For all homes

The home was a big focus of the Sydney Architecture Festival: from how much space do we need in our homes to temporary housing and off grid affordable solutions.

A festival of ideas related to architectural design in the city, this years’ “Sydney Architecture Festival” was also a showcase for new architectural projects in the Chippendale suburb of Sydney, an area with a working class history that has been renewed as a retail and residential precinct through a series of new developments.

The major themes of the festival included a celebration of 200 years of public architecture with the bicentenary of the NSW Government Architect, the role of the government in building the cities, energy consumption and climate change and questions of density – or how much space we need to live in. However it failed in a way to interrogate its own suggestions, leaving the question open of who should downsize and who can expand.

In Australia’s short history, and in its first colony, this role has a heritage that outlasts the treasury or even parliament itself – and which is responsible for having built much of early Sydney and still has a role to play in taking a macro view of its idiosyncrasies of wealth and geography.

To illustrate this point in the Sydney Stories panel discussion, author David Malouf said, “I think the other thing about Sydney which is quite interesting is because it has all those little bays and peninsulas, some of which lead absolutely nowhere, it really leads strongly early on to the fragmentation of Sydney. If you live at Woolwich or Longueville or Cremorne Point, they are little dead ends that are terribly enclosed areas and I think Sydney encouraged that kind of thing”.

Chippendale is an area 2 km south of the central business district of the city – putting it at the very centre of greater Sydney. When first developed however it was on the periphery – and was defined overwhelmingly by the Carlton & United Brewery, an industrial estate for the production of beer established in 1838. This site was bought by developers Frasers who established 2500000m2 development called Central Park, complete with art studios, residential and commercial and green spaces, vertical gardens, a heliostat and – most interestingly – onsite thermal tri-generation and water recycling plants.

As Festival Director Tim Horton said, “that the festival was held at Central Park at this was not accidental – we wanted a developer who walked the talk – a developer who worked with a range of architects, environmental engineers and others – a developer who could deliver public good through development. Central Park is a highly dense development where 30% of the site is open and greet – using rainwater, a precinct that is effectively its own grid”.

The intent behind featuring this suburb in the festival was to showcase the renewal project, and the heritage of the area, to produce what Horton called, “the architecture of place”. This is to support the development of a planning and design model that can ultimately inspire urban renewal throughout other cities-within-a-city in Sydney, such as Parramatta, Liverpool, or even in the adjacent cities Gosford or Newcastle.

A big focus of the festival was on the size of the home people need to live in, with One Central Park as the stellar backdrop to promote high-density living.

Taking over the footpaths near the festival hub, The Global 1:1 was a project that asked how many sqm do we need to live well in the city? Over the central park brewery yard Sydney Architecture Festival with Hassell and Committee for Sydney compared floor plans of average apartment sizes by mapping them out on the concrete yard. By mapping out the floor plans of average sized houses in cities across the world – it gave people a very concrete comparison how much or how little space people normally have.

As David Tickle from Hassel says, this asks the question of how much space do we need in our homes. It compares a standard Australian home at 78 sqm with much more compact average living spaces from other cities around the world including Copenhagen (50 sqm), the US (70 sqm) and Hong Kong (15 sqm). As Tim Horton said, they took down plans of apartments at full scale 1:1, finding “you can fit 3 apartments into the footprint of 1 Australian house”. This exhibit did not ask about the implications of living in smaller spaces for health, family and community, nor what other resources are available at a public or community level for those invested in smaller spaces.

Temporary housing was another solution considered by the festival. Designed by Alexander Symes, Australia’s first flat pack, off grid affordable housing solution, Big World Homes was exhibited at the Festival Hub at Central Park. Intended to be used as transient housing for transients. Solar panels provide electricity, and running water is sourced from inbuilt rain tanks. By being mobile (the house is also a registered vehicle) and easy to construct the tiny home gets around the cost of land and labor, removing significant barriers to entry for first home buyers. This model costs about $ 65,000 (about 45,000 euros).

But where would these homes be parked in a place such as Chippendale? The great contradiction of the Sydney Architecture Festival was its featuring as a profile project, the enormous art mansion of 1,050 sqm built for one person – Judith Neilson, while situating opposite tiny houses of only 13.75 sqm which are supposed to be a solution to the housing affordability crisis.

This is not to downplay the design brilliance of the premises, or openness of Judith Neilson it making her home available to strangers. However there is some hypocrasy which the festival organisers should admit to.

Tours of the Judith Nielson’s new residency called “Indigo Slam” were available to select attendants of the festival. She had bought the warehouse from the previous owner who planned to turn it into office spaces, and she liked the initial plan so came in and saw the architects Smart Design Studio in Surry Hills who had planned that redevelopment and briefed them on a house that should look like a piece of sculpture to be lived in, and to last 100 years.

The result is unequivocally beautiful. All materials and fittings selected to endure the climatic conditions, all operable elements such as hinges are mechanically rather than digitally operated. The house has geothermal heating and cooling. It has four bedrooms as well as a separate guest apartment, and an adjacent terrace house to house the butler. It has a dining table that can sit 60 people. 6 bathrooms. And yet, at present, one person lives in this house.

Is their no contradiction? Why are some people being encouraged to live in tiny spaces while others places for buying up multiple buildings for a private development?

While Neilson intends to share it with the world, there is no doubt it is and should be at her sole discretion.

It begs the question of whether it is necessary to put a premium on space, regardless of the purchasing power of the resident in densely populated urban areas, in the same way that government sometimes does with freeway space. If it is possible to require at least 2 people travel in a car on certain freeways, can we make the same demands of housing? Since her function space is in a private home, and cannot be hired, it is technically less available to the public than even a commercial space, which could at least be rented.

It is necessary that the government recognize these contradictions. In a city where property is the primary tradable asset that inequality will be measured not in cash, but in sqm – the amount of land that you have at your permanent disposal.

Australia most urbanized nation in the world, some of the most livable cities in the world.

In such a new nation, where architecture has played a pivotal role in the process of building national identity and housing new immigrants, the festival did a good job at thinking about architecture of place. Using Chippendale as a focus, the organisers showed how new projects could document social history and reflecting it in future development.

However the festival should have taken a more critical view of some of the solutions it intimated, and how they may apply to people differently – asking what would happen if we all lived in small spaces, or all lived in big spaces? Who gets to decide who lives in what, and for whom? While a festival like this may never resolve all the contradictions of a city as diverse as Sydney, it needs to at least be aware of those of its own making.