IF IT WAS EASY, ANYONE COULD DO IT

SETTING THE CONTEXT.

IN DESIGNING ANY BUILDING THERE IS A BIGGER PICTURE THAN THE JUST THE NUTS AND BOLTS OF WHAT IT IS.

Design begins with much wider considerations including the character of the place and the form of the landscape. With an understanding of the context within which we are to work. With an understanding the history of the site and area. With understanding what has generated the look and feel of this place over time.

From this develops a sense of what might be an appropriate next layer to add to the built form to pass on for future generations. Unless somehow frozen in a museum our urban fabric is in a state of constant change. New needs arise, old ones vanish, buildings are put up and torn down and some a re recycled into new uses.

But over time some places, some urban environments are recognised as being special. As somehow having a look, a feel, a scale and a history that makes them cherished. As being just nice places to live and to be in and around. I am sure you can imagine your own favourite places that you love to be.

With modern cities regulated by strict design rules that do not work to the human scale and are ruled by the automobile places like this have become increasingly rare. Yarraville is one of them.

MELBOURNE AND PLANNING REGULATIONS

Here in Melbourne such places have been belatedly recognised in planning legislation with various forms of protection. Sometimes its specific buildings, groups of buildings, streetscapes, vistas, trees. And there are larger areas and whole precincts in which it is not so much the specific details but rather the scale and form of the dwellings, their spacing and the street layouts that make them special. Always these places have a distinctly human scale and are walkable.

Intact areas of Yarraville were developed at a time when building was craft based and where construction relied on human and animal muscle.  These areas have a very different look and feel to places developed after the rise of modernism that were designed for machine construction and the motor car. Past buildings were constructed from elements that a human being could manhandle into place. This limited the size and weight of components. Design had to work within the nature and character of the materials and this fixed the proportions of walls and window openings, roof shapes and thousands of other details. The palette at hand was far more limited than today. Brick, stone, render, timber glass iron, paint and sheet metal. Materials were valuable and used sparingly.

The dwellings erected in Melbourne during the 19th century and the early 20th century came at the very end of a building tradition and craft that stretched back thousands of years and through many cultures. This tradition has now largely been extinguished within the span of only a few generations.

BUILDING MATERIALS PAST AND PRESENT

An inestimable reservoir of building and design knowledge has been lost. Past skills and understanding have been replaced with the products of factories that can come from all over the world. Today you can build in any material you choose, in any style, in any fashion. Designers once consciously and unconsciously followed examples and rules that over time had been found to create comfortable and satisfying environments. There was if you like a language and vocabulary of design with which to speak. With their loss design is now largely illiterate.

Today each design begins anew with a blank computer screen. Where do you start? Browse through House.com or Domain.com for ideas? With so many millions of possibilities what generates a design when you have no solid place to begin?

Dwellings are for real people, for you and for me. They are not about abstract ideas and fashion. They are about being a comfortable living environment in the exact spot where you have chosen to dwell. About working with the climate to keep you warm in winter and cool in summer. Allowing you to feel the breeze and to have spaces filled with sunshine and light. About capturing the opportunities and quirks of the location to enrich your daily life. About creating places where you can sit to catch the winter sun or to view that distant church spire.
About being crafted for their exact location, and this requires care, attention, patience and reflection.

DWELLINGS AND MODERN LIVING ENVIRONMENTS

Within your hectic world your dwelling is the one place where you can truly relax and be who you really are. It is where people come to see the real you. To experience the colours, texture and feel of your life. When designers lose their foundation, their awareness of where we have come from and the real needs of people they fall back on regulation and fashion.

But building regulations do not generate beautiful living environments. For most of history the buildings that we now most cherish were built without regulation. They arose from craft and tradition. Rooms were composed by proportion. Their spaces and arrangements were what over time people had found to be the most pleasing and comfortable.

To design without an awareness of this and rely on prescribed ceiling heights and mandatory setbacks produces crude and ill-suited spaces. Spaces suited for factories and machines but not for people. A present without an understanding of the past has no future.

So how do you embrace and build upon the vast experience and skill of our past yet create dwellings for the 21st century? Your ancestors have been creating beautiful places to dwell for more than 10,000 years. Once you can again draw on this accumulated experience you can have far more than you might think possible.