A week dedicated to architecture and design once would have been strictly the province of the cool crowd, hipsters who spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about the visual landscape and the importance of building beautiful things.
But with the housing crisis and the horrors of urban sprawl rarely out of the headlines, and the call for sustainability moving from the margins to the mainstream, the design community’s concerns have moved to the centre of the conversation.
Philippe Braun is an associate at the Netherlands-based architecture firm the Office for Metropolitan Architecture.Credit: Julius Pang
Just this week, there was debate around the state government’s decision to wind back the Medium Density Code in an effort to speed up the construction of new homes and a proposed 12-storey apartment block on Scarborough Beach being approved.
Philippe Braun, an associate at the Netherlands-based architecture firm the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, and one of the international guests at this year’s Perth Design Week, said the design community had a crucial role to play in tackling social and political issues and shaping our futures.
“Fifteen years ago we didn’t think much about sustainability, but now it is at the heart of everything we do,” he said.
“Embracing sustainability is now a design tool that pushes us toward new ways of thinking.”
“We’ve got a legacy of poor-quality medium-density development which has put people off and created the NIMBYish pushback that is halting so many worthy projects.”
Perth Design Week co-founder Sandy Anghie
Braun will be involved in a number of sessions during the week-long gathering of design professionals, held at various locations until March 21.
“But sustainability is not just about using environmentally friendly materials,” Braun said.
“It is also about creating buildings that people fall in love with and they want to keep. A building is not sustainable if you want to tear it down after a few years.”
And, like Australia and many other parts of the post-pandemic world, the Netherlands faced a housing crisis, with OMA doing its part by building The Rotterdam, a 44-storey mix of apartments, offices and a hotel as functional as it is stunning.
Perth Design Week’s PRINCIPLES Square.Credit: Frans Parthesius
“At OMA we like to make every project mixed used. We are not interested in building simple apartments or offices. This building we imagined as a city, a vertical city,” said Braun, whose company founder, Rem Koolhaas, has been hailed as one the most celebrated architectural thinkers and practitioners of our age (OMA is also behind the WA Museum Boola Bardip).
Thinking about social challenges and opportunities is also central to the practice of the Italian office interior design company UniFor, which has joined forces with OMA to create the hub for this year’s Perth Design Week in Cathedral Square on St George’s Terrace.
Renamed PRINCIPLES Square for the duration of Perth Design Week, this playful, wonderfully flexible collection of office furnishings is a result of UniFor’s collaboration with OMA on the breathtaking Axel Springer Campus in Berlin, a mecca for Germany’s “digital bohemia” (the hub-cum-exhition is a must-see and experience for anyone interested in the future of work and design).
“People spend a lot of their lives in offices, so the office environment has a major impact on their lives,” UniFor chief executive Carlo Molteni said, while sitting on the Pop Art-inspired office objects that are part of an exhibition getting only its second outing after its Milan debut.
UniFor chief executive Carlo Molteni.Credit: Julius Pang
The challenge of building office environments pleasing to workers got that much harder after COVID, which reprogrammed employees across the globe into expecting spaces that were as comfortable and inviting as those they got used to during lockdown.
“Businesses need to get people back into offices but they have to change the way of working if they are to attract their employees,” Molteni said.
“What everyone wants is more collaborative spaces. Workers have spent a long time at home working alone, so they need spaces that allow them to work together. And it needs to be flexible, as you can see from the 160 pieces in this collection.”
Perth Design Week co-founder Sandy Anghie agreed debate on how to solve the biggest housing crisis in memory added urgency to her event, with the session on medium density and the need for housing diversity one of the first to sell out.
Anghie believed the best way to break down the defences of those still clinging to the Great Australian Dream of the quarter-acre block was better design.
“We’ve got a legacy of poor-quality medium-density development which has put people off and created the NIMBYish pushback that is halting so many worthy projects,” said Anghie, a lawyer-turned-architect and former City of Perth councillor.
“If we could do it better — if we were retaining the streetscapes, if we could keep the mature trees, if we could protect what we love about existing suburbs — then I think people would embrace medium density.
“MJA Studio’s development on Clifton and Central in Mount Lawley is a great example of how to do medium density well.
“They maintained a corner deli throughout the whole process and is now a restaurant, which has been embraced by the whole community. It’s now a community hub.”
While Perth Design Week is mainly for professionals and students, Anghie said the wider community was welcome to attend talks, view exhibitions and generally engage in a process that had a major impact on their lives and which most people did not understand.
“Once again we are doing the Home Inspiration Marathon in which we have 20 architects spending an entire day at the State Buildings talking about their work,” she said.
“Many people have never experienced the architectural process and don’t know how things can be different. It is eye-opening for many people and very exciting.”
Perth Design Week runs until March 21.
Read more
‘Destructive density’: The Perth housing estates exempt from new residential design code
The price of preservation: What will it take to protect Fremantle’s endangered heritage?
They’re cheap and ugly. But these Perth houses are flying off the shelf
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