Housing the Future: Six Points

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1. Common Ground Every apartment block is not an island. When designing towers for living in, the ground-plane condition should be addressed with utmost consideration for the wider urban fabric (beyond the site’s boundaries). A typical residential tower has its back to the street, often featuring a locked private lobby and underutilised lounge area. For security reasons it is made impermeable to the public. In this ubiquitous, default model of high-rise living, the resident is increasingly isolated from their broader environment. What if high-rise residential typologies were more aligned toward urban integration? The notion of public thoroughfare exists predominantly in commercial building such as office towers such as the examples below; why not extend this thinking to residential towers? What if, like mandatory setbacks, we speculated the establishment of a mandatory ‘common-ground’ plane? By respecting the existing grain and civic adjacencies of inner-city plots, cities may be able to better uphold urban continuity in the face of an increasing demand for housing stock. Conventional multi- residential ground plane: Impermeability denies public & breeds isolation Potential to democratise access: Establishing a ‘common ground’ plane across private developments HSBC Tower in Hong Kong by Foster + Partners. Photo by Eldan Goldenberg. Example of an ‘unlocked’ lobby. A corporate foyer and public thoroughfare on weekdays, the covered open space is appropriated by Filipina domestic workers every Sunday for social gatherings and micro-trading. Urban Workshop in Melbourne CBD by John Wardle Architects. Photo by Irwinconsult. Example of a permeable lobby that ensures the continuity of laneway networks in the city. It has a cafe and gallery archiving the site’s historical artefacts; and operates like a through public laneway. 2 OF 8
2. Flexible Programming What if the choice to live in a high-rise city apartment did not necessarily mean having to give up neighbourliness, community and civic interaction? One concern with the locked-lobby approach (a feature of the prevailing high-rise residential model) is the perpetuation of gated vertical communities. While not immediately perceptible, the anti-social condition is already manifest in areas such as Southbank where chronic impermeability has resulted in insular living and street inactivity. This has a long-term impact on liveability and suburb desirability. and exchange will only grow more scarce. By encouraging space-sharing, space-adapting and space-letting we effectively multiply these urban spaces. Ground-level vacancy may in turn be reduced, over time restoring street life and mitigating the ‘ghost-streetscape’ effect that currently haunts tower-suburbs such as Southbank and the Docklands. The progressive reevaluation of our living norms will undoubtedly come with challenges, particularly in operational planning, security and body-corporate maintenance and overall financial viability. However these recalibrations should be seen as “growing pains” Future apartment towers should provide a robust and adaptable interface between public and private realms, embracing moments of overlap instead of wholly segregating private from public zones. The potential to transform static resident-only spaces (e.g. foyers, receptions, privatised landscaping) into dynamic, active platforms exists across the various stages of a building’s life: from pre-construction temporary site activations to post-occupancy operations and management. Time-sensitive programming might be seen as a parallel to the ‘open-plan’ model of the last century: radical in its programmatic flexibility at the time of proposal, but upon refinement large-scale adoption, it has become the modus operandi for architects globally. Assemble, an emerging residential developer focused on small-footprint living, has based their current office on Roseneath Street, Clifton Hill- the site of their first multi-residential project in partnership with Wulff Projects and Icon Co. Other parts of the private site are leased out to creative enterprises such as local clothing label Kloke, while its vast ground-level warehouse space is regularly activated by design presentations, exhibitions and public events such as the up-coming Brutalist Block Party in collaboration with Open House Melbourne. Even before any construction has begun, community is already being created upfront and on-site, where future occupants of the new project get to meet potential neighbours and familiarise themselves with the location. This is one such example of flexible cross-programming being used to establish resilience and social capital. In light of our city’s projected residential growth, public greenspace as well as areas for civic gathering 3 OF 8
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Housing the Future: Six Points

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