Architects are focusing on higher-density projects as demographics change: Rob Stent
Australians have long been predominantly urban dwellers.
Despite over 80% of us now living in cities, our self-image remains of a sunburnt country girt by sea – when in reality it should be of a frazzled city girt by sprawl.
The stress of living in our capital cities is well known: our crowded roads, poor and ageing infrastructure, and a lack of public transport.
Yet while Australia’s economic wealth is driven from the major cities, the federal government is almost completely absent from the contemporary discussion about the future urban environment and housing in Australia.
The true costs associated with poor urban environments are rarely part of the economic debate.
Our cities are largely left to the under-resourced state and local governments to devise and administer planning systems in the hope of shaping our urban environment.
Planning systems revel in written policy full of ‘government-speak’ for best practice or driven by nullifying empirical process and regulation.
Our market-driven development sector is unchanged since white settlement – consisting of appropriating land, cutting it up, building on it, selling it off and moving onto to the next deal ASAP before the market turns.
Very few of our urban population living in the traditional single house would have any direct relationship with architecture.
Our traditional housing construction industry comprises of independent craft-based subcontractors putting together 'stick build' detached houses for project-home developers large and small, having procured basic plans that meet ‘tick-the-box’ planning and building regulations.
This has long been our traditional way of providing housing and forming our suburban fabric, resulting in the ever-expanding concentric growth of our cities with all the associated shortcomings.
However, a tipping point in this traditional order may have been reached, causing change to occur in a number of connected ways.
For the first time, the value of a block of land on the fringe is now more expensive than the house that will go in it.
The size of the average block has been decreasing to the point that the narrow side gaps between houses cannot be justified.
Housing is becoming joined and connected and as a consequence is having to be delivered in groups and clusters.
Resolution of the relationships between landscape, sense of address and amenity for sunlight and privacy between dwellings, requires embodied architectural knowledge.
The change of demographics is also driving change. Architects are now designing higher density housing on the fringe with townhouses and apartments meeting the housing demands for a rapid increase in different household configurations.
That too requires an increased level of research and application of design rigor not found with ‘off the shelf’ pro-forma plans that characterise the ad-hoc fashion of the traditional housing development industry.
Architects have, in the past, been at the forefront of change and innovation in housing environments.
The design of the garden-city suburb and projects such as the cluster housing at Winter Park in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs are such examples.
They again have an opportunity to contribute in determining contemporary solutions to the challenges beyond the 'tram lines'.
Rob Stent is a director Melbourne-based architecture, interior and urban design practice Hayball and is a past president of the Victorian chapter of the Australian Institute of Architects. Among the buildings he has designed is Lend Lease’s completed Serrata apartment building in Docklands, one of Melbourne's first apartment buildings to achieve a four-star Green Star rating.
