The Minns government’s urgent push for densification in Sydney is a necessary response to the multi-faceted housing crisis, but the role of a pattern book needs to be moderated to prevent it from spawning “one size fits all” design types that become the same thing everywhere all at once. The current proposal is that developers who use the pattern book will enjoy an accelerated approval pathway.
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Providing fast tracked development approval for designs taken directly from any pattern book is a bad move. Not only does it stifle design creativity, but it also eliminates a place based and site-responsive design approach. Building design should never be like choosing a dish at a fast food restaurant, where you can order dishes by numbers. Great design is always a unique response to the site’s natural and cultural context.
While it’s true that some of Sydney’s most valued heritage houses, such as Glebe’s terraces, result from a pattern book approach, those precincts have totally redefined their natural context and established a redefined cultural context long ago normalised and accepted. There is no trace of the original ecosystem, and only the broad form of the original topography remains to tell us what was there before. Apart from verandahs to the street, the architecture has little to define as peculiarly Sydney and the same design is seen in any 19th century suburb. What’s done is done there; we can do things better now.
The dangers of this prescriptive approach have been seen in another pattern book incarnation, the original NSW apartment design pattern book, which appeared in the early 2000s as part of the NSW Government’s SEPP 65 (State Environmental Planning Policy No.65). This is not to be confused with the current SEPP 65 apartment design guide, which is more about principles and performance requirements. Thankfully, the earlier document died a quiet death, and the more innovative actors in the design community have moved on to create better unique buildings. How we wish all developers had followed suit!
The need for place- and site-responsive design is not an elitist archi-wank; it is a key part of ecological and social sustainability. How can we know that the design for a manor house copied from “page 34” will correctly address north orientation and neighbourhood character at 34 Smith Street? How will the terrace houses lifted straight from “page 59” sit comfortably on the slope and solar access and views available at 59 West St? Permit me the speculative fiction there.
Hosting an international design competition may seem useful in infusing fresh design DNA into the local scene, but only if one assumes that the locals are too small a pool of talented designers in the first place. I know any number of architects and building designers who would take umbrage with that notion!
There is always a whiff of design-culture colonialism when internationals are parachuted into a local environment, even admitting to spectacular successes like the Sydney Opera House. However, the CBD architecture is different from that of the suburbs. As Paul Kelly has observed, “Every f…kin’ city looks the same”. Do our suburbs have to lose their individual character as well?
Local character is more than skin deep. The erstwhile Pittwater Council on Sydney’s northern beaches made a point of picking out the subtle differences between each of the village centres scattered between Narrabeen and Palm Beach in its LEP, back in the mid 2000s, and that was just in 11km of coastal suburbia. Even more profoundly, Trevor King has extensively researched and presented on the deep time analysis of place, resulting in a theory of “localness” – where building design and construction materials reflect local differences in topography, geology, and flora, expressed in the correct application of passive design that responds to latitude, altitude, and aspect; with colours and textures that reflect the local natural and cultural history.
A pattern book is useful for showcasing exemplars for breaking “same old, same old” thinking. Implemented a “copy and paste” fast track approvals process guarantees it will become tomorrow’s “same old same old” and that we will all regret it. “Those who fail to learn the lessons of history…”
