Case studies: The future of suburbia?
Introduced by Rory Hyde
We know that our approach to suburban development needs to change: we must achieve greater residential density, sustainability, affordability and diversity. But what visions do we have? And do they fulfil citizens’ requirements? The four schemes included here offer different and creative design ideas.
In recent years, various state governments and universities have sought to re-imagine suburban housing for tomorrow. This is both an acknowledgement of the primacy of the suburb in defining Australian cities, and a recognition of the limited suitability of current patterns of development.
Here, we present three winners from competitions in New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria, and a scheme from a collaborative research project in Western Australia. While all are proposed for different sites with different contexts, they share similar aims: to increase density, to improve sustainability, to be more affordable and to increase the diversity of home types available.
Each project adopts a different approach: building along the fenceline, respecting existing trees, constructing a village of tiny homes, and creating a multi-residential block. All are beautiful, intelligent and respectful of context.
And, hopefully, some will even be built, providing much-needed alternatives to the status quo.
But, in only providing spaces to live, rather than spaces to work or learn or share, are these projects serving to further reinforce the mono-functionality of the suburbs? As we look ahead to the post-pandemic suburbs of the future, we would do well to consider them as integral parts of the city, not merely places to sleep between commutes.
Periscope House by Youssofzay and Hart
Periscope House is a speculative design that builds on the Missing Middle Design Competition’s winning scheme and uses the New South Wales “dual occupancy” housing typology to extend an existing dwelling and build an intergenerational family home for an R3 (medium-density residential) zone.
The competition entry sought to address issues of housing supply and affordability, citing ABS statistics that showed large areas of Sydney with a so-called “bedroom surplus.”1
A site was selected within a suburb composed of 76 percent “empty nest” homes, defined as dwellings headed by a person of retirement age with two or more spare bedrooms. The design imagined absorbing a spare bedroom of an “empty nest” home into an attached second dwelling. Modular additions built over time would defer the construction costs, thereby reducing the initial cost barrier to home ownership.
Introverted and small in scale, the house re-imagines a typical suburban home. It plays with the idea of rooms as a series of well-proportioned and carefully crafted volumes filled with natural light. The name Periscope House is derived from the shape of the roof, which has apertures oriented to capture the moving sun throughout the day.
Connection to landscape is interwoven throughout the building footprint. The garden frontage, proportional to other houses along the street, is re-imagined as a semi-private space featuring productive garden species, while an enclosed internal courtyard provides a sheltered outdoor space that connects the sleeping and living quarters. The living spaces seamlessly extend into a verdant backyard that also provides a picturesque backdrop to the daily activities of its occupants.
This proposal shows an approach to housing supply that works with the single homeowner, allowing them to develop extra housing on their own block. The existing house stays as it is while the new contemporary home is sleeved beside it. Three generations can occupy the block together, providing support through the varied life stages.
— Jury citation, Missing Middle Design Competition
— Youssofzay and Hart
The Scale of the House, by Fernando Jerez, Belen Perez de Juan, Joshua Cobb-Diamond and Stephen Thick
The Scale of the House is the contribution of one of the collaborating design teams in the 2020 Place Value Ashfield research project at the University of Western Australia. The project aimed to explore the potential of a coordinated approach to urban infill housing.
The Scale of the House proposes a series of cellular dwellings across three sites, addressing a need for alternative models of density that maintain the scale and identity of the suburb. Two-storey construction is made viable in Perth’s suburban economic context through the use of a modular, prefabricated system, mitigating the typical horizontal sprawl of the suburbs. The building footprint is reduced, allowing space for retained mature trees to grow and encouraging a continuous tree canopy from the street verges to the suburban lots. The houses are arranged to consolidate unbuilt areas, blurring public front yards and private backyards.
The rooms within the dwellings form an enfilade, rather than the conventional open plan, with multiple forms of inhabitation concurrently occurring – sleeping, eating, cooking, reading, viewing on devices and even working-from-home. The corridors ordinarily required to circulate a sprawling house are consolidated at the junction of the enfilade, creating a top-lit common space between shared rooms and a buffer to the private areas. The modular spatial logic and construction suits domestic functions, which rarely require vastly different volumes. The module also accommodates potential expansion to address intergenerational living and supplementary functions such as suburban agriculture or a suburban business.
— Fernando Jerez, Belen Perez de Juan, Joshua Cobb-Diamond and Stephen Thick
Dappled Dwellings by Trias
Brisbane’s suburbs contain a rich collection of post-war timber cottages, which form charming streetscapes.
Often overlooked, the homes themselves are also ripe for re-use.
Dappled Dwellings seeks to densify within and around a suburban context. Rather than starting anew, it adds density below and behind existing homes, creating a stealthy transition to higher density.
The scheme borrows from the tradition of the elevated Queenslander. It raises a typical weatherboard cottage on stilts, infilling the space below with shared services, an office and a small, one-bedroom apartment. The upstairs home then becomes a two-bedroom dwelling. A pair of small garden dwellings are also built in the rear yard.
This new arrangement of micro homes is oriented around a central courtyard, which becomes a shared space where people can gather, socialize and play.
Dappled Dwellings proposes a different way of living in the suburbs. Instead of a streetscape of closed-up houses, front windows are animated by small businesses and home studios. The proposal also creates diverse housing choices for people beyond the nuclear family, including singles, couples and the elderly. This furthers ideals of ageing in place and encourages a genuine demographic mix.
Looking to the future, Dappled Dwellings imagines suburbs that are eroded, open and welcoming. A single suburban block could accommodate an intergenerational family while, at a larger scale, blocks could form small collectives, sharing swimming pools, gardens and backyards.
This small-scale infill strategy is a slow and appropriate transition to density that suits suburbia.
— Trias
Freespace by Lian with Openwork and Finding Infinity
As Australia’s big cities continue their projected growth and look to friendlier levels of density that balance walkability with openness, an opportunity exists to discover a refreshed hybrid of urban and rural that celebrates the best of both.
In acknowledging the qualities most revered in the suburbs and deeply embedded in the Australian psyche, Freespace sets out to provide the advantages of the single-family home (a sense of privacy, generosity of space, the ability to individualize and a strong sensory connection with the outdoors) in a form that enables more dense development. Double-height, dual-aspect, open-plan spaces ensure abundant natural light and the flexibility to accommodate the changing requirements of the home.
At the neighbourhood level, by mirroring the suburban conditions of a centrally located, freestanding volume with generous setbacks, the project ensures that the rhythm of the existing suburban context is continued. Within these setbacks, trees and planting provide visual and physical relief for future occupants and existing neighbours. On a smaller scale, the space between provides the spark for interaction. North-facing gardens and terraces encourage individualization, improving the livelihood of the street and providing spaces for lifestyles to expand and contract through the seasons. Rather than bedrooms, living rooms and usable open spaces face the street, subtly shifting the focus from the backyard to the street.
— Lian