Who’s Responsible For Crappy Design?
When 6 years old, my older brother drew a picture of a house with his crayons. It was a square-and-triangle variety of house that we are all familiar with, however this one was more colourful than most, and included a caption. Below the house it said ‘I like Dubuque for the pretty houses’. My parents entered the picture in a contest and it won, and ended up on billboards around the city.
I grew up in Dubuque, a town of 50,000 people in Iowa, which is about as far away from my current home in Melbourne, Australia as you can imagine, in most respects. What they share, though, is a glorious wealth of 19th century architecture and houses.
Both places have ‘pretty houses’, and I’ve always appreciated that. Thus you can imagine my dismay, chagrin, and general saltiness when witnessing a scourge facing Melbourne more and more often in recent times: crappy design.
This is something I’ve been thinking about and observing for awhile, especially with every new two-storey townhome being an obligatory dark brick and gray render design which was probably cut and paste from the last one, but it’s a phenomenon that’s only really come home recently when some new apartments started going in next to my house.
The giant wall of lifeless concrete in the picture is in actuality an apartment building, despite all appearances to the contrary. The developer has called its masterpiece ‘Tre Viso’, which I believe is Italian for ‘Really Boring’. I captured this picture of Really Boring (with my house, the one that looks vaguely like a boat, in the foreground; I know, those in glass houses…) on a lovely morning, where the northerly sun set everything aglow. If you’ve bought yourself a unit in Really Boring, you’ll need to go stand in the laneway to experience northerly sun for yourself. In a word, depressing. What’s worse, this is happening everywhere.
Further, it’s not just Really Boring, it’s really crappy design, not only for those suckers who live there, but for the neighborhood and community as well. So where should we direct our angst… who’s responsible? Let’s examine the most likely suspects.
Architects
Architects are an obvious one — someone had to put pen to paper on the giant featureless wall of concrete that sits next to my house. It makes me sad to think a self-respecting professional thought this — or any other crappy design, for that matter — constituted good design. Is this what you went to school for, and trudged through the many years working your way up the architecture ranks, to grace the world with eyesores? Maybe the graduate architect in the office put this one together and the lead was on annual leave at the time. Maybe their design was inspired by concrete sound barrier walls along the M3… how very urban. One can only wonder. We must cut our fair architects some slack, however, as they are not always given a blank sheet of paper and afforded the opportunity to design the next Sydney Opera House. They’ve got others pushing them to spit out crappy designs.
Council
Of course it’s the evil government that is to blame for crappy design. They are responsible for protecting the community and setting planning rules, right? Not exactly. Council does not typically opine on what looks good and what doesn’t. There are no planning rules which say that new developments need to look nice. Council does set guidelines on things like how high a building can be, the minimum sizes of apartments (a contentious one), and, likely the culprit in the case of the concrete wall of crappiness, rules about overlooks, i.e., one cannot build a building facing another with windows which would allow residents to look down upon a neighbouring building and watch people eating dinner or folding laundry. On the base of it, this guideline makes sense. I would not want someone from another building seeing how dirty my kitchen is. And unfortunately for me, the location of my house probably led to a requirement by the local Council that the design of the apartments take care to not overlook my kitchen. However…. this does not mean that it needed to be a blank wall with no windows whatsoever. There could have been windows, though opaque ones, to let in the glorious northern sun onto happy residents (openable ones to let in fresh air would have been truly luxurious), and some sort of architectural detail. But this did not happen, probably because of our next suspect.
The Developer
Of course it is evil developers that are driving the scourge of crappily designed developments, which fail their residents and the neighborhoods in which they reside. But why would one care about such grandiose things like as offering residents a living experience that extends beyond caesarstone countertops and SMEG appliances (in your kitchen that’s too small to use them), and the community a place it can be proud of? There’s money to be made, baby!
The business of a developer is like any other. Revenue minus costs equals profits.There’s revenue coming in from sales of apartments, and there’s costs going out like the cost of construction, the cost of the land, permits, etc. The sale prices one gets for apartments is largely driven by the market. Apartments in Brunswick generally sell for a certain dollar range, which is different than what you’d get selling in South Yarra. Costs, however, the developer can control to some extent, and the more the costs get screwed down, the more money that gets stuffed into the developer’s pockets at the end of the day. Cost saving measures can include hiring a two-bob architect who is happy to draw up zombie concrete walls in exchange for a fee, cramming as many apartments into the building as is physically possible within the limits of the law (why make them bigger than you need to?), and utilising Council’s rules about overlooks to their favour, by not having any windows on the north and south sides of the building, because windows are exceedingly more expensive than precast concrete.
Not all developers focus on maximising profit at the expense of good outcomes for residents, neighbourhoods, etc., but sadly most do.
Us
While the evil developers are certainly driving things in terms of crappy designs, there’s one more group that’s certainly not innocent: us. We encourage these outcomes and here’s how.
Consider this gem of a building which was also recently built in my neighbourhood. Its gloomy appearance is enough to spoil even the sunniest of days, and makes me fear the coming of Communism. However I believe sales went well, and certainly soon after the place opened up there were many phone conversations similar to the following happening all throughout the building:
‘Brah, you coming over Saturday check out the new pad?’
‘Yeah brah, where you at?’
‘Brunswick Road. The new one.’
‘Is that the one that looks like a square Death Star?’
‘Yeah brah, but you should see the rooftop pool. And there’s a barby up there.’
‘Sweeeet.’
It is hard to fight the battle of internal amenities and external appearance, as most people would say they could not care less what the outside of their home looked like, as long as they had a nice bathroom with a rainwater shower head and a kitchen with stainless steel appliances and copious amounts of cupboard space to fit your juicer, sandwich press, food processor, gourmet pod coffee machine and ultra-high powered blender.
Perhaps you think this is just another NIMBY-ish rant, but it is not intended to be so. Crappy design bothers me whether it is in my neighborhood or yours. So what’s the point? Maybe that in 20 years time, when the Melbourne landscape is a sea of brick and render townhomes, you can smugly tell your kids that you were there when it all started and have been shaking your fist at them ever since. Or maybe this will inspire you to organise a scappy band of rebels to travel the suburbs and fight the evil powers of the dark side to ensure that another square Death Star is never built. But those are just a couple of options, and enough for now. I’ve got to go fire up the SMEG and make some breakfast.
