An RMIT student only needs to walk through the lobby of Building 80 to be confronted by what feels like a black and lime-green maze.
Designed by Lyons Architects and completed in 2012, entry to the 11-storey building is dominated by the escalator, which hides the elevator lobby. This creates a usual “circulation”: the word used by architects to describe the intended movement of people within a space.
The end user, students like ourselves, and the architect can feel incredibly disparate in moments when running late to class, unable to distinguish which floor is which in the nodal design, where classrooms are clustered in branches that spring from the central shaft.
It is exactly at these moments when an understanding of how the design of a building affects your everyday life might start to develop. And justifiably so.
For Naomi Stead, the architecture critic for The Saturday Paper, her goal is increasing design literacy.
“I’m really carefully trying to teach people about what architects do, think about and what contribution they can make.”
Architectural criticism for a general audience has diminished in the twenty-first century, with the position of a dedicated architecture critic absent from the pages of our major local mastheads, The Age and The Herald Sun. This is a global trend.
Yet the need for rigorous judgement of the built environment seems all the more pressing as calls for expansive developments to counter the current housing crisis are being implemented at a policy level by both state and federal governments.
Just this week, Prime Minister Albanese said that next month’s budget will include incentives for foreign investors looking to invest in build-to-rent projects. These projects represent a fundamentally different approach to how housing stock will be managed in the future, with an emphasis on long-term renting over home ownership.
The Housing Australia Future Fund Bill 2023, Labor’s $10 billion social housing fund, remains in a stalemate. If and when a version of the bill is passed, this will have significant impacts on the built environment.
Of course, on a state level, the Big Housing Build, the $5.3 billion investment in social and affordable housing, continues to be slowly rolled out by the Andrews government.
These policies affecting the built environment have a significant impact on the economy and real estate market and are reported on by news media from these perspectives.
However, robust architectural criticism at various stages of development offers a valuable perspective that publicly holds investors, developers, architects and planners to account as we future-proof our city for impending population growth and climate change.
Furthermore, it is an important way to better educate the public on how design can impact people’s standards of living, for better or worse.
Source: Parlour
The current lack of literacy has resulted in an unusual problem, according to Naomi Stead. With the rise of social media, anyone feels emboldened to be a critic. And some point their pen (or smash their keys) at critics.
This, alongside reduced support for permanently employed critics within newsrooms, means that editorial focus is too frequently on what’s good rather than what’s bad since negative critiques can attract “cancel culture” commentary or, at the more serious end, result in legal battles.
“Invariably, what makes it into the papers and magazines is the good work,” said Naomi Stead.
This results in a lack of criticism of poor design work, which is well worth talking about. Identifying the flaws in our built environment is a key way that would guide us to better outcomes that are just and fair for all citizens – renters, homeowners and those without a home at all.
