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Crimes against architecture

An essay and rant on a topic that I feel strongly about: overdevelopment in the suburbs and the eye-gougingly ugly styles of houses that comprise much of this development. This is an emotional issue for me as the familiar landscape of the suburb I grew up in and have lived in all my life so far is changing, and not for the better.

Under siege

Since the changes in planning laws introduced by Premier Jeff Kennett’s Liberal government in the early 1990s, all suburbs have been affected by new housing developments. Melbourne’s growing population and economy has exacerbated this, as well as policies such as negative gearing that encourages investors and developers to buy, demolish, rebuild and rent out houses. A culture of greed and excess has led to housing design changing from relatively modestly-sized homes to enormous ostentatious monstrosities. The planning laws are now a farce, with almost free rein given to property developers (now my most-despised profession).

The changes in the suburban landscape would be more bearable if the new developments replacing older-style suburban homes were aesthetically-pleasing and environmentally-friendly. But in most cases they are not. Instead, the typical types of houses being built are:

  • Enormous double-storey box-like single homes that take up most of a block – the “McMansion” style.
  • Two or more townhouses crowded onto a single block where one older house once stood, with little or no room for vegetation or a backyard.
  • One of the worst designs currently in fashion are the large double-storey attached/duplex dwellings which are particularly intrusive and ugly, filling a whole block and crowded close together.
  • Corner blocks have two or three multi-storey townhouses crammed onto them.
  • The attached style of housing has become more prevailent in recent years, leaving even less room for open land.

These architectural abominations loom over the streets in a menacing fashion, overshadowing other smaller houses and blocking off the view of the sky. Unlike the modest older houses, the new constructions come across as arrogant and unfriendly. The effect I feel when walking down a street with such houses is one of claustrophobia.

The housing style currently in fashion is reminiscent of a charmless bleak utilitarian factory building, all angles and grey- or beige-rendered surfaces. It seems that developers and so-called architects have deliberately set out to create the ugliest houses possible. The houses have little or no room for a back- or front yard, and little if any vegetation is planted. The tiny gardens reflect the latest landscaping fads, consisting of mostly paving with a few small forlorn pot plants or small shrubs scattered around. There is no room for large shady trees which are such a haven in a hot land. There is no habitat for birds or other wildlife, even insects; the small scraps of land surrounding the houses are reminiscent of a concreted desert.

The architects who design these eyesores should be lined up and shot! Or, somewhat more moderately, banned from their profession. They know nothing about sustainable and aesthetic design: good design leaves room for vegetation, is environmentally-friendly and ample space between houses for privacy.

Every time I see an auction sign go up on a house in my neighborhood I feel a sick dread as more often or not it means the house will be demolished; the block of land it resides on “moonscaped” – cleared of all vegetation – and some ugly monstrosity replace it. This feeling is reminiscent of being under siege from a relentlessly-advancing army – of huge houses in this case – and it seems never-ending.

Before and after

Before and after – modest, well-kept older suburban houses and their typically ugly new replacements (two-storey duplex/attached dwellings)

A nickname I thought for this process is “The Scouring of the Suburbs” – after the chapter title in The Lord of the Rings. It seems rather appropriate!

It was after nightfall when, wet and tired, the travellers came at last to the Brandywine, and they found the way barred. At either end of the Bridge there was a great spiked gate; and on the further side of the river they could see that some new houses had been built: two-storeyed with narrow straight-sided windows, bare and dimly lit, all very gloomy and un-Shire-like.

[…]

The travelers trotted on, and as the sun began to sink towards the White Downs far away on the western horizon they came to Bywater by its wide pool; and there they had their first really painful shock. This was Frodo and Sam’s own country, and they found out now that they cared about it more than any other place in the world. Many of the houses that they had known were missing. Some seemed to have been burned down. The pleasant row of old hobbit-holes in the bank on the north side of the Pool were deserted, and their little gardens that used to run down bright to the water’s edge were rank with weeds. Worse, there was a whole line of the ugly new houses all along Pool Side, where the Hobbiton Road ran close to the bank. An avenue of trees had stood there. They were all gone. And looking with dismay up the road towards Bag End they saw a tall chimney of brick in the distance. It was pouring out black smoke into the evening air.

– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

There is no avenue to enable protest – emotional complaints of the new house’s impact on the suburban landscape are not considered valid by the authorities (namely VCAT, which usually rules in favor of developments) – so one is virtually powerless to do anything to stop the development. Few people seem to care anyway; there seems to be an apathy about these changes to the suburbs.

Philosopher Glenn Albrecht came up with a phrase, “solastalgia”, to describe the emotional impact of changes in the landscape on the people who inhabit it.

People are feeling displaced. They’re suffering symptoms eerily similar to those of indigenous populations that are forcibly removed from their traditional homelands. But nobody is being relocated; they haven’t moved anywhere. It’s just that the familiar markers of their area, the physical and sensory signals that define home, are vanishing. Their environment is moving away from them, and they miss it terribly.

– “Clive Thompson on How the Next Victim of Climate Change Will Be Our Minds”, Wired.com, 20/12/2007

The article is focused more on environmental and climate changes, but it expresses how I feel about the changes and ugly overdevelopment in my suburb and others: a continuing low-level depression and anxiety, perhaps a grieving, over the loss of what was familiar. A similar article published later is “Is There an Ecological Unconscious?”, NYT, 31/1/2010.

“There’s a scholar who talks about ‘heart’s ease,’ ” Albrecht told me as we sat in his car on a cliff above the Newcastle shore, overlooking the Pacific. In the distance, just before the earth curved out of sight, 40 coal tankers were lined up single file. “People have heart’s ease when they’re on their own country. If you force them off that country, if you take them away from their land, they feel the loss of heart’s ease as a kind of vertigo, a disintegration of their whole life.” Australian Aborigines, Navajos and any number of indigenous peoples have reported this sense of mournful disorientation after being displaced from their land. What Albrecht realized during his trip to the Upper Valley was that this “place pathology,” as one philosopher has called it, wasn’t limited to natives. Albrecht’s petitioners were anxious, unsettled, despairing, depressed – just as if they had been forcibly removed from the valley. Only they hadn’t; the valley changed around them.

In Albrecht’s view, the residents of the Upper Hunter were suffering not just from the strain of living in difficult conditions but also from something more fundamental: a hitherto unrecognized psychological condition. In a 2004 essay, he coined a term to describe it: “solastalgia,” a combination of the Latin word solacium (comfort) and the Greek root –algia (pain), which he defined as “the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault … a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at ‘home.’ ”

Perhaps there is some small comfort in the fact that the houses won’t last forever and will be themselves knocked down and replaced in a few decades. Hopefully with something better?

A letter from the 19 March 2007 “Youth forum” in the Herald-Sun – some children feel the same way I do about overdevelopment and the slow tsunami of houses covering once-open land:

We strongly believe there are too many houses being built around Melbourne.

We know that around Hoppers Crossing there are thousands of new homes.

It is important to save the land and all the animals living on it.

When they build new homes, builders destroy the environment and the animals end up dying.

If there are too many houses around Hoppers Crossing, we can’t have animals, ride horses, have farms or pretty countryside.

– Madison (9), Lara (8), Saffy (8) and Mohammed (9)

Shrinking backyards

A dismaying trend of upsizing houses is the consequent loss of backyard space. Houses in Melbourne are now built so large, or so many townhouses are crammed onto a block, that virtually the whole block is covered. This leaves little room for vegetation or outdoor play space for children. One of my favorite activities when young was playing in the backyard, either games with my sister or by myself, making up adventures for my various figurines (model horses and such). This type of unstructured and unsupervised outdoor play is valuable for developing the imagination and getting contact with Nature, and is much healthier for children than being inside all the time playing video games, watching TV or using the Internet.

Public parks are no real substitute for backyards; the latter provide space for unsupervised play and privacy. A comment on an article linked to below notes this:

Outdoor and spontaneous play is part of a healthy childhood and child development. Although adult-supported play has many benefits, so does playing without adult interference and many children are missing out on this. For many children, simply heading out into the back yard whenever they like, unsupervised or with minimal supervision, is an impossibility because they are living in units – or for many who do have back yards, they are adult-oriented spaces rather than child-friendly. It’s also more difficult for parents who were once able to tell their children to “go outside and play”, but now are saddled with finding a good time to take their child(ren) to a local play area, walking, driving or taking public transport to get there, probably packing a bag and stroller with snacks, toys and other necessities. Even if it’s just a few minutes away, it’s not the same as kicking your children out into the garden so you can get a load of washing done or get a bit of peace and quiet while they make their own fun. Not having an outdoor play space for children at home means that play is more sedentary and outdoor play becomes more adult-directed rather than child-directed. This can limit children’s freedom, independence and creativity.

– Amy | Sydney – September 15, 2011, 2:30AM

A case study: my grandmother’s home

Located at 14 Bridge Street, Elsternwick (Google Maps view), this was an Edwardian-style house had been built around 1927, and my grandparents had moved there in 1941. Mum and her brother had grown up there, and it was a “second home” to myself, my sister and our uncle’s 3 children. It was about 15 minutes’ drive from my parents’ home, so we visited there regularly.

It was set on a huge block of land (about 1010 m²); the backyard was spacious and great fun for we children to run around in. A canal was located behind the houses on the street (Elster Street Drain); more fun places to explore. The house itself, though, was fairly small (two bedrooms) with an outside toilet and a bungalow (a small one-bedroom unit). It had not been too much altered from its original design, aimed at some form of self-sufficiency, with ample space for a vegetable garden, a workshed, carport and a chicken shed (the latter long disused when I was born). It had a musty atmosphere of age, and I rather liked this, as well as the surrounding old homes and streets in the area dating from early in the 20th century (before developers started coming from the 1990s onward and ruining this). The suburb was quite pleasant, with large gardens and close to amenities such as shops and a railway line.

Gran lived there for many years after Grandpa died in 1982, but she became increasingly frail and after a bad fall in 1997 resulting in a broken arm, Gran was moved to accommodation and her house would have to be sold to pay for her care. My last visit with Mum was on Friday 17 October 1997 to have the mains power disconnected. I had not visited the place very much in the previous few years or taken any photos; now I wish I had.

The house was ominously advertised as a “sensational multi-unit/townhouse development site”, which meant that after its sale the new owner-developer would demolish it. This was very upsetting, as the house and garden that we had known and explored since childhood would be erased, and only memories remain. It was demolished and replaced by four oversized ugly two-storey “Tuscan-style” townhouses which loomed menacingly over the street. The developer, being greedy as most are, squeezed as many homes onto the block as possible in order to maximize his profit. I would like to see him (whoever he is) burned at the stake (as I would all property developers).

These abominations have also sprung up along the rest of Bridge Street like ugly toadstools.

It might not have been so bad if, say, the developer had retained the original house (and renovated it), and built just one 1-story unit behind the main house. Or even better, if a family had moved in and renovated the house to live in it for a few more decades and continue its history. But that would have been too much to hope for.

The house, like that of my parents’s, is embedded in my long-term memory, so it and the surrounding area appears in my dreams.

Before and after

Before and after – my grandparents’ home, and what replaced it

~ Page last updated: 19/1/2012

Related page: The war on gardens

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