THE TONE OF AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE
IN THIS EDITION, WE SPEAK EXCLUSIVELY WITH TONE WHEELER, THE PRINCIPAL AND DIRECTOR OF ENVIRONA STUDIO AND A PASSIONATE ADVOCATE FOR ENVIRONMENTAL ARCHITECTURE. WHEELER HAS TAUGHT AT UNIVERSITIES FOR OVER 40 YEARS AND IS A CHRONICLER OF THE CHANGING MOOD OF AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE AND ITS MANY ITERATIONS OVER THE YEARS. Three years ago, you wrote an obituary to the late Australian architect Ken Woolley, where you said we have lost a great architect. What makes a great architect in your opinion?
I said that because I think Ken Woolley was very broad in his interests and in his abilities, and he was also incredibly thorough in what he pursued. He designed a whole range of buildings from the ABC headquarters in Sydney to several really iconic houses, none of which look like anything else.
And that’s one of the most interesting things about Ken Woolley – that he didn’t have a signature style, and we’ve been obsessed with style for 55 years so that’s an interesting thing about somebody who designs and doesn’t stylise things.
He was one of a number of architects including Peter Johnson and Bill Lucas; there were a number of people who were looking at Sydney as being a particular place so if you were designing a building on a steeper hillside, which is often the case in those houses in the 50s and 60s, whether it was Bill Lucas in Castlecrag, Peter Johnson in Chatswood or Ken Woolley in Mosman, they tried to make the buildings fit the landscape of that place, without taking out too many trees or disturbing it too much.
For instance, Ken used clinker brick in the house in Mosman. Clinker bricks are basically bricks rejected by the brickworks because they are damaged, misshapen and rough, all of which appeal to architects, but they are also cheap. So he fitted the sandstone outcrops off it, he used timber structures for the roof that very evidently weren’t made from the eucalyptus around, but it was sympathetic to the site. The house in Paddington was all white brickwork, curves and round windows – it was in the middle of a period of postmodernism and the house had some of that flavour but it was also an urban house. His house in Palm Beach is up on stilts sitting above a creek that runs down onto the roadway. A river runs underneath it and it has some sort of giant lattice underneath and timber framing – it’s a tree house! So he’s done a cave house in Mosman, an urban retreat in Paddington and a tree house at Palm Beach.
This is what I admire about Ken Woolley and to a certain extent we want to do that in our own work – take the project from its fundamentals. There are two things that you begin with in architecture – a purpose and a place. A client comes to you to design a building – it usually has some purpose. It could be a home, housing, a school, or a civic building and it has a brief to it. But more than the briefing, it has a purpose – the brief might say what the building is on the inside but the purpose of the building may also be to add something to the city that might not be in your client’s brief. The building needs to have both an inward looking special arrangement and an outward looking place.
The thing about architectural design is that it occurs in a particular space and a particular place. There are a number of people who claim that modern design should be taught across multiple disciplines – graphics, textiles, products, food, white goods and so on – that you should be able to design anything and everything.
But when you design something for someone’s kitchen, you don’t know what the kitchen is going to be like; it could be going into thousands of different kitchens from a country style to a modernist concrete benched design. The graphics could go anywhere, the textiles could be worn by any shape or size of person in any place, but buildings are located in a place, not a site – they are much more than a site. In the same way that the purpose of the building is bigger than the brief, the idea of a place for the building is bigger than the site – it includes things like the environs, the surroundings, the climate, the attitude around that particular space.
The Italians have a lovely word for it – they call it ‘situazione’, which is basically the situation but it sounds so much better in Italian!
What would be your favourite thing to design and what would be the least favourite thing to design and why?
As a younger architect quite some time ago, I was interested in housing. Now I am really interested in the city as a whole; that may sound incredibly pretentious but as you get older and live in many cities around the world, it really does pressure you to think about your particular building in the context of the wider city and so I’d really want to change the way cities are done, the way we have been working building by building, brick by brick. I try to tell every student: Every building has a purpose, every building has a place; therefore develop your own unique way, or find your own voice to interpret those things to come up with a unique building as we are looking for diversity.
One of the few irritating things about Australian architecture is the idea of Australia is a homogenous ‘thing.’ It’s the most polycultural nation on earth. It’s a highly multi-national, multi-religious, polychromatic society and yet we have a very singular kind of architecture. You do Brisbane architecture in Brisbane, or you do Melbourne architecture in Melbourne. I think the regional areas are much more homogeneous still, but the cities are very polycultural and you’d expect the cities to be very diverse. We go to cities that somehow have a kind of consistency about them, not a uniformity by any means but in places like Paris and London or even parts of New York, you get a consistency of those buildings and how they work. They did arise from a particular society at a particular time, which had a kind of universality to it. We are building the cities in the 21st century and we are building them with a whole range of different people, so I can’t have an ambition to do the city or even do the same building twice. You’re going to do something different but I have a vision to make the rest of my contemporaries be a little bit more open minded, a little bit more, perhaps, conciliatory towards the diversity of things that are being built in our cities.
One of the things that I tried to do when I was teaching was to only show buildings that met these criteria: First, you had to like and admire, and find something worthy in the building. The second thing is you had to have been to the building. You can’t talk about a building if you haven’t been there and experienced the space, the texture of the building, the qualities of the acoustics of the building, and the sense of the environs. The third thing is you have to show the plan in section at the same time you show the building. One of the things that you always want is the section. It’s very hard to convince students that they should draw a section; at some stage you have to say to them well, amateurs draw plans, professionals draw sections. How a section works is the key to how architects use the space. You can’t talk about sustainability in buildings, or how it works environmentally without a section.
The more remarkable architects to visit are always the architects who are in command of the section.
You recently hosted the Sustainability Live panel event where a range of issues were discussed and a range of ideas thrown around. What are your views?
What was really interesting about the curatorial effort was that it was really moving towards the idea of passive solar housing and passive house versus the idea of a highly Green Star rated building and so on. I think you moved away from the object or the product to the process and everything that was talked about there was process-driven from the very first one when Elizabeth Watson Brown and James Grose started talking about how the thought processes of growing up in Brisbane — where you are alive to the humidity and the heat and the breeze and the sounds — left a lasting impact on how they practised architecture.
You start to talk about chain of custody in materials and the idea of what makes a sustainable material, not in terms of its end product but in terms of the process by which it’s devolved, and then you link that to modern slavery because slavery is a process by which those in power dominate and subjugate people in order to manufacture products in a price system over which they have very little power or control.
Then you start talking about the mental health of people working in architecture generally... there’s a huge issue with the ideas that can make people happier, and therefore, more fulfilling and enjoyable for them to be working in an industry that’s very hard. It’s the second most dangerous industry to work in, in terms of deaths onsite; it’s variously described as being 8-12 percent of the GDP; it’s the single largest sector, bigger than mining, and employs five times the number of people than the mining industry ever did at its height.
ONE OF THE FEW IRRITATING THINGS ABOUT AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE IS THAT THE IDEA OF AUSTRALIA IS A HOMOGENOUS ‘THING’.
As an architect, engineer or planner sitting in the office, your biggest joy is when you go out onsite and start to see your special drawings becoming a building – it’s a huge thrill.
But you’re working in the extreme cold conditions, you’re working in extreme heat, you’re working outside, it’s not easy and yet people are a slave to the time pressures, the money pressures, the drawing pressures – does this work, do I keep building, do I question it? I think that’s all process.
It culminated in the debate that you were talking about as to whether population is a good thing or a bad thing. My main comment about that is that it depends how you handle the process. In 1950, Sydney had 1.6 million people. Twenty five years later, 1975, it had grown to just over 3.3 million – the number of people living in the city doubled in 25 years. If you look at the city in 1950, the tallest building was the AWA Tower sitting on top of a 10-storey brick and stone building and then you look at it in 1975 and the city is there, you know the big towers, the waterfront, the Cahill Expressway, and the Opera House – the city that we know as Sydney is formed in 25 years by that huge influx of population.
I don’t think it’s anything to be scared about – of doubling the population, of adding one percent or two percent per annum; in order to double the
population we were talking about having to add five, six, seven percent in some of those years.
So was that sustainable then, looking back?
No, they were building suburbs, the city they built was modernist and pretty and personable but they did some stupid things like the Liberal Party pulling out all the trams – the third biggest system of transit services and second biggest system from Brisbane and Melbourne. That was rank stupidity.
However, a lot of very good things happened such as the social housing programs when we were trying to help people after a terrible war, we were taking in people from mostly southern Europe and then towards the end of that period, we were taking in people from Asia because we were fighting in south-east Asia.
You can repopulate those suburbs, you can take the main lines of transport, and double, triple, quadruple the population in those areas, but you can leave the suburbs as they are. Your house is not threatened, 90 percent of the houses in the suburbs are not threatened. Maybe you could do something like make your house more sustainable, grow some vegetables, put in some solar panels, put in some better insulation but the real sustainability is that you increase those traffic routes now.
Rob Adams, the former city architect for the Melbourne city council calculated that you really only have to work on a very small percentage, about six percent of the building stock to double, triple, quadruple the amount of housing along the transport routes in order to be able to double the population. That’s what we want to do in Sydney – you just need to target certain areas and you build something so if you look at the way in which some of the urban centres of Sydney are being revitalised, you don’t hear the negativity of medium density houses and people living in flats. Actually quite a lot of people like living here without a car, having direct access to the services, and don’t want a big kitchen as they would rather go down and have a meal at a restaurant.
Will the so-called ‘invisible hand of the market’ increase sustainability in our capital cities?
One of the talks I gave at the Sustainability Live event was how in my woods the green karma runs over the brown dogma. What I’m talking about is that green is no longer on the margins; it’s become mainstream and brown dogma is really the kind of pushback against it. Taken as a whole, Australia has got some of the most interesting innovations in sustainability, the highest uptake of photovoltaic panels on private houses in the world, maybe due to the fact that we have so much suburbia, or maybe because of the incentives that we have.
Australia has a huge number of self-made electric cars – the Australian Electric Vehicle Association listed about 400 homemade electric cars. The thing is they’re coming and they’re coming in such a way because it’s so much easier to charge off the photovoltaics than indulge in fossil fuels. That aside, there’s a whole revolution in what people are eating, and how you eat and how you travel, where you go, how things get made and what goods are at one level.
It’s not all bright sky because there’s a brown dogma; I think Australia has world class brown dogma. Any country where the Prime Minister, the premier politician, walks into Parliament carrying a lump of black coal saying this is the future, don’t be scared of it; not to put too fine a word on it – it’s idiotic.