Moving day

Click on the Logo below to continue through to the new look website

 

The Red +Black Architect started as an after-hours hobby in 2012. It was a platform to talk about architecture and the built environment in a straight forward way, such that the public could get an insight from an architects perspective. Five years on, it has achieved some extraordinary things. From discussions with leading architects and influential politicians through to coverage of major events and local controversies, The Red + Black Architect has provided a unique lens on the architecture scene in Melbourne.

This was only possible due to a confluence of factors for which I am incredibly grateful. It never ceases to amaze me how supportive Melbourne’s architecture community can be. To all those who have been interviewed, written guest posts, shared content, commented on or read articles, thank you. Particular thanks must also go to Olivia, Sonia, Justine, Alison, Peter and Stuart for your incredible support and encouragement.

Today is moving day. Having outgrown this free wordpress site it is time to turn the page. To kick off the discussion on the brand new website, is the Atelier Red+Black entry into the 2017 NGV Architecture commission.  The new refreshed website is live and can be found at:

www.TheRedAndBlackArchitect.com

Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy the next generation of The Red+Black Architect

Architecture is for everyone

 

PS

If you are currently a subscriber to this site you can renew your subscription by entering your email address here www.theredandblackarchitect.com/subscribe/

Turning the ship around

2017 marks five years of substantial and sustained cultural change within the Australian Architecture profession. On this International Women’s Day it is timely to reflect on how far we have come towards a diverse profession, as well as how far we have still to go.

In May 2012 the website Parlour: Women, Equity Architecture burst onto the scene. Armed with a potent mix of rigorous scientific data and digital media savvy, it demanded attention from all levels of architectural practice. It could no longer be argued that architecture didn’t have a gender problem, all that was left was to figure out what to do about it.

“It is a debunking project in that it is trying to show the realities of everyday life at work in architecture, not necessarily the kind of glamourous public image, but at the same time there is a lot idiosyncrasy and pleasure, fun and sense of community that happens in architecture where everyone is working together on a common project and really committed. You can see that in the images of people and also workplaces and the minutiae of everyday life of women in architecture” Dr. Naomi Stead
(Photo Phuong Le, from Portraits of Practice Exhibition by Parlour)

 

In 2013 Parlour hosted perhaps its most pivotal event to date, Transform: Altering the Future of Architecture. The central question of this full day seminar was: If architecture were more inclusive would it also be in a stronger position? This broad ranging question intentionally made diversity everyone’s business.

Transform was also the debut of what eventually became the Parlour Guides for Equitable Practice. This award winning and internationally significant publication takes individuals and practices through the major causes and resolutions of inequality in architecture.  These guides have had such an impact, that the American Institute of Architects is now beginning to look at producing a similar set of guides for their own members.

Perhaps change over the last five years has been most notable in the Australian Institute of Architects itself. In 2013 the Institute announced its new Gender Equity Policy and a National Committee for Gender Equity. This triggered a raft of changes within the AIA, some subtle, others more obvious. There have been CPD events, media interviews, policy reviews and a new national award: the Paula Whitman Leadership in Gender Equity Prize. This award was presented for the first time two weeks ago to Catherine Baudet, who has been advocating strongly and effectively for gender equity for well over 30 years.

The Institute has also undergone a substantial change of leadership. From May 2016 Jenifer Cunich, the Institutes first female CEO has been at the helm. Supporting her is a new board of directors, which will at all times have a minimum of three men and three women to ensure gender diversity.

There is a familiar saying that ‘if you can’t see it, you can’t be it’. Looking across the key positions in 2017 it is clear that regardless of your gender you could be anything from the State Government Architect, to the CEO (or board-member) of the AIA or the Registrar of the ARBV.  This is a substantial difference to just five years ago.

So after five years of substantial change, where are we now at? Have we turned the ship around? It would certainly seem that there is more awareness within the profession of ethical work practices and gender equity issues. Parlour has also reported an increase in the numbers of women registering as architects. Between 2012 and 2014 there was a 16% increase in the number of female registered architects, bringing the percentage of female registered architects in Australia from 20.5% to 22.2%. (source). These percentages identify two aspects to the progress so far. Firstly that things are going in the right direction, but secondly that there is a long way still to go, given that universities graduate similar numbers of men and women.

Dr Naomi Stead and Justine Clark from Parlour

In 2017 it is also clear that there is substantial and growing interest in all manner of social justice issues within the architecture profession. Earlier this week at Process, the monthly forum aimed at graduates and students of architecture, over 200 people turned out to hear an all-star panel of women discuss gender equity, diversity within the profession. After five years of active discussions within various architecture forums, there is no sign of ‘issue fatigue’.

What these discussions are revealing however is the huge next hurdle that awaits us, cultural diversity. Without in any way slowing down, or diverting from tackling gender inequity, it is being understood that we have to start taking on this issue. As Parlour has shown us already, step one is to get the data.

 

“There has never been a more exciting time to be an architect”

Dr Karen Burns

 

Architecture is for everyone

Melbourne’s White Night 2017

Once again Melbourne has turned it on for the spectacular cultural juggernaut that is White Night. A crowd of around 600,000 took part in the all night festival of projections, performances, artworks and installations.

Stealing the show again this year was the extraordinary projections upon the Royal Exhibition Building.  The Light show entitled ‘Rhythms Of The Night’ by White Night & Artists In Motion, depicted the four stages of sleep. These fantastical scenes were at times like that of a Halloween nightmare, with spiders and skeletons. The dream would them move on by disintegrating into vibrant black and white patterns reminiscent of MC Escher.

Supporting this main event, were a number of excellent installations throughout the Carlton Gardens Precinct. Sailing in between the Melbourne Museum and the Royal Exhibition Building was ‘The Pyrophone Juggernaut’. Part steel pirate ship, part musical performance, part pyrotechnic show this collaboration between Hubbub Music and Strut & Fret was a real crowd favorite. Nearby, the Sonic Light Bubble by Eness and Pixel Fruit by Tim Newman both created valuable support pieces to this precinct, which as a whole was a significant improvement from previous years.

Sonic Light Bubble by Eness

Sonic Light Bubble by Eness

Sonic Light Bubble by Eness

Pixel Fruit by Tim Newman

Nebulous by Alex Sanson

The Royal Exhibition Building annomated with ‘Rhythms Of The Night’ by White Night & Artists In Motion

The Royal Exhibition Building annomated with ‘Rhythms Of The Night’ by White Night & Artists In Motion

The Royal Exhibition Building annomated with ‘Rhythms Of The Night’ by White Night & Artists In Motion

The Royal Exhibition Building annomated with ‘Rhythms Of The Night’ by White Night & Artists In Motion

The Pyrophone Juggernaut Hubbub Music in association with Strut & Fret

The Pyrophone Juggernaut Hubbub Music in association with Strut & Fret

In Flinders Street, the ‘usual suspects’ between St Pauls Cathedral and the Forum Theatre were lit up with vibrant animations. This year the theme was ‘Fractured Fairytales’ which gave some traditional fairytales a Pop Art feel.

Fractured Fairytales by White Night with The Electric Canvas

Fractured Fairytales by White Night with The Electric Canvas

Fractured Fairytales by White Night with The Electric Canvas

Flinders Street in party mode

More Than 1 Nation by The Electric Canvas in collaboration with The Pitcha Makin Fellas

In the southern gardens, participants were greeted with any number of unusual sights and experiences. The White Knight Messenger, a superb piece by Blanck Canvas, patrolled St Kilda Road, moving majestically between the Elm trees.

The Bouquet Toss, Mitch Gow and Eloise Kent

Echinodermus by Tilt

Intrude by Amanda Parer

SPHEROPHYTE by Alex Sanson

The White Knight Messenger (A Blanck Canvas), patroling St Kilda Road

Another White Night favorite is the State Library of Victoria which was illuminated both outside and from within the reading room. This year punters were taken on a trip beneath the waves, to view the seascapes of Port Phillip Bay. Seals, Seahorses and a swarm of crabs all made for a surreal library experience in the middle of the night.

Outside the library a group of protesters took the opportunity to make their views known on the City of Melbourne’s homeless ban. Their protest was peaceful and undertaken with great respect.

Seadragon’s Lair by Sheree Marris, Lisa Greenaway and John Power, in the State Library of Victoria

Protesting the homeless ban

The Night Garden by Lisa Greenaway, Nick Azidis and Rose Staff

Perhaps no building is more suitable for dramatic projection than the National Gallery of Victoria. The smooth bluestone facade beyond the rippling water fountain could make any moving image sing. This year the fashion designs of Victor and Rolf were chosen to bring the colour and style. Whilst it probably didn’t live up to the highs of last year, it remained a spectacular contributor to the evening.

Not all parts of the program were brilliant successes. The illumination of the Coops Shot Tower at Melbourne Central was quite underwhelming and the limited scope of the Flinders Street Station projections (although high in quality) would have disappointed some.

VIKTOR&ROLF – INSIDE OUT by White Night with the Electirc Canvas

VIKTOR&ROLF – INSIDE OUT by White Night with the Electirc Canvas

VIKTOR&ROLF – INSIDE OUT by White Night with the Electirc Canvas

Overall White Night 2017 was another shining success for the arts and urban culture in Melbourne. Yet despite the 600,000 strong crowds and the crowding issues having largely been resolved, there is a determined force that is working to undermine this event.

Some sections of conservative politics are attempting to politicize the event as a law and order issue. This is being readily facilitated by some sections of the media who are continually pushing fear. If you were to read the Herald Sun at the moment, you might think Melbournians shouldn’t leave their homes for fear of certain death. The reality at White Night however that there were ample police available to respond to the slightest issue.

The White Night crowd size of 600,000 punters is roughly equivalent to the size of 6 Melbourne Cup crowds. Despite this huge number, there were just 21 police arrests. By comparison there were 9 arrests at the Melbourne Cup in 2016, well over double the arrest rate per patron.

There are always going to be incidents when there are large crowds at events, but to push fear for political gain, is petty and irresponsible. White Night is a celebration of our diverse society together, enjoying the vibrancy of our city, contesting ideas, experiencing culture and participating in urban life.

 

“Night the beloved.

Night when words fade and things come alive”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

 

Architecture is for everyone

2016: A fork in the road

It is hard to remain positive reflecting upon the year that is now rapidly drawing to a close. 2016 has been a difficult and particularly disliked year. To the despair of many, the world lost some of its cultural giants, David Bowie, Prince, Leonard Cohen and Mohamed Ali, to name a few. At times it seemed like a week could not pass without another icon leaving our midst.

Australian architecture also lost giants. Paul Pholeros AM the founder and driving force behind Health Habitat, Romaldo Giurgola the architect responsible for Australia’s New Parliament House, Stephen Ashton from ARM in his AIA Gold Medal year, and another Gold Medallist Peter Corrigan AM, from Edmond and Corrigan all left us in 2016. They will all be greatly missed for what they gave the architecture profession.

Many will look back on 2016 as the year of Brexit and Trump. The year great democracies chose building walls over building bridges. Australia, despite our geographic isolation, has not been left out of this reactionary, fear driven club. Our Federal politicians are building their own fence, around our Parliament House. The house Romaldo Giurgola designed as an expression of our democratic freedoms, is to be undermined by wire and steel, excising the building from the founding ideals of our democracy.

“Romaldo Giurgola designed this building so that you had very good access to the people – so it expressed freedom, it didn’t in any way express exclusivity. Putting a fence around it is putting a noose around it.” Glenn Murcutt

The popular thinking for the moment is that if we continue to build walls, fences, detention camps and surveillance we will eventually be able to isolate the good from the evil. We will be able to prevent unwanted people, unwanted ideas and unwanted change. Those within the sanctuary will prosper and those outside it, well who cares about them anyway.

New Parliament House by Romaldo Giurgola

This ideology of divisiveness will not deliver harmony nor prosperity. It will instead harbour inequality and resentment, which are at the very cause of the anger levelled against our democracies and the fear within them.

“The real work of an architect today is to have a vision of the future of life”
Jean Nouvel

As we approach a new-year we as Australians find ourselves at a fork in the road. Should we follow the United Kingdom and the United States down this dangerous path, or should we take the opportunity to boldly set our own direction? There is opportunity here if we want to seize the day. As the US and the UK move to reject their migrants, Australia should forge its own identity as a destination for the world’s talent. Melbourne is already a living breathing example of the benefits of a truly multicultural society, reaping the economic, cultural and social rewards.

Perhaps it is not up to architecture to change the world, however it can certainly aspire to reflect the very best of our society, rather than merely react to the climate of fear. As architects who wish to pursue this better vision, who better to turn to for inspiration, than our dearly departed giants.

In 2017 architecture should strive for compassion. The type of compassion that Paul Pholeros showed by working to achieve basic amenities for disadvantaged communities. As the gap between the rich and the poor continues to grow, so too does our need to provide environments where everyone can prosper. From well-designed housing solutions through to schools and community centres, our built environment is critical to providing a level playing field for all.

In 2017 architects need to grow bolder and more confident. The type of boldness and confidence that Peter Corrigan and Stephen Ashton showed was possible. We need to prove again to the community that it is ok to leave the tired tropes of the 19^th and 20^th century behind and push ahead into a future of our choosing.

Finally in 2017 our architecture should embody the ideals of our diverse society and of the democracy we live in. Romaldo Giurgola, a migrant from Italy, embedded this within our Parliament House, and in doing so, wrote a design constitution for our nation. We need to defend this constitution with future architecture that allows us to walk as equals, whilst tearing down the fences and barriers that divide us.

 

Architecture is for everyone

 

 

If you would like to support the Australian Institute of Architects campaign against the Parliament House fence you can sign their petition here

 

Thanks for reading

The Red+Black Architect will be back in 2017

Beyond Sculpture: Melbourne’s new Habitat Filter

In a city that boasts an impressive collection of freeway architecture and roadside sculpture, Melbourne’s new Habitat Filter looks to set a new benchmark in urban art.

The Power Street Loop has been an industrial by-product since the construction of CityLink by Transurban in the late 1990’s. This island site sits isolated inside a ring of bitumen and fast moving traffic, but is now home to Melbourne’s latest piece of urban art – Habitat Filter.

The project itself is the result of an open design competition held by Transurban. Landcare Australia were looking to re-vegetate and rehabilitate the site, whilst Transurban were also looking for a sculpture that would sit comfortably within the adjacent arts precinct.

Image from the winning competition entry by Drysdale, Myers + Dow

The winners of this competition are a tight group of design professionals each with their own complementary skill sets. Urban designer, Matt Drysdale and graduate of architecture Matt Myers both have strong architectural backgrounds, whilst Tim Dow who studied landscape architecture, also brings to the team substantial expertise in wayfinding and user experience.

The result is a collection of monoliths playfully interspersed around the site. During the day, the colourful pixelated cladding on the structures feather their colour as they reach for the sky. At night the angled forms suggest a critical reflection upon the apartment buildings of the Southbank skyline, as the lighting from within the sculptures mimic the lights within the buildings beyond.

“When initially designing the skin, the main focus was never really about colour or materiality. Rather the main priority was for the skins to have a layers of transparency, ensuring the forms blended into the landscape and wider context.”

Matt Myers

Habitat Filter at night, critiquing the Southbank skyline. Photo credit: Tim Dow

Whilst the monolithic forms and the vibrant colour pallet are bold and distinctive, the more functional aspects of the project are less obvious. For the design team there was a conscious decision not to just have a meaningless object in space, it had to be more than a ‘one liner’. As the name Habitat Filter suggests, the intention was to create habitat for birds, insects and other small creatures, whilst allowing natural vegetation to filter the air.

“We are interested in how the urban and natural environments interact. The form becomes secondary to the more the pragmatic processes of capturing [water and sunlight], filtering [air] and creating habitat”.

Matt Drysdale

Competition image by Drysdale, Myers + Dow

Sustainability was embedded within the brief of the competition. The steel and concrete used within the project contain high levels of recycled content. The lighting of the sculpture at night is powered by the integrated solar panels and the natural vegetation is maintained with rainwater collected on site.

When running the competition Transurban had to allow for the possibility of an artist winning the competition and had therefore arranged for the winning design to be documented and delivered by Tract Consultants. For design professionals accustomed to the process of documenting and delivering projects this might have been a strong point of contention. However Drysdale, Myers and Dow were relaxed about this process, having great faith in the team at Tract to deliver on their design.

“On any large project you need to be willing to allow a project to evolve.”

Matt Drysdale

Perhaps the most unusual aspect to this project is that within our city it is one of very few places where vegetation is encouraged and people are specifically excluded. Whilst Melbourne is fortunate to be well serviced with parks and vegetation it is very difficult to think of any other such space where people cannot visit. For some, such as the outspoken Lord Mayor of Melbourne, Robert Doyle, this is a missed opportunity. He described Habitat Filter as “too intrusive” and just “a road with some stuff that you look at”. The issue of pedestrian access is an interesting one that the winning design team did consider carefully.

“Our design response aims to facilitate an open discussion about the meaning of public spaces. By addressing sustainability on a number of levels, Habitat Filter provides our community with a living, breathing sculpture and an opportunity for education and cultural engagement. We encourage all contributions to this conversation.”

Tim Dow

Due to the nature of the site within the freeway context, pedestrian and public connection into the loop site was ruled out as an available option. This however creates a unique opportunity to provide dedicated space back to flora and fauna. A “human” free zone.

Habitat Filter with the sculptures complete, awaiting vegetation to grow.

Visiting the site today, whatever you might think of the sculptures, it is still just a work in progress. Whilst the built environment components are complete, the natural environment is only just getting started. Over time the steel mesh will be used as scaffolding for creepers to grow, and the bird boxes will become nesting spots for Melbourne birdlife. The true measure for this site will be how well the natural elements will thrive within the hostile setting that surrounds the site.

“It is not designed for today when it is opened, it is designed for five, ten or fifteen years down the track”

 Matt Drysdale

Photo credit: Tim Dow

The decision for Transurban to hold a design competition and invest in the built environment in this way is to be applauded. As a result of this commitment, our city has a new multifaceted sculpture that is a provocateur of thought, and a unique environmental refuge. As our city continues to grow and evolve, it will only become more important to allow spaces such as the Power Street Loop, where the natural environment can thrive alongside the built environment.

 

Architecture is for everyone.

Desivolution

Architecture is a reflection of culture. For architects, understanding and responding to culture through design is a critical part to achieving buildings that resonate with people.   

Architect and Atelier Red+Black co-director Sonia Sarangi, has been investigating the evolving Indian culture in Melbourne which has now led to a solo photographic exhibition at Magnet Gallery in Melbourne.  

The evolution of Indian culture in Melbourne is still very much a work in progress. Whilst many would be familiar with the butter chicken and Bollywood stereotypes, there is far greater diversity and depth to Indian culture than what is commonly portrayed. For Sonia, exploring how the Indian food scene was adapting and thriving within Melbourne was a window into this evolution.

 

“People call Melbourne the sports capital of the world, but I also call it the food capital. Melbourne has so many cultures, people here come from every single part of the globe. We have another restaurant in New York, however the Melbourne restaurant is the original. Usually trends come from the United States, however this is the other way around. One thing I can say, with my hand on my heart, is that Melbourne is way ahead of New York when it comes to food.”

Mani

Babuji, St Kilda

“Architects are trained to make unexpected connections and see patterns in daily life. So my interest was piqued by each of these new wave of establishments and I began to see the wider shift they are creating.”

Sonia Sarangi

The exhibition installation by Atelier Red+Black references the traditional Jali screens of India which often have triangulated geometry and abstract ornamentation. In India these screens are used to divide and define space. The reinterpretation of these screens for the exhibition uses them to frame the images, taking the artwork of the walls and placing them in the centre of the gallery space.

Desivolution is part of the Mapping Melbourne Festival, which is produced by Multicultural Arts Victoria.

The exhibition is at Magnet Gallery until the 15th of December 2016

Level 2, 640 Bourke St
Melbourne, Victoria,

For more information click here

 

Architecture is for everyone

 

The dark side of architectural education

Architecture is one of the most intense university courses one can pursue.  Chelsea Doorne, a fourth year Master of Architecture student, shines a torch on the dark side of the architecture student experience. 

Architecture school and dedication are synonymous, however more often than not, this devotion to the art of design comes at a cost.

A recent survey conducted by the Architects Journal documented that 1 in 4 architecture students are suffering from mental health issues, with a further 26% stating that they would likely seek treatment and professional help in the future. This is hardly surprising given that when searching ‘architecture student’, images of solitary students crouched over models are accompanied by a smattering of ‘memes’ depicting feelings of rejection, chaos, and most predominantly, forced insomnia. This deeply embedded culture of overworking and negativity is one of the primary reasons why mental health is such a prevalent issue within the architectural student community.

Long hours are one of the most recognisable traits of the architecture student community, with almost 1 in 3 students reporting that they work through the night on a regular basis. This common place experience of sleep deprivation within architecture school is widely known and also referenced by a number of blogs such as architorture school. Among students, stating your longest time awake can become akin to a competition, and often be seen as an implied level of success in the studio realm. This normalising of nocturnal study isn’t just supported by students, with there being an expectation to work throughout the night imposed by many tutors. The large workload of the degree, noted as being one of the heaviest, can also contribute to the frequency of ‘all-nighters’ with the design process demanding an unquantifiable number of hours. It is common for a designer to feel that the process is never truly complete, even when the final deadline has long passed. With one often feeling as though a large amount of improvements which can be made, unlike a finance report, for instance, which is completed when all the data has been entered.

The ever present threat of time, or lack thereof, is added to by the expectation of students to work part time in firms to gain experience and in the case of some universities, it is a requirement for graduation. In a course where, particularly at Masters level, most timetables demand the full five days of study, many students are skipping classes to satisfy these demands. The high requirement of these hours along with the prevalence of some internships that (illegally) pay in ‘experience’ over money, lead to many students experiencing financial difficulties throughout their degree. Although the job market for architects is currently looking positive, it is also highly competitive and many universities no longer offer study placement programs, making these positions increasingly difficult to secure. This stress of gaining necessary, yet difficult to find experience, coupled with the already stressful study period is a large contributing factor to the poor mental health of architecture students.

These monetary stresses extend into the cost of study which is notoriously expensive. While university text books are expensive across the board, the constant need to print and construct models can often blow an already tight student budget, with some models costing in excess of $300, and printing frequently exceeding $100 per presentation. These expenses (coupled with expensive software, computers and the cost of travel for site visits), can force many students to switch to a part-time load, adding time to an already lengthy degree.

“The overarching costs of the degree as a whole, when coupled with poor pay and employment prospects, paint a bleak outlook for the average architecture student.”

The critique or design review of the architecture degree is well known from day one in architecture school, and the negative stigma that surrounds it is intrinsically linked to the design culture. Design is not as simple as a yes or no answer that can be found in other faculties, such as engineering, instead, it is subjective, leading to confusion between a critic’s opinions versus how the project is received in the studio class among tutors. These critiques are feared throughout the faculty and many students accept that they will often receive a bad comment or a terrible review, regardless of the number of hours and effort devoted to a design proposal. Design is an intensely personal endeavour and is not too dissimilar to an art piece, with heart, soul, sweat and tears being poured into a project. This brings an additional intensity to the critique process and makes a negative reception much more distressing. To those students who are already suffering from mental illness, the toll can be devastating, particularly when coupled with running on little-to-zero sleep, often poor nutrition and an already volatile state of mind, this can only lead to negative outcomes for the student.

It is not uncommon to see a shift in the demeanour of students throughout the semester. Ask someone how they are in the early weeks is answered with an upbeat, “great”, or “looking forward to the semester” or something of the like. Ask the same person  in week 7 and you’re looking at a less than jovial response. They’re likely either “tired”, or just “fine”. This dramatic shift in attitude in less than two months is sadly commonplace among students.

One of the primary issues with this negative ethos of studio critique is that it is deeply rooted in architecture culture and widely accepted, if not expected. The critics of today do not feel it is an overly harsh response as they were treated the same in their time at architecture school, much like their tutors before them. It is normalised and expected that tears and breakdowns will follow a critique and this is where the issue lies. Yes, we need to be prepared for the inevitable future of practice which may involve an imposing director and a less than content client. However when students are learning, this breaking of their spirit through a ruthless critique does little more than demotivate and encourage a negative outlook in the architecture field, contributing to the low mental health state throughout the faculty.

Until this cycle of pessimism and demoralisation is broken, we can only expect that the mental health of architecture students will continue to be poor, particularly when a bleak economic outlook is added into the mix for future candidates.

 

Further reading:

http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/671226/Final-year-exams-university-stress-selfies-Nottingham-University

http://www.lifeofanarchitect.com/mental-health-awareness-for-the-architecture-student/

Professor Peter Raisbeck writes an excellent blog covering some of these issues

 5 ways architecture students can avoid a mental health meltdown

 

Important: If you are experiencing depression, anxiety or other mental health issues, make sure you get help from your general practitioner or organisations such as The Black Dog Institute or Headspace.

 

About the Author

Chelsea Doorne is a Masters of Architecture student and an architectural assistant at Atelier Red + Black. Chelsea can be found on Instagram @snarchitekt

Architecture is for everyone

Negotiating Form: Q+A with Kerstin Thompson (Part 2)

Recently Michael Smith and Sonia Sarangi sat down for an in depth conversation with Kerstin Thompson, one of Melbourne’s most highly respected architects, to discuss the built environment, form making and the relentless negotiation required to create excellent architecture.

This is the second part of the interview, to read from the beginning click here

Timber detail from Deakin University School of Architecture and Building, Kerstin Thompson Architects

 

Michael Smith: Previously you’ve spoken about your architecture as being a gradient architecture. Is this a conscious benchmark or is it a result of the process?

Kerstin Thompson: I wrote about gradients a long time ago – the thinking came from a classic late 80s training in architecture where all oppositions were being challenged. Anything that was black or white I was always looking for the grey. You think about things on a spectrum rather than one or the other. The article reflected on the kinds of formal outcomes a gradient architecture might offer. I think that idea still permeates through a lot of our projects where the situation presented is not an either or it’s an in-between and you need to formulate a response to that.

In relation to our Deakin School of Architecture and Built Environment / A+B this idea of gradients relates to different kinds of spaces and how they relate to each other. The school’s existing floorplan was highly cellular and comprised of discrete spaces. We shifted this to a more fluid arrangement, rethinking the formal binaries of public vs private spaces, smaller spaces to bigger spaces, intimate space/open space, quiet space/loud space. Exploring the space between these two ends is often an important driver our projects. You offer a range of spaces and it makes available different sorts of positions; people find their preference and make their choices within that.

MS: So it is a deliberate strategy to put that in?

KT: Yes I think it is. It came from when I was teaching in the early 90s at RMIT. I was doing my Masters and I became interested in all the figure grounds we used to do in black and white. I thought about what it might look like if you thought about a grey rather than black or white; what are these confused in-between things? Whether it’s the public/private conundrum of the shopping mall; what is that, that’s not a black or a white. Much later when KTA began working in heritage contexts we found ourselves needing to respond to neighbourhood character but we didn’t want to do this through direct imitation. There’s a way of transforming but also having some continuity with where you are. That’s an in-between. They were early examples in the practice and I think that’s something we’ve tried to build on.

Sonia Sarangi: That is a very rich approach and I can connect to that, but I wonder whether sometimes if that approach takes a bit more convincing. Our human nature is to look at black and white, you are picking the harder route.

KT: True. I remember years ago when we were working on the Upside Down House in Middle Park – that project was exactly that. There was a heritage listing on an existing house on the site but the house was in a very poor state structurally. Even though it had a listing on it the council said a case could be made to pull it down. However, we had to demonstrate that what replaced it would be a better outcome. We spent 2 years proposing various iterations but still had to go to VCAT because we couldn’t get council support. My argument was that while this building didn’t mimic the form of its neighbours, its holistic approach to site was entirely appropriate for the pattern of the neighbourhood. Form isn’t the only key.

Upside Down House section, Kerstin Thompson Architects

So much heritage discussion then revolved around whether you are either exactly like your neighbours or you’re a juxtaposition attempting to slam dunk the suburb. I explained it would be a subtle building that didn’t look like its neighbours but still had a quietness to it. But they didn’t believe me. Council wondered why would any architect be advocating for that? Well, because we’ve always maintained that a good building doesn’t have to stand out. Anyway, when the project was eventually built it ended up winning the City of Port Phillip’s local design awards for new house.

SS: It is a rich irony that Port Phillip obviously loved the finished building.

KT: They did. The reason they gave for blocking it was: “Kerstin we know you’ll do a reasonable job but this will set a precedent and then we could get bad versions of it.” Point being, I see it as council’s problem to stop the bad versions not the good ones. Anyway, when the jury came they drove past the house twice because they missed it. I said: “See I told you it was low key”.

MS: Do you see your architecture as being particularly Australian, or is this perception a by-product of integrating your architecture so successfully with Australian landscapes?

KT: That’s a really good question. I think we probably understand our work both within a local repertoire and a global one. Yes you have your local reference points and whether that’s contemporary peers or older peers. For example, Boyd and Grounds, Baracco + Wright and all that mob from when I grew up. More recently current peers I’d say NMBW’s interests, some of Michael Markham’s work for example. There are peers I have a great respect for and there are interests common to us. I think there’s the bigger global discipline and you’re always trying to situate your work within that but also draw from it too. There’s also the idea of acting locally with a building. Not so much in the formal sense of what an Australian building looks like but more that it does something to help place-make in its situation, and help reinforce valued aspects of the local condition.

It can also be more explicit than that. For our design for Ivanhoe House, for example, it felt important to draw on the incredible architectural heritage of the suburb. Neighbourhood character is one of the planning requirements but I don’t have a lot of time for that generic contemporary. Instead we looked to Harold Desbrowe Annear as a reference point knowing that he had a body of work in that suburb and also because it fitted with the client’s preference for a slightly arts and crafts type building. We thought let’s look to a local precedent with that being part of what we interpret for the building.

One of the other things I’ve noticed is that a lot of our buildings are very long and low. Sometimes, I think, this has stemmed from a desire to make sense of the vastness of the site. When you don’t have a defined site, you have to use the built form to define the territory. It started with the Lake Connewarre House but you can also see it with Marysville Police Station and Hanging Rock House. It’s where we’ve attenuated the buildings into length to help define the space around it.

It’s almost turning the building into a wall of sorts, and you use that to make it less about a figure and more about trying to harness a territory adjacent to it. Sometimes I think that might be a response to our bigness of horizon, our wideness and our flatness. It’s something I’d like to give a bit more thought to.

MS: You have done a few police station projects.  What I find interesting about that building type is that despite the substantial functional requirements and a consistent client, the finished buildings are diverse.

KT: That’s true. I have tried to write a bit about this because it goes back to that question around making an architecture of a situation. The police stations are a nice example of that because the brief is the same. Often people justify built forms through program, whereas if the program is consistent across, say four projects, then what varies the outcome? That’s been really fascinating to wrestle with. That’s where we thought interestingly form was one of those devices. Same program but how we arrange it has a really big impact on how it operates on its site.

With Marysville it gets dragged out. It’s a long building along the edge of a park and that’s because we wanted to create more interface with interiors of the station looking out to the green space rather than just a tiny little shop front and then a long deep plan. By contrast with Warrandyte and Hurstbridge, which were done together, they are both in green belt suburbs in Melbourne. To camouflage them in their landscapes, we took an approach to brick detailing that was friendly and endearing: to reflect the greenness of the communities we used green bricks. With Marysville, we used timber instead. Through formal differences, the arrangement of program, and material choices those buildings fit more appropriately to their situations. The situation is what changes in the brief. The program is the same.

Marysville Police Station by Kerstin Thompson Architects.
(Photo credit: Trevor Mein)

 

Marysville Police Station elevation. Kerstin Thompson Architects

MS: In addition to running a highly successful architecture practice you are also involved in architecture education both here in Melbourne and New Zealand. It seems that for the longest time the mantra of architects looking at the current education system is one of concern that it’s not what it used to be. How do you think our institutions are preparing the next generation of architects? Are they on track or do we need to shake it up?

KT: One thing I touched on earlier is the strange resistance to housing as an agenda for architecture schools. Some academics consider it too difficult, others that it’s got no speculative potential. But I think it’s strange in education for us to be resisting a major and important endeavour. Another issue is the enduring emphasis on the single author project in schools. I would still say that most studios run with about 20 students working in parallel, maybe on the same brief but individually. Something I’ve tried to do in my own teaching programs is set up opportunities for familiarizing students with a much more negotiated practice that I think architecture is and which I think has enormous design opportunity too. Studios where for instance there’s a very high level of interfacing of other student’s work in the outcome.

An example is a studio I did I think it was about 2004 at RMIT, I’ve since run different versions of it. There were 3 different projects. The first was about building a piece of infill. That’s simple interface, you just have to interface your site with the adjoining ones first thing. Then we bumped it up where it was a row housing project and if there was 20 students in the class they each did one of the houses in the row. They had two neighbours, they had a live, contingent interface that could change outside and they had to respond to that. That was the row house. Then the third part was when instead of just having 2 moving edges you had them in every possible interface on the QV site and they all worked out how they would Masterplan and organize the whole site now overlapping and moving through each other.

The point of all of that was to teach an appreciation for non-static context, which I think is in every way what practice is like every day. It’s contingent, you’re constantly getting thrown curve balls, and it’s how you negotiate and manage that and what you can extract out of it. I think that’s how good buildings come about. That’s a very valuable skill to have. The tragedy of architectural culture, and even the recent talk with Darren Anderson covered this, is how students do their final project at school and it’s as if it’s the greatest moment in their thinking and then they get into practice and it’s all depressing and downhill. That’s the exact opposite of what I think an architect should be thinking. I actually think you’ll get out of school and you’ll be so glad to have these real conditions to try and extract good architecture out of. I think it’s teaching an appreciation for the messiness as the potential and if you’ve got the tools to channel that then that’s where good architecture happens. I’d like more of that in education.

SS: I don’t think I ever heard the word negotiation once in my 5 years of education. That’s the sad thing and that’s every day now. That word just never comes up in school.

KT: It’s relentless. All you do is negotiate.

MS: Thank you very much for your time.

 

Architecture is for everyone.

Negotiating Form: Q+A with Kerstin Thompson (Part 1)

Kerstin Thompson is one of Australia’s most respect architects. Her practice Kerstin Thompson Architects was established in 1994 and has delivered architectural excellence across a broad spectrum of project types from education projects, police stations and commercial fit outs, as well as multi-residential and single bespoke homes. Recently Michael Smith and Sonia Sarangi sat down for an in depth conversation with Kerstin to discuss the built environment, form making and the relentless negotiation required to create excellent architecture.

Kerstin Thompson

 

Michael Smith: As one of Melbourne’s leading architects, how do you evaluate the development of our city? What do you think we’re doing well and where do we need to lift our game?

Kerstin Thompson: I often bang on about how housing matters because most construction activity is housing. If you get housing wrong you’re buggering up your city. In my teaching in Wellington, but also in my practice here, I often lead research around higher density forms of housing. Recently one of my thesis students did an interim presentation to an academic from Newcastle University on the topic and his comment was “it’s so unusual seeing thesis projects on housing. In Newcastle we think it’s too hard so we don’t encourage students to tackle it.” I thought what a failure not to ask students to think about a substantial part of the city’s formation.

MS: It’s an extraordinary approach.

KT: It is. I’m always surprised that housing is seen as a prosaic topic in universities, that it’s not viewed as a place for innovation and good thinking. I think we’re realizing that Melbourne, despite priding itself on its architectural cultural, is missing the mark in terms of housing quality. This crisis is reflected in the design of minimum standards but it’s 10 years too late. That said, any turnaround is something.

MS: That leads directly into my second question, which is exactly on those draft apartment standards. Are they a good result or a missed opportunity?

KT: They’re a good start. Minimum size always alarms me because I do think there are cases where size is not the determinant of a living space’s quality or public realm benefit. When I brought a group of students over from Wellington earlier this year we went on a   housing tour that took in Cairo Apartments – a classic case of where very small spaces can have an incredibly high level of amenity because of their relationship to garden or to outside. I know that’s a low density version compared to high rise but there are many cases to be made for small that’s well designed and meets a whole lot of other liveability criteria.

What I’m not sure about is how much needs to be discretionary or mandatory. I think you’ve always got to allow for alternatives and exceptions. By way of example, we’re currently doing a project in a suburb in the inner north that’s involved an interesting negotiation around the relationship of the development to a boundary setback. The local council has been ahead of the curve in developing its own apartment design code. The challenge for us was a section of the code pertaining to varied setbacks depending on a spatial use (bedroom, living room) and the height of the building (how many storeys). Essentially if you had blank walls and relied on borrowed light from other rooms it was a lot easier to meet the code than incorporating windows and having to adjust your setback. It was a classic case where you know potential quality is being lost if the code is followed. We thought it was more generous to have a 3-metre setback because every apartment in the scheme has a double aspect and maximum cross flow ventilation. That was a fundamental principle that directed all of the massing across the site. We weren’t reliant on this rear setback, it’s only secondary, but we know it’s better for those apartments and we also think it had some benefits for the future development of the adjoining side.

Council has obviously adopted the code for a reason but then you begin to see its unintended consequences. So begins a larger discussion around discretionary aspects and being able to espouse the merits of an alternative. That’s probably one of our big hurdles, that a level of expertise and resourcing is required within council to review individual designs. You can see why it doesn’t happen, but it’s only through challenging these codes that we find new ways of doing things.

We had a case, again I’m trying to be concrete, a few years ago with a site in Fitzroy which has a 2-storey heritage base. We felt that if we put the new building in line above that the development – compared to the usual wedding cake setbacks – would be more appropriate to the morphology of Fitzroy. Also, that a perimeter block development provided better internal amenity for the development because you could do dual aspect. Even though it defied all the usual heritage defaults of setbacks from the historic façade, we pushed really hard and eventually got council support.

So it becomes a question of constantly challenging the default and approaching projects from first principles, which sometimes means high risk because you are saying to your client I actually think questioning this will get a better outcome but it’s a less predictable process that we might have to go through. That’s the scary part because it’s on your head if it doesn’t work.

MS: So to summarize your position, the apartment standards are good but they can’t be definitive. We need to have people who understand the issues to be able to provide exceptions to the rules, where appropriate.

Kerstin T: That’s right, and the intelligence to recognize when a diversion from a default is a much better outcome. How you would measure a better outcome is you would always assess it within the development, but around the development too.

“Housing always has to have a level of mutual benefit for its situation.”

That’s another little test you apply. Yes it’s good for the development but as long as it’s not jeopardizing or offsetting a problem from your site onto someone else’s site.

MS: One of the biggest changes globally that we have seen in the last few years in architecture is the rise of parametric design. Do you see this as a style in itself similar to say art deco, or is it more simply a tool that some architects will use to explore complex forms?

KT: I think it’s really interesting. Recently I went to the talk at the Boyd Foundation by Darren Anderson, who wrote the book Imaginary Cities. His talk was about future visions and they necessarily tell you more about the present out of which they came. Also that future visions tend towards this idea of tabula rasa. That they’re often presented without any understanding or concession to the existing layer of stuff that will be there. They’re strangely outside of time. Anyway, the point in relation to your question was he showed many future visions for Melbourne and he dug up all of these extraordinary schemes. Some of which I’d seen before but others were really new to me. One of them was from the 70s that was a scheme done on the Jolimont Railway.

Sonia Sarangi: Yes, those are some really crazy schemes.

KT: The wildest form making. Except for the fact that it was rendered through hand, it was a hand drawing. It looked like the sorts of projects I’ve seen recently coming out of RMIT’s parametric studios. I found it fascinating. Partly because there were these direct formal parallels using an old technology and a new technology. It’s interesting in that it tells you it’s not necessarily the tool that’s determining the forms. He also showed Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower and you see this formal interest from early in the 20th century through to this one in the 70s in Melbourne. It’s interesting where there’s a formal intent and you just pick your tool to get to that.

The extent to which the tool can enable a new formal intent, that is something I’ve seen in the more innovative parametric studies, and again at RMIT, the thesis work there with Roland Snooks and his students. I think the possibility of these self-proliferating formal processes is really interesting. Revit, for example, which is more for the purposes of documentation and procurement benefits is not necessarily for a formal end. Why is that? Possibly because formally it doesn’t help our language or our architecture.

I will say that a long, long time ago, ’97 when we did an early project for RMIT, it was a technology estate project. It was a twisted form we were attempting to develop, which was to do with solar orientation on this curve site, et cetera. I remember having to go and find one of my old students to help me model it because with my auto CAD skills it was never going to happen. That was a nice moment where I completely understood this need for another tool to generate a 3D model.

SS: Do you ever worry that it might plant the seed for a certain kind of … I don’t want to use the world laziness.

KT: Absolutely. But it’s a complex one because on the one hand a lot of discussion in architecture is not necessarily to do with form making, and I do think that there are high risks when it’s the number 1 priority because it can result in an excess and wilfulness that I associate with problematic buildings. I know that on the one hand we fight form as a key driver or manifestation of architectural thinking. On the other I also realize that if we think of what we do as architects it is about making a physical space out of matter, and inevitably that is a creation of form.

I also recognize that some of our buildings have been identified for a clarity of form making. It’s not that they’re anti-form either, which I know some people will try to argue. I still think we always have this problem with form, but it is that extent to which it is a square peg/round hole problem. I think that’s when I question it, and how you find a form. I tried to describe this in a recent talk on ethics at the Robin Boyd Foundation in relation to the idea of accommodation.

To accommodate sounds like whatever comes in as a force within the making of a project you just take on board unquestioningly. It’s not saying that. It’s saying that all projects have various forces on them and our job, I think, is to accommodate those but through an intent of sorts. You are still doing something with these forces that is directed somehow. It’s not just whatever. I think that’s where bad architecture has an intent that is divorced from the forces it has to navigate and it just has determination to apply those regardless of whether it’s the right thing or not. That was partly where I was getting into an ethics of architecture that you have to wrestle with these considerations, it’s our duty to do that. Also for a disciplinary contribution you’re trying to wrestle and doing something with those that achieves something of integrity especially.

 

To continue reading part 2 of Negotiating Form with Kerstin Thompson click here

 

Architecture is for everyone.

 

Council Election Special: Q+A with Councillor Rohan Leppert

In many ways it is the local council level of government which has the most profound impact on our built environment. In most cases they are the first line of decision making for buildings seeking planning approval and they also have a very significant role to play in the formation of local planning strategies and regulations. Right now the 79 local governments across Victoria are in election mode, with the postal ballots being accepted until Friday 21 October.

In this election special, The Red+Black Architect spoke exclusively with Councilor Rohan Leppert from the Melbourne City Council. Rohan is one of very few councilors across the state with any formal training in planning or architecture.

Red+Black Architect –  You’re currently studying a masters of urban planning and environment. How has this influenced your decision making process when considering planning applications?

Cr Rohan Leppert – It’s a really good question. I’m only half way through the degree which is quite theoretical and I’ve not had to do too much technical work yet. To be perfectly honest, the work I’ve been doing at council has been influencing my work in uni much more so than the other way round. It’s good, I appreciate having a much more solid understanding of the history of planning in Victoria to when I’m applying my role as a decision maker on planning applications and planning scheme amendments at the city of Melbourne. In many ways, I think it improves the quality of my work at the city of Melbourne. I’m in a very fortunate position.

CR Rohan Leppert

R+BA – From what you’ve seen of how the council operates and the various councillors, how they vote and questions they ask. Do you think that the other councillors have a genuine understanding of what they’re deciding upon or it is very much a case that they’re relying on their officers to sort of hold their hands through the process?

Cr RL – Well there are eleven councillors and I think it’s fair to say there are eleven different understandings of the role of a councillor. That’s natural and inevitable. Well before I went back to do more study in this area, I’ve been on the public record being quite critical of the lack of training available to councillors at the beginning of a term. Because roughly half of all matters considered by council are technical planning matters and none of us have any training whatsoever upfront.

I think that’s inadequate for somewhere like the city Melbourne, which is growing at break neck speeds at the moment and which has one of the most complicated sets of different planning controls across different areas of most councils. I also think it’s too easy for councillors to throw their hands up in the air and say that their role isn’t to judge the quality of planning applications. It’s either to say, we’re not qualified, therefore we must always vote the way offices tells us to. The logical extension that argument is why get elected in the first place. Or in the worst cases, and there is maybe a couple of councillors on this council that do this, they believe their role is to vote based on the quantity of objections and so it’s gut feeling whether they like it or not. It’s a gut feeling whether there is community opposition to an application or not but as we know that’s not the way planning rules work. The council is meant to take a much more legally pure approach and decide whether or not an application complies with the scheme. Not decide whether or not the application complies with their gut feeling. This is a problem for all councillors at all times but we often have quite a few messy debates at the city of Melbourne because we all have different understanding of what our role is.

Of course I would say this, but I believe I have a much more correct understanding of what our role is than others do, but all councillors will say that!

R+BA – How would you rate the Melbourne City Council’s performance over the term?

Cr RL – What we’ve done this term is automatically consider all ministerial applications for towers above twenty-five thousand square meters in floor area. That has changed the quality of the public debate around what constitutes good planning in the central city. It has forced the minister’s hand on quite a few occasions and it’s pressured the minister to be more publicly accountable for the decisions that he makes. Whether that was Matthew Guy or now Richard Wynne. The council has definitely this term improved the quality of debate around central city planning and that alone deserves a tick I think.

The other side of that same issue is the fact that, because we consider so many large applications in public, I think this council is very bad at switching over to considering small applications in ResCode areas for example. Far too often I think some of our councillors particularly those who might not live inside the municipality – and we’re unique in being the only council Australia where a majority of councillors don’t live in the municipality – don’t know how to deal with issues surrounding smaller residential zone applications. So a bit of mixed report card from me.

We’ve improved the quality of debate around ministerial applications but we still make a mess far too often of the residential design applications.

R+BA – Perhaps the most contentious CBD shaping projects of the Melbourne city council at the moment is the redevelopment of the Queen Victoria Market. What is your take on what has been proposed and the process to get to the proposal?

Cr RL – There are lot of aspects of the Queen Victoria Market renewal that I strongly support including upgrading the car park to a new central city park for tens and thousands of new residents to enjoy. We need hot running water and a refurbishment of the bathrooms and the public amenities and the pedestrian areas and just the streetscapes generally to the Queen Victoria Market. All of these things are important, overdue, excellent things to do. There is still a very valid public debate over the extent which underground services are needed and council needs to do much more work to demonstrate what that need is.

There is more work to be done on being transparent about what the global budget for the whole renewal program is and what its component parts are going to be spent on. The biggest thing, I’ll certainly be continuing to advocate strongly for, is to improve the governance of the Queen Victoria Market, which is now quite outdated. The constitution which is a couple of decades old now, has one remit for the board and management and that is to drive a profit and return it to council. Now, the markets are a lot more than that and the management of the market now really answerable to both the board and the council in a way because the council is leading the renewal and that’s forcing the boards hand on a lot of its operational decisions because they have to anticipate that renewal. I think it’s time for a governance overhaul of the Queen Victoria Market and that’s going to be important now during the renewal, not afterwards, because the governance structures are very out of date and probably aren’t serving the market and the people of Melbourne as best they could.

R+BA – Do you think there is enough support of the existing businesses to continue to operate during this sort of uncertainty or down the track when there is construction work to make sure that the long serving businesses survive the disruption.

Cr RL – Well I absolutely don’t think that there was enough but last month at council, I moved a motion to establish a compensation fund for all traders. All traders who aren’t on perpetual licenses have now been given a five year certainty through the life of the renewal to know that they will be trading throughout, but what they hadn’t been given was an insurance that they won’t be worse off if they take that five year license. I’ve established a compensation fund by forgoing the license fees that come from Queen Victoria Management to the council which I want to be passed on as fee relief to the traders.

Any trader who can demonstrate that they’re worse off as a result of the renewal, we will make a proportional cut of their license fees. I think that’s only fair because what is happening here is going to be very disruptive. The end result is promised to be a vast improvement and I’m going to work very hard to make sure that is the case. In the meantime, we have to be scrupulously fair and supportive of the traders who are the lifeblood of the market and have been for generations.

R+BA – What are your thoughts on the state government’s draft apartment standards?

Cr RL – We considered this at council recently as well. Look, it’s a strange one. The apartment guidelines have been such a long time coming and obviously Mathew Guy went through a couple of rounds of work on this and then there was a big pause with the change of government and then it was promised to come back soon. In one sense, these are years too late. In another sense, what’s been released now seems to be quite rushed and incomplete. I’m quite critical that the draft standards have been released but the draft objectives haven’t been released alongside them. If we’re looking at a performance based regime, a ResCode style regime for apartment standards, then the state government should be consulting on that comprehensively.

It’s all very well to say here are the draft standards but if you don’t know what the objectives are then you don’t have the complete picture. There are also quite a few issues that I know are going to be picked up in this consultation round. For example the standards about the dimensions of rooms may be causing knock-on issues. This has all been in the public realm. I’m very nervous about what we’re going to be saying with more and more tiny living areas because there are no standards around minimum dimensions and sizes for living areas but there are around bedrooms.

While the bedrooms might be getting a higher quality, are the living rooms going to become lower quality? All of these issues need to be properly tested and to be frank, we’re a long way from something that I’m confident will be improving the quality of apartments in Melbourne.

R+BA – Wouldn’t that be the role of a draft document, to have that discussion early rather than to lump it together as the final release?

Cr RL – That’s right but my understanding is that the final is going to be released in conjunction with the final central city built form review controls. That suggests to me that the complete apartment guidelines planning controls won’t be consulted on. We’re just looking at the early draft standards only now and it may be that there is no consultation on the complete picture before they’re gazetted in December. I don’t know the answer to that question but there is still a little way to go.

R+BA – What project or precinct do you consider to be the most vital to get right for Melbourne’s future? Or to put it in another way, in hypothetical question. If you can instantly fix one precinct or build one piece of infrastructure for Melbourne, what would it be?

Cr RL – I’m strong supporter of the Metro and I think that’s going to be a complete game changer for transport in Melbourne but that’s a very standard answer that you’re going to hear from many people. If I could wave my magic ward, I would go back in time and stop Matthew Guy from rezoning all of Fishermans Bend to capital city zone overnight. We’ve now got a Labor government who have inherited that problem and has pretty much decided that it’s too complicated and too great an infringement on property rights to reverse that decision now. We’re in this ludicrous space where they’ve released a draft vision framework for Fishermans Bend which talks about what land uses they want in each of these precincts, but they know full well that they have a capital city zone which allows most land uses as of right.

So they’re looking at financial incentives to encourage apartments in some areas but not others, offices in some areas but not others, artist live-work spaces in some areas but not others. We’re now looking at a situation in Victoria where we’re ‘post–zoning’ in terms of how we’re going to be generating and incentivizing land use. That’s quite dangerous. It’s relinquishing government’s role in regulating good public outcomes and it’s embracing this very unpredictable, very neo-liberal space which I’m utterly nervous about. I think that the Labor government is not averting the disaster in Fishermans Bend that Mathew Guy created and that’s very scary.

R+BA – What’s on your agenda if you’re re-elected for another term?

Cr RL – A lot of things. We released a twenty-six page policy platform. It’s always the way that the Greens are very policy heavy in the context of elections. I would like to refocus council attention on the affordability crisis in housing in the central city. As you may know the offices have worked for years and years preparing a housing strategy for the city of Melbourne which at five minutes to midnight, a majority of council decided they did not want to include any planning controls for affordable housing quotas in urban renewal areas. That was devastating. It means that after all of that work, council does not have a policy on how it is going to drive affordability in urban renewal areas or anywhere in the city other than a few individual sites that it happens to own.

Council squibbed it and the planning minister also squibbed it. He went with an election promise of introducing inclusionary zoning in some areas, we’ve heard nothing more of that in two years now. The council and state government must start addressing this issue. I know it’s very much a state government issue as well and state government needs to build more public housing, it needs to introduce more planning controls to force a higher quality apartments and more affordable apartments. Council can play leading role on that as well and it completely squandered that role in this term and we need a bit more of a shift and the balance of votes on council to be perfectly honest to make a different in the next term. Housing affordability is a huge emphasis for me going forward.

R+BA – What is your view of developer donations to candidates? Would outlawing this practice, banning developer contributions, will that push it underground in the sense that it will be invisible to scrutiny . For example, many developers are sort of the ‘mom and the dad’ kind of developers who are not huge players in town, but they do projects all the same.  They are somewhat anonymous and so if they donate via their personal name, how would you know if they’re a developer or not?

Cr RL – That’s absolutely right. I believe that developer donations are a form of soft corruption at least and must be abolished but how you define ‘developer’ is the crux of the matter. In New South Wales where donations from developers have been banned, there has not been enough work been done to be define in the legislation what that actually means. Luckily though in New South Wales they’ve got ICAC which is a strong anti-corruption body which can weed out the behind-the-scenes, getting-around-the-law activities that have gone on in that state.

For example in Victoria, if we were to introduce the New South Wales model of banning developer donations, I don’t think our IBAC is strong enough to do what ICAC does. You can’t just copy what they have done in New South Wales. We need a very strong definition around which class of persons and organizations may not make a donation, and mechanisms to stop the transfer funds via a third party as well. However the principle is absolutely the right one. That councils which deal so often in making assessments of whether or not development should go ahead, must not ever be influenced. The constituent members, the councillors, must not ever be influenced by donations from developers.

It just makes the work of council grind to a halt if we lose quorum as we’ve done at this term of council here. Just as badly, the perception in the public that council cannot act in the public interest is utterly, utterly damaging and it loses all the good will that there might be for council to plan new planning rules and to plan new communities. It just puts this big question mark over everything we do and that’s just so lamentable. Especially for those of us who have vowed to never ever, ever take a donation from any developer, and of course the Greens never will.

R+BA – Recently Sydney had their local council elections and there was a bit of controversy around the state government introducing new rules around how businesses could vote and so forth. Despite all that, the siting Mayor, Clover Moore was re-elected by an even stronger margin. Is there any lessons to be learnt from that context or is Melbourne in completely different bubble?

Cr RL – There are similarities but there are quite a few differences as well. The law change in Sydney recently was just about compulsorily enrolling businesses and giving them all two votes. That was the only bit of the legislation. It was much easier to galvanize opposition around because it was quite clear that that legislation was introduced for one reason only, and that was to knock off the incumbent Lord Mayor.

In Melbourne, we’ve got this system in place already but it came into effect as part of an omnibus package with the 2001 City of Melbourne Act introduced by the Labor Government. Jeff Kennett introduced two votes for businesses in the 1990s but it wasn’t until the omnibus City of Melbourne Act in 2001 was introduced that the sweeping changes in all aspects of City of Melbourne Elections were introduced.

There wasn’t the opportunity there for the public to galvanize around those changes because they were part of a more comprehensive suite of changes and it also wasn’t about getting rid of an incumbent because immediately before the act was introduced we’d had administrators at the City of Melbourne. Of course all local residents are always happy to get rid of the administrators! There hasn’t ever been the outrage in Melbourne that there has been in Sydney and yet our electoral system is much worse. Non-residents make up sixty percent of the residential role here whereas in Sydney, the residential role is still the vast majority of the role.

Because of that set of circumstances we’ve never had the public outrage that we’ve seen in Sydney recently. Which is a shame because the Melbourne electoral system is fundamentally a system that enfranchises money, it’s the most male electoral roll in the country, it’s the most wealthy electoral roll in the country and as I said earlier, it’s the only council in the country where majority of the councillors live outside the municipality. Now all of these things really deflect the purpose of local government I think. It removes council from the day to day work of the community to too great an extent.

It’s a strange situation. We’ve got a much worse situation than Sydney does at the moment and yet we’ve got less of the outrage because of the particular ways that both systems were formed. That’s the system we all have to work in.

R+BA – Thank you very much for your time.

 

Voting for local council elections close on Friday 21 October 2016, make sure you have your say.

 

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