Home a place in the Urban Environment.
Moving to Higher Density Housing
In 1992, David returned to Vienna to research medium to high density housing and also began a design for the conversion of an attic roof space in a nineteenth century building for artist studios/apartments for a artist friend. While there, he also worked with the Finnish/Austrian architect, Pekka Janhunen, in an architectural competition for the new Austrian Cultural Centre in New York.
Back in Sydney, David spent the next 10 months co-organising the launching of Home - A Place in the Urban Environment. This project, an initiative begun by David together with Architecture Lecturer and Design Tutor, Dr Anna Rubbo, became a joint effort between the Architectural Faculties of Sydney University, University of NSW and University of Technology, Sydney. The project consisted of: the exhibition, New Housing in Vienna;, a two-day housing forum, Home a Place in the Urban Environment; and the National Ideas Design Competition,The Next Step.
Back in Sydney, David spent the next 10 months co-organising the launching of Home - A Place in the Urban Environment. This project, an initiative begun by David together with Architecture Lecturer and Design Tutor, Dr Anna Rubbo, became a joint effort between the Architectural Faculties of Sydney University, University of NSW and University of Technology, Sydney. The project consisted of: the exhibition, New Housing in Vienna;, a two-day housing forum, Home a Place in the Urban Environment; and the National Ideas Design Competition,The Next Step.
New Housing in Vienna
An exhibition of housing since1920 by the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the City of Vienna.
Organised by Dr Peter Marchart, Stadt Wien Magistratsabteilung 24
Conception and arrangement by Gustav Peichl and Dietmar Steiner.
Exhibition Design by Margarethe Cufer
Dr Peter Marchart, Chief Architect Public Housing, City of Vienna, opening the Exhibition with Dr Anna Rubbo, University of Sydney
David Aitken Co-organiser with Architect Peter Myers on opening night
Forum ~ Home a Place in the Urban Environment
A forum to engage the public, planning and design professions in a discourse on housing for the future.
SATURDAY AUGUST 17 9-9.45 .
Venue: Level 2, Architecture Department, University of Sydney, 148 City Road, Darlington
Welcome & Opening . The National Housing Strategy . Urban Environments & Environmental Issues . Reflections on The Meaning of Home 2-5pm . Lessons from Sydney : 1920s-40s . Sydney & Melbourne in the 90s 5.30pm . Reception
SUNDAY AUGUST 18
10-12.30pm ~Ideas Competition : Background Briefing . New Ventures: Cooperatives as Home
2.00-5.00pm ~ Home in the Urban Environment . North America . Europe
5.00 pm . ~ Summary & Closing
Participants
SAT AM
Meredith Edwards( ACT). Winston Barnett. Jeff Kenworthy (WA). James Weirick. Anna Rubbo . Susan Thompson . Virginia Spate; Maggie Fooke (Vic); Marla Guppy.
SAT PM
Maurice Daly. Max Kelly . Philip Thalis . Peter Myers . Harry Bechervaise . John Roseth . Peter Dalton . Rob Adam (Vic) . Stephen Axford (Vic) .
SUN AM
Col James . Karen Shellshear . Tone Wheeler . Laurie Chiarella . Shelly lndyk . Amalina Wallace . Don Proctor . Cathy Craigie .
SUN PM
Sophie Watson . Mui Ho (California) .Ian McBurnie (Quebec) . Glen Gilsenan . Jeff Lesueur . Deborah Dearing . Peter Marchart (Austria) . Michael Bier (Austria)
National Ideas Design Competition, The Next Step
An ideas competition to explore innovative and affordable approaches to home in the urban environment. The brief calls for design ideas that respond to changing living patterns, and acceptable alternatives to the Australian Dream. Some of the issues to be addressed are: home and community, home and workplace, home as centre of private life, mixed use and social mix in housing, ecological approaches to building design and landscape. Prizes will be offered and interdisciplinary teams are encouraged.The competition is open to entrants from all states. Local sites can be used. Materials will be available at the August 17,18 forum or from the NSW RAIA 3 Manning St Potts
A forum to engage the public, planning and design professions in a discourse on housing for the future.
SATURDAY AUGUST 17 9-9.45 .
Venue: Level 2, Architecture Department, University of Sydney, 148 City Road, Darlington
Welcome & Opening . The National Housing Strategy . Urban Environments & Environmental Issues . Reflections on The Meaning of Home 2-5pm . Lessons from Sydney : 1920s-40s . Sydney & Melbourne in the 90s 5.30pm . Reception
SUNDAY AUGUST 18
10-12.30pm ~Ideas Competition : Background Briefing . New Ventures: Cooperatives as Home
2.00-5.00pm ~ Home in the Urban Environment . North America . Europe
5.00 pm . ~ Summary & Closing
Participants
SAT AM
Meredith Edwards( ACT). Winston Barnett. Jeff Kenworthy (WA). James Weirick. Anna Rubbo . Susan Thompson . Virginia Spate; Maggie Fooke (Vic); Marla Guppy.
SAT PM
Maurice Daly. Max Kelly . Philip Thalis . Peter Myers . Harry Bechervaise . John Roseth . Peter Dalton . Rob Adam (Vic) . Stephen Axford (Vic) .
SUN AM
Col James . Karen Shellshear . Tone Wheeler . Laurie Chiarella . Shelly lndyk . Amalina Wallace . Don Proctor . Cathy Craigie .
SUN PM
Sophie Watson . Mui Ho (California) .Ian McBurnie (Quebec) . Glen Gilsenan . Jeff Lesueur . Deborah Dearing . Peter Marchart (Austria) . Michael Bier (Austria)
National Ideas Design Competition, The Next Step
An ideas competition to explore innovative and affordable approaches to home in the urban environment. The brief calls for design ideas that respond to changing living patterns, and acceptable alternatives to the Australian Dream. Some of the issues to be addressed are: home and community, home and workplace, home as centre of private life, mixed use and social mix in housing, ecological approaches to building design and landscape. Prizes will be offered and interdisciplinary teams are encouraged.The competition is open to entrants from all states. Local sites can be used. Materials will be available at the August 17,18 forum or from the NSW RAIA 3 Manning St Potts
ARTS
|
 Page 44 The Sydney Morning Herald Saturday, September 7, 1991
|
That the most important exhibition of contemporary architecture yet to visit this country is housed in its least prepossessing venue - at the University of Sydney‘s Tin Sheds Gallery - is not without a certain irony, well suited to its Viennese promoters.
After all, it is only days since Harry Seidler, Australia’s most famous expatriate from the suburbs of that city, declared Vienna a place where the “greatest ambition of the architects is to renovate a shop window or something“.
Well, the shop windows of Vienna are pretty good and have occupied some fine architects in their time and, as this elegant exhibition shows, the “something” is a revelation indeed.
Vienna is a wonderfully compact city in that a great majority of its citizens are housed in sophisticated apartment buildings that at street level contain many of the aforementioned shops and workshops and all of which are built into continuous street frontages of similar height and materials.
Many of these apartment buildings are publicly built and owned and it is this great body of architectural work that forms the subject of this exhibition, and its excellent catalogue.
Public housing in Vienna is the benefit of city life that is available to all and at rents to suit both location and income and is entirely free of the welfare stigma that so unfortunately blights its Australian equivalent.
Consequently, it really matters that the Vienna’s own housing stock be well designed and integrated into the city fabric. Thus the architecture of public housing has probably been pushed further in Vienna than elsewhere simply because it is the most significant new building type in a city that is already well endowed with ostensibly more significant structures.
The first impression is that the consistently high standard of the work on display and the determination of the exhibition designers to ensure that no particular architect is promoted beyond the confines of his or her particular project.
No matter that some of these housing projects are by such seminal architects as Karl Ehn and Adolf Loos; here they are part of the crowd, and mercifully free from the corny exemplarism that seems to forever dog the progress of architecture upon our lucky shores.
Certainly, to alight from the Metro at the portals of Ehn’s Karl Marx Hof (1926-30) and to promenade along its vast meadowed courts is a wonderful experience of a now vanishing socialist utopia where the spring flowers are not trampled and the gravel paths still crunch reassuringly and the walls will always bear plaques in memory of the residents butchered by the fascists in 1934.
Ehn was an astonishingly lucid architect and his masterpiece is so defiantly expressive of its locality, that it is no wonder he remains almost unacknowledged in the literature of international modernism. His few surviving drawings show a revolutionary architectural vision, clearly influenced by Frederick Gilly and Claude-Nicholas Ledoux and are rendered in charcoal on the cheapest paper in a style that makes the Vienna of Carol Reed’s Third Man look positively cheery.
Nevertheless, in Vienna a building that is almost invisible, like Timo Pentilla and Pekka Janhunen’s 40-44 Gumpendorferstrasse (1983-89) housing project, is just as highly regarded as its more topographically prominent predecessors.
I can only agree with this respect for understatement as an attribute of great works of architecture that only ever fall into place when seen as part of an already finely wrought city fabric and which are so subtle in their modernity as to be only just perceivable.
The care with which these architects have planned and detailed this public housing project containing both modest and expensive rental apartments, along with shops and a kindergarten all built to the street perimeters so as to make a large garden courtyard is quite frankly sensational and a profound refutation that only some buildings matter.
Certainly there are flat patches in the policy and architecture of Vienna’s public housing and it is to the curator’s credit that no attempt has been made to exclude those projects from the years. Immediately following the 1939-45 war when the new dangers of urban destruction, disguised as reconstruction, resulted in housing projects built with little or no regard for the recently devastated city’s subtle architectural qualities.
Austria is a curiously ambivalent nation. At once progenitor of both Adolf Loos - surely the most urbane of modern architectural pioneers - and the fascism that ruthlessly eliminated the besieged public housing communes of the inter-war years, Vienna seems destined to continue an uneasy truce between a social democratic transformation of the city into an institution capable of removing existing inequalities and leaden conservatism deeply suspicious of any changes whatsoever.
Even as this exhibition tours Australia the legislative framework that enabled these projects to be built throughout Vienna is being dismantled under a new conservative administration and from now on it will be the skills of special pleading and parochial realpolitik that will determine the allocation and siting of housing within the city.
So what’s new? Maybe the Australians should send some people out here to report back on just how quickly local prejudices can undermine even the most timid attempts at increasing the residential densities of our metropolitan regions and how the average Australian is destined to wear the exploitations of the so-called “housing industry” and its rapacious consumption of land and capital.
If there was ever any doubt that the politicians and the “housing industry“ together have a totally bankrupted view of our urban future it is at once dispelled by studying the recently unleashed “Green Streets“ propaganda campaign for a marginally more dense form of suburbia now strewn across every local government foyer throughout Australia: one can only speculate on what this multicoloured trash cost to produce.
Do our long term planners seriously believe that the prevailing national obsession to consume the considerable chunk of the Earth it has been our dubious legacy to control before the very same Earth consumes us can continue indefinitely?
Surely it is now time to question the fuzzy liberationism with which we Australians have defended both our rights to pursue our own ends and excused as too difficult the outrageous exploitation of the average citizen under the banner of the private freehold of land and houses.
What have we gained? An increasingly stressed service infrastructure that is doomed because we do not have any more money to make it any more efficient and vast areas of suburban tracts that can never hope to be anything more than isolated dormitories of single-family houses whose occupants are yoked to mortgages which they might just acquit before snuffing it.
Surely it’s time to get exhibitions such as this up onto the walls of our major public galleries and to give air-play to the proposal that we may not have to reinvent the wheel and that we may actually have something to learn from “Over There” about how to live in and make cities.
The reconstruction of Australia’s urban regions will take place whether we like it or not and the form of our rebuilt cities will go on being dictated by the shonky freemasonry of capital and developers unless we as citizens can lift the debate to a point where the iniquities of the present “system” are displaced by a new vision of the city as the highest expression of our precious democracy.
This is not an easy exhibition, so allow yourself an hour or so and wear comfortable shoes. There are dozens of panels each containing a project in photographs and architectural drawings and several beautifully made models among which is Loos’s ingenious attached houses from the Werkbundseidlung (1932).
The panels, sequentially, begin with the heady days of Red Vienna, go through the lost years of the 1950s and ‘60s, to the present public housing program of “Urbanity and Understatement”.
Various outer urban settlements and newly rezoned industrial hinterland sites are also shown, but it is the inner urban projects that are of most interest to those seeking new housing possibilities within our cities at densities that are somewhere near what is needed to regenerate the urban life we somehow lost sight of in the flight to the suburbs.
This exhibition has been brought to Australia by the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the City of Vienna with additional support from the Australia Council and the Buchan Fell Research Institute; it will also tour to Canberra, Melbourne, Launceston and Hobart through November.
As an indication of the urgency with which they regard these issues, the Royal Australian Institute of Architects and the universities of Sydney, NSW and Technology are sponsoring a nationwide Ideas Competition for “innovative and affordable approaches to home in the urban environment“.
Details are available from the Institute at 3 Manning Street, Potts Point, Fax: 358 3604,
Tel: 356 2955. Entry costs are $50 for “professionals” $25 for “students”… the choice is yours.
After all, it is only days since Harry Seidler, Australia’s most famous expatriate from the suburbs of that city, declared Vienna a place where the “greatest ambition of the architects is to renovate a shop window or something“.
Well, the shop windows of Vienna are pretty good and have occupied some fine architects in their time and, as this elegant exhibition shows, the “something” is a revelation indeed.
Vienna is a wonderfully compact city in that a great majority of its citizens are housed in sophisticated apartment buildings that at street level contain many of the aforementioned shops and workshops and all of which are built into continuous street frontages of similar height and materials.
Many of these apartment buildings are publicly built and owned and it is this great body of architectural work that forms the subject of this exhibition, and its excellent catalogue.
Public housing in Vienna is the benefit of city life that is available to all and at rents to suit both location and income and is entirely free of the welfare stigma that so unfortunately blights its Australian equivalent.
Consequently, it really matters that the Vienna’s own housing stock be well designed and integrated into the city fabric. Thus the architecture of public housing has probably been pushed further in Vienna than elsewhere simply because it is the most significant new building type in a city that is already well endowed with ostensibly more significant structures.
The first impression is that the consistently high standard of the work on display and the determination of the exhibition designers to ensure that no particular architect is promoted beyond the confines of his or her particular project.
No matter that some of these housing projects are by such seminal architects as Karl Ehn and Adolf Loos; here they are part of the crowd, and mercifully free from the corny exemplarism that seems to forever dog the progress of architecture upon our lucky shores.
Certainly, to alight from the Metro at the portals of Ehn’s Karl Marx Hof (1926-30) and to promenade along its vast meadowed courts is a wonderful experience of a now vanishing socialist utopia where the spring flowers are not trampled and the gravel paths still crunch reassuringly and the walls will always bear plaques in memory of the residents butchered by the fascists in 1934.
Ehn was an astonishingly lucid architect and his masterpiece is so defiantly expressive of its locality, that it is no wonder he remains almost unacknowledged in the literature of international modernism. His few surviving drawings show a revolutionary architectural vision, clearly influenced by Frederick Gilly and Claude-Nicholas Ledoux and are rendered in charcoal on the cheapest paper in a style that makes the Vienna of Carol Reed’s Third Man look positively cheery.
Nevertheless, in Vienna a building that is almost invisible, like Timo Pentilla and Pekka Janhunen’s 40-44 Gumpendorferstrasse (1983-89) housing project, is just as highly regarded as its more topographically prominent predecessors.
I can only agree with this respect for understatement as an attribute of great works of architecture that only ever fall into place when seen as part of an already finely wrought city fabric and which are so subtle in their modernity as to be only just perceivable.
The care with which these architects have planned and detailed this public housing project containing both modest and expensive rental apartments, along with shops and a kindergarten all built to the street perimeters so as to make a large garden courtyard is quite frankly sensational and a profound refutation that only some buildings matter.
Certainly there are flat patches in the policy and architecture of Vienna’s public housing and it is to the curator’s credit that no attempt has been made to exclude those projects from the years. Immediately following the 1939-45 war when the new dangers of urban destruction, disguised as reconstruction, resulted in housing projects built with little or no regard for the recently devastated city’s subtle architectural qualities.
Austria is a curiously ambivalent nation. At once progenitor of both Adolf Loos - surely the most urbane of modern architectural pioneers - and the fascism that ruthlessly eliminated the besieged public housing communes of the inter-war years, Vienna seems destined to continue an uneasy truce between a social democratic transformation of the city into an institution capable of removing existing inequalities and leaden conservatism deeply suspicious of any changes whatsoever.
Even as this exhibition tours Australia the legislative framework that enabled these projects to be built throughout Vienna is being dismantled under a new conservative administration and from now on it will be the skills of special pleading and parochial realpolitik that will determine the allocation and siting of housing within the city.
So what’s new? Maybe the Australians should send some people out here to report back on just how quickly local prejudices can undermine even the most timid attempts at increasing the residential densities of our metropolitan regions and how the average Australian is destined to wear the exploitations of the so-called “housing industry” and its rapacious consumption of land and capital.
If there was ever any doubt that the politicians and the “housing industry“ together have a totally bankrupted view of our urban future it is at once dispelled by studying the recently unleashed “Green Streets“ propaganda campaign for a marginally more dense form of suburbia now strewn across every local government foyer throughout Australia: one can only speculate on what this multicoloured trash cost to produce.
Do our long term planners seriously believe that the prevailing national obsession to consume the considerable chunk of the Earth it has been our dubious legacy to control before the very same Earth consumes us can continue indefinitely?
Surely it is now time to question the fuzzy liberationism with which we Australians have defended both our rights to pursue our own ends and excused as too difficult the outrageous exploitation of the average citizen under the banner of the private freehold of land and houses.
What have we gained? An increasingly stressed service infrastructure that is doomed because we do not have any more money to make it any more efficient and vast areas of suburban tracts that can never hope to be anything more than isolated dormitories of single-family houses whose occupants are yoked to mortgages which they might just acquit before snuffing it.
Surely it’s time to get exhibitions such as this up onto the walls of our major public galleries and to give air-play to the proposal that we may not have to reinvent the wheel and that we may actually have something to learn from “Over There” about how to live in and make cities.
The reconstruction of Australia’s urban regions will take place whether we like it or not and the form of our rebuilt cities will go on being dictated by the shonky freemasonry of capital and developers unless we as citizens can lift the debate to a point where the iniquities of the present “system” are displaced by a new vision of the city as the highest expression of our precious democracy.
This is not an easy exhibition, so allow yourself an hour or so and wear comfortable shoes. There are dozens of panels each containing a project in photographs and architectural drawings and several beautifully made models among which is Loos’s ingenious attached houses from the Werkbundseidlung (1932).
The panels, sequentially, begin with the heady days of Red Vienna, go through the lost years of the 1950s and ‘60s, to the present public housing program of “Urbanity and Understatement”.
Various outer urban settlements and newly rezoned industrial hinterland sites are also shown, but it is the inner urban projects that are of most interest to those seeking new housing possibilities within our cities at densities that are somewhere near what is needed to regenerate the urban life we somehow lost sight of in the flight to the suburbs.
This exhibition has been brought to Australia by the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the City of Vienna with additional support from the Australia Council and the Buchan Fell Research Institute; it will also tour to Canberra, Melbourne, Launceston and Hobart through November.
As an indication of the urgency with which they regard these issues, the Royal Australian Institute of Architects and the universities of Sydney, NSW and Technology are sponsoring a nationwide Ideas Competition for “innovative and affordable approaches to home in the urban environment“.
Details are available from the Institute at 3 Manning Street, Potts Point, Fax: 358 3604,
Tel: 356 2955. Entry costs are $50 for “professionals” $25 for “students”… the choice is yours.
Find Out More
PO Box 1018 MORUYA
NSW 2537, Australia |
|