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Architecture, landscape, and industrial design shared studios technical workshops, common courses in first year, and interdisciplinary projects. Whilst that innovation has dimmed in the intervening years, its successes and future possibilities were celebrated in a symposium this month, which inspires today’s column.
Peter Myers was a tutor at the University of Sydney in the mid-seventies as the first intake of the new six-year program reached final year. The last design project was for student housing, which many students interpreted into ‘college’ form, tutored by Douglas Gordon, Glenn Murcutt and Swetik Korsenewski (who had recently returned from Louis Kahn’s office, and it showed in the schemes).
But it became the least sustainable. Post WW2, as Canberra rapidly expanded, the politicians, egged on by bureaucrats, supplanted the compact layout with the ‘Y-plan’ by Lord Holford, of the UK ‘New Towns’ movement. Its inanity promoted low density suburbia full of curved roads and roundabouts, creating the nation’s highest demand for cars to reach individual, poor climate-designed houses.