Listening to the stories of our city
How do we create something enduring from Hobart’s heritage? asks Mat Hinds
I AM an architect, which means I am interested in the stories that buildings tell us. Like words that form a sentence, or notes in a musical score, the stories told by buildings coalesce into a larger civic language which makes our towns and cities. This language forms over generations, as a kind of spatial dialect which distils the social, cultural and territorial circumstances of our community. As a Tasmanian architect, what I think we mean when we talk about preserving our built heritage is actually an expression of desire to sustain these stories.
Built stories matter because they outlive us. Through form, proportion, materials and siting, buildings accommodate needs, but also communicate ideas about society which can be told for generations.
Our practice carefully adapted a convict- built cottage and worked with the Aboriginal Land Council in a significant cultural landscape. We are designing buildings for Tasmania’s most historically important public garden, and are converting an early 20th century inner- city coffin factory into housing. All have remarkable heritage. But our effort is not toward their preservation as cultural artefacts. We seek to make a new clarifying contribution, so the story is intensified and opened to contemporary life.
The efforts to academically conserve heritage draw mainly — and at times ideologically — from the principles of the Burra Charter, which refers to intergenerational equity, implying an economic imperative to the preservation of heritage. In a productive architectural sense, the Charter does not tolerate experimentation, or speculation on the inherent meaning of the heritage fabric. Nor does it provide framework for articulating new meaning, to tell contemporary stories. Nonetheless the charter is widely used to appraise the promise of proposals. Sometimes this is for the better, to stop badly designed and destructive development, but I have seen it used to cudgel the possibility of extraordinary civic offerings for Hobart, in particular. For instance, the fascination with preserving the streetscape, while permitting destruction of the rooms behind, seems a particularly alarming pattern. When a facade is stripped of its inherent spatial logic, it becomes a pretence. The yield of inner- city sites is forced up behind heritage facades, and we end up mired in the politics of height, as if this is the only factor that makes a city. These are issues a government or city architect could guide. It makes me uncomfortable when citymaking issues are so heavily politicised, without being countenanced by the voice of my profession.
The responsibility we have is not just to pay regard to our current heritage as a static economic artefact, but to also make new heritage — as an act of cultivation of history for the future. This is often where we find the political tension in considering built heritage, because while there may be anxieties about the conservation of our built fabric, we must also be concerned with livedexperience, and how ideas are adapted into buildings.
On the weekend we’ve seen the community engage with admired buildings through Open House Hobart, and tonight conversations will continue through CityTalks. These events display the community’s commitment to the past and future of Hobart. Economic considerations of heritage do not stand alone. We must approach the broader question, of what stories are being told, thence determine what our contribution is to the larger narrative. Only then will we achieve something enduring. Tonight’s CityTalks event: Power of Preservation, the economic value heritage creates for Hobart, is at 6pm with Donovan Rypkema from Heritage, Strategies International. Webinar live at https:// www. youtube. com/ c/ IslandofIdeas