A Bad Dream
1.
Bad Dream.
Piles of wood chips stretch along the border of the paddock like a small mountain range. They are steaming gently in the cool morning sun as they begin to compost. Behind them in the eight hectares defined by a typically rural wire fence, bobcats and men with chainsaws and a big yellow excavator fitted with hydraulic jaws, continue the job of completely clearing the red gum and grey box and sugar gums that make up the park-like vista of this small patch of central Victoria. A Billabong snakes through the grey, loamy soil exposed by the machinery. Even in this winter of low rainfall, it holds a foot or so of water. Still melodious with parrots, the red gums, their seed spread and germinated by floodwater, show the occasional extent of the nearby meandering creek. But all the trees, even those on the banks and in the billabong itself, are being cut down.
These hundreds of healthy, mature trees are now being stretched in neat rows each about forty metres long and two or three metres high. They are not milling length, but cut to about two and a half metres, for the convenience of mechanical handling and a probable destiny as firewood. Stumps are dragged out and assigned to their own special heaps and the branches chipped to those mountains of mulch. Here, on the outskirts of my small local town, is stage one of another paddock full of the Great Australian Dream.
Australia has become a nation obsessed by building and real estate perhaps more than any other. Television’s top rating show is based around renovation, and such top-shelf house-porn as Grand Designs is un-miss-able and inspirational. However it is not the scale of these structures, indeed they are often preposterously large, it is the delight in the possibilities of what can be done, how a problem can be solved beautifully, how you can break away from the obvious, apply an old material in a new way, make ideas soar into three dimensions.
But at their best they are also houses that make sense of their environments. What is the value of a grand edifice that is hostage to massive heating and cooling expenses and constant artificial lighting? When a house design fails to even consider the very existence and traverse of the sun itself, it becomes an absurdity if not an obscenity. Who would knowingly choose a house with such fundamental and unnecessary flaws? Well, generally speaking, it is the Australian public.
We can see what this denuded paddock will look like in twelve months or so. Just to the east of it, beside the same pretty and archetypally Australian creek, is stage one of the estate constructed a few years ago to the standard formula. All the original trees are gone and roads and dead-ends snake around in utterly artificial curves to attempt some sort of pseudo gracefulness of natural form. Thickly clustered around are the building lots in an array of pure expediency. No consideration is made for the occupants to enjoy the original natural beauty of the site, indeed the aspect of the beautiful red gum creek is fenced off with a continuous high, yellow tin fence. Neither is there opportunity to orient buildings with a readily available northern aspect. To understand the fundamental importance of this failure is vital as it is the first and most basic tenet of enlightened building design.
In our southern hemisphere, the sun sweeps (in simplest terms) from the east to the west in a constantly changing arc. In the winter it completes a very low path staying quite close to the northern horizon and therefore shining into any north-facing windows even at midday and providing natural heating and light. As the seasons advance the sun creeps higher in it’s daily traverse and shines in at a higher angle until, in mid-summer it passes virtually overhead and no longer shines in to a northern window. A house designed with the correct eaves and glazing takes advantage of this natural, self-regulating system known as passive solar heating. Minimal south and west windows, shade-able east windows (ideally all double-glazed), and good insulation contribute vastly to the comfort and economy of the house. This is not rocket science, this is easy stuff, so why isn’t it happening?
An estate “designer” who has completed the work for many such projects in this area of Northern Victoria stated that not once had a developer requested any specific consideration for blocks to be arranged in a way that would make it convenient for a builder to correctly orient a house other than by accident. Neither was any consideration given to incorporate the natural vegetation.
It is not actually obvious that good orientation would result in fewer building blocks, neither would it be beyond the ken of competent designers to incorporate dominant vegetation into park areas rather than the laughably diminutive “reserves” limited to little over one percent of the area.
And what is more, wouldn’t a project that was able to trumpet actual environmental benefits constitute a commercial benefit? Vague assertions on a developer’s websites that they are somehow environmentally thoughtful don’t amount to anything, regardless of calling their ninety-lot subdivision Froggy Meadows.
So are we to presume estate designers don’t design well because developers don’t ask them to because house buyers aren’t asking for it? Or have we missed something? What about the builders?
It is a reasonable generalisation that most builders are pretty good at what they do. Familiarity and uniformity means faster and more. They have an interest in a competent job quickly done. It matters not that the house is a depressing hotbox whose biggest window faces a tin fence three meters away, just as long as someone is willing to buy it.
But pulling back to the bigger picture, the major project builders are loosely engaged in a price war like the supermarkets with a carton of milk. To take the mcMansion analogy, you can start with the basic cheeseburger and start adding to it in the form of dado-boards, nicer bench tops, gold taps and possibly side by side toilet bowls according to your fancy. Each project builder has their menu worked out to cater for the obvious budget-ranges and it’s pretty simple; more money is more house, not a better house other than in ultimately superficial detail and trim. People understand that. It’s easy to quantify. Four bedrooms and two bathrooms versus four bedrooms, two bathrooms and one en suite… I win by one en suite! No embarrassing questions there about double glazing or how much insulation is in the ceiling or just how much power and water does that aircon suck come February with the sun blazing into that great big dumb west picture-window? The practical experience of living in them is secondary to their floor area and a check-list of decorator gimmicks.
And why not? Because, like those people who leave the plastic on the seats of the new car or the furniture, it’s all about the resale value. The pervasive thinking is that selling a house after about seven years should reap the capital gain of increased house prices and allow an “upgrade” to something further up the ladder and, inevitably, with an even bigger mortgage. Life is something that apparently happens sometime in the future, and a house is a type of temporary financial vehicle, not a home to actually nurture its occupants with warmth and character and economy. It matters not that the average Australian occupancy is 2.55 people, the aspirational Australian’s dream is for four bedrooms and two bathrooms so a bare minimum of three bedrooms is the rule regardless of actual need. This “chicken and egg” principle that you have to buy big because that is what people buy is reinforced by the Real Estate agents and has become the essential dogma of the resale market.
And beyond mere bedrooms are multiple living areas, increased physical isolation from each other at home mirroring the experience of a lonely modern existence in broader society. It is easy to picture the individuals in one or another of the far reaches of the new brick veneer precariously connected with other humans via a screen in that parody of conversation, like monks in their en suited cells practicing that most singularly modern vow of silence.
And from outside in the street there is a sterility to the gingerbread houses jammed into the blocks, each different but weirdly identical. These subdivisions are perfectly extruded by the industry, every surface bordered and curbed, a square of turf, the neat oblong of coloured gravel, a feature-palm and a drive of pattern-paving and there is not a hair out of place with each maximized house on its minimized lot.
The streetlights are decorated with some laser-cut, industrial-strength whimsy, in effect the developer’s corporate logo, stamped across the project at forty metre intervals.
Cars emerge and return through remote roller-doors and then the stillness returns. This is a sterile place. The street is without children, they are safe inside or in the security of a small backyard. The front garden is suggested rather than real. The effect of the streetscape is that of a film set or a brochure. It is somehow not real and it bears no connection to where it is in the geography or topography or natural environment. To all intents it is a human desert.
It is surrounded by the latest trend, a nearly two metre high fence whose presence may serve as a gratuity to the new tenants as a free back fence rather than risk any variations to spoil the corporate perfection but it also has resonances with the so-called “gated” communities where the nastiness and threat of “out there” can be imagined to be kept at bay. Main access is not through an actual gate, but certainly a decorative gateway. The desired effect is to create a faux sense of a distinct and safe community. In reality it further isolates itself from the real environment or the need to design with any concord with it.
And there is no “centre”, there is only expanse. Were a designer to attempt a personality or sense of identity, they would have to provide a focal point which might consist of a civic space or square or park and even the possibility of the most basic civic centre, a “main street” in fact. The charm and indeed the very thing that makes us recognize a town or village is this heart which is made distinct principally by its architecture. Imagine if a developer were to include something like terrace houses and a square. In a single move we would have high-density housing (for those 2.55 occupants and think of retirees) and whenever it was appropriate they could be immediately transformable to a shopfront. The viability of terrace housing is more than proven by its enormous desirability in our cities. Here we could create a genuine sense of place, somewhere to actually walk to, the kernel of real character.
As it is, the science of commercial demography dictates that, whenever there is a high enough concentration of housing estates, at some midpoint on the major road a truly horrendous array of concrete tilt-up commercial premises can be thrown up. A small chain supermarket, a bakery, a fuel station and a chemist to provide the burgeoning quantities of pharmaceuticals necessary to sustain life in this new paradise. We see these strips everywhere and they are universally depressing and ugly. Invariably, almost by definition, beyond walking distance from the housing, the cars scurry in and scurry home again. The scale is already beyond any real chance of establishing relationships of familiarity or friendship.
And oddly, despite the apparent inevitability of the current style of development, people know what charm is when they see it. Nobody goes on a nice drive to a housing estate for a day out, they are drawn to towns with soul and charm. It could be conjectured that nowhere without roots in 19th or early 20th century architecture and civic design has any real chance of capturing our hearts. How little of Australian housing built since the fifties manages gracefulness and its charmless DNA thrives, little changed other than the odd boxy portico extrusions, in the current manifestation of housing fashion.
How many of the developers who have made such killings in new estates aspire to live in one? For them the leafy suburbs and inner city of the old world or perhaps a thoughtfully designed one-off is what the real winners choose.
The newly popular small towns within an hour or so of Melbourne and blissfully bereft of much modern central development now demand premium prices. Why can’t we take the best of the old and apply the advantages of the new (in terms of thermal efficiency and modesty) to house ourselves in rather than pedaling this rat-race of ill-thought-out, wasteful and dysfunctional brick veneer, each nastily-angled black roof topped with an air conditioner indicating, almost by definition, a failure in design?
A vista looking across any number of Europe’s older cities reveals roofscapes that are in themselves picturesque. How is it that any similar view across our new suburbs is so unfailingly and almost uniquely ugly? A builder would say that we choose an angle for our roofs that is the cheapest compromise of pitch in consideration of covering the area but sufficiently shedding rain and even for the convenience of the plumbers or tilers fitting them. But our forebears didn’t choose that. As a rule they little understood insulation, indeed it hardly existed, but they understood beauty. Somewhere we lost that eye.
Brick veneer was a postwar innovation that allowed us to throw up buildings quickly and save on the inner skin of brick. Brick veneer houses with an inner wall of plaster over a timber frame are predictably thermally disastrous with virtually no isolation from the temperature of the outer brick. The introduction of the star energy rating system beginning in 2005 began to address this with wall and ceiling insulation but not, shamefully, without a certain resistance from industry bodies. From a thermal point of view a brick veneer house is inside out. An outer skin, then the insulation and then a brick inner skin acting as heatbank would actually be a more logical arrangement and there are other ways to achieve good thermal performance without brick at all but the predominance of veneer construction is almost unquestioned. “You don’t have to paint it” would appear to be the chief argument in its favour. This hardly trumps the currently poor application, the cost of energy in brick production, especially concrete brick, or the many alternatives available that are more effective and sustainable and at least as attractive. The second oldest building in my local Goldmine-era city happens to be weatherboard, well over a century and a half old.
Bricks are wonderful things but they are not compulsory and shouldn’t be presented as such by an industry force-feeding us poor designs in inappropriate materials.
The way any country houses its people provides one of the most recognisable characteristics of it. Indeed through history it is perhaps the most obvious and lasting manifestations of a culture. To reduce this to nothing more than an industry whose principle purpose is to consume materials and feed the infinitely ravenous and probably planet-consuming imperative of limitless economic growth is something we should be intelligent enough to avoid.
Australia’s high rate of population growth and subsequent housing demand represents to all stripes of politics a most reliable form of golden goose that must be kept alive at all costs. It doesn’t have to be efficient or attractive or compete overseas. Generally speaking it is run on borrowed money (ultimately from offshore) and is paid for by an increasingly desperate population intent on the imperative of home-ownership and dedicating a large portion of life and income for decades to come in total subjugation to feeding the cuckoo of their mortgages.
With notable exceptions, from the hastily assembled and usually soulless and shoddily fitted apartment blocks to the thousands of acres of energy-guzzling and land-consuming estates that bear no closer examination to reveal their true nature than to see past the lip-stick on a pig, we are being duped, misled and debased. It is greed and not need that is driving this. We could easily do so much better with what we know. The quantities of energy and materials spent should at least be advancing our society rather than largely representing a burden and a waste into the future, to be pulled down or expensively retro-fitted until they make sense.
This massive industry owes us better choices and our leaders and bureaucracies are failing in their stewardship, essentially asleep on their watches and only roused from slumber by the gross measure of the construction rate slowing down.
And finally, let us return to the eight hectares. The local council and the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning refused to provide the precise contract of vegetation offsets the developer had been required to purchase in exchange for clear-felling all those trees and gouging out and filling the billabong. But what they did disclose was that, despite the whole elaborate process involving so many bureaucrats, consultants, brokers, a snowstorm of permits and an imponderable amount of money, all that really happened was an equivalent amount of similar vegetation, already existing somewhere, was “set aside” in a covenant, not to be cleared. It was as if someone had merely been paid to take a gun from its head.
In an abuse and betrayal of what the public would think was the most fundamental common sense and payment of a debt to the environment, not one seedling was actually planted to replace that which was destroyed.
In some darkly cynical Kafkaesque formula, two minus two has been made to equal four.