This week

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” The more things change, the more it stays the same.

Welcome back to Design Notes by Tone On Tuesday, a column about design process, design policy and design and politics. There's been much madness on all fronts over the summer break.

Balmain Gentrifiers get stuck in Balmain

The recent opening of the WestConnex Rozelle interchange has drawn much opprobrium from Balmain locals. The SMH spelt out how the interchange was working exactly as planned: very effectively moving traffic in multiple directions to and from the city, even if, weirdly, the traffic on Victoria Road refuses to use the (totally free) by-pass.

The downside for the wealthy gentrifiers of Balmain has been that it's hard to get out of their insular peninsula. Can't say that I've got much sympathy for them. They're overindulged with public transport, with multiple ferries and buses available. And now extra parks and bike tracks.

One resident bemoaned the additional three quarters of an hour to drop her child to school. First world problems. Get on ya bike ya lazy kid. Balmain has one of the best public schools in NSW, but Balmainites would rather chauffeur Aurelia and Augustus in a massive SUV to some private institution that sucks the life out of government funds. Crocodile tears here.

The Powerhouse and community insultation

Protests were held this weekend at the original Powerhouse Museum - the one where the building was a former powerhouse - not the ersatz one under construction in Parramatta. It closed for three years yesterday but, as the protestors pointed out, there is no approved plan for either the building or its contents. A previous winning design has been shelved, and moves abound in the background.

In response, the premier avowed that community consultation would take place. More like community insultation in my experience. Properly done, it would take at least three months, maybe more, to canvass community thoughts, and workshop options, and encourage participation in a realistic review. All the while leaving the building open.

Community insultation appears to be a fig leaf to divert attention from a government that doesn't know what it's doing. The Labor Party inherited a steaming pile of procedural crud from Baird / Berijiklian / whats-his-name (“Sirius housing is a carpark”) government. Labor seems to be mismanaging at about the same level the previous LNP.

Why not re-open it, hold public workshops in it, and make an ABC reality show of the architect’s competition. That’ll fix it.

Saving the hip and hippy in Chile

Wildfires (aka bushfires) in central Chile, on the coast below Santiago at Valparaiso and Vina del Mar, have been devastating with more than one hundred deaths. Hundreds of houses have been lost and under threat has been Ciudad Abierta (or Open City), an experiment in alternative modes of building and living, started in the late sixties by the Catholic University in Valparaiso.

On my visit I began to wonder about the close connection between the desire for organic shapes and forms and ‘alternative ideas’, often driven by hippies. Think Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti, Nevada’s Zomeworks or our own Nimbin’s domes. Open City seemed to be out-Gehrying Frank Gehry if you will. I am praying (in my atheist’s way) that the fires spare this extraordinary collection of structures (check out the brilliant Architzer coverage here).

ICE cold on emission standards

The federal government is moving, ever so slowly, to adopt emission standards on automobiles. About 50 years too late. Russia and Australia are the only two OECD countries that do not have emission standards, to both improve ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) vehicles, and increase the diversity of hybrid and EV vehicles.

The opposition Cash’s in with the supercilious nonsense about increased costs and the death of utes, ignoring entirely the substantial savings in fuel costs, and reduction in greenhouse gases. Not to mention that even the supposedly gas guzzling Americans, who have had emission standards since the 1970s, have a huge range of pick-ups (aka utes) and SUVs that outperform the current models in OZ.

As standards are raised, auto makers will always have superceded stocks of older, poorly performing cars. What to do with the rubbish? Dump it in Australia.

This follows our dreadful track record in having some of the world's poorest environmental standards for products. One star and two-star refrigerators, energy and water wasteful washing machines and dryers, as well as gas, gas, gas, for heating and HWS. Not just growing rich from dodgy car sales, there are several multi-millionaires whose fortunes were made on the back of white goods that no other OECD country will touch.

Australia’s the western world’s dumping ground for poorly designed appliances; it’s what you get when the LNP has been in charge nationally for seven of the last twenty-seven years. Values-averse, tax obsessed, market-driven and quite frankly totally design-ignorant.

EV’s crawl to a halt in Canberra

Allied to the government's failure to introduce emission standards is the failure to support EV charging. In the whole of Canberra, the federal government's hometown, there is only one site, (with just two superchargers) for non-Tesla cars. One. In a Kia Motors commercial car yard. Not even a public facility.

In what is supposed to be Australia’s model city (guffaw) anyone driving a non-Tesla (about 20 models and counting) has virtually no chance of getting a quick supercharge. Backwards looking sleepy town, it fails to provide for the 21st Century transport system.

Signs Off: Palm Springs

Last year, for the Australian Architecture Association, I presented a talk about Palm Springs. Not just the glamourous MCM homes (although there was plenty of that), but also some of the often-unremarked issues, such as the gridded subdivision of Indian land that makes it a modernist’s dream urbanity, or the requirement for all houses to be single storey, never two, which is reserved for motels, or how the volume builders (Krisel and Wexler) imitated the modern masters.

Now, thanks to eClassroom, you can watch and listen to the talk (warning, it’s behind a paywall). Alternatively, and for free, you can check out my A&D podcast on ‘why the architecture profession is broken’. Whingeing Wheeler in full flight.

Next week

I’m a big fan of humidity.

Tone Wheeler is an architect / Adjunct Prof. UNSW / president AAA.

The views expressed are his.

These Design Notes are Tone on Tuesday #194, week 6/2024.

Past Tone on Tuesday columns can be found here.

Past A&D Another Thing columns can be found here.

You can contact TW at [email protected].