An architecture of resistance: A.S. Hook address

Beginnings

I studied architecture at Sydney University, then a laissez-faire course espousing pluralism to shroud its lack of a core of architectural knowledge. As inquisitive students, we gravitated to that magical – and now sadly lost – architectural library that was the heart of the school.

Nonetheless there was lots of interest around the periphery: a season of guest lectures from a young William J.R. Curtis, a week with Aldo Van Eyck, a tutorial with Reyner Banham. It was leavened by a mix of the Sydney’s most engaging architects – Col James committed to social justice, Peter Myers ruminating on architectural culture, Jennifer Taylor keen on Australian architecture, and Swetik Korzeniewski and his confreres steadfastly trying to provide a centre with his exhortation: “What is Architecture?”

I was poached in 1984 straight from university to work on the Darling Harbour redevelopment scheme on the western side of Sydney’s city centre. Darling Harbour was a confronting introduction to the politics of architecture and urbanism in NSW: brutal infrastructure, object buildings in disaggregated public spaces disconnected from the city. Vital heavy- and light-rail connections were proposed and disregarded for the gimmick of the monorail.

Making a quick exit, I walked up the hill to Sydney Town Hall and introduced myself to independent city councillor Jack Mundey, the union hero who had led the Sydney green bans. With a group we formed the Sydney Citizens Against the Proposed Monorail (SCAPM) to oppose the monorail’s absurdity as a transport option and its harmful intrusion into the city’s streets. SCAPM organised many well-attended Town Hall public meetings, with three 10,000-strong street marches and widespread coverage. We may have lost at that time, but the city ultimately won when the monorail was removed less than three decades later.

Busy years following graduation involved working with Ken Maher in his vibrant studio shared with landscape architects; teaching, writing articles, engaging in criticism, activism and competitions. We had some successes, such as coming fourth in two competitions when there were only three prizes awarded. These ventures were collaborations with friends, especially Richard Francis-Jones and Peter John Cantrill.

Bitterly disillusioned by Sydney’s inability to grasp urban opportunities, I headed to Paris-Belleville to study urban architecture under leading professors Bernard Huet, Jean-Louis Cohen, Antoine Grumbach and Bruno Fortier. In parallel, I worked in offices with opposed modernist values, the grandee Paul Chemetov, then Yves Lion – a master of urban housing. I started to grasp the longer timeframe essential to understanding cities. My masters’ thesis was on the Sydney Harbour Trust’s public projects of wharf reconstruction and workers’ housing in Millers Point and The Rocks, which I presented in Paris.

Subsequently, Peter John and I were appointed as fractional lecturers at University of Technology Sydney in the vibrant decade led by Professors Winston Barnett and Adrian Boddy. We developed theory and history courses on the architecture of the city in parallel with our design-studio teaching; starting with world cities, their emblematic streets, squares and housing, then turning our attention to Sydney. Learning through teaching. What could we find? Plenty!

Starting Hill Thalis

In 1992 we jointly won the Olympic Village National Competition with many long-term collaborators. Our aim was to advance a prototype for mid-scale green urbanism in an open and connected city. This underpinned the theme of Sydney’s successful “green games” bid. Instead, what eventuated was a developer-led, walled suburban enclave.

Concurrently, my partner Sarah Hill and I began the precarious adventure of practice. From the outset our work took a different trajectory to Australian architectural interests of the time. We set off with urban projects and designs for public spaces, mostly for public clients and often in collaboration with landscape architect colleagues, particularly Jane Irwin. We worked on multiple housing projects for a disparate array of public clients and a united nations of family groups and smaller builder/developers, located on residual sites or in suburbs where architects were rarely invited to venture.

Our work oriented towards an urban architecture, reflecting on propositions in Aldo Rossi’s influential book The Architecture of The City, and Bernard Huet’s categorisations of the city as conservative and architecture valorising the revolutionary. Italian architect Pier Paolo Tamburelli recently compressed this tension so succinctly: “Once the city is recognised as the precondition of architecture, it becomes the objective of architecture as well.”²

The urban project

I have always preferred the more active “urban project” to the more passive “urban design”. The urban project retains the sense of making a project specific to time and place – an anticipatory project comprising specific elements applied discerningly to the particularities of a site; amplifying, as Manuel de Solà-Morales stated, “what is particular, strategic, local and generative.”³

Any genuine urban project must be founded on public space, whether making it new or anew, connecting with or redefining existing places. As Michael Sorkin sharply observed:

“The most important single task for architectural criticism is to rise in defence of public space. Threatened by the repressive sameness of global culture, contracted by breakneck privatisation, devalued by contempt for public institutions, and victimised by the loss of the habits of sociability, the physical arena of collective interaction – the streets, squares, parks and plazas of the city – are, in their free accessibility, the guarantors of democracy.”⁴

The quintessential public space, the organising element of almost every human settlement on every continent in every epoch is the street. Certainly, we can add parks, ecological areas, squares, promenades and the like, but we are yet to evolve an urbanity without reliance on the street – and by street I mean the peopled street, the spatial street, the democratic street, not the twentieth-century corruption subjugated to the dictates of the car.

Too often today what passes for urban design is simply deterministic capacity testing, only sometimes restrained by solar analysis or scenography; or, in Sydney’s case, the international aviation contour height limits. Entirely suppressed are questions of the positive form of the city, its history, the aspirations of the citizens, the tensions around all aspects of housing, and the challenges we face in the era of climatic catastrophe.

The urban project must go beyond the sterilising processes of planning based on two-dimensional zoning and the concept of “use” when it’s really the most transitory aspect in a dynamic city. Planning is over-reliant on height and floor space controls, while ignoring landscape, culture and positive urban spatiality. Planning marginalises public space, as its purpose is as a development mechanism for private land. It eschews interest in city form and design, preferring instead the abstract, the word-based and the quasi-legalistic.

Through our teaching and research, Peter John Cantrill and I posited an alternative way of seeing and understanding what we derived as constituent elements of the city. These are equally valid as tools of analysis, as generators of urban projects, or identifiers of architectural interventions. We drew on a number of applied theories, including those of Team 10, Castex and Panerai, and Huet.

Being predominantly European, they concentrated on the built reality of their cities, whereas in Australia we must start with the territory, its landscape and ecosystems. We prioritised the scaled reality of the accumulated physical material of the city, its unique place on the planet, its history, its culture, its openness to possibilities.

Elements of city making

Our studies defined five interacting elements:

The Geography of an area – encompassing climate, soil profiles, geology and topography, the water table, vegetation, exposure and microclimates, and cultural overlays. The great Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha observed, “Geography … is the primary and most primordial of architectures.”⁵ In Australia today the enlarged Indigenous understanding of Country encompasses all of this and much more.

The Layout is fundamentally the city’s street pattern, retained natural areas and sometimes major infrastructure, as laid across the geography and later only altered with great effort or following crises, either natural or manmade. The importance of the urban plan, of the network of streets, is absent from current “planning” practices in Australia. Look at planning maps – streets are classified as zoned land.

The crucial spatial act of city-making through layout is routinely devolved to the siloed prescriptions of surveyors, and civil and traffic engineers.

Public Works are the collective elements that articulate the layout. These comprise parks and squares, all public and community buildings, public spaces of connection to transport infrastructure, monuments and public art. Their placement and architectural qualities are intrinsic to every city, as are their absence. Here, architecture and landscape come to the fore.

Subdivision is the mechanism, so often overlooked, that allows private land to change over time – ensuring genuine variety due to lot size, street frontage, orientation. The subdivision can subtly denote the intended urbanity. For the architect, projects invariably start with a survey of a plot, with north point, boundaries and angles and a unique longitude and latitude.

Building types are where most architects work throughout their careers. Set on privately owned lots, common types can be categorised by either use or by relationship to their lot. By use: housing of myriad types and sizes, shops, offices, factories. By form: detached or attached, courtyard, zero lot, street wall, point tower, slab block. Across all is the richness that architects bring to type, increasingly in fascinating hybrids.

The layout and public works encompass the public space of the city and its collective life, while subdivision and building types relate to private land and individual interests.

Model urban projects

Our research identified some model urban projects, such as High Street in Sydney’s Millers Point, a comprehensive urban project carried out by the Sydney Harbour Trust’s engineers between 1906 and 1920. It remade the site, overlaid a complex new layout tied spatially to the prominence of Observatory Hill, placed one of Sydney’s first kindergartens as a social centrepiece, and delineated a sophisticated subdivision. The ensemble was constructed with new forms of street-walled finger wharfs and some of the first public housing in Australia, built with the newest construction techniques; a four-pack of flats seemingly arranged as stepped terrace housing. This urban project stands worthy comparison to antecedents in eighteenth-century Adelphi Terrace in London, and nineteenth-century Algiers waterfront.

For its unsurpassed totality as an urban project, the Griffins’ plans for Canberra after the 1911–12 competition are exemplary. Their urban intent was captured in the two-month conception of their competition scheme, elaborated over five years of tortuous work, all the while being undermined by jealous rivals until they left the project.

It is important to reconsider the legacy of the distinct nineteenth-century city plans in Australia, all of course occupying the unceded lands of Aboriginal people. Adelaide’s tartan-gridded square mile, punctuated by squares and bound by parkland, is one of the great urban plans in history. Darwin is memorably situated atop its plateau and Melbourne’s grid is strong and decisive. Or consider Sydney and Hobart’s aggregated plans – more difficult to decode with their incremental responses to topography and connectivity that emerged over time.

But over the century since the Griffins’ Canberra plans – a century of ever-expanding sprawl – where are the successors of such decisive layouts? Where are the new towns, urban projects and models of environmental urbanism? As our cities and towns have doubled and doubled again in population, we’ve exponentially enlarged our sprawling footprint at the expense of ecology. How are we acknowledging Country? Where is the sense of meaningful planning, or a national population strategy tied to targeted investment? Look at the damning travel metrics across our capital cities, testament to a century of car-dependence and under-investment in public transport. It’s time to call stop to sprawl. It’s time for intelligent and culturally aware city making.

Barangaroo

The 2005–06 international East Darling Harbour Competition attracted 137 entrants to shape the urban potential of 22 hectares of public land along the city centre’s western edge. Now called Barangaroo, the jury unanimously selected our scheme, which was devised by an ensemble of small local architects and landscape architects. Atypically, our project was founded on a public space structure that tied this long-isolated site into the broader city, generously connecting to a harbourfront reserved as inalienable public land.

Reprising our experience on the Olympic Village, the murky world of NSW power play got to work and we were marginalised, then excluded. As successive dismal changes were announced, we chose to open a critique; not motivated by personal exclusion, but in defence of the city and the public interest. Our scheme promoted public space as the physical representation of democratic society. Instead, Barangaroo has become a symbol of the power of corporate self-interest.

Public Sydney

My book with Peter John, Public Sydney: Drawing the City (2013), grew from our teaching and research with students at UTS. It started out of curiosity – what could students find examining the public rooms and spaces of central Sydney? Not a CBD, but a treasure house of public space, social purpose and civic architecture.

After being terminated by a new regime at UTS who didn’t want practitioners sullying their academy, we were prompted by then-NSW government architect Peter Mould to reconsider this archive. Alec Tzannes as dean of the University of New South Wales School of Built Environment put seed funding towards the project, and supported by the Historic Houses Trust of NSW, we launched into three years of self-funded work to bring the research to publication. Our motivation remains to interrogate how the city is made and to share that knowledge with a wider audience.

Sydney is an accumulation of urban projects, new pieces, surgical interventions and subtle adjustments, demolitions, reclamations and resumptions – analogous to the “Sedimentary City” previously posited by Brit Andresen in her study of Brisbane⁶. Strikingly, we found the most dramatic, incongruous transformations in use over centuries, beyond the narrow framing of functionalism. If architecture and its response to the city are strong enough, it can, with due architectural skill, be adapted.

For me, “Public Sydney” has taken on a wider role. It is a principle I promote in public talks and advocacy, a hashtag I use across social media, and a challenging jigsaw puzzle. I also use the antonym “Privatised Sydney” as catalogue and critique of the wilful ongoing sale of public assets. This neoliberal accounting trick is short-sighted policy that robs future generations of assets and opportunities for intelligent city making. We must give architecture and city making a stronger public profile, to cultivate more informed clients and politicians with a “public imagination”.

City of Sydney

Having suffered at the hands of political and bureaucratic decisions, in 2016 I was persuaded by talismanic independent Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore to stand as a councillor for the City of Sydney. Highlights included policy initiatives on affordable housing, supporting the city’s many public space initiatives, strengthening planning policies and environmental targets, and standing with the most disadvantaged members of society, protecting their public housing and their right to the city.

A key role was acting as an explainer of place, policies and priorities to the broader public. A cursory glance at any council meeting agenda reveals so much that intersects with architectural and urban practice. Why aren’t architects more involved in government?

The architecture of housing

We inhabit a wealthy country obsessed with real estate, yet one with such a mediocre standard of general housing – poor in design, affordability, sustainability and urbanity.

Australian architecture has long focused on the individual house. In this century, urban housing and particularly the apartment building must become a major architectural activity in Australia. What I term “the architecture of housing” is a specific body of architectural knowledge centred on imbuing housing’s economical quantities with architectural qualities. It includes an encyclopaedic knowledge of models and types, and curiosity about particularities and shifts in culture.

I firmly believe that housing benefits from a limited number of primary standards. By contrast, most Australian jurisdictions have a plethora of minor and often conflicting controls focused on extraneous, aesthetic and formal presumptions. Better to first identify the type or model that responds to the evolving urbanity of a place, then apply good passive design, which almost always mandates a thin cross section and limiting the number of apartments per-core. I hear some architects bemoaning the requirement for minimum sunlight and cross ventilation standards in apartments, yet surely they wouldn’t design, let alone live in, a house lacking adequate sunlight and fresh air-flow. NSW has the best codes, yet the Apartment Design Guide still only requires 60% cross-ventilated apartments. Why such low amenity restricting people’s health and wellbeing? Why have controls that allow apartment living to be second rate?

Our role as architects is to respond intelligently to the misguided frameworks of planning – so often anathema to attuned site planning and durable and characterful construction. What drives planning’s default concentration of density along polluted roadways or its obsession with setbacks? Let’s instead reappraise the long culture of city-making being led by the architecture of housing – from the Adam brothers at the dawn of the speculative city, to the modern movement, when housing became a central concern of architects, to so many contemporary exemplars.

There is such richness in all this accumulated architectural knowledge, going far beyond the ideas-deficient realm of planning or development proscriptions. Urban housing is our story to master and showcase. Our disciplinary knowledge should lead the design of housing and the city.

Threats and possibilities

 Glenn Murcutt, interviewed in Architecture Australia in 1992⁷, exhorted Gold Medallists to speak out for the good of society, the environment, the profession and, I would add, the rising generation of younger architects. Needless to say, I’ve rarely needed much encouragement.

In such forums many architects adopt a position of dignified optimism, but I see existential challenges to the role of the architect and pressures on the profession today. But this doesn’t dampen my mindset or outlook – it sets an agenda.

Let’s start by giving students a deep and meaningful education in architecture, challenging their debt-laden and abbreviated teaching experiences.

Let’s make our daily practice more humane and rewarding. Parlour’s revealing studies show the worsening data on work and wellbeing⁸, a weight falling more and more heavily on young architects. On behalf of all of us, I will ask why, when we go to meetings or building sites, the architect is so often the worst paid person there (unless the landscape architect is also there). It’s time to build a supportive culture around architecture that allows its value to be understood and its profile to rise.

We must become champions of the city, of its public spaces loved or unappreciated, of those suggested but not yet made. Let’s reclaim the street from the car and nurture street life in compact, amenable cities, positively framed by architecture and landscape. We must help translate evolving understandings of country and manifest them in our projects and culture. Let’s advocate for a fairer and more inclusive city with new housing models. Let’s overturn the preoccupations of development, real estate or lifestyle and foreground equity, urbanity, passive environmental design and the human rights to shelter and security. Let’s lead a new generation of exemplary public and affordable housing.

Above all let’s confront the existential threat of climate change. As buildings and cities capture so much of our human energy and waste production, we must lead urgent change now.

Let’s be – and be seen to be – the custodians of our cities, acting in society’s long-term best interests. No one else has our combination of skills, our particular way of seeing and understanding the city and architecture’s place in it. It’s never been more important that we contribute an authentic, expert, independent voice.