High Life Comes Out Of The Closet
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday May 3, 2007
A new look at apartment living in Australia challenges the quarter?acre block stereotype.
"To our dear mother the idea of taking a flat was only one step away from announcing he was going to shack up with a prostitute," wrote Robin Slessor in 1920 when his poet brother, Kenneth, left home to live near Kings Cross. "Flats in those days were looked upon as something evil, something really evil."The social history of apartment dwelling and our attitudes towards the buildings as much as their architecture inform the content of Homes in the Sky: Apartment Living in Australia, published this month to coincide with an exhibition of apartment history at the Museum of Sydney.Curators and co-authors Caroline Butler-Bowdon, of the Historic Houses Trust, and Charles Pickett, of the Powerhouse Museum, have uncovered a history to counter Australia's collective self-image as a place full of homes on quarter-acre blocks in the suburbs.Pickett says this image has hidden apartments from history. "There was so much invested emotionally and culturally in the idea of the suburban cottage," he says. "Even in the 1920s there were the subsidised cottages for returned servicemen. You just have to look at the way Australians talked about themselves - you wouldn't know apartments existed."There are more apartments than houses being built in Sydney today and a third of all Sydney households live in medium- and high-density housing. It is predicted that this figure will rise to 45 per cent by 2030.Apartments came rather late to Sydney. There were medium-rise blocks of flats in New York and London from the 1880s, driven by technological advances such as steel-framed buildings and lifts. In Australia, however, it wasn't until the beginning of the 20th century that luxurious apartment buildings such as Kingsclere and The Astor were built. Their inhabitants were usually the very rich - pastoralists wanting a pied-a-terre in town, for instance - and mod-cons included dumb waiters from ground floor dining rooms.Apartments were expensive and difficult to buy (90 per cent were rented) but there was an apartment boom in the 1920s and '30s, and tenants steadily gained a reputation as single, unconventional bohemians. Many wonderfully inventive blocks were built, including the extruded Federation Byron Hall, the art deco Macleay Regis and the modernist Wyldefel Gardens - all in Sydney's premier historic apartment suburbs of Kings Cross and Potts Point. Further afield, Manly's Borambil apartments featured niceties such as "separate entrances, with shower and change rooms for lady and gentleman surfers . . . on the lower ground floor". The book and exhibition include excellent photographs (many by Max Dupain) and drawings of these buildings. Twelve case studies of contemporary apartment dwellers are also in the volume.Few public housing towers were built in Sydney, in contrast with the custom in other countries or even in Melbourne. Those that were, often poorly designed and managed, helped to further sully apartment living's louche reputation, but probably not as badly as suburban walk-up blocks."Trying to accommodate apartments on an ordinary suburban block is a very Australian thing," Pickett says. One of the few walk-ups to transcend the genre was the Chilterns in Rose Bay, built in the early '50s and raised on international style pilotis (supports). In many ways, Harry Seidler's now much-loathed Blues Point Tower - Australia's first residential strata block - led to a revival in the fortunes of high-rise living. Pickett and Butler-Bowden use exactly the same phrase to describe the building: "much maligned".Butler-Bowden says the tower marked the democratisation of apartment ownership and, while austere, "it was luxury living for people on modest incomes". Blues Point also embodied, as part of a wider plan for the peninsula, "the idea of communal life; the idea that we might share child-care centres and parks", she says. At the same time, however, hostility to towers was mounting, especially where large-scale slum clearance schemes, such as those in The Rocks, Victoria Street and Waterloo, threatened historic streetscapes.In the '90s, of course, apartments once again became glamorous with developments such as the Republic and Engelen Moore's award-winning Altair. The emphasis this time around, however, was on high-living individualism rather than communal Utopia. Increases in density are a vital way of sparing Sydney's peripheral farmland and regenerating inner-urban centres. However, many of the mass-development apartment blocks built recently in the city are of dubious quality to say the least - repetitive designs that do little to create a sense of place. After leading the apartment living charge for a century, Sydney's crown as design innovator is slipping, with Melbourne providing more thoughtful designs and, according to Pickett, the Gold Coast bucking up its ideas and building better and more spacious blocks than are found in NSW. In Surfers Paradise Q1 is pushing the limits in more ways than one - as the world's tallest residential tower. Height isn't everything, of course, but it makes a change from Sydney's recent cookie-cutter approach to design. This book and exhibition remind us what can be achieved when we set our sights higher.Homes in the Sky: Apartment Living in Australia is published on Monday by Historic Houses Trust, $69.95. The exhibition opens at the Museum of Sydney on May 12 and runs until August 26.
© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald