Page 2 - Design Notes News Today

More recently, critics such as Mike Davis, with his books including City of Quartz, have seen it crashing back to the present, discussing its negative aspects, the deep social inequality and the physical degradation wrought by its car-based culture and freeways.

50 years ago, in the ‘year out’ between architecture degrees, most of my cohort went overland to London, following a path laid out just a couple of years earlier by Tony and Maureen Wheeler, which became the foundation of Lonely Planet.

Firstly, tendering is a scourge on quality in the industry – lowest price usually wins, and invariably it is too low, and something has to give, inevitably quality. Subbies are pressured to lower their costs, and then pressured further to return to a job they lost money on, to repair defects. The end process is a s**tfight to get something approximating the intended finish. Or the builder folds.

Of the 220+ entries in the 1956 competition Jørn Utzons (number 218), was one of the very few that put the two required halls side by side. This gave equity to both halls, made the same approach to both and provided a foyer for each that faced the harbour. You’ve seen the spectacular view that results.

Comparisons have been made to the marriage equality plebiscite: many knew someone gay, maybe wanting to be married, and so it was personal. But very few white Australians know an indigenous person as a friend. It’s not just numbers - people identifying as LGBTI has been estimated as high as 11%, but is usually accepted at a third of that – the same percentage as indigenous. There are so many other factors.

For most of his practicing life Marsh was devoted to developing homes that drew upon historical and world-wide ideas to forge an architecture utterly appropriate to its location, and for the most part that was Auckland. He was a driving force in New Zealand architecture for almost sixty years, recognised with the NZIA Gold Medal in 2010.

School ONE experimented with breaking down the all-too-common faculty siloes twelve years ago. Sponsored by the state government, three professors offered a course for senior students from several disciplines (architecture, sustainability and two strands of engineering), to jointly design a complex project. Groups had at least one of each discipline, as well as a mix of ethnicities and sexes.

First Peoples’ Architecture is a chance for attendees to be immersed in a deep cultural experience of architecture and language from the families and elders who have an ancient connection to Coolendel. They will be actively building structures in collaboration with the traditional custodians who themselves built on this same site. Attendees will also be taking part in a Corroboree, Yarning Circles and even a cold plunge in the Shoalhaven.

But we also have a housing construction crisis: planning freezes; rising materials prices; builder bankruptcies; subbies raising prices to recoup lost income; increasingly difficult building regulations. Costs are up to 50%, starts have dropped by 50%.

Locals demonstrated loudly against its demolition, and so the Government agreed to re-build it, piling a terrible idea on a bad one. No budget or site was established by the bureaucrats; once demo had taken place it had nowhere to go; some of the protesters conceded that there was no point creating a Disneyfied Madame Tussaud’s house. Quite how saving rendered bricks to be scraped clean and re-rendered is a heritage move mystifies me.