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.
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.
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.
30 September – 3 October 2016
Future Impending
Sydney Architecture Festival