4.14 Core House, NMBW Architecture Studio, 2010. Application of commercial typology of fixed service core and flexible/generic tenanted floor space applied to a domestic setting. The ‘core’ is a highly serviced space, with brick boundary-wall construction, and the ‘shed’ component is large, lightweight and changeable, potentially DIY or prefab construction.

Figure 4.13 (facing page) North Melbourne House, NMBW Architecture Studio, 2017. Translation of the infill opportunities base type of stacked services core with large flexible rooms to an actual site in North Melbourne. The ultimate form of the house is determined by site topography, neighbouring buildings, sun angles and other constraints; room sizes have been ‘stretched’ to fit the available site, with one quarter of the site left open as a courtyard. The house links to the neighbouring cottage through kitchen and courtyard spaces, forming a double house with four separate entries and multiple service spaces: a ‘share house for ageing-in’.

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for external dining, parties or gatherings. This space is considered as an external room and can be easily filled in and retrofitted as a spare room or ground floor workspace. Garden Open Space: 5.4 × 5.4 Metres Good access and outlook from each internal room to well-oriented and useable external space is essential for the workability of this model. The external garden space is square in proportion and provides adequate space for deep-root tree planting for shade. It connects all internal rooms and provides a private space/open space focus for the house. North-facing orientation of this space allows good sunlight penetration and surrounding building volumes can be oriented northeast or northwest, depending on context, topography and site conditions. The deep-root open space allows for large tree canopy that can also be enjoyed from upper-level terraces and roof decks. These five elements (and their variants) can combine in different ways suited to site size, available access points, topography and physical context. They are intended not as a modular or standardised system, but as concepts or frameworks to illustrate different ways of organising suburban dwelling space—easily achievable on typical sites within the current regulatory framework. These concepts can also be expanded to suit larger households, multiple or extended families, and modified as they grow. The arrangements illustrated are proposed as ‘organisational’ and would then be adapted and translated by users and designers to suit the requirements of any actual condition. These arrangements of rooms are a study in pursuit of suburban flexibility and adaptability over time. The ethos of ‘long-life, loose-fit’— developed as a concept for sustainability—is primarily applied to larger institutional or commercial buildings that change occupants frequently,5 but can also be applied to suburban houses as projects such as Lacaton and Vassal’s Cité Manifesté housing and Baracco and Wright’s Garden House clearly illustrate. Each of these projects introduces a level of redundancy and ambiguity in order to provide long-term flexibility and non-prescriptive opportunities for occupant-led personalisation and adaptation. Leaving things a little vague and open, and indeed leaving some things out altogether, is a strategy that has been shown to increase and provoke the input from occupants and their ability to personalise and customise the space.6 This is one way of increasing engagement and taking ‘ownership’—common in traditional owner-occupier suburbia, but sometimes difficult to achieve in rented, low-income supported housing, accommodation for people living with disabilities, or in need of support.

Single Houses 77 NMBW’s Core House project explicitly takes the commercial office building parti of relatively fixed service core and freely modifiable office floorplate and reapplies it in a suburban residential setting. The strategy of solid core (infrastructure) and lightweight shed-type rooms (changeable occupation) allows multiple uses and household configurations to be possible and to change over time, much like changing leasehold tenants in a commercial building. This hypothetical project was then applied to the North Melbourne House on a tight infill site that necessitated boundary construction. The owners of this site also owned the adjacent block, with an intact nineteenth-century double-fronted cottage. Together, the two adjacent dwellings, one old and one new, were conceived as a ‘share-house for ageing-in’. Two kitchens are separated by small courtyards and the combination of service spaces allows for either two independent households to share open spaces or four smaller sub-households (such as individual sub-tenants or an elderly couple) to live semi-independently with use of the double site. The two kitchens combine, at the same floor level, with exposed laundry and workshop/garage to provide a walkthrough house, connecting the three available address points of front street, side street and laneway access. An ambiguous relationship between household unit(s) and dwelling object(s) allows for multiple generations to cohabit and provides future sub-tenanting possibilities. The spatial organisation and arrangement of rooms is unrelated to the final formal and material expression, which in the case of this infill site is largely determined by adjacent building envelopes and planning regulations around sunlight penetration.

Notes 1 2

3

4

Willa Cather, The Professor’s House. Virago, 1981, New York. This data is often illustrated in the form of three icons at the bottom of a sign or advertisement: bed, bath and car—with numbers beside. The advertisement also usually contains a large photographic image of the house from the street. This might be contrasted, for example, with the way houses and apartments are advertised in Japan, which is primarily through floorplans showing how many tatami mats (or equivalent space area) are in each room, plus the number of minutes it takes to walk to the nearest train station(s). Particularly Robin Boyd, in Australia’s Home: Its origins, builders and occupiers, Melbourne University Press, 1952, Victoria, and also Philip Goad, ‘The Modern House in Melbourne 1945–1975’, PhD dissertation, University of Melbourne, 1992, Melbourne. The Age Small Homes Service was started by Robin Boyd in 1947 and ran until around 1970. Other local practitioners experimenting with suburban housing types for the mass market included Cocks and Carmichael, and Graeme Gunn, for Merchant Builders and other progressive developers in the 1960s and early ’70s. See Judith O’Callaghan and Charles Pickett, Designer Suburbs: Architects and affordable homes in Australia, New South Publishing, 2012, Sydney.

78 5 6

Parts and Pieces of Suburbia ‘Long-life-loose-fit-low-energy’ was first articulated as a concept by Sir Alexander John Gordon in 1972 and is often cited as a principle in contemporary sustainability discourse. Nigel Bertram, NMBW, Furniture, Structure, Infrastructure: Making and using the urban environment, Ashgate, 2013, Farnham, UK, p. 58. A similar outcome and philosophy was evident in Lacaton and Vassal’s apartments at Cité Manifesté, Mulhouse (2005), as revealed in interviews with tenants of that development and architect Anne Lacaton by the authors in 2014. Refer Monash Architecture Studio, Best Practice Discussion Paper, ISCRR, 2015.

5

Small Groups

Preamble In popular culture, a house situated in a street is celebrated, such as being ‘in the middle of our street’ in the song ‘Our House’ by Madness, 1982. Just as we tend to inhabit houses and, indeed, different kinds of suburban subdivision without being aware—until a misfit hurts—of mismatches with our internal ideas of house, so we tend to accept as normal the groupings of dwellings that occur. Houses arranged in ‘courts’, ‘cul-de-sacs’ or ‘places’ have an inevitability about their configuration. The merits of the different fan-shaped blocks could give rise to earnest purchaser debate. In grid layout suburbs, there could be debates about the relative merits of corner blocks and island blocks, the first offering more exposure and less privacy, but also one less potential boundary dispute and greater potential for subdivision; the second providing more privacy to the rear. The cursive worming patterns of some mid-twentieth-century layouts could give rise to curious coincidences. A Melbourne artist, whose family migrated to the city from Cyprus, describes how, when he fell in love with the girl next door and they set off on a house hunt, they eventually found a good option. They drove back to get his parents to inspect the house. After a while his father pronounced that this was a very good house. ‘Why?’ asked the son, whereby the father led his son to the backyard fence and pointed to the lemon tree beyond. ‘That is my tree!’ said the father triumphantly. His son had chosen a site that backed onto the family home. Just as we can lose ourselves in the repetitions of suburban layouts, we carry internal pictures of normality around with us. Yet there is nothing set in stone about our familiar ways of subdividing land. Even as fencing protocols determine who pays for what on the boundaries of plots, and in terraced housing party wall conventions apportion costs of repairs, the assumption that plots should share boundaries is not universal. Research in Botswana1 has revealed a quasi-urban culture in which every plot is an island fenced by its owner, with passageways between that vary in width, allowing fence maintenance but also the switching of pedestrian desire lines as facilities in the suburb change. Here and in later chapters, this tartan grid potential suggest that a changed subdivision could refresh an ageing subdivision and allow different solutions across all scales.

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Design Proposition Background Melbourne’s subdivision started in the central city, with allotments of approximately one quarter-acre—the two standard allotment dimensions being close to 20 × 50 metres or 25 × 40 metres, each 1000 square metres.2 This quarter-acre allotment type was repeated in the first suburbs and has since been understood as a standard type, but lives perhaps more in the popular imagination than in reality. Although blocks equivalent to this can be commonly found throughout Melbourne’s suburbs, the typical as-built allotment size in the middle-suburban areas, where half of the population lives, is around a third smaller, approximately 670 square metres with median dimensions in the order of 16 × 42 metres.3 Of course, the actual dimensions vary greatly due to local circumstances and the historical time of subdivision, but the above can be used as a rough guide. In terms of density, a single villa on the quarter-acre block gives an underlying net density of 10 dwellings per hectare (dw/ha), while the asbuilt average block of 670 square metres is approximately 15 dw/ha. Most of Melbourne’s twentieth-century suburban hinterland sits at densities between these two figures. In the nineteenth century, however, demand and speculative opportunity in Melbourne’s inner suburbs quickly drove densities higher and the single villa on 1000 square metres was a relative anomaly. The original large blocks were widely subdivided into narrow terrace strips, again with the theoretical ‘base case’ being four sub-lots each of 5 × 50, or 250, square metres. In practice, however, this varied greatly and opportunistically in response to location, with individual lot size further reduced by the ad hoc provision of rear service lanes for night soil access. Common nineteenth-century inner-suburban terrace house sites are in the order of 180 square metres (e.g. 5 × 35; 6 × 30; 4.5 × 40 metres), yielding a net density of around 55 dw/ha.4 These ‘workers cottages’ are now an essential ingredient of Melbourne’s inner-urban grain and prized for their compact low-rise liveability. Typically one to two storeys high and close to the city centre, these terraces are now largely unaffordable to most as single dwellings, with prices reaching up to three times the median average.5 The Melbourne version of terrace housing is, however, a useful model with which to start a discussion about ‘small groups’ of dwellings, being built all at the one time by small-scale, private developer-builders, who might have purchased one or two blocks from the original land subdivision and proceeded to build, subdivide and sell for a profit. Although each dwelling sits on its own plot of land and no formal sharing of space occurs, the physical configuration of volumes on long skinny lots resulted in the passive sharing of light and air through mirrored setbacks and shared light courts, to mutual benefit. The group of two, four or maybe eight dwellings built together also often shared

Small Groups 81 20m

242 LYGON STREET, CARLTON

40m

50m

25m

15-21 GRATTAN STREET, CARLTON

Scale 1:1000

Figure 5.1 Nineteenth-century Subdivision of Inner-Suburban Blocks for Terrace Housing. Surveyed quarter-acre blocks and their variants were subdivided by small-scale developer/builders into strips four- to six-metres wide, typically built as a single construction project.

a common frontage, with unified verandas and other ornamentation under a single parapet facing the street. As well as symbolic identity of group expression, physical aspects such as light, air, view and services connections were shared across front and rearyard spaces, giving each lot a larger sense of amenity than could be achieved strictly within its own boundaries. This group thinking and passive co-dependence formally ceased as soon as the individual sub-allotments were sold, but has been generally protected over time through a combination of common sense and legislation. In the 1960s and the decades following, another small group development typology emerged in the next ring of suburbs, where a single detached dwelling per allotment was still the norm. Small apartment blocks of two to three levels became attractive due to changes in the investment market and legislative environment,6 and developers soon came up with a highly efficient building type yielding 10 to 12 apartments on a single house site. These buildings were known colloquially as ‘sixpacks’ in reference to the common form for buying cans of beer, tied together with plastic string in a group of six. It was not a flattering name, with the implication that flats were tightly packed in with a monotonous and mechanical efficiency. While the model is not without merit, in

20m

50m

49m

15m

24m

37m

53m

12m

Scale 1:1000

Figure 5.2 1960s and ’70s ‘Six-Pack’ Flat Developments on Suburban Allotments. Walk-up typology with surface parking, either on concrete paved yard areas or in open undercroft spaces under a raised building. Six flats per level over two levels on a quarter-acre block yields densities of around 120 dwellings per hectare. A range of typical suburban block sizes were developed in this way, reaching a peak in the late 1960s and again in the early to mid1970s.

Small Groups 83 practice these flats were largely aimed at a rental market, providing in most cases low amenity, little private open space (sometimes none) and little attention to detail in communal or shared spaces. The need to provide one carspace per dwelling was met through surface-level open parking, or sometimes in building undercroft spaces at ground level. Accommodating 10 to 12 cars and a driveway on a single suburban allotment meant that cars and concrete surfaces dominated the open space surrounding the building, with many apartments’ only outlook being over a carpark. Combined with the perceived lack of incentive for landlords to invest in quality common property, many of these flats are poorly maintained and give little back to the street in the way of landscaping or architectural quality. But the ‘six-pack’ typology of a linear medium-rise block has many benefits that its bad reputation in the popular imagination has perhaps prevented contemporary exploitation of. There are a number of good period examples where design has been more considered and the high quality of space and outlook to landscaped garden areas makes the relatively small floor areas very liveable. Not surprisingly, the welldesigned and well-located examples are increasingly popular for both renters and owner-occupiers in the inner suburbs, as they provide a more affordable, smaller footprint option for both younger and older households to live where they want to be—close to services, jobs and embedded within urban life. The scale of three levels can easily be integrated into a typical Melbourne middle-suburban street, maintaining a meaningful relationship to tree canopy and ground level activity. A group of eight to twelve dwellings within a single building/organisational unit is also a feasible small community size, where a sense of security and passive ‘neighbourliness’ can be maintained and agreement on projects or actions of common benefit can be imagined, even if it does not frequently occur.7 The typical maximum apartment size within these 1960s and ’70s buildings, however, is around 65 square metres and the vast majority of stock is of one- or two-bedroom dwellings, which makes this a challenging location for typical families or for elderly people with limited mobility. The reliance on external stair access and the efficient tightness of internal planning—especially bathrooms and kitchens—make accessibility a major challenge and retrofits or alterations expensive. Although compact, lowrise and low-maintenance apartments in well-serviced urban locations are inherently suited to an ageing cohort, the historical lack of well-designed options provided by the market has led to a reluctance within the older population to embrace this alternative and a prejudice towards the traditional house. Suburban apartment living is seen as a lower-amenity, lower-socioeconomic option for the elderly,8 and at best a transition phase accommodation or simply an investment opportunity. Since the 1980s, the six-pack apartment type on a single allotment has not generally been

Scale 1:1000

Figure 5.3 Walk-up Flats, Hanover Street, Fitzroy, 1965. Some walk-up flats were carefully designed to provide landscape amenity through courtyards. This Fitzroy block uses half-level vertical separation between front and back units to improve privacy and has large (10 metres × 10 metres) landscaped entry courtyards facing the street, which now host substantial canopy trees. Parking is distributed around the block, some surface parking on permeable gravel under trees, some in enclosed garages under the rear of the building.

Scale 1:300

Figure 5.4 Original 65 Square Metre, Two-Bedroom Apartment, Hanover Street, Fitzroy. With single-brick internal dividing walls and southfacing balcony.

Scale 1:300

Figure 5.5 Family Apartment, NMBW Architecture Studio, 2013. Conversion of original two-bedroom apartment into flexible three-bedroom dwelling; additional cantilevered balconies on northern side allow double use of north-facing bedrooms as living spaces and improve crossventilation. Internal partitions between bedrooms are non-structural and can be reallocated, as family needs change.

Small Groups 85 built, largely due to new streetscape and building volume controls that were introduced around that time,9 and a simultaneous market shift towards either freestanding townhouse typologies with independent lockup garages, or much larger developments with basement carparking on consolidated sites. Freestanding one- or two-storey townhouses (typically two per lot) are by far the current dominant suburban infill building type. They achieve substantially lower densities than the previous six-pack apartment block, offer little in the way of smaller or alternative/diverse dwelling types, maintain the car-centred use of suburban territory, necessitate the widespread removal of mature trees and vegetation and offer little in the way of shared amenity or engagement with the surrounding community.

20m

1073 DANDENONG ROAD, MALVERN EAST

55m

45m

18m

64 PRICE STREET, ESSENDON

Scale 1:1000

Figure 5.6 Contemporary Subdivision of Middle-Suburban Blocks into Townhouses, 1990s–2010s. Each house has a lock-up internalised garage, which in comparison to similar subdivisions from the nineteenth century, means that vehicle crossovers and blank facade area take up a large proportion of the streetscape. Open space between dwellings is dominated by car circulation and largely impermeable.

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5.1 Small Groups: Design Proposition In order to test and develop these ideas, a design project was undertaken by our extended research team to attempt a replicable contemporary apartment building type on a standard single allotment in Melbourne’s middle-ring suburbs, achievable within current regulations and within an economic framework of ‘affordable housing’.10 The starting premise was that a different type of apartment living could be offered to those with limited mobility who spend more time at home and for whom quality of internal and private external space is arguably more critical—and if this model could be made affordable and achievable within current limits then it would also offer alternative suburban apartment typologies relevant to others in the wider community, such as small families or a range of contemporary, non-nuclear household structures. Importantly, the design is focused on meeting the needs of the elderly but is not officially ‘elderly housing’—a range of tenants of different ages will be accommodated here (approximately 50 percent elderly tenants in the first instance) and the building is designed so that each individual apartment can be strata-titled and sold to the free market over time. Our aim was to ‘normalise’ the provision of age-friendly housing within existing suburban fabric—so that people can age within their existing communities, surrounded by a variety of different people and with possibilities to engage with others, while also being able to receive and accommodate the extra support they may need in their homes.

Scale 1:2000

Figure 5.7 Distributed Parking and Deep-Root Landscaping Between Walk-Up Dwellings, Hanover and King William Streets, Fitzroy, Mid-1960s. Three-level walk-up construction: one car space per dwelling and 100 dwellings per hectare.

Small Groups 87

Scale 1:500

Figure 5.8 10 metre × 10 metre Landscaped Courtyard with Shielded Overlooking Between Adjacent Private Balconies. The degree of privacy or openness to the landscape is not dictated by the building; but can be modified by occupants. This arrangement, although proven successful over time, would not be possible under current planning laws designed to prohibit overlooking between neighbouring units.

It is in the interstitial spaces—the transition spaces such as porches, landings, balconies and terraces, walking paths and entrances, or even shared laundries—where the potential for an independent life that is subtly engaged with others can occur. Many well-intentioned purpose-built common areas and shared landscape areas for multiple dwellings are abandoned and neglected. Many contemporary medium-density complexes are designed to minimise common-property areas for maintenance

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and cost reasons. Luxurious shared facilities such as rooftop terraces and lounges are out of the reach of this scale and type of development. With design intelligence, however, provision can be made for a type of ‘passive sharing’ and casual co-dependence, more in the manner perhaps of the nineteenth-century terrace house block. If the position of a kitchen sink window or sideways views from a terrace can allow some contact with neighbours, but without overly infringing on privacy, then we might become almost intuitively aware of the presence of others (and hence also more alert if they are not home, have not appeared for a few days, or require some assistance). A less isolated life is more secure, as well as more stimulating.11 The design of the Gertrude Street Apartments starts with a reassessment of the six-pack efficiency and seeks to update this model, providing eight fully accessible apartments accessed from a central lift and stair core. Each dwelling is large and flexible, well-ventilated and with generous outdoor open space. The siting of the building also aims to maximise deep-root areas for mature trees and permeable areas for private and semi-private gardens. A height of four levels was set by current planning regulations in response to the local zoning, working with the side setback profile to achieve a feasible envelope that does not overshadow neighbouring properties. The analysis of a number of separate regulatory and practical requirements located a ‘sweet spot’ height of twelve metres, with fourmetre setbacks to side and rear boundaries. This dimension allows vertical wall construction within the allowable envelope controls, usable private open space (minimum dimension three metres, plus allowance for onemetre shared path, where required), sufficient space for large tree roots and canopy that will shade the building and increase privacy between neighbours over time, and allows for non-fire-rated construction and openings to side boundaries (minimum setback three metres). The height of four levels also allows for a cheaper, domestic-scale elevator (maximum travel twelve metres) and an open stair without fire doors to promote easy use and allow a naturally ventilated lobby (maximum of three interconnected levels with ground floor directly accessed from outside). Working within these regulations and also assuming a conventional, small-scale fire-rated construction technology of core-filled masonry walls and lost-formwork horizontal concrete slabs means that the building does not require a fire sprinkler system. Masonry block walls are externally insulated and lined with lightweight cladding—achieving required energy ratings and allowing a more flexible, site-specific material response. The construction system and building scale was also designed to avoid the need for crane access and to be feasible for smaller-scale, suburban domestic builders. Internally, floors and walls are exposed concrete block, responding to the Housing Association’s common expense of new carpets and painting

Small Groups 89 each time a tenant changes, but also prompting the addition of rugs and other soft furnishings to be added by tenants, personalising the home. A series of non-structural partitions and joinery types allows simple subdivision and rearrangement within this shell. Importantly, the number of internal doors is minimised. Required circulation zones for wheelchair access around doorways greatly decrease efficiency and useability of internal space and are cumbersome for wheelchair or mobility aid users, so a strategy was adopted to set the default provision for rooms to be without a door, with a door only added if and when required for a specific purpose. For many smaller households, internal doors are not required outside of the bathroom and perhaps one sleeping space. The internal arrangement of apartments is focused on providing the largest possible area of high-quality space—rather than a predetermined number of bedrooms and bathrooms, which is the usual way of defining house capacity and value in Australia. These apartments have in the order of 100 square metres of internal space, without internal structural subdivisions, plus 20 square metres of external terrace—and could be arranged internally to suit a variety of sleeping and living configurations. The large, single-level warehouse-type spaces are inherently suited to wheeled movement, and hoists or other equipment can be supported from the concrete floors above, if required. The room-like terraces can be screened, built-in, planted out or customised by residents over time. Bathrooms are considered a key part of the building’s infrastructure and sought to provide fully accessible and usable spaces in a way that is integrated into the apartment, suited to general use and not noticeably ‘specialised’. The bathroom spaces have multiple doors and access to external facade, providing daylight, ventilation and outlook. The space provided is in excess of legislated accessibility standards and its configuration is based on analysis of actual use scenarios, including assisted bathing and space for carers as required for a variety of disability types commonly encountered with this cohort. Bathrooms are elevated in the domestic hierarchy to the position of living rooms or workspaces—in recognition of the extended periods of time that residents and carers can spend in these rooms—and the variety of occupational needs it will be possible to encounter over the building’s lifetime. Kitchens are also designed to be extendable/modifiable from a basic minimal core, allowing for adaptability and customisation to suit different individual needs. Basic infrastructure is provided for an informal type of neighbourliness—a type of casual contact between adjacent households, which one can choose to participate in (or not). Extra space is provided at each landing for equipment, pot plants, or even a small table and chair. A small potting bench is located at the ground floor to allow messy activities that might not fit comfortably within one’s apartment. The parking space is also adjacent to this space, planted with care to provide shade, and supplied also with bench and table, to encourage lingering and multiple

Figure 5.9 (1)

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Figure 5.9 The design starts with a reassessment of the ‘six-pack’ model, providing eight fully accessible apartments each entered from a central lift and stair core. The analysis of a number of separate regulatory and practical requirements located a ‘sweet spot’ of 12-metre height, with 4-metre setbacks to side and rear boundaries. The height of four levels also allows use of a domestic-scale elevator and an open stair without fire doors.

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Figure 5.10 Internal layouts and flexibility: the internal arrangement of apartments is focused on providing the largest possible area of high-quality space, rather than a predetermined number of bedrooms and bathrooms. The large, single-level warehouse-type spaces can be arranged internally to suit a variety of sleeping and living configurations. Internal partitions are non-loadbearing and rooms are provided without doors to improve accessibility, with doors able to be retrofitted to specific areas requiring privacy.

Figure 5.11 Bathrooms and wet areas: bathrooms are elevated in the domestic hierarchy to be equivalent to living rooms or workspaces, in recognition of the extended periods of time that residents and carers can spend in these rooms. The bathroom spaces have multiple doors and access to external facade, providing daylight, ventilation and outlook. The space provided is in excess of legislated accessibility standards.

Figure 5.12 Circulation core with ventilated open stairwell. Shared space is provided at each landing for equipment, pot plants and furniture. A small potting bench is located at the ground floor to allow messy activities that might not fit comfortably within one’s apartment.

Figure 5.13 The siting of the building maximises deep-root space for mature trees and permeable areas for private and semi-private gardens. Parking is configured as a semi-public north-facing space, planted with care to provide shade and supplied with furniture to encourage lingering and multiple uses.

Scale 1:300

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uses of this semi-public north-facing space. We consider the parking area as a type of forecourt, a semi-public plaza in which parking happens to occur. The layout and planting design offers something back to the street, reduces the visible impact of the building, as well as creating an interface for people to pause and engage with others. Surface parking is located at the front of the site and integrated with a semi-public landscape plaza space, intentionally designed as a multifunction zone. This frees up a significant area of land for planting, both by the building owners and by individual tenants. It increases the total amount of permeable surface and green cover dramatically, compared to a typical response with parking at the rear. The strategy has proved quite controversial with local planning authorities that prefer a ‘buffer zone’ non-active landscape to the street, with cars hidden out of sight at the rear of the property. The negative side-effects of the conventional strategy in terms of car-dominated landscapes have already been noted and a real tension exists between an inherited city-beautiful concept of ‘tidiness’ perceived only from the street (and its associated ideal of an ornamental, passive streetscape) and a more performative, green and active city that considers equally the full depth of the block, treating the suburban street as part of a lively and changeable public realm.

Notes 1 Graeme Hardie, Tswana Design of House and Settlement, Continuity and Change in Expressive Space, unpublished doctoral thesis, Boston University Graduate School, 1980, Boston. Leon van Schaik assisted in the fieldwork. 2 Robert Hoddle, subdivision of Melbourne, 1837. See also an account of the evolution of the quarter-acre block by Miles Lewis in Melbourne: The city’s history and development, City of Melbourne, 1995, Melbourne. 3 Monash Architecture Studio, Infill Opportunities, research report for the Office of the Victorian Government Architect, 2011, Melbourne. 4 Nigel Bertram and Kim Halik, Division and Multiplication: Building and inhabitation in inner Melbourne, RMIT University Press, 2002, Melbourne. 5 After falling out of favour and into disrepair due to the post-war ‘white flight’ to the suburbs, terrace houses became famously reused as multi-bedroom student share houses in the 1980s–90s, a phenomenon that is now rare due to the rapid rate of house price and rental inflation over the past 20 years as more people desire to live closer to jobs in the city centre. 6 Miles Lewis, Suburban Backlash: The battle for the world’s most liveable city, Bloomings books, 1999, Melbourne, pp. 90–3. The Strata Titles Act was introduced in 1967 and the Cluster Titles Act in 1974. 7 The ratio of ‘eight dwellings per core’ is cited in many design guides for higher density living for similar reasons—for example the London Housing Design Guide, Mayor of London, 2010 (updated in 2016). 8 As revealed in internal surveys undertaken by Housing Choices Australia of their elderly residents. 9 For example, the introduction of ResCode in 2001, with its emphasis on existing ‘neighbourhood character’, following on from The Good Design

Small Groups 97 Guide for Medium-density Housing, Department of Planning and Development, 1995. 10 As delivered by a Housing Association, who holds the asset and rents to tenants based on a set percentage of their actual income. The project is on a current development site in St Albans (15km northwest of central Melbourne) and meets the real development needs of our research partner organisation (Housing Choices Australia). 11 Current Australian planning laws prohibit ‘overlooking’ between individual apartments within a development, and do not allow many of the subtle connections with neighbours that occur successfully in older blocks of flats. These codes and the preoccupation with individual privacy that lies behind them can be challenged by intelligent design and adjustment of behaviour.

6

Larger Ensembles

Preamble The novelty of living in an apartment as opposed to a suburban house has found its way into popular culture through songs such as those by Kate Miller-Heidke, in her album Circular Breathing, 2006. Just as our mental space is permeated by unconscious ideas of house, we also internalise expectations about apartment living. Those who grew up in eighteenth-century Edinburgh tenements would expect large high-ceiling dwellings stacked above each other around wide, easy-rising, stone stairways. The top apartments were double-storey and contained a ballroom. Patent devices enabled inhabitants to admit visitors to the central stairs and landings at the pull of a handle. The Edinburgh Patent Window hinged inwards to facilitate cleaning. There were delivery boxes and waste chutes. Each apartment had a coal hole under the stairs adjacent to the front door. An entire social organism existed, serviced by ingenious technologies. Dwelling patterns such as this were common in continental Europe, and today artists and others make much of the convenience and spatiality of Berlin equivalents. The necessary conviviality entailed by living around a stairwell did not appeal south of the Scottish border in England and, even in Edinburgh, the New Town embodied notions of private living on one’s own piece of land. Tenements today are thought of as the dim resonances of these pioneering urban forms, space and services standards eroded away. Early apartments in Sydney and Melbourne shared more with these tenements than they do with the current ideal of independent living units stacked around a lift core, rising above buried parking floors and served, if opulent, by a reception desk. The early apartments did not have kitchens, but rather an in-house restaurant serving set meals. This was the expected pattern for some decades; the buildings, like Beverley Hills described below, slowly converted into independent units. The ‘six-pack’, described in the previous chapter, was a pattern that became a social norm and militated against apartment living for most of the second half of the twentieth century. While Asian cities such as Hong Kong normalised high-rise living, it was not until an economic downturn made many office towers available

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for transformation into apartments that a shift to this kind of living became part of the mental space of Australians. This shift also coincided with the end of the White Australia Policy, which, within a few decades, resulted in migration from Asia overtaking migrations from Anglophone Europe, with more and more of the population not prejudiced against apartment building.

Design Proposition Background Larger groups of people, buildings and landscapes offer different social possibilities. A large ensemble of dwellings forms a mini-city within a suburb that can evolve a tangible sense of identity through shared values and behaviours. At Beverley Hills Flats in South Yarra (Howard Lawson, 1935–6), three freestanding buildings sit on a steep escarpment with established and overgrown gardens. The complex is not fenced to the street, but accessed via a steep driveway and a series of steps meander up through the site alongside evocative and eclectic landscaped spaces. Within this hillside village, residents access their apartments through three separate open stairwells—each of which are filled with plants, open horizontally to the outside air and are lit from above. These circulation spaces overflow with plantings, which is a mixture of group-owned larger planters and residents’ own smaller pot plants. Carparking occurs at the perimeter, with roofed open carports under an enormous Moreton Bay Fig. Over time, the distinctly decorative architectural and landscape character of the ensemble has grown to attract a certain type of resident and the site houses many older people and single person households. The architecture is highly idiosyncratic and demands a response. Residents over the years have been passionate about the building and look after it through a chaired committee structure. Windowsill planters were built into the architecture from the start, to compensate for lack of private yard, and external spaces house such amenities as vegetable gardens and shared compost/potting areas. When a new resident arrives, they are presented with geranium cuttings to transplant. When residents go away on holidays, a network of keen gardeners within the block water their plants.1 This may be an unusual example that has grown and evolved naturally over decades; however, other instances of strong architecture mixed with abundant and generous landscaping, housing distinct and proud, mixed communities can be found. Torbreck in Highgate Hill, Brisbane (Job and Froud architects, 1958–60) is an example, sitting at the top of a hill like a Stadtkrone, above a sea of timber houses, and housing a dedicated group of residents who are advocates for the building’s liveability and design qualities.2

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Melbourne’s Cairo Flats in Fitzroy (Best Overend, 1935–6) have accommodated generations of bachelors, singles and couples of all ages since its completion in 1936, when the U-shaped block was marketed as semi-serviced apartments with a communal dining room and meals available for delivery along with other domestic services, such as laundry and shoe cleaning. At first these dwellings faced a large open communal courtyard garden, which is now completely established and overgrown. In the early 2000s, the originally single-owner property was strata-titled and subdivided, with small private-hedged patios eating into the communal space. The two garden types have since merged into one green oasis, giving privacy and a sense of refuge from its busy Nicholson Street frontage. The apartments are minimal in size, but with generous grounds and (originally) a shared roof terrace. Importantly, the shared courtyard garden is visible from the street, its overgrown open space—in place of the usual building frontage—adding to the amenity and interest of the pedestrian experience. In the low-scale but densely populated inner-suburb of Fremantle in Perth, Brian Klopper has converted a number of factory buildings into multiple dwelling ensembles, which exist within the unroofed but intact perimeter walls of the original factory. At Fabrik (Klopper, 1989), maisonette terrace-type apartments with double-height custom-made ‘leadlight’ steel-window facades are entered from shared car-pedestrian ‘streets’ and semi-private front garden courtyards, providing privacy when sitting down and the ability to see out and communicate with others when standing. These terraces are also a type of minimal living unit, repeated and symbolically collectivised within a defined (walled) compound that maintains parts of the original roof truss structure. There is no official sharing of space, other than the internal access pathways; however, each unit feels distinctly part of a greater shared whole, and daily life includes an awareness of neighbours within an overall condition of privacy. All of these examples combine a strong and recognisable architectural identity, with equally strong landscaping, vegetation and external spaces, which tread a delicate line between privacy for individuals and maintaining a ‘neighbourly’ sense of belonging. They are all separated from the surrounding suburb in some way—either by topography, elevation or fencing—but also rub directly up against it, with facades, views and frontages clearly engaging with the street. Each building also has a distinct story—a story of its making and origins, a collective history of past and present residents, sometimes recorded but often only known anecdotally or passed down through word-of-mouth, physically described through the cumulative traces and evidence of its inhabitation. Even for the most introverted of tenants, there is a sense that each resident ‘belongs’ to these buildings and a collective life.

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Scale 1:1000

Figure 6.1 Beverley Hills Flats, Howard Lawson, South Yarra, 1935–6. Two separate small towers accessible by a steep driveway and a range of pedestrian paths and steps. Individual apartments accessible by intimate stairhalls—top-lit and open to the sky—with an abundance of planned and unplanned vegetation and furnishings. The steep levels of the site, opportunistic planning, together with the distinctive character of architectural expression, generate a rich variety of apartment types, balcony and entrance configurations. The garden and its many pot plants both decorate and provide a form of social cohesion between interested residents.

Larger groups of people living together in a single building or ensemble have a long history and take many forms. Rooming houses and boarding houses used to be common in Melbourne, frequently renovating or subdividing old mansions to accommodate a new multi-residential purpose. At one end of the scale these were a cheap form of lodging for those who could not afford to rent conventionally or for semi-itinerant workers; and at the other end of the scale they offered a respected alternative to conventional domestic life3—a type of permanent serviced hotel. Living in hotels with limited private space but meals and other services readily available was fashionable in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in large cities such as London and New York, where buildings of apartments without individual kitchens were common.4

Scale 1:1000

Figure 6.2 Cairo Flats, Taylor Soilleux and Overend (Best Overend), Fitzroy, 1935–6. Built as serviced ‘bachelor flats’ with roof terraces, now a popular inner-city apartment complex with a strong sense of identity, including some flats available through Airbnb. Originally the large shared garden was communal space with a low chain-link fence to the street. Parts of this garden were subdivided in 2001 with hedges and brush fences separating semi-private areas for each flat from semi-public shared areas. Since that time the garden has grown vigorously and provides an oasis of green that works together as a whole, visible from and contributing to the public street and footpath experience.

Scale 1:1000

Figure 6.3 Fabrik Townhouses, Brian Klopper Architect, Fremantle, 1989. A factory/warehouse conversion: original structural bays have been infilled as simple multi-level maisonette apartments with full-height glazed walls fronting the central garden/courtyard area. Curtains, planting and internal furnishings moderate privacy by occupants, rather than being dictated through architectural form or fixed screens. Courtyard plantings and dividing walls allow subtle connections between units and an awareness of others, but maintain a sense of containment and individual privacy at ground level.

Scale 1:1000

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These complexes had shared dining rooms with in-house cooks and other communal facilities, giving a form of social life that individual private tenants could partake in, or not. Larger numbers of private apartments can support more communal facilities, due to simple economies of scale. At one end of the sharing spectrum is co-housing, where residents opt-in to a semi-communal lifestyle, with individual facilities in each apartment, plus the option of shared cooking, group meals and other activities—with an equal expectation of collectivised and rostered labour. This works well, but is perhaps not for everyone and places an emphasis on shared values and social life—something not always possible or necessary within a group of tenants sharing the same structure. The Brisbane Housing Company, an affordable housing association, has developed an interesting and flexible mixed tenure model for its larger inner-city buildings. In Fortitude Valley, a group of 107 apartments is split into three strands—social and supported housing; affordable rent-subsidised housing; and housing sold to the free market. This allows the not-for-profit developer to access different funding streams, but the scale also allows the provision of diverse communal spaces. Three large semi-external and double-height rooms have been designed to suit Brisbane’s subtropical climate: one an open-air lounge room, where movies are shown on hot nights; another is a room full of raised vegetable garden plots, with shared watering systems and keyed access to those who choose to join; and thirdly a bookable party space overlooking an adjacent park, where functions such as children’s birthday parties can be held—something not always possible in a small subsidised apartment. A diverse mixture of ages, income brackets and recreational interests are mutually collaborative as a single formal and financial unit. Even a large single-purpose nursing home or retirement village does not need to exclude the city or suburb around it, and can take on some of the qualities of the semi-independent/semi-supported ‘group hotel’. In the Dutch city of Breda, the Vredenbergh Nursing Home (DAT Architecten, 2009) is a supported aged-care facility that takes the form of two L-shaped five-storey apartment buildings. The two buildings face each other and the park-like suburban surroundings, but also provide and encourage a pedestrian shortcut route through the block, increasing the porosity and connectedness of the suburb. This is achieved through

Figure 6.4 (facing page) Torbreck, Job and Froud Architects, Highgate Hill, Brisbane, 1958–60. This complex offers a range of apartment types with semiopen plan layouts and generous external terraces. The shared landscape spaces, distinctive architecture and iconic hilltop presence of this development have lent it a strong identity, passionately articulated and looked after through the active custodianship of its residents over time.

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Scale 1:1000

Figure 6.5 Richmond Apartments, Affordable and Mixed-Tenure Housing, Brisbane Housing Company (BHC) and MODE Architects, Bowen Hills, Brisbane, 2011. This block mixes market housing with affordable and subsidised dwellings in a single, large atrium-courtyard building of hybrid identity. Separate communal spaces are offered, each with a distinctive purpose and ‘membership’, allowing an optional coming together of residents through shared interests, such as gardening, movie screening and children’s parties. Flexibility is built in through intelligent future proofing, such as a semi-sunken carpark area with courtyard frontage, which can be retrofitted into the office or childcare space.

locating security at the building ground floor entry, rather than at the site perimeter. In one of the blocks, a concierge-type reception acts as a filter between residents, carers and other guests in a hotel-type configuration. Locating shared dining rooms, cafe-restaurant and other recreation facilities on the ground floor, providing these at a quality level that is also attractive to outsiders, means that other people regularly go to the aged-care complex for a meal, and conference rooms are also used

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RESTAURANT

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Figure 6.6 Vredenbergh Nursing Home, DAT Architecten, Breda, Netherlands, 2009. An upmarket development of serviced and semi-serviced apartments for elderly people, with different levels of living support and medical care available. Residents can live entirely independently or with full attendant care and meals service. Instead of surrounding the complex with a locked security fence, the central space is left open and purposely landscaped to encourage pedestrian through-use and public links to surrounding parkland. Ground floor shared facilities are modelled on the semi-public (and passively secure) typology of the large downtown hotel lobby—where visitors are welcome but managed through a combination of concierge staffing and technology.

by surrounding doctors and hospital staff.5 This is a type of group hospitality, where outsiders are ‘invited in’ and facilities shared by elderly and vulnerable residents are made available to others, but also kept secure. In combination with the site and landscape being open to the city at ground level, this provides far greater contact with the outside world than is normally the case for residents unable to leave their home independently.

Figure 6.7 Sankt Antonius Community Centre and Housing, Lerderer Ragnarsdottir Oei Architects, Stuttgart, Germany, 2001. Fourteen subsidised apartments for the elderly are located above a church-run community space, facing both the street and a secluded public courtyard between the adjacent church and kindergarten. The apartments have their own stair and lift entrance lobby off the street, which takes residents to a generous deck terrace overlooking the street at each level before arriving at the front door. Like an oversized landing, this interstitial space provides strong urban orientation and outlook, while also giving space to leave mobility aids and equipment, and a place for casual lingering, socialising or even shared meals. Each apartment also has a fully private balcony looking over the rear courtyard.

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The architects for the Sankt Antonius Community Centre and Housing in Stuttgart (Lerderer Ragnarsdottir Oei Architects, 2001), a block of 14 aged-focus independent apartments above a church-run community space and adjacent to the church, say that they won the design competition due to achieving a careful balance between providing a sense of security for residents, as well as an engagement with the street and awareness of other people coming and going in the public spaces below.6 Each resident enters the building past the letterbox just off the street and through a shared foyer facing the church courtyard plaza. A secure stair and lift takes residents up to the living floors, where outside again, residents are taken onto a generous corridor-deck-terrace, with views back down to the street and through the building to the brick church behind. There is space for tables, chairs and walking aids to be left here safely. People can choose to interact and linger or move on to the privacy of their own apartment, with secluded balconies looking over the square and within earshot of the kindergarten playground next door. The ambiguity of this interstitial terrace-circulation space is key to the building’s success, together with its careful combination of separation and connection to the life of the street below. The building functions independently and has its own entrance, but is also part of an extended precinct or cluster of church facilities, with a community hall, fair trade shop and welfare staff offices on the ground floor, a church and kindergarten opposite, and a semi-public plaza linking these buildings and opening directly to the street. The amount of contact one might have with this extended semi-public realm and social infrastructure is not defined—it is left for each individual occupant to decide. In his collection of lectures and notes titled How to Live Together,7 Roland Barthes builds up a definition of what he calls idiorrhythmic clusters—‘where each subject lives according to his own rhythm’, of the need for closeness, but also the importance of a ‘critical distance’ governing the relations between individuals. A key notion of this text is that we each want to live together (co-habit harmoniously) and simultaneously want to be alone—and that these desires are not contradictory, but both always present to some degree.8 He posits an ideal structure of idiorrhythmy—‘something like solitude with regular interruptions’— where independence is maintained at the same time as an awareness of (and reliance upon) others. This concept, although oblique, is a useful tool for thinking about such nuanced and hard to pin-down concepts such as ‘neighbourliness’ or an engaged (cf. exclusive) type of privacy. Such concepts are impossible to regulate and can only be demonstrated through example or experience. However, if we are to effectively include and cater for a more diverse group of ages, mobilities and abilities within our everyday, mainstream city, then such concepts deserve to be taken seriously and examples analysed to demonstrate that nuanced answers can, and should, be provided, even within limited space and budget.

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The concept of ‘supported living’ inherently involves the presence of others, and this support can come in many guises and degrees—from physical help with lifting and showering, to the delivery of meals, to the stimulation of casual conversation, to knowing that someone is home and can drop over to water the plants. Without taking such imprecise and fuzzy notions seriously—whether it be through the amount and type of overlooking allowed, or the way in which ambiguity can be employed to promote new uses and understandings of spaces such as accessible bathrooms and surface carparks, the default approach will be the suburb of single-purpose, under-used and gated spaces that we see being built around us. These spaces are additionally oppressive for those who are less empowered and less mobile, either physically, financially or both.

6.1 Larger Ensembles: Design Proposition In order to test and develop these ideas, we have designed larger apartment ensembles, where opportunities for neighbourly interaction, personalised expression and informal identity building are built into the infrastructure and considered as an essential part of the brief. Lift lobbies have natural light and air, extra space for seating, pot plants and storage of equipment, such as scooters and wheelchairs. They are modest places to sit for a while or personalise. Ground floor areas incorporate shared facilities, such as small bookable meeting or function rooms. External courtyard spaces make deep-root planting space for trees and provide outlook from private balconies. Balconies in turn are proposed as ‘outdoor rooms’ and able to be semi-enclosed with their own lightweight roof or awning structures, allowing easy personalisation and gradual differentiation and ‘ageing’ of the external public building appearance over time; something common in traditional suburban houses and gardens but not always possible or allowed in multi-residential environments. In order to do this, a certain ‘letting go’ of formal control in favour of a robust infrastructural approach is required. Management rules and practices also require flexibility and creativity to nurture the creative energy of owners and tenants, as in the Beverley Hills example described.

Figure 6.8 (1)

Scale 1:350

Figure 6.8 Rosella Avenue, Werribee, 2016. A larger, three-level apartment building on a corner site in outer-suburban Werribee, located on a street with a bus service, in close proximity to the major shopping centre. A ground level community meeting space with small kitchen and street interface is designed in a way that it can also be developed as three separate apartments, depending on funding options. A multipurpose court occupies the space between this community room and street, encouraging the semi-public and flexible use of the frontyard space adjacent to a relocated bus stop. Large courtyards for deep-root tree planting for privacy separate the building into two wings, joined by a naturally ventilated lift core with views into these courtyards. Economically planned, the core also has enough space for storage of scooters, wheelchairs and other resident equipment, and contains areas for seating and plants, encouraging personalisation. Six different units open to the central core on each level, each with a flexible, warehouse-like layout with linear kitchen-entrance spaces. Oversized accessible bathrooms (similar to the Gertrude Street building) are located to have external wall frontage for views and ventilation. Large ‘outdoor room’ terraces provided for each dwelling are partially covered above and staggered vertically to allow sunlight penetration and opportunities for lightweight modifications by residents. The building is conceived as a staggered, monolithic and robust armature for inhabitation, with flexible internal layouts and adaptable external private spaces. Concrete floor structure with lightweight infill and commercial floor-to-floor heights allows ground floor occupation to change over time, as the suburb develops and densifies. This basic model can be adapted, stretched and reconfigured to suit a wide range of larger suburban sites.

Figure 6.8 (2)

Figure 6.8 (3)

SOLAR SHADE

LARGE SHIFTING WINDOWS ACCESSIBLE OUTDOOR ROOMS

MULTI-USE COMMUNITY SPACE STREET PRESENCE ALLOTMENT GARDENS

MULTI-USE SPACE ENTRY PASSIVE SURVEILLANCE

NATURALLY VENTILATED COMMUNAL PORCHES

RESIDENT ENTRY COMMUNAL COURTYARDS, SUFFICIENT SPACE LARGE MATURE TREES

RESIDENT ENTRY

MULTI-USE SPACE CAR PARK ENTRY

JULIETTE BALCONIES TO BATHROOMS

BASKETBALL COURT

BASKETBALL COURT

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Notes 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8

Nigel Bertram, ‘High Density Living with Plants’ in Bree Claffey, Indoor Green: Living with Plants, Thames & Hudson, 2015, Melbourne. Andrew Wilson, ‘Life Cycle: Torbreck’, Australian Design Review, March 2012: www.australiandesignreview.com/architecture/life-cycle-torbreck/ See Seamus O’Hanlon, Together Apart: Boarding House, Hostel and Flat Life In Pre-War Melbourne, Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2002, Melbourne. Kitchenless City, Anna Puigjaner/MAIO Studio, 2016. The outsourcing or exclusion of traditional domestic activities from the urban dwelling is linked to the emancipation of women and enabling them to participate in the workforce. This was used as an explicit strategy of 1920s and 30s collectivised apartments in socialist eastern bloc countries, which also included on-site shared childcare. Interview with Walter van der Hamsvoord, October 2014. De Architectenworkgroep Tilburg. Interview with Arno Lerderer and Marc Oei, October 2014. Architects Lerderer Ragnarsdottir Oei. Roland Barthes, How to Live Together: Novelistic simulations of some everyday spaces, Columbia University Press, 2002, New York. Ibid, Session of January 12, 1977.

7

Streets and Cul-de-Sacs

Preamble Roads streets and laneways have all found their place in the songs that permeate popular culture. In 1974 Van Morrison even celebrated the culde-sac. In the mental space of planners and politicians, traffic looms large. There are votes to be lost in commuter frustration, votes to be won by appearing to be making decisions that ease the flow. In Britain, railways that carried people from the provinces towards the cities had the unintended effect of enabling the well-to-do to live in rural surroundings while commuting to the city. Whole districts—such as the West London extension of Kensington around Paddington Station—developed speculatively for this demographic failed, and mansion flats were divided up into one-bedroom studios. In the second half of the twentieth century in North America, freeway building opened up pathways to greenfield suburbs and expedited the move of the well-heeled from the inner-city to greenfield suburbs, resulting in doughnuts of abandoned or impoverished acres around downtowns. Later,1 beltways surrounded North American cities and secondary downtowns developed at radial junctions. In Australia, this evacuation did not follow the North American pattern, largely because freeway building was not a universally stateencouraged enterprise. When freeways threatened inner-suburbs, there were massive protests and they were blocked. And yet increasingly the idea that anyone should be able to drive to any destination took hold. The small city of Hobart in Tasmania has the doubtful distinction of having a greater proportion of its surface covered in tarmac than any other Australasian city. And it has the added misery of a one-way traffic system, a mode of traffic flow enhancement that makes streets almost impossible for pedestrians to use. As freeways are built to ease congestion, motorists seek out alternative routes, turning even quiet suburban backwaters into traffic channels. An entire field of expertise in ‘trafficcalming’ has sprung up to mitigate this, with road humps and chicanes installed to interrupt such ‘rat-runs’. To us it seems that there is no end to this political endgame. Only the reassertion of the suburb as a place in which to dwell a full life can thwart

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the lemming-like flows of peak traffic. When suburbs become liveable again, then streets may once again become what they once perhaps were: places where neighbours meet as they go about their daily chores, places that build community rather than disrupting it and eroding cultural cohesion. In this chapter we examine some moves in this direction.

Design Proposition Background The suburban street differs from its urban counterpart in that it is not generally defined by built form. The street’s open space of circulation, which is also a conduit for electricity, water and other services, adjoins various other open landscape spaces, such as building setbacks, front gardens, nature strips and surface parking areas. This void-to-void adjacency means there can be a continuity of landscape from private to public realm and also produces a level of redundancy. The notion of ‘streetscape’—that is, the visual appearance of a street— has great currency among town planners and the general public alike. In a suburban context, this scenery is primarily understood as a landscape, within which buildings appear. The presence of buildings is ‘softened’ by a combination of physical setback, planting and low building height (relative to tree canopy). A view of Australian middle suburbs from a hilltop vantage point frequently reveals a scene that is more than half vegetation, with buildings partially visible between tree canopies. From street level, the vista is similarly dominated by open space and landscape elements. Of course, in areas of the city that have less rainfall and less fertile soil conditions, or have received less maintenance and attention, the amount of vegetation filling up open spaces may be substantially less. In newer greenfield suburbs and recent infill areas, tree canopy may be non-existent and planting tokenistic. The City of Melbourne has recognised that streets themselves are the primary public spaces of the grid city and that the network of these 10-, 20- and 30-metre-wide strips constitutes a substantial asset that needs to be invested in and work hard as a vibrant public realm. This includes a vigorous street tree planting regime and investment in generous bluestone footpaths, lighting and street furniture. The street frontage of buildings, particularly at ground level, is understood as primary real estate and the critical qualitative contribution of private buildings to the public realm happens along this plot boundary interface. In the suburbs, the same interface occurs as a type of garden-to-garden adjacency. What this lacks in architectonic definition, can be gained in ecological continuity and landscape connectivity. Water moves freely across property boundaries, as do birds, insects, tree canopies, sounds and smells. The hybrid private– public realm as a social-spatial idea can also flourish in the suburb, where vague boundaries can be an advantage.

Streets and Cul-de-Sacs 117 Questioning the role of the suburban street and its public-private interface has a long history in both design and everyday practice. All over the city, people expand beyond their boundaries and plant in the nature strip or occupy the public space outside their house. This is a form of engagement and activation similar to fruit stands spilling out of grocery shops and cafe tables on footpaths. North-facing front gardens in some parts of the city have been completely transformed into productive vegetable gardens, their decorative role being replaced by or combined with a productive aesthetic. Children freely roam from one garden to the next and passersby take cuttings of plants spilling over the fence. The suburban street network is a landscape public realm that is typically underused and passive, but can become active and productive in a related but fundamentally different way to the city street realm. Most twentiethcentury Australian suburbs founded in the era of the motorcar lack rearlane access, which limits redevelopment and access options; however, suburban driveways are an untapped resource of privately developed tertiary circulation that could be exploited to increase the porosity and flexibility of suburbs—much in the way that private laneways have expanded the network possibilities of the urban block. In Canberra, as in leafier parts of US suburbs, front fences are prohibited, lending the streets a more spatially continuous park-like atmosphere. Parking cars on the street is discouraged—largely for aesthetic reasons—through onerous on-site parking requirements. This creates an atmosphere of visual calmness, but without secondary purpose or social use. With a slightly different mindset, the 1960s Merchant Builders development of Elliston Estate in Rosanna (northeast of central Melbourne) by landscape designer Ellis Stones removed footpaths and nature strips altogether, spreading a continuous native landscape from private front garden into the street space. Carports provide open-walled shelters for vehicles and offer shade that could provide amenity for other activities. This phenomenon of landscape spreading seamlessly over allotment boundaries happens naturally in some semi-rural subdivisions, where unpaved roadways take up around five metres, or just one quarter of the overall 20-metre road reserve, and pedestrians share the meandering vehicular path, with only softly defined edges. Victorian beachside suburbs such as Point Lonsdale and parts of Sorrento are very similar in both structure and density to city suburbs, but due to a vagueness and casualness of boundary definition, and a larger-scale continuity of native sand dune coastal vegetation, the streets are able to play a markedly different role.2 In mid-twentieth-century suburbs, the cul-de-sac or ‘court’ became emblematic of a type of suburban concept or even ideology. In 1950s Heathmont in eastern Melbourne, dead-ended curvilinear cul-de-sacs were the physical and symbolic loci of neighbourliness and community spirit. Residents sharing this type of road would hold joint Christmas

Scale 1:2000

Figure 7.1 Unpaved Streets Without Footpaths, Point Lonsdale and Sorrento. Within a standard suburban 20-metre road reserve and regular subdivision, a distinctly informal character is achieved through continuity of landscape planting between private and public realms, and lack of boundary definition.

Heathmont, Melbourne 1950s

Ferndale, Perth 1970s

Figure 7.2 Suburban Cul-De-Sac Layouts: Heathmont, Melbourne, 1950s and Ferndale, Perth, 1970s. Dead-end ‘courts’ can provide tranquil and idyllic streets suited to informal use and playing, but under different circumstances can engender a sense of menace through a lack of through-circulation and escape routes. In Ferndale, the dead-end courts are linked by small laneways, which are part of the stormwater drainage network and appear to have been considered as easements, rather than as primary public space or circulation.

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parties in the street, and hang up tea-towels as signs for neighbours to drop in for a cup of tea.3 The dead-end street is conventionally understood as a quiet and relatively safe environment for kids to ride bikes and play in the street, free of the speed and noise of through-traffic. Just as easily, however, the cul-de-sac can become a locus of disadvantage and the lack of passive surveillance from through-traffic can be read as a threat. There are cul-de-sacs in Broome, Western Australia, where police are said to refuse to enter, as houses surrounding the court have become territorialised by certain groups and have become concentrated spaces of family or gang violence.4 The dead-end street is famous for its ability to act as a type of trap, with no escape route out, and this is the flipside of suburban idyll of the quiet curvilinear court. Cul-de-sac suburbs are non-porous, full of eddies and backwaters. They can be frustrating places to move or stroll through if not intimately familiar with which roads lead where and what informal or formal shortcuts are available. In Ferndale, a 1970s suburb of Perth on the lowlying land along the Canning River, dead-ended cul-de-sacs are almost accidentally joined to each other by a secondary network of drainage easements—put in as mere civil engineering infrastructure but used informally as pedestrian links and even to drive through as they are wider than city laneways. The potential of these small water-engineering connections to also provide a more diverse, active and multi-scalar street network—and enable increased density and new infill typologies—is unrealised and latent. Many such small connections and irregularities exist within the suburban fabric, often not shown on maps, and known only by local dog-walkers and children. More recently, architects and landscape architects have looked to the suburban public street as a space of both social and infrastructural potential. In Sydney, Neeson Murcutt Architects designed a scheme for a large site in Five Dock of three compact L-shaped courtyard dwellings for ‘empty nesters and new nesters’.5 When multiplied, this densified suburban typology is shown as supporting the regeneration and reconception of the street space it fronts as a green infrastructure corridor or suburban lineal park, with recreation space and vegetation cover migrating from private backyard to public street zone, along with parking and vehicle circulation, water storage infrastructure, stormwater infiltration zones and shared maintainable services trenches. This trafficable ‘park’ stretches across the street from house wall to house wall, incorporating a mixture of private and public realms as a single environment. Similarly, in their 2011 competition entry ‘Civic Suburb’, architects Officer Woods proposed a complete re-evaluation of the large and drastically underused space between the house and road, including the front garden setback and roadside verge or ‘nature strip’, but leaving the sacrosanct backyard untouched. ‘Civic Suburb’ illustrates a do-it-yourself tapestry of open-sided carports (‘vehicular forecourts’) that can be used

Foot Path Front Garden

Driveway/ Nature Strip

Two Way Street With Kerbside Parking

Foot Path Driveway/ Nature Strip

Front Garden

Existing. Scale 1:300

Stormwater Infiltration Zone Shared Vertical Services Trench

Shared Vertical Services Trench

Water Storage Foot Path

Foot Path Front Garden

30m

Extended Front Garden Parking Zone Beyond

Roadway Shared Bike & Car Lane

Extended Front Garden/shared Public Recreation Zone

Front Garden

Proposed. Scale 1:300

Figure 7.3 Five Dock Lineal Park, Neeson Murcutt Architects, 2007. With subdivision and densification of large suburban blocks, the street space can gradually transform into a ‘linear park’ and environmental services infrastructure, replacing to a degree the traditional backyard, with contributions from each individual development into this shared local public realm.

Parts and Pieces of Suburbia

20M 30M

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Scale 1:2000

Figure 7.4 Civic Suburb, Officer Woods Architects, 2011. Plans of reconceptualised front gardens and street verge/nature strip. The large but often vacant and under-used street verge space between front fences has been reconceived as an active and accommodating suburban public realm. The equally passive private space of front gardens is included in this zone, which has been designed with open carport structures for parking—also serving as shade pavilions for social gatherings—and semi-structured garden beds. This new landscape supports diversification through either new subdivided dwellings or through repurposing the ubiquitous large double garages facing the street as accessible dwellings or home offices.

for parking, as well as for occasional gatherings or parties; and walled gardens, allowing and provoking a more intense use of the existing street space, but without altering its fundamental purpose or structure.6 Previously enclosed garages within the house can be repurposed as front rooms, home offices, small shopfronts or independent accessible flats. Such a reworking could also be supported by increased density in the form of not only new infill dwellings and ‘suburban apartment’ extensions, but also through potential subdivision and/or sub-letting of existing large suburban houses, making use of the increase in usable shared and semiprivate outdoor space. All suburban streets carry services, most are planted with street trees, some are occupied or appropriated by adjacent residents—as places to play, park cars, leave sporting equipment or other possessions, plant species of their own choosing and otherwise temporarily modify the public realm. This is usually (though not always) tolerated by local councils and

Streets and Cul-de-Sacs 123 neighbours as an informal extension of the owner’s obligation to maintain and mow the patch of nature strip grass outside of their house. However, it is rarely explicitly encouraged and actions such as digging up the nature strip to plant vegetables or a garden of succulents remain strictly speaking outside the law. Along with attitudes of local lawmakers, it is accumulated cultural patterns of behaviour and notions of propriety that govern how frontyards and streets are used—not the formal structure of suburbia itself. In the mid-west of the US, frontyards are frequently fenced with transparent low chain link-style fences and occupied by a cacophony of kids’ play equipment and other ‘messy’ furniture and equipment that in Australia would normally be confined to the backyard. In Amsterdam, the public space in front of brick tenement houses is used informally as a private bicycle-parking zone, with many building walls having substantial metal hooks and brackets bolted to them for the chaining of bicycles and other wheeled equipment. In parts of the city, authorities have changed laws allowing residents to dig up public street paving within the first 45cm of footpath to plant vegetation directly in the ground,7 including climbing plants, which have started to grow up buildings to create ‘facade gardens’. With the change of a by-law and establishment of a manageable formal process, the opportunistic energy of private residents has been harnessed to transform street image and repurpose the public realm. As suburbs densify and become more culturally, ethnically and age diverse, a wider range of acceptable street behaviours and public-private interface actions can be expected; the suburban street can and will transform physically to reflect this. We can choose quite easily to allow and encourage existing streets to move in this direction and permit a wider range of activities, realising the suburban street network’s capacity to evolve into a rich landscape of social and cultural purpose.

7.1 Streets and Cul-de-Sacs: Design Proposition In order to test and develop these ideas, we have considered the public streets within existing suburbs as transforming alongside the transformation of the private realm and building stock. In a series of ‘disaggregated precinct’ studies (see Chapter 8), the street space in front of site-by-site development parcels is conceived as a co-funded patchwork upgrade—a partnership between individual developers and council according to a strategic plan—where redeveloped lots are incentivised and encouraged to extend their landscape treatments and planting into the ‘nature strip’ zone, gradually changing and personalising the street character over time. Once a certain density of change is achieved in areas of high infill activity, the street culture might evolve to become more varied, so that other landowners in the sites between are also encouraged to participate, even without associated development or density increase.

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Such diversified and participatory street environments would develop a public–private hybrid character, while also able to achieve additional urban design benefits at a local precinct scale, such as improving pedestrian priority connections between existing landmarks, and social infrastructure, such as small existing groups of strip shops, linking into new pedestrian and cycle paths through areas of redevelopment and integrating localised stormwater storage and detention.

Figure 7.5 (facing page) Green Streets, 2015. This street type develops as a patchwork of infill development site frontages and over time the entire street can be transformed in a participatory manner. Existing streets providing strategic pedestrian connections and links to existing infrastructure (in this case two sports ovals with clubhouses, etc.) can be targeted for renewal, co-contributed to by higher density infill developments and local council according to an agreed framework plan and process. Associated non-residential services can be incentivised at ground level, linked to adjacent uses such as sports clubs, as well as new elderly residents. Figure 7.6 (page 126) Neighbourhood Shops, 2015. Many middle suburbs have remnant strip shops dating from the post-war era that have become unviable as businesses and, in many areas, remain shuttered and closed. These small nodes of community focus are an important and symbolic community asset and their narrow site type—often with rear-lane access—can be leveraged to support new higher-density housing typologies and more engaged street uses. Single-storey shopfronts can have dwellings added above and behind, with shop spaces transformed into small meeting rooms or project spaces for local schools. With sufficient densification at a precinct scale, a new generation of retail or shared networked office space can inhabit these small grains of difference and seed a finer-grain, more intense and street-focused development within existing fabric. Figure 7.7 (page 127) Park Edge, 2015. The middle and outer suburbs of Australian cities have a high acreage of green open space, but much of this is passive, without function and with no particular ecological or environmental value. Vast areas of weeds are fenced off and fronted by the blank timber paling fences of adjoining rearyards. This substantial open space amenity has the potential to be reinvigorated and used more intensively through new links and connections into the existing street network. A series of laneways shared between vehicles and pedestrians and associated with terrace-style lanewayfronting housing here connect a previously isolated street to substantial park and creek frontage, linking to a regional cycle path network. Potential for similar fine-grain street extensions into existing park and waterway open space networks is scattered all over the city.

Figure 7.5

Figure 7.6

Figure 7.7

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Notes 1 2

3 4 5 6 7

Joel Garreau, Edge City Life on the New Frontier, Doubleday, 1988, Toronto, New York, London. Parallels could be drawn to the Woonerf, or ‘living street’, in the Netherlands that has continued since the 1970s. More recently, there has been a movement to renovate some inner-urban streets as consciously designed ‘shared spaces’ for pedestrians and vehicles, with flush kerbs and cobblestone-like paving to slow down traffic. In such shared spaces, the whole street space is considered walkable, not just the footpath. This happens naturally in environments where streets are unpaved, such as Point Lonsdale, in country towns where traffic volume is less, and in villages where the scale of the street is reduced. The 48 Courts of Heathmont, Ringwood Historical Society, 2007. Comment from Housing WA staff member, in relation to government-owned housing in Broome, WA, 2016. Neeson Murcutt Architects, Think Brick, ‘About Face’, competition entry, 2007. Grace Mortlock and David Neustein, ‘Reinventing density: Overcoming the suburban setback’, The Conversation, November 2016, Australia. Rules for front gardens in Nieuw-West’, Parish of Amsterdam, 2011. The rules allow residents to apply to establish geveltuin (‘facade gardens’) in the first 45 cm of public land in front of their property, including the removal of stones or tiles from the pavement, in a type of formal agreement with the local authority. Residents are responsible for planting and ongoing maintenance.

Part III

Conflations and Combinations

8

The Missing Middle

Preamble Even the middle finds its pace in popular culture, celebrated by DJ Snake in the album Encore, 2016. On a first visit to Los Angeles, friends advised against driving to San Diego. You will never get there they said. You will lose heart because for hours you will drive through what seems to be the same suburb. You will lose all sense of progressing on a journey. This seemed hyperbolic and the drive began . . . And ended after some hours when an old Spanish mission church loomed into view, offering the first view of something of a different scale to the hipped roofed houses along both sides of the freeway. After recovering a sense of difference, the drive back to Los Angeles commenced. We did not reach San Diego. Flying across southern England later on that trip, a very distinctive grain appeared on the outskirts of London. Yes, there were suburban tracts and ribbons of housing developments, but they were forced around larger land holdings, some centred on mansions, some on churches. The grain here coagulated around many larger land parcels, as if a giant oyster was at work secreting suburban form around the grit of old-field system boundaries, feudal estates, quarries, churchyards, ancient villages . . . In this tussle, there were patches of middle-ground developments that mimicked the older grit. There was a model village of worker houses around an Art Deco factory and clusters of warehouses on an industrial garden estate. These had come about through competing ideas about urban form and had found their opportunities in the lacunae between the cores of the land holdings and land usages of previous eras. Musings about how to replicate this mixed-grain commenced. Gentrification that follows artists as they seek out low-rent large-space studios is a documented coagulator, as Nikos Papstergiadis has shown.1 And while this real estate rolling-over has its qualities, it is a development process that seldom benefits incumbent populations. Working in Soweto on systems for house extensions on very small plots in the early 1980s, The Urban Foundation architects and lawyers proposed a legal shifting of plot divisions to consolidate the open space on each plot into a usable area on one side, creating a party-wall condition on the other side. All sorts

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of possibilities arose once this boundary shifting was explored.2 It created a tartan grid of possible shifts and opened the way to locating small social facilities in neighbourhoods. Coagulating the grain . . . amalgamating and enriching . . .

Design Proposition Background Melbourne’s middle and outer suburbs have an ‘atomised’ structure that is typical of twentieth-century urban form. Roads carrying vehicles and services connect a vast field of small individual allotments to each other. Commercial ‘strips’ in small groups of narrow allotments that resemble terrace housing are dispersed irregularly through this fabric, generally along main roads, and larger-scale commercial centres and industrial estates are zoned apart, surrounded by buffer zones of arterial roads and surface parking or abutting natural topographic barriers, such as creeks and flood plains. The individual allotment’s autonomy in suburbia is sacrosanct. Each rectangle of territory is fenced and organisationally independent from its neighbours, generally owned and controlled by a different entity. The great power of this compartmentalisation is its ability to accommodate diversity—of culture, values, style and expression—through adjacency and separation, similar to the way in which the New York city grid has been shown to accommodate an impossible range of ideas . . .3 but its great weakness is that the small scale of division and fragmented ownership condition limits the types of buildings and spaces that are possible and, at the same time, does not incentivise cooperation across boundaries. Passive neighbourly cooperation for mutual benefit has been common on smaller allotments in the past, such as nineteenth-century terrace house blocks where, for example, the sites are too small and narrow to adequately provide light into each dwelling, so a practice of grouping of lightwells across boundaries developed in order to share amenity by collating access to light and air. The traditional suburban block and house type, by contrast, provides enough space to solve all (conventional) operational and functional issues within the confines of a single plot, set back from boundaries and idyllically self-contained, without impact from or reliance upon others. Pre-war suburban allotments included enough space for a vegetable garden that could sustain a family, with perhaps chickens and, in some cases, a cow for milk. In more remote towns, a half-acre house allotment allowed septic tank sewage filtration. While there is renewed interest by some towards self-sufficiency and ‘off-grid’ autonomy, in the vast majority of suburban cases this is not possible.4 As has been widely commented on in mainstream media, Australian suburban blocks are getting smaller and the houses on them are getting larger. Market demand for housing in a growing city is driving densifi-

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133

cation and infill development, but the majority of this simply duplicates existing historical suburban types and reduces the space around them. Suburban private open spaces are being shrunk to terrace house scale; however, the method of planning, building, buying and selling these pieces of land remains atomised and still requires all issues and facilities to be solved within the boundaries of a single plot, in a traditional suburban manner. The dominant planning factor at this scale and density becomes the car, and a significant percentage of suburban territory goes into accommodating its storage and movement, generally on hard-paved surfaces. On small allotments, with only one point of access, this has

Scale 1:1000

Figure 8.1 Rows of Adjacent Suburban Detached Houses in 1940s (Heidelberg) and 2010s (Truganina). The basic single-storey, double-fronted villa typology remains constant, but house size and relative proportion to land allotment radically changes the landscape typology and character from continuous to fragmented.

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74 Nimmo Street, Essendon

49-51 Cooper Street, Essendon

4/6 Hewitt Street, Reservoir

Scale 1:1000

Figure 8.2 Typical Multi-Unit, Single-Storey Infill Development (Essendon/ Aberfeldie, 1990s). Cluster developments of multiple units on single and double suburban allotments: the single and double-storey semi-attached villas leave little open space other than for car circulation and parking. The staggered offsets in plan are determined by requirements of vehicle turning circles. Linear terrace variants result in a street frontage dominated by vehicle crossovers and garage doors.

a significantly detrimental impact on tree canopy cover, ground permeability, streetscape interface, private open space amenity, passive sustainability and liveability. The small apartment building in St Albans, discussed in Chapter 5, illustrates this point via the difficulties this project faced in gaining permissions from planning authorities. The permissible building envelope easily accommodates eight generous apartments, with wide setbacks allowing deep-root tree planting zones and access to usable open space from each dwelling. The strategy used to achieve the high percentage of landscape cover was to limit vehicle access to the front section of the site; double-using parking space as high-amenity landscaped open space and removing side driveways and the privacy issues they create. However this met fierce opposition from council, whose parking policy of requiring more than one carspace per dwelling and preferred aesthetic planning policy of no parking to be visible from the street when combined on a single block of these proportions forces design solutions towards

The Missing Middle

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Scale 1:1000

Figure 8.3 Typical Middle-Suburban Dual Occupancy Development on a Single Site (Ringwood). Original condition (left) and developed condition (right). The original house remains, with a duplicate constructed in the rearyard. Garden area and substantial trees are removed to make way for new house and driveway. In this case, the sole private open space of the second house is a narrow leftover strip between house and fence, south-facing, which will receive almost no direct sunlight.

the standard model of side driveway, rear carparking, reduced dwelling amenity and reduced tree coverage. Landscape objectives, including performance-based criteria such as urban heat island mitigation and water-sensitive outcomes through increasing canopy targets and permeable surfaces are overruled by parking concerns. The inherited (pre-car and low density) ‘garden city’ streetscape aesthetics of neatness and propriety—the desire for cars and other realities to be hidden from view—outweigh functional efficiency, social and spatial diversity and real environmental performance. Until these competing priorities can be renegotiated and debated, the diversity of suburban typologies remains severely constrained. At the middle scale of suburban infill redevelopment—where excavating basement carparks is generally economically unfeasible—accommodating parked cars and negotiating vehicle access becomes a dominant factor determining the built outcome and dwelling yield.5 In these environments, both in building frontage (garage doors) and surface area

Figure 8.4 (1)

BASE MODEL CONTEXT-SENSITIVE BUILDING FORM

Lift (Domestic)

ACCESS AND CIRCULATION SECURITY - IDENTITY - PRIVACY

Secure Front Entry Resident Rear Access Secure Vehicle Access

Shared Shar areeedd RRoof o f Terrace, Kitchenette And Laundry Kit hheenne nette ettt AAn

Building Orientation And Long Roof Surface Suitable For Solar Energy Generation Private Balconies

HIGH AMENITY 3 X OPEN SPACE OPTIMAL SOLAR ACCESS

Courtyard And Planting And Deep Root Planting

Collective Parking P k Pa Landscape pee Amenity Amen meen enit Shared Store

SHARED SERVICES PARKING AREAS AND STORE

Surface Treatment Enables Dual Use For Vehicle Access And Play/recreation

Shared Store

Figure 8.4 Redcliffe Connect, Monash Architecture Studio and University of Western Australia, 2016. Three-storey terrace apartment type: suited to 15 × 30-metre allotments typical of this area. The base type is possible on a single or two side-by-side allotments but increases in efficiency with longer runs due to sharing of driveway access.

Figure 8.4 (2)

Active Street Interface & Upgraded Public Realm Sectional Diagram

First Floor

Ground Floor Scale 1:1000

Large courtyards allow deep-root planting between building elements. Dwelling yield is determined by site width for parking shared along rear boundary: single site: 4 units, double site: 9 units, row of 5 sites: 27 units.

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(driveway access space), cars dominate market-led, contemporary vernacular responses. When this load is spread over more than one allotment, however, options open up. Government-owned social housing is present in varying concentrations across the middle suburbs of Australian cities, typically in small clusters of one, two and three allotments.6 In the Perth suburb of Redcliffe, a scheme for infill development across adjacent lots designed for state housing agency, Housing WA, demonstrates that vehicles are more easily accommodated and that both density and yield increase when working over more than one contiguous allotment. In this project, a ‘terrace-courtyard’ three-storey apartment building type was tested, with cars parked across the rear boundary. The width of the site directly sets the dwelling yield (at one carspace per unit) and net densities of 100 to 120 dwellings per hectare. This typology, combined with the particular geometry of Redcliffe suburban allotments (15 × 30 metres), allows parking provision, streetscape concerns, generous deeproot planting zones and apartments with good access and orientation. The width of the combined site is critical here, firstly in terms of adequate street frontage to allow separate in-out vehicle lanes either side of the building; and secondly, to allow efficient parking at the rear. Amalgamation of adjacent lots for joint sale is also increasingly popular in the private market, as owners realise the potential increase in sale value for larger allotments. This type of development activity (temporary cooperative action for mutual benefit) is also able to be incentivised by local governments and is starting to appear in policy frameworks.7 It has the potential to increase the diversity of housing types on offer and also vary the physical and social mix of suburban fabric in positive ways. Commissioned by the Office of the Victorian Government Architect, the ‘Infill Opportunities’ project was briefed to investigate higher-quality infill design solutions at a 3:1 density increase (approximately 50 dwellings/ hectare) as alternatives to current market dual and triple-occupancy developments. It was found that by utilising two and three adjoining allotments, a greater range of dwelling solutions are possible—enabling fit to different adjoining contexts and orientations. The low-rise fabric is diversified by utilising semi-attached, terrace and courtyard arrangements, rather than relying on the detached villa in all instances.

Figure 8.5 (facing page) Elwood Flats: ‘Six-Pack’-Type Developments on Adjacent Suburban Blocks, This result in multiple driveways and a high percentage of concrete/impermeable ground surface, with each block needing its own vehicle access in and out. The diagram on the right shows a hypothetical rationalisation allowing adjacent buildings to share driveways and providing through-block circulation, resulting in a more efficient use of limited land and increase in permeable area (Ambrose Zacharakis, 2016).

PERMEABLE SURFACE E.G. GRASS, GARDEN BED

IMPERVIOUS SURFACE, E.G. CONCRETE

INCREASE IN PERMEABLE SURFACES

NEW PATHWAYS LINKED THROUGHOUT BLOCK

Scale 1:2000

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Increasing the range of approaches to grouping and building suburban dwellings is important in the Australian context—where there are wellestablished industries in place to deliver detached single houses at one end of the spectrum and high-rise apartment buildings (typically 20 storeys and above) at the other. The range of options between these extremes is often referred to as the ‘missing middle’.8 It is, in fact, this type of density that many people would choose, enabling them to live in a relatively convenient location at a relatively affordable price range.9 Dwelling types in this middle category include duplexes, terraces, multidwelling houses, cluster housing and low-rise (two- to five-storey) apartment blocks. In addition to formal and architectural considerations and dwelling type diversity more suited to current and projected demographic shifts, there is also a need for greater diversity and choice in the way that buildings are procured, financed and delivered. Private developers, almost exclusively, produce apartments and medium-density dwellings, with owners purchasing ‘off the plan’ or through the real estate market after completion. Owner-occupiers have traditionally had little say in what gets built in this market, as a large percentage of apartments are built for investors who live elsewhere10 and whose interests are in rates of return, rather than liveability. There is a movement to change this, led by committed individuals and groups of architects and planners. The German Baugruppen model of owner-developer ‘terminating cooperatives’ that join forces to develop and build their own apartment block and obtain economies of scale is being trialled in Fremantle by Geoffrey London and Space Agency architects. The Nightingale model, led by Breathe Architecture, Six Degrees Architects and other collaborators, sees architects leading the development process based on quality and sustainability, offering savings on marketing and through deletion of many arguably unnecessary ‘essentials’ promoted by the real estate and development market, including on-site parking, air-conditioning, second bathrooms and individual laundries, putting resultant savings into increased quality and quantity of spaces and communal facilities. Other commercial development teams are conspicuously asking pre-purchase buyers what they want before the design is finalised, allowing customisation and input into the final product.11 Demand for this type of product is high, as demonstrated by the ongoing success of the Nightingale projects, but still not exactly mainstream nor supported by policy incentives. The design and spatial possibilities within the existing suburban allotment structure are clear, the market demand for quality, affordable, well-located and wellintegrated housing is there . . . new financing and legal structures are desperately needed to enable and incentivise this to occur.

Figure 8.6 (1)

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Figure 8.6 Infill Opportunities, 2011. A range of possible dwelling arrangements at 1:3 density ratios, sited on adjoining standard middle-suburban sites (16 × 42-metre nominal). Two backto-back allotments with L-type linear courtyard house; two side-by-side allotments with ‘mansion’ house and outbuildings; three side-by-side allotments with ‘cluster’ arrangements of nine dwellings and shared guest room/office facing the street. All options keep height within the central areas of the block to work within standard volumetric controls and have the ability to extend to a third level. Initial parking provision is one space per dwelling, which has been designed to transition to communal open space with eventual reduction in private car use and expansion of car-share network. Sections show relationship to existing context.

Figure 8.6 (2)

SUBJECT SITE Scale 1:500

Figure 8.6 (3)

SUBJECT SITE Scale 1:500

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The transformation and infill densification of suburbs within metropolitan centres is of course not a new phenomenon. Yoshiharu Tsukamoto’s research lab at T.I. Tech has shown how in Tokyo four generations of housing have gradually replaced, filled-in and densified the early twentieth-century suburban neighbourhood fabric to produce the particular fine-grain and dense mat of buildings that we experience in Tokyo today.12 This process is caused by particular land tax and inheritance laws that are specific to Japan, but demonstrates a formal outcome and type of infill-growth that is related to what is currently happening in Australian suburbs. Interestingly, Japanese suburbs are divided into small neighbourhood sub-precincts called cho, which can be of a scale similar to the disaggregated suburban precincts proposed in the following design studies. Within each cho, houses are numbered chronologically rather than in direct spatial sequence, describing a process of non-linear infill and adaptation over time.13 Within each sub-neighbourhood group, there is also a shared community watch monitor, who keeps an eye on things and reports to the local police box or Koban, which are distributed at frequent intervals throughout the city. While some might see this as an intrusion or type of snooping, it functions as day-to-day passive surveillance and an informal safety network. In Australia, suburban ‘neighbourhood watch’ programs were introduced in the 1980s for similar reasons, and at a similar or smaller scale.14 The delivery of organised home support and home care for aged and high-needs residents can be thought of in similar networked ways. The hypothetical dispersed nursing home project in Jeparit discussed earlier in Chapter 3 proposed a network of paths and routes through the small town, which residents, carers and hospital staff alike might use to connect one patient or client to another. In the UK, the ‘KeyRing’ system of care operates in a similar way, where a dispersed group of residents requiring care or help is established as a walkable network, providing a community of contact with each other, and also a known, predetermined communication network for disability services and medical support.15 Mobile technology is already increasing the flexibility of such remote or dispersed systems, which are by nature less intrusive and obvious than centralised systems. In the Weidevogenhof development (refer Chapter 9), a nurses’ staff room located in the town centre monitors an electronic

Figure 8.7 (facing page) ’Fokus’ Remote Monitoring and Living Support, Weidewogelhof, Netherlands. A nurse’s station and meeting space is provided within the main apartment complex, which can receive requests for help from a community of people living with disabilities independently in the surrounding suburb, in dwellings indistinguishable from the rest of the community. Support workers are dispatched to particular dwellings within walking distance, only upon receipt of request. The client thereby has control over the level and frequency of care, and the presence of carers within the home.

FOKUS HEADQUARTERS

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network of residents living with disabilities dispersed throughout the surrounding suburb. These residents are living independently but can request help, either physical or verbal, if required. Support staff and medical assistance are only a few minutes’ walk away, but remote and unobtrusive.16 Future advances in technology, such as remote environment sensing17 and driverless cars will only increase the ability for suburbs to accommodate diversity and independence.

8.1 The Missing Middle: Design Proposition In order to test and develop these ideas, we have experimented with a precinct-scaled design approach to suburban infill redevelopment. Working across a notional territory of one square kilometre, the high percentage of government-owned social housing allotments in certain suburbs with buildings in need of repair or at the end of their useful lives allows (or necessitates) a ‘disaggregated precinct’ approach to renewal. Figure 8.8 Northern Suburb Infill Precinct, 2015. (1) Plan showing distribution of publicly owned land reaching the end of its useful life, in the form of post-war low-density housing. Twenty-three percent of total available sites are in this single ownership but are spread in a ‘disaggregated’ pattern of single, double and larger groups of adjacent allotments. The dispersed ownership coverage is due to a historical process of piecemeal selling and purchasing of land and gives increased surface area contact with the surrounding private suburb—in comparison to a single consolidated site of equivalent area. This poses challenges for redevelopment but can be utilised strategically to uplift the entire area, if considered as a single urban project. (2) (page 148) Selective Hierarchy of Sites. These maximise pedestrian connectivity and relationship to existing urban and landscape features through infill redevelopment that increases diversity of housing stock. Some individual sites can be sold off and others purchased over time. Connections are made to existing transport infrastructure and parklands, increasing urban porosity and improving access. Local strip shops and a gated retirement village are embraced and augmented with new programs, such as shopfront meeting spaces and childcare facilities. Water runoff is combined with pedestrian links between new housing and underutilised green open space along the creek. Building density, height and provision of parking space for vehicles can be managed opportunistically and collectively across the precinct, rather than applying blanket planning rules or trying to achieve all functions within each individual site. (3) (page 149) Eastern Suburb Infill Precinct, 2015. A similar situation but including two large consolidated housing estate sites. A ring of pedestrian and cycle-focused ‘green streets’ is made, joining existing sports ovals into an open space network, with opportunities for supporting program integrated with development along these routes. For example, park-facing, elderlyfocused apartments might have allied health services, such as physiotherapy and rehabilitation gyms located on ground floor, which can serve both elderly and sporting communities.

Figure 8.8 (1)

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Figure 8.8 (2)

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Figure 8.8 (3)

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A relatively neglected but well-located north suburban pocket with steep topography and creek frontage has around 23 percent public housing ownership. As a case study, these allotments were analysed for their collective rejuvenating potential and considered as potential catalysts for wider precinct transformation. Certain allotments that allowed new pedestrian linkages or through-block urban connections were highlighted, while others with less potential could potentially be sold to fund more intensive redevelopment. Through a process of precinct-wide community engagement and partnership with local councils and businesses, a sitespecific local precinct masterplan based on actual site potential rather than blanket development controls was developed as a more holistic and cooperative process of urban renewal within this typically atomised suburban fabric. Private properties outside of the initial project (shown in white—that is, the other 77 percent) could over time benefit and increase in value if cooperation with the initial catalyst development (shown shaded in grey, that is the 23 percent under single ownership) was incentivised and joint community development goals and ambitions identified.18 Even in suburbs of relative high density and dwelling diversity, such as Elwood in Melbourne, the effects of piecemeal atomisation and lack of cooperation between adjacent landowners acts to restrict potential lived amenity, with opportunities for new ways of working for increased efficiency and economies of scale. The high percentage of ‘six-pack’ flats in Elwood, each with their own vehicle driveway in and out of a single allotment, means that there is an unusually high percentage of impermeable concrete paving dedicated to car circulation and parking, which is a particular problem in this flood-prone suburb built on reclaimed land, on the site of a previous swamp (wetland) drained in the

Figure 8.9 (facing page) Redcliffe Connect, Monash Architecture Studio and University of Western Australia, 2016. Precinct-scale infill development plan: seven kilometres from central Perth and close to the airport. An existing low-traffic street is proposed as a ‘linear park’ joining new development sites to existing local shops, schools and park spaces and providing increased amenity to both new and existing residents. New three-level housing typologies (see Figure 8.4) have reduced footprint to leave space for mature trees, including retention of remnant stands of native Jarrah at the top of the rise, which provide important bird habitat (conventional development processes on such sites involve clearing sites of all vegetation). An existing campus-style retirement home uses a secluded adjacent local park as recreation space for residents, with a natural pond where groundwater reaches the surface (a previous swampy area). This non-gated approach can be extended and linked to mixed tenure, supported living accommodation within the new infill housing sites. Stormwater retention and other watersensitive infrastructure can be incorporated into new pedestrian accessways, leading to the natural low-ground of the pond. Precinct-scale planning also allows implementation of districtwide services along shared routes, where adequate density permits. Adjacent landowners could buy-in to such schemes over time, or redevelop their own land in a similar manner.

Figure 8.10 (1)

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Figure 8.10 Elwood Project: Water Body Corporates. In the flood-prone suburb of Elwood, residents face an annual battle with excess water, with major floods occurring more frequently in recent times. A precinct-scaled approach to flood mitigation allows residents facing related issues to join forces and pool funds for mutual benefit, to achieve more than can be done on a single allotment. ‘Water body corporates’—expanding on the body-corporate structure managing the shared areas of strata-titled apartments—give organisational structure to groupings of dwelling and flats sharing common water issues; for example, a row of properties facing a laneway (a previous open drainage channel) that floods regularly. Adaptation and retrofitting of existing buildings and construction of new buildings over time can be associated with an ongoing urban block-scale plan for shared water storage, water retention and flood mitigation—and in the process transforming the laneway from a drain to a contributory open space accessed by all adjoining residents. (Andrew Wright and Kai Zhu, 2016).

Figure 8.10 (2)

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late nineteenth century. A precinct-scaled design approach reveals that with a limited degree of sharing across title boundaries, rationalisation of driveways within a localised concentration of apartment buildings could provide a dramatic increase in permeable surface area at ground level (Figure 8.5). Similarly, the issues of flood resilience are complex and require a multi-scalar approach. Collectives of adjacent landowners working for mutual benefit could potentially achieve much more than if the owner of each individual parcel acted alone. The exhibition Swamped (2017) proposed a network of ‘water body corporates’, where groupings of adjacent landowners facing linked flooding issues might pool resources to achieve greater and more effective flood mitigation.19

Notes 1 Nikos Papastergiadis, Spatial Aesthetics; Art, Place and the Everyday, Rivers Oram, 2005, London. 2 The Urban Foundation was founded in 1976 with the aim of addressing as many of the causes of urban unrest as it could within existing legal frameworks. Funded by many global enterprises it was a not-for-profit agency that brought together professionals working in urban issues. Leon van Schaik was the Chief Architect for the Transvaal Region when the work here mentioned was carried out. 3 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York, Monacelli Press, 1997 (1978), New York. 4 A contemporary consumerist version of the autonomous ‘castle’ mentality can be seen at the upper end of the suburban market, where peri-urban fenced allotments include not vegetables or cows, but traditionally shared and communal urban functions such as ‘home’ theatre, bar, swimming pool, tennis court and so on. 5 This is a finding of Murray, Bertram, Khor et al., ‘Processes for developing affordable and sustainable medium-density housing models for greyfield precincts’, AHURI, 2015. 6 This disaggregated pattern is caused by a succession of housing policies over time, including original large-scale housing estates being constructed postwar and then partially acquired by tenants under a range of home ownership incentive schemes, or sold off to the general market under policies of deconcentration. ‘Spot purchasing’ of general market properties by the government for public housing has also occurred. 7 Government of Victoria, Plan Melbourne 2017–2050, Policy 2.2.4, ‘Provide support and guidance for greyfield areas to deliver more housing choice and diversity.’ 8 NSW Government Department of Planning and Environment, Draft MediumDensity Design Guide, 2016. 9 Jane-Frances Kelly et al., ‘The Housing We’d Choose’, Grattan Institute, 2011, Melbourne. 10 In some cases, investors make up to 85 percent of owners (City of Melbourne). 11 For example, Assemble Projects’ Roseneath Street apartment development in Clifton Hill, 2016–current. 12 Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, ‘Escaping the Spiral of Intolerance: Fourth-generation houses and void metabolism’. In Koh Kitayama, Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, Ryue Nishizawa (Eds.), Tokyo Metabolizing, TOTO, 2010, Tokyo.

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13 For a description from a Western perspective, see Barrie Shelton, Learning from the Japanese City: West meets East in Urban Design, E. & F. N. Spon, 1999, London, pp. 24–9. 14 ‘Neighbourhood Watch’ is a not-for-profit community-based crime prevention program, based on the community and police working in partnership. It started with a pilot in Frankston in 1983 and has expanded successfully in both urban and rural areas. www.nhw.com.au 15 KeyRing Living Support Networks: ‘In a traditional KeyRing network nine people live in their own homes, not far from each other. A volunteer lives in the same area, in housing provided by KeyRing. The volunteer supports people (KeyRing members) with things like bills and budgeting, getting into education, employment or volunteering, and getting to know the community. They also encourage members to support each other and share their skills.’ www.keyring.org 16 ‘Fokus’ remote care network—see www.fokuswonen.nl/Home/Fokuswonen. Fokus assists with the activities of daily living for people living with a disability or handicap, and operates 24 hours per day, seven days per week. It is active throughout the Netherlands. 17 For example, the UNISONO passive activity monitoring: a sophisticated, multiple sensor-based system utilising predictive artificial intelligence algorithms to track user behaviour in the home and interpret when normal patterns change. It is currently in pilot/testing phase, developed in partnership with Deakin University and Samsung Electronics Australia. 18 For a full account of the design and engagement process for this project, refer to the final AHURI report: www.ahuri.edu.au/research/final-reports/236. 19 N Bertram, C Murphy and R Pasman, Swamped: Future Water Scenarios for Elwood, City of Port Phillip Gallery, Co-operative Research Centre (CRC) for Water Sensitive Cities, 2017.

9

Suburban Engines

Preamble Popular culture explores the conditions that give rise to engines of change in suburbia, as in the song ‘Suburbia’ on the album Please by Pet Shop Boys, 1986. When, on the tellingly entitled TV series, Escape to the Country, English people are asked to describe the home of their dreams, despite differing programmatic requirements, certain words predominate: character features, inglenook, island bench, view, detached, privacy . . . In ways that Raymond Williams recognised1, while French dwellers in the provinces dream of being in central Paris, every English city dweller dreams of being in the country. Further, English visitors to the country houses of the aristocracy imagine themselves living inside, when in fact their forebears would have been able to see these great assertions of power and wealth only through the wrought iron gates that closed off vistas from the houses. While the French visiting Versailles think of revolution, of ‘liberty, fraternity and equality’, Australians don’t confront such dramatic physical manifestations of their mental space. The wealthy cluster in harbour-side mansions, but may just as readily be found in suburban enclaves carved from the surroundings of the first house in which their family settled. Australians expect equality and see it even when it is manifestly not there. These engrained communal mental spaces exist everywhere. In every country, there are prejudices about lazy southern climes (if in the northern hemisphere, lazy northerners if in the southern). There are preconceptions about eastern seaboard and western seaboard characters. These mental spaces are enshrined in common law precedents that further complicate thinking about the ways in which suburbs relate to the major engines that they cause or attract: hospitals, colleges, factory parks, universities and research campuses, airports and transport interchanges. Some societies are able to embrace major installations with ease, whereas others fight against them. Northeastern France has readily embraced the building of massive entrepot complexes. High-speed trains thread through the countryside. Central determinations stick, projects carry through. Australian sensibilities enshrine the notion of a ‘fair go’ and no one can be denied their opportunity to improve their lot. This

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means that we look for ways of infiltrating across the boundaries of the big engines. A good example is in the city of Perth, where the rail network is extended by running the tracks up the centre of the urban coastal freeway along which the city is expanding, locating stations at flyover junctions and positioning major facilities adjacent to these hot spots. In such a young and linear city this works well, but it took the vision of young planners to embed the idea of transport and facility co-dependence in the political imagination. There is complete consensus on the approach. However, in other major Australian cities, road, rail and facility planning have yet to meet. Our approach is to work with what is here, and with the prevailing attitudes, but give them a twist that we believe will reveal the possibilities to those who have yet to remove their blinkers.

Design Proposition Background On the outskirts of the Dutch town of Pijnacker, near Delft, a large development with a focus on aged care, dementia and high-needs supported living was completed in 2011.2 Eight buildings accommodating 350 units (105 supported, 249 unsupported) were constructed as part of a newly built suburb. Rather than this conglomeration being isolated, fenced and ‘protected’ by buffer zones of parking and landscape—as might be the case in a typical retirement village—the very opposite strategy is used. The elderly and high-needs residents are placed right at the heart of the suburb, adjacent to the train station, in apartments that overlook town squares, public and commercial realm. Each day, people from the surrounding suburban houses walk and cycle through this precinct, which includes community and health facilities used by both high-needs residents and the general community: doctors, pharmacy, physiotherapy, allied health, post-hospital care hotel, community rooms, restaurant and so on. Instead of being dedicated for a specialist population, these facilities gain catchment and become normalised by being both visually and literally open to others. Aged and high-needs residents have everything they need nearby and can also watch the goings-on of the town below from generous balconies with the proportion of outdoor rooms.

Figure 9.1 (facing page) Weidevogelhof, Pijnacker, Netherlands, DAT Architecten 2011. The development of large courtyard-style multi-level apartment buildings with a focus on aged and high-needs supported living is located adjacent to the train station at the centre of the town. A range of health and public services are included at ground levels of the buildings, used both by the immediate network of carers and residents, but also servicing the general community from surrounding suburbs. The development is open and porous, encouraging people to pass through on their way to the station and supermarket, giving the area a sense of connectedness and vitality, which is often lacking in typical accommodation options for this cohort.

PUBLICALLY ACCESSIBLE PATHS AND PLAZAS THROUGHOUT

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In this example, the conventional nursing home model is turned on its head—instead of being a single-use island or ‘ghetto’ it has become a multi-use centre, or filter, through which other people and activities can pass. In this way, its surface-area contact with the regular, everyday suburb is increased. The activity, social life, economy and workforce of supported living and healthcare is attached to and combined with the activity, social life, economy and workforce of the whole place, with its family housing, supermarket, train station and higher-density housing. It is not only location that is important in making this combination work, but the conscious intent and design attitude towards mixing evident in the distribution of activities, use types and frontages—and in the approach to delivery and integration of support services and workers. The main buildings themselves are arranged around courtyards, allowing both private secluded spaces for community functions or gardens and pragmatic spaces for parking and services without impacting on the primary public realm. In an Australian suburban context, we posit that the social and economic ‘engine’ of healthcare and ageing might benefit from and bring diversity to other large suburban entities in a manner where combinations and conflations of purpose and activity might enrich the overall suburban experience. This potential is particularly in the form of new qualities that could emerge in suburban public and semi-public realms, or edge conditions, which have been conventionally separated from the spaces of living and domesticity through zoning, physical barriers and spatial buffers. Our suburbs contain many very large and productive objects and conglomerations, such as hospitals, shopping centres, universities and ‘big-box’ retail clusters. It has long been argued that the shopping mall is the piazza or town square of the suburbs,3 certainly functionally but also socially, with shopping centres focusing more obviously in recent times on their roles as places for socialising and entertainment, rather than simply shopping. Renovations to Doncaster Shoppingtown (Westfield), for example, include comfortable lounges arranged in groups, where people meet or just rest for a while, and glamorous internal streets of cafe tables mixed between fashion house shopfronts, which thrive on Sunday mornings as places to meet over brunch much in the manner of an inner-city high street—the only caveat being that these streets are completely internalised within a wrapping of multi-storey carparking. Renovations to Chadstone and Highpoint shopping centres, in the east and west of Melbourne’s middle suburbs respectively, have also demonstrated an acute and commercially savvy awareness of the shopping centre’s role as public realm experience and provider of suburban amenity. Similarly, hospitals and their surrounding health and research precincts are now understood as ‘employment clusters’ and function much like small cities, with a thriving workforce of staff and researchers who are

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not sick, but need to eat, socialise and collaborate. University campuses around the country are investing heavily in the quality of their public realm spaces to attract students and researchers, providing a diverse, vibrant, connected (and largely pedestrianised) town centre-type experience in suburbs where such experiences and spaces are hard to come by. Monash University’s Clayton Campus has established a program of music festivals on its grounds, primarily targeted at enriching student life, but also frequented by the general public.4 Public transport connections to this campus, with a bus every three minutes, are at a much higher frequency and reliability of service than average middle-suburban environments are used to. Many of these large suburban entities—hospitals, shopping centres, universities and airports—are expanding. New buildings are being constructed each year and traditionally core activities are being expanded and diversified to make them more attractive as ‘sticky’ destinations, as collaborative workplaces—and as urban economic engines.5 The notion of a precinct implies an area of intensity or specialisation that is continuous with the city. Classic examples are urban precincts with a particular ethnic concentration such as ‘Chinatowns’, which generally exist—for example in San Francisco, Yokohama, central Melbourne and Box Hill—as concentrations within a continuous and pre-existing urban fabric. They may perhaps have an iconic central street or area of intensity, but usually do not have clear edges. Their activity and influence naturally gathers and grows, spreading through the city opportunistically or shrinking and being replaced by other tenants and residents if demand is low. The fuzziness and mixed-use nature of precincts such as Chinatown, Little Italy or Little Saigon within a city is in stark contrast with large suburban entities, such as shopping centres and airports, which are frequently separated from the city around them by large arterial roads, surface carparking and land set aside for future expansion. Hospitals and universities have also historically been established as bounded islands of defined function and purpose, but decades of expansion, organisational recombination and collaboration with industry, community and government have seen new adjacent sites acquired, blurring boundary and functional use definitions6 and perimeter buffer zone carparking used as sites for new buildings and spaces with high visibility and street frontage— providing new opportunities for contact.7

Scale 1:15,000

Figure 9.2 Doncaster and Chadstone Shopping Centres, Siteplan Showing 1960s (left) and Current Condition (right). Initial large areas of surface parking have been gradually replaced with new multi-storey buildings and parking structures, resulting in the built form of the centre having a greater street presence.

Figure 9.3 (facing page) ‘Chinatown’ Precincts in San Francisco (above) and Melbourne (below) City Centres. This type of precinct does not have distinct boundaries but ‘bleeds’ naturally into the surrounding fabric, depending on demand. Both have a recognisable central spine, but indistinct edges that accommodate mixed and contemporary variants of culturally specific businesses.

Scale 1:15,000 SOURCE: San Francisco Planning Department; Chinatown Land Use and Density Plan

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9.1 Suburban Engines: Design Proposition In order to test and develop these ideas, the western edge of Monash University’s Clayton Campus was selected as a site within which to embed a new residential and allied health precinct—an experiment to demonstrate the potential of a more blurred and porous edge condition to a large suburban engine, such as a major university. This proposed new precinct has a focus on the needs of aged and supported accommodation, but also provides embedded opportunities for academic research and training, as well as the provision of residential facilities used by the university, such as apartments for visiting academics and postgraduate students. The western edge precinct utilises a strip of existing suburban blocks, around half of which are already owned by the university, with street frontage and a rear boundary directly adjoining the campus. This allows a two-way interaction and literal mixing of functions and address between the small-scale individual allotments of the suburban neighbourhood and the consolidated campus. The planning strategy was to use this strip of dual-frontage properties as a version of the ‘filter’ concept—in the manner of the Weidevogelhof example—with services in this strip utilised by the university, general community and the specific community of residents requiring supported care. Over time, the strip of properties along this edge can become a finegrain and porous entry to the campus, and an opportunity to locate ‘offcampus’ collaborative and partnership activities requiring a more discreet and sensitive community interface—such as counselling, rehabilitation and therapy. These can be seen as a natural extension of the current medical and allied health research undertaken by the university, as well as a ‘live’ service for the resident population that is also an opportunity for staff training and student experience. In turn, the residents gain access, contact and a sense of belonging to a larger urban realm, with activities, facilities, lectures, transport options, landscape spaces and, importantly, a large and diverse population of young people. This type of two-way edge is a looser and more filigree interface than provided by the current three major vehicular ‘gates’.8 The adjoining suburban blocks, stretching westward over approximately 800 metres, are already transforming in response to market opportunities. Many of these single suburban houses from the 1960s have already been developed as dual occupancies or subdivided into informal ‘rooming houses’ suited to student accommodation. There are already Figure 9.4 (facing page) Monash University, Clayton Campus. Initial campus established on previous farmland in early-1960s (left) and current condition (right). Substantial densification and expansion has occurred over a 50-year period and the campus now hosts a large resident and daily population, providing a type of community infrastructure and transport services for the surrounding area in excess of a ‘normal’ middle-suburban quota.

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some conventional aged-care facilities in the area, located at the other side of this neighbourhood, and a small network of health services. In close and strategic partnership with both the university campus and the local council, a consortium of private developer(s) and housing association(s) could opportunistically purchase individual parcels of land in the adjacent suburb to develop as aged-focus housing as part of a dispersed but coordinated precinct, intermingled with student and general housing. These blocks would be ones that are likely to be developed over time by the market (for example, many that contain older suburban houses in a state of disrepair) and adding a long-term framework into which these individual allotments could participate and benefit from would allow issues such as parking, landscape, services and support provision to be thought of collectively rather than everything being solved within the boundaries of a single allotment. Over time, the pedestrian porosity and accessibility of the whole suburb would be improved, in tandem with an overall increase in diversity of dwelling types, landscape and ecological connections, and opportunities for service provision and other commercial and cultural activities. The open weave and natural flexibility of the suburban allotment structure are here used as a template for mat-like horizontal organisation—working over the complete scale range from small home modifications to large new buildings—entrepreneurial and opportunistic in spirit and flexible over time in boundary and shape. Figure 9.5 Beddoe Avenue Precinct, Monash University, Clayton Campus, 2017. Urban diagram: showing strip of residential blocks facing Beddoe Avenue and with rear boundary adjoining the university campus (currently fenced). This strip of double-fronted blocks, around 20 of which are already owned by the university, is conceived as an interface zone, facing both out to the adjoining suburb and in to the campus. Proposed infill redevelopment is designed to encourage pedestrian through-traffic, making a new ‘soft’ type of campus entrance and interface with surroundings, also integrating with priorities and opportunities of the existing campus and its masterplan. Ground floor activities, such as supermarket, conference rooms, allied health offices, therapy and rehabilitation gyms cater for both residents and university research-led teaching needs linked to the medical faculty. The higher-density heart of the new precinct is within this strip, however, linked supported accommodation and aged community can extend into the adjoining suburb, as indicated by disaggregated blocks of redeveloped land over time. At the other end of this walkable neighbourhood, there is a group of existing shops, other medical and aged-focused services, and retirement accommodation. The Monash Medical Centre, a major research hospital, is around 1.5 kilometres south, on the other side of the main road. The precinct gives a new identity and type of address for the campus in the suburb, and acts as a catalyst for positive change in the neighbouring blocks. On the other hand, a more porous edge gives residents direct and convenient access to the life of the campus, including sports facilities, open spaces, social events, lectures and public transport. University researchers can use selected supported accommodation units as ‘living laboratories’ and develop community outreach programs. Accommodation would be a mixture of aged-focus supported living, affordable housing and university-specific housing for visiting faculty and postgraduate students with families.

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Figure 9.5 (1)

Figure 9.5 (2)

Figure 9.5 (3)

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For this to occur, methods of procurement and financing also require flexibility and lateral thinking. The university needs to protect its longterm options for expansion and change, but this does not preclude interim uses being feasible; housing associations and developers need access to land, but, depending upon the financing approach used, do not need to own the land they build on. Housing can be built on long-term leased land, with a 20-, 30- or 50-year depreciation and the land-owner (in this case the university) can have options built-in for breaking the lease if its forecast needs substantially change in the future. All of these factors require thinking about housing more as an ‘infrastructure’ than a fixed product. It can be built, occupied, bought, sold and modified and demolished over time in different ways. In the meantime, the life of the suburb and its occupants—its economy and its ecology—will continue to evolve.

Figure 9.6 Beddoe Avenue Precinct, Monash University, Clayton Campus, 2017. The precinct uses the full range of age-friendly housing typologies developed in the previous chapters to embed a new supported living precinct within the existing suburban fabric. New small and large apartment buildings, shared streets, subdivided houses and outbuildings work with existing fabric and open spaces to make a network of living, working, community services and recreation, used by university staff and students, aged-care residents and the wider community. A carefully modulated sense of overlooking, privacy, landscaping and ground floor permeability allows the suburb to be used in a different way—for example, vehicle access might be provided through the rear of the adjacent block, freeing up street frontage for other uses, or an existing side driveway might be renovated to provide laneway address to a new small dwelling behind or a through-block pedestrian shortcut. The inherent flexibility of the suburb, with its outbuildings, fences and freestanding buildings, is used with a new injection of population and university campus interface to exploit opportunities for diversity of dwelling scale, address type and sub-groupings—evolving over time into a fine-grain, mixed-use, age-friendly precinct.

Figure 9.6 (1)

Figure 9.6 (2)

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Care hotel with Carer’s headquarters at ground floor level Sainkt Antonius type building with gymnasium at ground floor opening out onto the square New public square Existing garage converted to become a pop up coffee stall serving the pedestrian route Pedestrain route with public seating

Figure 9.6 (3)

Figure 9.6 (4)

Figure 9.7 (1)

Figure 9.7 (2)

BEDDOE

MARSHA LL

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St Albans Type Dwellings Above

Werribee Type Dwellings Above Unit

Unit Unit Carer’s

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Shared Surface Basketball Court

Community Hq Room/ Public Square Cafe

Route To Monash Medical Precinct Care Hotel Rooms Above

RY ROAD

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Figure 9.7 (3)

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STH PRECINCT - GFA

Figure 9.7 Beddoe Avenue Precinct, Monash University, Clayton Campus, 2017. Diagrams: showing indicative development parcels for south and north precincts. Within what is perceived as a plausible, medium-density infill development envelope compatible with surrounding fabric, a total of around 350 dwellings is possible over 75 standard suburban allotments, with a densification ratio of between 1:4 and 1:5 average across the precinct. Including ancillary and community spaces, around 40,000 square metres of floor area is represented in the scheme as shown. In order for this development to start, partnerships will need to be established and a program of community engagement take place between the university, community-housing provider(s), private developer(s), local authorities and surrounding landowners. All of this is possible, and a successful design-led pilot engagement process for such a precinct-scale transition has been simulated in previous infill precinct projects (refer Chapter 8). An institution or major ‘engine’ like the university might need long-term flexibility and may prefer to enter into lease agreements with break clauses to protect their future options on land use. On the other hand, housing providers do not need to own the land they build on to deliver a viable product and house those in need. Both the institution and housing associations have long-term strategic goals linked to nurturing holistic, sustainable and resilient communities, which have the potential to be aligned on interface sites such as this for mutual benefit.

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Notes 1 2 3

4

5

6 7

8

Raymond Williams, The City and the Country, Hogarth Press, 1973, London. Weidevogelhof, Pijnacker, The Netherlands. Architects: DAT Architecten, 2011. Client/service provider: Pieter van Foreest. A realistic and inclusive attitude toward mainstream suburban practices and rituals has been ongoing in Australia since the 1970s, through the work and observations of Peter Corrigan, Ian McDougall, Richard Munday, Carey Lyon and Peter Brew, among many others. Monash WinterFest and SummerFest music festivals—curated by Paul Grabowsky in partnership with local council and community. A comprehensive campus masterplan was developed 2011–15 (and is ongoing with updates), with an emphasis on pedestrian connectivity, legibility and quality of public realm spaces between buildings. Universities and their research environments are a key component of ‘National Employment and Innovation Clusters’, in Plan Melbourne 2017–2050. Combinations of universities and hospitals are frequently strategised as employment centres and drivers of economic growth—‘Health and Knowledge Precincts’—with evolved and expanding examples in Parkville and Monash Clayton, latent and emergent clusterings in outlying centres such as Frankston and Ballarat now appearing in official government policy and a 200-hectare newly created version recently masterplanned on the Gold Coast. For example, Melbourne University’s Parkville Campus and its changing relationship to the Royal Melbourne Hospital research precinct over time. For example, Monash University’s Clayton Campus. Many suburban shopping centres are similarly expanding and converting surface carpark to buildings with consolidated multi-storey parking, for example Doncaster Shoppingtown. Australian urban university campuses have already gone through this type of transition, with RMIT University in Melbourne and UTS in Sydney being mature examples. In the 1990s, RMIT University’s city campus removed its perimeter security line altogether, with the physical barriers of gatehouse and boomgates being replaced by swipe-card security at each building entry, allowing the public realm between buildings to be accessible 24-hours per day, and much more porous, open and natural pedestrian connection with the surrounding city.

Conclusion

As a Melbourne-based team, we embarked on this venture recognising that we had a situated view of suburbia—both its pleasures and its perils. We also knew that because of our country’s unusual history, commencing as a penal colony, this situation has made for an early, in some ways unique, and often pioneering, urbanisation. We understand that our culture, literary and visual, is marked by the ambition to make sense of suburban living. Knowing all of this we felt comfortable in what we were setting out to do; nonetheless, we scoured our mental horizons, revisiting the iconic historians and theorists who have shaped our mental space. And we visited projects overseas that seemed to offer new ways of looking at suburbia. In Part I—Living Together—we outlined the mental space that forms the platform from which we set out to design for a reimagined suburbia. We looked at the views of suburbia that we are surrounded by, many of them dismissively negative. We decided to concentrate on close observation of the actualities of individual instances of living in particular places, in particular plots, houses and yards. We designed from that base. But in order to do this close observing, we realised that we had to loosen up the deeply embedded mental pictures we have of what constitutes a house and a yard, what its proper subdivisions and arrangements are. We wanted to look at the poetics of suburbia from the ground up. To do this, we captured all the ways of making dwellings that history records and, in Chapter 2, we came to the realisation that there had been a spiralling development from undifferentiated space that gives its dwelling form by rituals rather than walls, through a long period of evolving spatial specialisation that seems to peak in the industrial revolution. As the information era advances, space became ever more undifferentiated and once again rituals—very different ones—held the key to an idea of the house for our times. Then in Part II—Parts and Pieces of Suburbia—we presented a series of designs that started with renovations (internal and external), moving on to single houses, to small groups of houses, to larger ensembles, streets and cul-de-sacs. In each case, we discussed examples from other places

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and other designers before we demonstrated our own designs. We captioned our drawings extensively, making our arguments about the enhancements we proposed. In Part III—Conflations and Combinations—we addressed what has emerged for us and others as the ‘missing middle’, looking for opportunities for higher-density infill and renewal of existing community assets. We proposed new links within the atomised structure of suburbia. And then in what may be our most challenging suggestion, we examined in full feasibility mode, ways of leveraging quality and complexity from the integration of suburban engines, such as healthcare facilities, shopping malls and university campuses. As before, we examined exemplars before presenting our own worked and designed proposal. As Lord Richard Rogers wrote: ‘Why can’t government itself adopt a joined-up approach to its own property and surplus land? Hospitals are suffering from the lack of affordable housing for their staff, why aren’t they using surplus land to tackle this? Railtrack’s successor body could make the most of surplus land around rail hubs to deliver high-density, highly accessible housing development for the public good, not simply the highest return. How can they be encouraged to embrace this brief?’1 We have design-tested the possibilities for improved living at the edge of a university campus. Partial edge solutions are being realised at different universities, as at the University of Cincinnati: At the University of Cincinnati . . . it was accepted that you could not beautify the campus and ignore its interface with the surrounding suburbs and (the university) has included various ‘pump priming’ strategies for neighbourhood development. Some of these involve funding facilities to support the educational and recreational aspirations of residents in run-down areas. Others have involved building whole streets of dormitories for students and housing for rent to staff and graduate students. The university has also joined an uptown alliance of local interests to restore a boulevard that had formerly led directly to the university . . . plans include five-year ‘forgivable’ housing loans (after five years have passed without property changing hands, the loan is forgiven) to staff who relocate to the vicinity of the university . . .2 This is exactly the relationship between policy reform and designing possible futures that this book advocates. Where might we design our way to further influence policy and its regulation?

UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI

RETAIL DISTRICT 2

RETAIL DISTRICT 1

UNIVERSITY GROUNDS NEW RESIDENTIAL PROPOSED RESIDENTIAL EXISTING RETAIL PROPOSED RETAIL PROPOSED COMMERCIAL

University of Cincinnati Master Plan, Hargreaves Associates; design from 2000, with ongoing implementation over two decades.

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Word Pictures for Future Design Investigation A Suburban Shopping Mall Today It’s a 40-degree Celsius day with a hot wind blowing across the city from the inland deserts. Snaking east to west across several consolidated city blocks is a suburban shopping mall. It has large tenancies at its two ends, entrances from the north and south, a few small tenancies towards the centre, where there is a cinema complex. Except for eateries that spill out towards the entrances, it presents a blank face. Surrounding the mall is a ring road and beyond that carparking. These abut the tree-planted verges of the city-grid roads. Beyond the northern and southern grid roads lie suburbs, stretching along roads towards the next towns. Along the spine road of the city lie other large box retailers. Would-be shoppers, one using a walking frame, wait for the lights to change so that they can reach the mall. Once across the road, they face a tortuous route through the carparks, which have central walkways every four bays. These are not linked to the verges. The pedestrians must cross many car lanes to reach them, and then eventually the pedestrian crossings that lead to the mall entrances. The cars are baking in the sun, very little shade is provided by the thin planting of small trees. On the radio and TV, there are regular warnings about the mortal dangers of leaving children and pets in parked cars on days like this. Consider the Winter Obverse It is wet and cold, with blustery winds. No one attempts to walk from the adjacent suburbs. Parkers circle looking for spaces and, when parked, struggle in the rain through parked cars towards the mall. Reimagined The Same Weather Conditions: Today The perimeters of the consolidated blocks are lined with terraces of apartments designed with flexible interiors. These apartments are inhabited by first-home buyers and ageing in place pensioners. The ground-floor apartments open onto small courtyards. The upper-level apartments have roof terraces. A continuous veranda runs along the treelined major roads, and this becomes a covered colonnade leading to the mall entries. The carparks are covered by shade structures supporting solar panels. Clusters of trees rise thickly at intervals. Drivers find their way to the mall by moving towards the colonnades. Walkers from nearby

Conclusion 183 suburbs are in the embrace of covered walkways as soon as they reach the consolidated block; and walkers from the perimeter housing are on accessible walkways as soon as they leave their apartments. The rezoning of the block by a development levy on the apartments has paid for these improvements. A body corporate governs the mall, the parking, the planting and the covered ways. Consider the Winter Obverse It is raining, but colonnades, solar panel structures and clumps of trees soften the blustery wind. People walk sheltered by the verandas; it is worth making the effort to walk from the nearby suburbs. Other Scenarios A Regional Hospital is Surrounded By Carparks Consider establishing long-life, loose-fit apron development around the perimeters and along the spines of the carparking. Some of this could be occupied by intermediate care clinics, medical practice surgeries, daycare lounges, housing for staff, housing for independently living elderly. An Airport is Surrounded By Carparks Much of the parking is for airport workers, who number in the thousands. Consider developing perimeter and spine long-life, loose-fit developments over the carparking levels, with pedestrian ways along highline-like landscaped walkways that lead to the airport’s various hubs. Offer ‘forgivable’ loans to workers who move onsite. The Sportsground is Surrounded By Carparks Consider developing perimeter and spine long-life, loose-fit developments above the carparking and creating new pathways for the crowds of spectators to arrive and depart. When the football stadium in Melbourne’s Docklands was planned, it was envisaged that the space around it would be in-filled with a mixture of medium-rise office and apartment buildings that would be serviced by the food and retail outlets that serve the spectators. This has happened, though the design has not quite lived up to expectations, the possibilities are manifest. Future work includes reflecting on the work of our reference groups in housing economics, procurement and the legal frameworks for inhabiting suburbia. What are the opportunities and what are the constraints that hedge in our ambitions to increase accessibility, social interaction and discreet support, greenery and interactions with natural

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systems, resilience in the face of heatwaves, droughts and floods? Can we decrease the segregation, isolation and buffering that divide monofunctional activities and entities from their surrounding suburbs? Can we decrease fear? We believe that our design innovations, from the smallest physical alteration that gives a dweller control over a patch of external space to the large cooperative initiatives that engage engines with their surrounding suburbs, herald new futures for suburbia, in which individual ‘republics of pleasure’ may aggregate to create commonwealths of enhanced living.

Notes 1 2

Lord Rogers, speech to The Observer Regeneration Conference, reported in The Observer, Sunday 21 July 2002. Leon van Schaik and Geoffrey London, with an essay by Beth George, Procuring Innovative Architecture, Routledge, 2010, London, p. 106.

Epilogue Shane Murray

In reflecting on this work, I want to consider three aspects of the continuing project of architectural research it describes. What are the origins of this research trajectory, how does this contribution extend and enrich this continuing project, and what will it need to address in the future? This book presents the contribution of key participants and their collaborators in a line of architectural research that has focused on the contributory possibilities of architecture directed to the question of our future housing. It has continually investigated how the form and understanding of this fundamental of our lives is inflected by social, technological and environmental transformation. The location of this inquiry has been the suburb, long-ignored and frequently disparaged in architectural discourse. The middle suburbs of the Australian city were chosen because they house a significant percentage of the Australian urban population. Also, due to the relatively high level of servicing, the suburbs are the best location for the type of urban intensification that will be required to solve the nation’s housing challenges and because they have been largely ignored as sites for this essential transformation. This research began at RMIT more than a decade ago, where I began a line of research that investigated how architecture could be applied to the challenge of developing more appropriate housing for the baby boomer generation as it transitioned into retirement. Rather than retirement, we could describe this period as a new type of alternation between working and not working, which might occupy a period equivalent to a traditional working life. ‘The Ageing of Aquarius’1 project focused on the presentation of spatial design knowledge contained in architectural precedents as a method of promoting innovation in housing provision. The context for the research was the general suburban condition of Australian housing, a territory largely ignored by most architectural inquiry and one that was characterised by small-scale atomised and traditional building and procurement processes that appeared resistant to architectural input.

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Issues deriving from an increase in dwelling-based activity that retirement will create and transitional modes of activity between work and retirement were largely ignored in housing provision at the time. Therefore, there was a need to conduct research into alternative forms of housing in urban housing markets that better met the needs of this important group. This was in a context where there was going to be a greater reliance on household resources and less on public provision. Retirement-based social interaction, shared use of open space for recreation, sharing of resources, including personal transport and household articles, and mutual caring and support were largely ignored, save for the narrow range of options offered by retirement village development at the time. This early work established key themes that we have subsequently pursued in the Monash Architecture Studio (MAS). These themes continue to influence our design approach to the question of housing our ageing population in locations that enable them to sustain their very important social connections. Flexible dwelling design that considers greater time spent in the dwelling and a complex range of activities, and the curation of thresholds, private and public space, that facilitates interaction, are continuing themes in the research. Additionally, how these can be achieved within conventional delivery models in middle-suburban locations that represent the locational preferences is an ongoing ambition of the work. This early research also led to a series of investigations of strategies that seek to achieve precinct-level transformations of suburban contexts through integrated infill strategies. Unfortunately, since then, little has changed and the Australian housing system, as with those in the UK and US, has failed to provide appropriate access to their housing products across a range of income levels, nor have they developed an appropriate range of typologies to recognise the diversity of household structures that now characterise these markets. In Australia, as with the UK, Europe and the US, housing affordability and growing rates of housing stress are reaching critical levels. In Australia commentators now speak of ‘the collective angst the country is experiencing over the future of home ownership and long-term housing security in Australia’.2 Continuing our remit to undertake research that explores architecture’s contribution to social and environmental sustainability at its core, this work maintains its focus on the dwelling and this book is evidence of that commitment. Focusing on the question of how we might house our ageing population more appropriately in suburban settings it provides a timely, rigorous and expanded development of our research efforts to date. Leon van Schaik contributes a broader understanding and historical underpinning to the nature of the contexts in which these designs are proposed. He provides a theoretical foundation to the enterprise, as well

Epilogue 187 as a critical agenda for the questions the research needs to attend to. Nigel Bertram’s architectural analysis extends on a number of earlier projects and themes and refines them through a scalar sequence of architectural inquiry that draws on historical precedent and contemporary exemplars and proposes more detailed solutions for age-appropriate dwellings. The work concludes with a proposition for an integrated age-friendly precinct that could be easily developed in a range of suburban contexts—in this case, a suburban engine adjacent to Australia’s largest university. While vivid in the collective memory of many Australians as their first experience of home, the suburbs have been largely ignored as a focus of architectural inquiry. Van Schaik provides a detailed insight into the evolution of the concept of the suburb and the suburban, observing that these descriptions first appear in the English language in the Middle Ages, predating many commentators’ location of the origin of the concept in the nineteenth century. Challenging the idea that suburbs began following the Second World War, he notes that Fitzroy was subdivided in 1850s and had a distinctly eighteenth-century cast, housing a complete range of income earners and corresponding dwelling typologies. Even the etymology of the word places it in a subsidiary relationship to its adjoining city. However, van Schaik observes that the suburb was not uniformly disparaged and that in the mid-eighteenth century, Horace Walpole ‘exalted the ideal of suburban living’ and subsequently authors such as Dickens addressed suburban living in a somewhat celebratory frame. While the suburb was increasingly maligned over the twentieth century, there have been some exceptions, with architects such as Victor Gruen, Jaap Bakema and Richard Neutra producing significant typologies for suburban settings. Despite this, contemporary commentary continues this dismissal of the suburbs. The suburb has often been described as a generic urban type common across new world settlements; however, van Schaik demonstrates that there are a number of characteristics particular to the Australian suburb. Rather than being characterised by the homogenous tract developments of the US, most evident in the Levittown examples, he points to the atomised highly varied nature of Australian suburban housing and the much more robust culture of individuality that pervades it. He argues Chartist immigrants drove this very Australian political impulse, fuelled by the desire to be as independent as possible. This, together with the nature of the local house building industry, leads to a more variegated range of interpretations of the Australian suburban villa and the treatment of its settings. From these observations, van Schaik develops a platform that reparates the suburb and lays open a number of positive trajectories for how we might reconsider its transformation. At the level of the dwelling, he introduces learning from both historical and contemporary precedents.

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At the root of his considerations is an inversion of what was once considered detrimental into potentials that resonate with our contemporary needs. The traditional suburban dwelling, together with its setting in a relatively generous allotment, is able to respond to contemporary needs for age-appropriate dwellings that call for a freeing up of the spatial subdivision of the dwelling. A reappraisal of its thresholds and a new type of attitude to what was once considered the detritus of domesticity has contributed to this reconsideration. Unassigned space in rooms and at thresholds, furniture and planting are now proposed as important adjuncts to an overall consideration of the dwelling, where the potential for social interaction and personal identity and control become key considerations for the overall design concept. These formerly unseen elements are presented in the various drawings and proposals in a manner that readmits them into the overall consideration of the architecture. At the same time, this avoids the rigid formality of previous formalist architectures by making ‘no attempt to design or guide aesthetically the inhabitation of the space’. Van Schaik points to the emerging awareness that the city today is not a hierarchical system, with a culture-generating core and a cultureconsuming periphery. As technology transforms the way, we think of location, propinquity and traditional hierarchies of centre and periphery, the authors claim everywhere is a ‘centre city of the information age’ and design examples of what this means for an ageing population. This is no longer the city spread thin but within suburban morphology resides unrealised opportunity for urbanity and ecological sustainability, as well as an innate permeability that can welcome new possibilities for generational integration. Within van Schaik’s overarching schema, Nigel Bertram develops a catalogue of the constituent elements of the suburban dwelling system, from the role of furniture to the composition of age-friendly precincts. At each scale he proposes the incorporation of architectural elements that maximise the potential for personalisation and social interaction. This work draws on previous research in the MAS studio, as well as exemplars from his architectural practice and local and international case studies. Bertram combines a careful architectural interpretation of the actualities of the existing suburban modes of habitation and reinterprets these over a series of scale-based components that together form a potential lexicon of how to reconsider our approach to alterations for accessibility and engagement, new detached dwellings and low-scale apartments. The material worked upon is the same as that of the generic developer, but in this case each element is thought out and considered for its potential to facilitate a more age-friendly approach. This lends the work a practical authority because it works with the elements of general housing, but with substantially more care and only a little bit more budget.

Epilogue 189 Bertram’s analysis begins by observing that the home modification industry is very large and claims a considerable portion of construction expenditure in Australia. While driven by the commercialisation of DIY culture, one of its most significant characteristics is its role in assisting the modification of one’s own environment as an expression of personal identity. He points out the ‘very human desire to modify and individualise one’s own environment’ is facilitated by the relatively generous space afforded by the traditional suburban dwelling on its own plot of land. This space allows for the construction of small elements—decks, sheds, barbeques and pergolas—that all contribute to the creation of an individualised domain. However, this potential for establishing personal identity becomes much more constrained at higher densities and more visible locations, where an individual’s actions are more likely to affect others. Despite this the architect has a responsibility to support this potential regardless of these more constrained settings. Another reason for beginning his investigation with the modifications and alterations is the growing need for these, as our existing dwellings require retrofitting for greater accessibility. The authors continually advocate for the fundamental principle of developing an architecture that maximises the potential for establishing self-identity and personal expression in the dwelling and its exterior thresholds. Moving from the scale of home modification and renovations, Bertram examines the room as a base unit in order to allow a different approach to how we might rethink the whole dwelling. Whereas the housing industry sticks to a set formula based on real estate value, here rooms are examined for dimension and proportion on the basis of how they will be used and what is the most appropriate spatial strategy for their use. This way of approaching a rethinking of the individual house type leads to a catalogue that features different spatial arrangements and possibilities based on the fundamental unit of the room. In this scalar progression, small multi-unit development typologies or ‘six-packs’, as they were once colloquially referred, are investigated. These were small apartment ensembles of six to eight dwellings that could be accommodated on a conventional suburban allotment. They gave little back to their contexts and were dominated by carparking and bitumen, with stair access to upper levels and minimal landscaping or architectural quality. However, the typology has much to recommend it, as three levels can easily be integrated in middle-suburban street contexts. On this basis, the six-pack was given a contemporary makeover to produce an apartment that would normalise the provision of age-friendly housing within suburban fabric and also provide a greater opportunity to enhance landscape values, as well as increasing density. Conceived as an assemblage of warehouse-like apartments, the research team applied considerable design intelligence to maximise passive sharing and casual

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codependence, in order to reduce isolation and provide for more opportunities for interaction. MAS have examined the dispersed retirement model over a number of iterations. The retirement industry itself has flirted with this idea as it finds itself thwarted in land assemblage in inner-urban areas. Bertram concludes his scalar investigation with a design proposal that develops this early work and provides much more detail, as well as a team of committed proponents for an integrated age-friendly precinct. This is woven into the existing fabric of a middle suburb adjacent to the ‘suburban engine’ of a large university campus. This project is an opportunity to incorporate all the scales of the research and propose a fully fleshed-out approach to age-friendly and activated suburban intensification. This project also gives veracity to the concept of the suburb as a field populated by what the authors describe as ‘significant suburban entities’. Shopping malls, universities and health precincts are of a scale where they act like small cities in relation their hinterland, providing amenity and public realm experience, as well as employment. By integrating this proposed ageing precinct with the university, a range of mutual benefits are established, and the open weave of the suburb provides an advantageous armature to grow the potential of the exchange between the university and its transforming suburban context. Throughout this book, the authors have argued for an approach that maximises the potential for social exchange. Every architectural element is considered and redesigned to maximise its potential to facilitate this exchange. Furniture porches, windows, ramps and gardens are marshalled to this purpose, particularly at boundaries and fences. They argue that this is a fundamental social aspect of liveable cities, especially important for the elderly and those who spend a large amount of time in their home. This approach is supported by a number of studies that investigate the mental health of the elderly and those living with disabilities and who are susceptible to social isolation. They also demonstrate through design proposals and case studies an argument for a more subtle and multivalent integration of function, image and impression for the facilitation of accessibility. This approach seeks to satisfy multiple criteria in the way we manage the thresholds between exterior and interior and the public and private realm. Small interventions such as ramps, garden beds and porches are rethought to form general armatures to be used by everyone as places to sit and gather. Beginning with the examination of furniture and small-scale infrastructure at the scale of human experience the authors believe that thinking up from these foundations improves suburban fabric at multiple levels. By 2050 Melbourne is expected to have doubled in population to approximately eight million people, accommodating 80 percent of the state’s citizens, and will be Australia’s largest city covering an area of

Epilogue 191 some 10,000 square kilometres.3 By that time 20.5 percent of the population will be over 65.4 Worldwide, we are witnessing astonishing urbanisation rates and most developed economies are on track to be 70 to 90 percent urbanised by 2050.5 Even higher rates of urbanisation are being experienced in developing countries, particularly Africa, where urbanisation is occurring without the benefit of industrialisation or appropriate employment structures. In all world cities, the challenge of growing inequality and the widening gap between rich and poor brings additional complexity to the question of housing. In Australia, there are approximately 200,000 new dwellings required for social housing tenants.6 A large number of these tenants are either elderly, physically or intellectually disabled or both. In the general population, housing affordability and the ageing of the population creates enormous challenges. Paul Karakusevic and Abigail Batchelor’s book Social Housing published in 20177 is the first on the subject to be published by the RIBA. Karakusevic observes that ‘after years of it being marginalised and viewed as an option of last resort, architects and designers are once again reengaging with the “social and public housing sectors”‘. As is in the case in Australia, a crisis of housing affordability has gripped the UK and the private sector has failed to respond or innovate to find solutions to this significant and growing societal challenge. Karakusevic observes that in the UK the will to respond is now with a range of different groups that have grasped the initiative. Local authorities, housing associations, cooperatives and various consortia of motivated residents are redefining social housing and affordable housing more broadly. These initiates have led to some of the first public housing projects in 40 years in certain areas and he believes there is a sea change in the ambition of the public sectors as a result of these motivated groups. In Australia, we are beginning to see some small movements in the direction that Karakusevic describes. The community housing sector is receiving more support and initiatives such as terminating cooperatives similar to the Baugruppen movement are starting to appear, bond aggregation is being developed for the community housing sector and partial mortgages and other alternative finance models are being developed. However, these initiatives lag far behind the UK and Europe. The real issue is that many of these initiatives are inconsequential at the scale of actual need for more appropriate housing and greater levels of access to it. Architecture traditionally speculates on the future. The discipline is replete with remarkable proposals, but not so effective in influencing the circumstances of how they might be realised. It seems that the next frontier for our research is to think through this impasse. We know what to do at the level of physical propositions and we have learned how to

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collaborate effectively. The work presented in these pages demonstrates a range of carefully considered proposals that are extremely plausible and which in most instances could be realised immediately. A number of the projects are teetering on the verge of realisation. The proposed Gertrude Street flats have been submitted for a planning permit and there is a real desire by our partner Housing Choices Australia to realise this project. Similarly, the Monash Clayton project for an integrated age-friendly precinct has had a sympathetic response from the university and accords with the institution’s remit to ‘meet the challenges of the age in service of national and international communities’.8 The question will be if the more optimistic context for housing initiatives in the UK and the small advances beginning to appear in our local contexts will be sufficient to redress the alarming global trend we are witnessing in reduced housing access. Looking to the future, it seems important to ask if architecture can work beyond its traditional disciplinary confines and begin to infiltrate and influence the circumstances of its delivery. Our training uniquely qualifies us to think in an integrative way and this is a skill that could be applied beyond traditional architectural destinations. If we are going to do this effectively, we will need to inculcate the value of such an endeavour in our students and young researchers. This is much harder than it sounds. For all of the contemporary ambition of architecture schools to produce a new type of urban professional equipped to step up to these challenges, our deportment and ingrained attitudes tell our young charges we don’t really believe it. My dream for the future direction of this research would be that it will be joined by new types of graduates and researchers, some who pursued the important career pathway of the architect/practitioner, and others who were motivated by their educators and, through a more flexible approach to their education, to become policymakers, urban managers, development financiers or treasury bureaucrats. Imagine if such a group could unite in the contributory possibilities of integrative design thinking applied to this enormous challenge.

Notes 1

2 3

4

Shane Murray, Mike Berry and Peter Downton, The Ageing of Aquarius: Designing new housing solutions for Australia’s baby-boomers, Australian Research Council grant, RMIT University, 2002–3, Melbourne. http://architectureau.com/articles/housing-affordability-in-focus-what-canarchitects-do/ Victorian State Government, ‘Victoria in Future 2016: Population and Household Projections to 2051’, Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning, 2016, Melbourne. Ibid, p. 13. In 2011, 13 percent of Melbourne’s total population was aged 65 or over.

Epilogue 193 5

6 7 8

United Nations, World Urbanization Prospects: The 2014 Revision, Highlights, United Nations, 2014, New York, pp. 20–5. On average, the more developed regions of the world will be 85 percent urbanised by 2050. More developed regions comprise Europe (82 percent urbanised in 2050), Northern America (87 percent), Australia/New Zealand (92 percent) and Japan (98 percent). AIHW, ‘Housing assistance in Australia 2016’, Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2016, Canberra. Paul Karakusevic and Abigail Bachelor, Social Housing: Definitions and Design Exemplars, RIBA Publishing, 2017, London. ‘Focus Monash’, Monash University Strategic Plan, www.monash.edu/about/ who/strategic-plan.

Project Credits

Monash Architecture Studio All projects led by Nigel Bertram and Shane Murray, unless otherwise indicated. Infill Opportunities 2011 Commissioned by: Office of the Victorian Government Architect Collaborators: Diego Ramirez-Lovering, Lee-Anne Khor Research assistant: Byron Meyer Processes for developing affordable and sustainable medium-density housing models for greyfield precincts 2015 Funding body: Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) Collaborators: Lee-Anne Khor, Catherine Murphy, Peter Newton, Steve Glackin, Tom Alves, Rob McGauran Research assistants: Byron Meyer, Deborah Rowe Mallawa Court, East Devonport 2015 Industry partner: Housing Choices Australia Research assistants: Holly Board, Deborah Rowe Gertrude Street, St Albans 2016 Industry partner: Housing Choices Australia Research assistants: Holly Board, Deborah Rowe Rosella Avenue, Werribee 2016 Industry partner: Housing Choices Australia Research assistants: Holly Board, Deborah Rowe

196

Project Credits

Beddoe Avenue Precinct, Monash University, Clayton Campus 2016 Funding body: Housing WA Collaborator: Lee-Anne Khor Research assistant: Byron Meyer Accessible Garden House, northeast Melbourne 2017 Industry partner: Housing Choices Australia Research assistants: Holly Board, Deborah Rowe, Helena Harry Redcliffe Connect Monash Architecture Studio and Geoffrey London (University of Western Australia) 2017 Funding body: Institute for Safety, Compensation and Recovery Research (ISCRR) Research assistant: Helena Harry Gym House, country Victoria 2017 Funding body: Institute for Safety, Compensation and Recovery Research (ISCRR) Research assistant: Helena Harry Swamped: Future water scenarios for Elwood 2017 Funding body: Co-operative Research Centre (CRC) for Water Sensitive Cities Collaborators: Catherine Murphy, Diego Ramirez-Lovering, Monash University Master of Architecture students Research assistant: Rutger Pasman

Index

Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations and related captions.

Adams, Rob 57–8n11 Airbnb 41 Alexander, Christopher 31 Alexander Miller Memorial Homes 24, 26, 45–6, 45 apartments: aged-focused and independent 108, 109; architectural and communal identities 100–1, 102–4; co-housing 105; ‘dual key’ 57n5; mixed tenure 105, 106; residents’ attitudes 99–100 Arkley, Howard 11 Australia: adaptive design 32, 33; attitude to suburban development 157–8, 178n3; demographic and housing challenges 191; housing availability issues 186; housing design preferences 23–4, 59–60, 157, 187; Melbourne’s suburban origins 9; neighbourhood watch schemes 144; post-war suburbs and housing 13, 14, 16–17; redundancy and changeable space 24, 26, 27; Robin Boyd’s perspective 11; Small Homes Service (The Age) 14, 16, 61, 78n5; supported living models 42, 45–6, 45–6; supported living renovations 50–5, 56–7 Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) 3, 124–7 Australian Ugliness, The (Boyd) 11 Bakema, Jaap 13, 187 Baracco and Wright Architects 67, 76 Batchelor, Abigail 191

Baugruppen model 140 Bertram, Nigel 187–90 Boyd, Robin 11, 14, 78n5 Breathe Architecture 140 Brisbane: community identity, Torbreck 100, 104, 105; mixed tenure apartments 105, 106 Brisbane Housing Company 105, 106 Britain see United Kingdom (UK) buffer zones: forms and implementation 41; local planning preferences 96, 96n11; Melbourne’s middle/outer suburbs 132; suburban engines and diversification 161 Canberra: Dickson Centre 14, 19; landscaping, private/public 117 Carter/Tucker House 31 Case Study House program 14, 15 Cather, Willa 59 Chartists 9 Chinese sleeping space 29 Cities in Civilisation (Hall) 7 co-housing 105 community capital 39 community living: architectural identity and shared belonging 100–1, 102–4; co-housing 105; mixed tenure apartments 105, 106; monitoring schemes 27; neighbourhood watch 144, 155n14; non-prescriptive landscaping 27, 89, 91, 96, 100, 110; renovation, inspirations and violations 39–40 corridors, impact of 29

198

Index

Crist, Graham 41, 42 cul-de-sacs 117, 119, 120 DAT Architecten 105–7, 107 Davis, Mike 12 Dickens, Charles 9, 11 Druot, Lacaton and Vassal Architects 24, 25 ‘dual key’ apartments 57n5 Edinburgh tenements 99 Eichler Homes 14, 16 England see United Kingdom (UK) ergonomics 31 Euro-Landscape 13 exurbia 11–12 Fasham Builders 14, 17 Fox, Paul 11 France: attitude to development 157; redundancy and changeable space 24, 25 future design investigations: airport and worker housing 183; hospital and site expansion 183; sportsgrounds, housing and services 183; suburban shopping mall 182–3 Gandelsonas, Mario 7, 11, 12, 20 gentrification 131 Germany: aged-focus independent apartments, Stuttgart 108, 109 Gordon, John Alexander 78n6 ‘greyfields’ concept 57n9 Griffin, Walter Burley 64 Gruen, Victor 12–13, 14, 187 Gunn, Graeme 14, 17 Hall, Peter 7 Halligan, Marion 13, 21n21 Harper, Laura 41, 43 Harrison and White Architects 32, 33 Heidelberg: house design comparisons 62, 133; single house design 64 Housebrand, adaptive buildings 32, 32 house design: house type and valuation 59, 77n3; idea of the house 59–60; knowledge base, building of 23–4, 179–80; modernist ergonomics 31; redundant, multi-functional space 24, 25–6, 188; ritual, functionality

and adaptive occupation 28–9, 28–30, 31; space-dividing furniture 32–3, 32–4; undifferentiated space, design questions 34–5 Housing WA 138 idiorrhythmic clusters 109 Infill Opportunities project: density improvements 138, 138–9; single house, alternative design 68–9, 69–73 Japan: house design 34; Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa 34; neighbourhood sub-precincts (cho) 144; single room house 63–4; single volume halls 28–9, 28 Jefferson, Thomas 9, 29, 30, 36n18 Job and Froud architects 100, 104, 105 Karakusevic, Paul 191 Kazuyo Sejima and Associates 63 Klopper, Brian 101, 104 Kong, Allen 24, 26, 42, 45–6, 45 Koolhaas, Rem 20 Lacaton and Vassal Architects 27, 67, 76 Lawson, Howard 100, 102 Le Corbusier 13 Lee, Terence 20 Lerderer Ragnarsdottir Oei Architects 108, 109 London, Geoffrey 140 ‘long-life-loose-fit-low-energy’ concept 76, 78n6 Mahoney, Marion 64 Medieval Europe: box/Dutch/closed beds 29, 30, 31; single volume halls 28 Melbourne: accessible garden house 50–2, 56; Beverley Hill Flats, South Yarra 100, 102; Cairo Flats, Fitzroy 100–1, 103; city expansion 12; demographic challenges 190–1; design project, Rosella Avenue, Werribee 110, 111–13; Fasham Builders 14, 17; Gertrude Street, age-friendly housing 88–9, 90–5, 96, 192; growth boundary changes 10; Merchant Builders 14, 17, 117; National Employment and

Index 199 Innovation Clusters 178n5; plots, densities, and house typologies 80–1, 81–2, 83, 84–5, 85; precinctscale infill project, Elwood 151, 152–3, 154; precinct-scale infill projects (N & E suburbs) 146, 147–9, 151; retrofitting program 57–8n11; shopping mall’s public realm role 160; streets as public space 116; suburban origins 9; urban form 132 Merchant Builders 14, 17, 117 middle and outer suburbs: building design, buyer input 140; carspace and access, planning impacts 133–5, 135, 138; contiguous allotment, infill opportunities 136–7, 138, 138–9; density and diversity improvements 138, 140, 141–3, 191; expansion patterns 131–2; Melbourne’s urban form 132; ‘missing middle’ dwellings 140; neighbourhood watch and care networks 144, 144–5, 146, 155n14; plot autonomy and infill developments 132–3, 133–4; precinct-scale infill project, Eastern Melbourne 146, 149; precinct-scale infill project, Northern Melbourne 146, 146–8; precinct-scale infill project with flood issues 151, 152–3, 154; social housing, disaggregated pattern 138, 154n6 migrants and housing choice 60, 100 Monash Architecture Studio: flexible dwelling design 186; precinct-scale infill development 136–7, 138, 150–1; research relationships 3 Monash University: Clayton Campus diversification project 164–78, 165–6, 170, 192; ‘Health and Knowledge Precincts’ 161, 178n5; public realm enrichment 161, 178n4 MTRN Architects 46, 46 multiple dwellings: aged-care complex and group hospitality 105–7, 107; apartment living, attitudes to 99–100; architectural identity and shared landscaping 100–1, 102–4; co-housing apartments 105; community focused design project 110, 111–13; mixed tenure

apartments 105, 106; rooming and boarding houses 102, 105, 114n4 Murray, Shane 41, 42 Nation Fender Katsalidis 57n5 Neeson Murcutt Architects 120, 121 Netherlands: aged-care complex and group hospitality, Breda 105–7, 107; aged-care focused community housing, Pijnacker 158, 158–9, 160; Amsterdam’s street space 123; ‘Fokus’ Remote Monitoring and Living Support, Weidewogelhof 144, 144–5, 146, 155n16; Stadtstheatre, Almere (SANAA) 34 Neutra, Richard 13–14, 187 Nightingale model 140 Nishizawa, Ryue 64 NMBW Architecture Studio: changeable space and furniture 24; Core House project and applications 75, 77; North Melbourne House 74, 75; Sorrento House 65 Officer Woods Architecture 120, 122, 122 Overend, Best 100–1 Papstergiadis, Nikos 131 Perth: Fabrik Townhouses, Freemantle 101, 104; Ferndale culde-sacs 120; social housing, infill development 136–7, 138, 150–1; transport and facility integration 158 place, individual contexts 20 privacy, design adaptions: landscaping, private/communal 45, 45; multiple dwellings 101, 104, 109; single room house 64; small groupings, age-friendly housing 87–8, 87, 97n11; social differentiation furniture 28–9, 34 Ramirez-Lovering, Diego 41, 42 redundancy and changeable space 24, 25–6, 27, 34, 188 renovation: do-it-yourself (DIY) culture 40, 57n2, 189; family dynamics and economic factors 41, 57n5; resident inspirations and

200

Index

violations 39–40; retrofitting issues 46–7, 189; subdivision, potential uses 41, 42; supported living models 41–2, 43–6, 45–6 renovation projects: accessible garden house 50–2, 56; accessible zone and rehabilitation 53–5, 56–7; cluster apartment adaptions 47, 48–9, 56 research study: aims and objectives 1–2, 182–3, 191–2; methodology 3–4, 179–80 retirement living, provision research 185–6 RMIT University: design practice research 3; public realm enrichment 178n8; ‘The Ageing of Aquarius’ project 185–6 Rogers, Richard, Lord 180 Rossi, Aldo 23 Rotterdam’s Lijnbaab 13, 14 Ruscha, Ed 11 Sakamoto, Kazunari 34 SANAA 34 Schindler, Rudolph 13–14 Scott Brown, Denise 12 Sebald, W.G. 31, 59 shopping malls: Dickson Centre, Canberra 14, 19; future design scenario 182–3; Gruen’s designs in US 12–13, 14; public realm expansion 160, 162; regimes of care 14, 20 single house, alternative design: Core House project (NMBW) 75, 77; evolving design 60–1; flexible room configurations 61, 189; infill opportunities project 68–9, 69–73; interchangeable space 61, 67, 77; multiple rooms, interchangeable 61, 66; multiple rooms and circulation 61, 65; North Melbourne House (NMBW) 74, 75; single room house 61, 63–5; traditional and modern comparisons 62; warehouse shell 61, 67 single volume halls 28–9, 28 Six Degrees Architects 140 small groupings: freestanding townhouses 85, 85; plots and densities 80, 96n6; ‘six-pack’ flat developments 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 138–9, 189; suburban subdivisions 79; terrace housing 80–1, 81, 96n5

small groupings, age-friendly housing: bathrooms and kitchens 89, 93; core construction and access 88, 90, 91, 94; elderly focus within community 86–8, 189–90; interchangeable interiors 88–9, 92; landscaping, private/communal 86–7, 88, 89, 91, 95, 96; parking facilities 96 social housing crisis 191 South Africa: Soweto plot divisions 131–2; Urban Foundation aims 154n2 Space Agency architects 140 Stones, Ellis 117 streets and cul-de-sacs: cul-de-sacs, mixed perceptions 117, 119, 120; landscaping, private/public interaction 117, 118, 122–3; road building, impact on suburbs 115–16; street precincts, participatory development 123–4, 124–7; ‘streetscape’ 116; sustainability focused developments 120, 121; underused space regenerated 120, 122, 122 Stretton, Hugh 13 subdivision, potential uses 41, 42, 57n5 suburb, historical perspectives: aesthetics and critical appraisals 11–12; Australian individuality 23–4, 187; dictionary definitions 9, 11; ideogram, key theorists 8; literary accounts 9, 11; origins, conflicting versions 7, 9, 187; place, individual contexts 20; post-war housing design 12–14, 15–17; shopping mall design 12–13, 14, 19, 20 suburban culture: attraction and constraints 39–40, 157–8; ‘buffer zone’, form and impact 41–2; gentrification 131; road building impacts 115–16; technological transformations 188 suburban engines: aged-care focused community housing 158, 158–9, 160; attitudes to development 157–8; future design investigations 182–3; hospital and university site enrichment 160–1; precinct’s mixed use 161, 162–3, 190; shopping mall’s public realm role 160

Index 201 suburban retirement village 41–2 supported living developments and networks: accessible garden house 50–2, 56; accessible zone and rehabilitation 53–5, 56–7; agedcare complex 105–7, 107; aged-care focused community housing 158, 158–9, 160, 190; aged-focus independent apartments 108, 109; age-friendly housing, design project 56–7, 86–7, 86–9, 90–5, 96; cluster apartment adaptions 47, 48–9, 56; KeyRing living support networks 144, 155n15; mixed tenure apartments 105, 106; remote monitoring and care services 144, 144–5, 146, 155n16–17 supported living models: comprehending resident needs 109–10; ‘fenced’ retirement village 41, 42, 44; integrated buildings network 41, 43, 144; landscaping, importance of 42; landscaping, private/communal 42, 45–6, 45–6 Tasmania: elderly accommodation project 47, 48–9, 56; Hobart’s traffic issues 115 Taylor Soilleux and Overend 100–1, 103 The Age Small Homes Service 14, 16, 61, 78n5 T.I. Tech 144 Transport Accident Commission 46 Truganina, house design comparisons 62, 133 Tsukamoto, Yoshiharu 144 United Kingdom (UK): English ideal homes 157; KeyRing living support networks 144, 155n15; London’s North Circular Road 11–12; railways and suburbia 115; shopping malls 14; social housing crisis 191; Span Homes 14;

suburban development patterns 131; suburbs in Dicken’s writings 9, 11; Walpole’s country house 7, 9, 187 United States (US): beltways and freeways 12, 115; Case Study House program 14, 15; Eichler Homes 14, 16; frontyard interaction 123; Gruen’s shopping malls 12–13, 14; homogenous suburbs 131; Jefferson’s Monticello 9, 29, 30, 36n18; suburban growth, elitist fears 12; Sunset Strip, LA 11 university buildings and campus: creativity, supportive design 31–2; housing and services integration 165–6, 166–9, 180, 181, 190; National Employment and Innovation Clusters 178n5; public realm enrichment 161, 178n8 university campus, diversification project: age-friendly housing and service networks 170–4; campus site growth 164, 165; housing and service provision opportunities 166, 170, 175–7; residential and health precinct proposal 165–6, 166–9 University of Cincinnati 180, 181 University of Western Australia: precinct-scale infill development 136–7, 138, 150–1 Urban Foundation 131–2, 154n2 Van den Broek, Johannes 13 Van Schaik, Leon: ideogram of Suburbia 8; research contribution 186–8 Venturi, Robert 12 Walpole, Horace 7, 9, 187 Williams, Raymond 7, 157 Wilson, Peter 13 Wines, James 14 Wright, Frank Lloyd 13