Between, beneath, beyond and before: Individual houses and suburban conflict
Having explored the outer suburbs of Australian cities, David Neustein and Grace Mortlock argue that the increasingly hot and unpleasant conditions are a result not of the design of each dwelling, but of a development regime that begins by clearing the land of native vegetation.
In 2019, a former student who had ascended to the position of Head of Innovation at a large-volume housing company approached our studio, Other Architects, with an irresistible offer: the opportunity to design a new variant on the standard Sydney suburban project home. If our design met the right criteria for cost, constructability and market appeal, it might one day go into production alongside established models such as the Balmoral Hamptons, the Leona Coastal and the Wilton Contemporary. To kick off this potential engagement, we drove out to Marsden Park, a rapidly developing suburb in Sydney’s north-west. There, within a vast housing estate, we toured a range of completed display homes and new houses under construction.
We were no strangers to suburbia. In the years leading up to our Marsden
Park visit, Other Architects had embarked on a series of speculative projects that explored architecture’s potential agency within the standardized and bulk-built parameters of suburban housing.
Specifically, our projects Offset House and House with a Missing Middle mined the excess gross floor area of Sydney’s so-called McMansions: large and cheaply built houses with numerous bedrooms, bathrooms and car spaces. In these projects we proposed to redistribute and remodel the redundant spaces typically allocated as media rooms, walk-in wardrobes, multi-car garages and convoluted corridors in order to create multi-household dwellings with large, shared gardens, leafy courtyards, breezy verandahs, deep overhangs and efficient interiors. Now, it finally seemed as if we would have the chance to make these dreams a reality.
The display homes that we inspected at Marsden Park had some fairly obvious flaws. One house featured a main upper-storey bathroom that looked directly into the entrance and stairwell of the next-door dwelling, and vice versa. Living rooms and outdoor areas were positioned irrespective of solar orientation. Some houses had doorways that were far too narrow, or corridors that were strangely wide. Insulated fibre-cement cladding was crudely affixed to exteriors, plasterboard lined every internal wall and ceiling, and synthetic floor surfaces provided cheap facsimiles of stone or wood. However, within each house we could find only minor scope for improvement. It seemed that the oversized McMansion was a thing of the past. By and large, these were sensible, compact and rationally planned dwellings, with little added fat to excise.
The real problem, we found, was what was happening between, beneath, beyond and indeed before these houses. At the outskirts of the display village,