In 2006 the world's tallest apartment building opened in Melbourne. The 300m, 92-storey Eureka Tower can be seen as far away as the Portsea seaside resort, 115km to the south. Victorian Premier Steve Bracks calls it "an urban sculpture", while architecture reviewer Norman Day has described its beauty from afar as "compelling and dazzling". Eureka Tower, home to the wealthy and the brave. How else to describe homeowners prepared to part with more than $2 million to live above the clouds?
Since flats first appeared in Sydney and Melbourne in the early 20th century, the apartment v suburban home debate has raged among generations of architects, town planners, municipal councils and residents.
At Eureka's opening last year, its co-architect Karl Fender highlighted the tension: "A lot of people like the idea of their feet on the ground, and their back yard. It's been a state of mind," he said. "But more and more, and especially in Melbourne, it's being understood to be a very elegant, safe and sustainable way of living."
Eureka's 556-apartment density is an example of how far the humble flat has come in 100 years. Shunned and ridiculed by their critics, today's apartments are often linked with wealth, social position and cosmopolitan lifestyles.
"The city apartment has become respectable as well as trendy," Caroline Butler-Bowdon and Charles Pickett write in Homes in the Sky: Apartment Living in Australia. "As significant as the raw numbers is the renewed association of city apartment living with affluence." Their new book is the first serious history of Australia's apartment and flat development. Chapter one is titled Slums of the Future? A Century of Controversy, which confirms the book is less about architectural aesthetics (although there is a good deal of reviewer comment included) and more about the social impact of apartments on our suburbs and our population.
Although apartments became popular in cities such as Paris, London and New York in the late 1800s, the first flats did not appear in Australia in large numbers until the years before and during World War I. The Astor in Sydney's Macquarie Street, built in 1905, was the country's first purpose-built mansion flats, while in 1914 a multi-unit development in Chippendale became Australia's first public housing flats.
After the war, workers' flats became a target for commentators who feared a new form of the inner-city terrace house slum was emerging. "Suburban living was promoted as the panacea for the social and public health malaise afflicting cities," Butler-Bowdon tells Review, "and you get that very much in Sydney with the bubonic plague fears, for example ... The term 'slums of the future' was born, and we hear it again and again during the 20th century."
Enter Australian architecture's new dark side: "A very great danger has again crept in ... the danger lying in the areas of flats which are fast springing up in some suburbs," warned Sydney journalist and historian Charles E.W. Bean in 1925. "In these regions the children are again turned out into the streets ... for their normal playground." Grim predictions from Australia's official World War I historian.
Butler-Bowdon, a former Museum of Sydney curator, agrees flats often receive a raw deal from urban planners, architects and social historians. "I think they were at odds with the Australian self-image, which, despite our highly urbanised society, remained for many years (and arguably still today) focused on rural and suburban ideals," she says. "The suburban cottage was the nationalist touchstone and apartments remained excluded from that."
She adds that while middle-class flat life could be tolerated, "flats for workers really inflamed social and political anxieties, and we see this right from the beginning".
Blocks such as The Albany and Kingsclere in Sydney, the Melbourne Mansions that once dominated the top end of Collins Street, and long-gone Cliveden Mansions in East Melbourne became fashionable. At the same time, however, the block of flats phenomenon was spreading. "As far as respectable society and published opinion was concerned," write the authors, "apartments were alternatively a symbol of respectability and progress or a potential blight, depending primarily on their social setting."
Many Australians welcomed the chance to live in a flat; single women, widows, bachelors and country visitors in particular saw them as affordable, pleasant and secure alternatives to boarding houses and hotels. "Melbourne has taken to flats with some of the feverish eagerness of a teetotaller converted to liquor," wrote art critic Basil Burdett in the 1920s.
Between the two wars 70,000 new apartments were built in Sydney, while in Melbourne flats made up one-tenth of private dwellings by 1947. Both cities, because of their populations and flat proliferation, are featured heavily in Homes in the Sky, although developments in Brisbane and Perth in particular are included.
Architectural styles differ between cities. To make the most of harbour views, Sydney went up in height. So did Surfers Paradise, Australia's apartment capital, where an absence of height restrictions unleashed a flurry of residential tower developments from the late 1970s.
In Melbourne meanwhile, Butler-Bowdon says, there were "many more courtyard apartments: two to three-storey walk-ups that blended into the streetscape. We think it's part of the anti-flat opinions which were prevalent in Melbourne, and the regulations in Melbourne."
Another regional difference: Melbourne's ugly public housing high-rise towers in areas such as Fitzroy, Carlton and North Melbourne are still considered blots on the landscape. (The authors point out that some private developments such as Harry Seidler's 1962 Blues Point Tower and East Circular Quay's "toaster" apartments have also ignited community furore.)
Butler-Bowdon describes the public housing tower as "a powerful symbol of social and physical failure to most people". Private high-rise development in the '60s and '70s, meanwhile, also receives a whack from the author, who calls it "an absolute festival of the cheap and nasty: the speculative property boom".
Although high-rise blocks usually attract all the negative comments, Butler-Bowdon wonders why critics often overlook the two or three-storey walk-up, a matchbox-style block with no verandas or balconies, small internal spaces and, often, an external communal staircase.
In 1937 architect Morton Herman was one of the first to criticise walk-ups. "Sydney is fast becoming swamped by innumerable box-like blocks which march, cheek by jowl, down uninteresting streets in increasingly dull suburbs," he wrote.
Years later architect Norman Edwards agreed: "The red texture brick home unit block has done even more to desecrate Sydney's fine natural environment than the proverbial red brick and tile bungalow."
Canberra architect Roger Pegrum is one who, in the '70s, summed up society's anti-flat feeling. Writing in Architecture in Australia, he observed that "soon, few people in the inner suburbs can afford to stay in their detached house, even if they do not object to living in the constant shadow of a large non-human ant-heap. None of this explains why 'home units' should be so bloody ugly."
Flats have always posed a challenge to the traditional Australian quarter-acre-block view of perfect domesticity, but perhaps never more so than at the start of the 21st century. In 2007 more flats are being built in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney than houses and, according to Butler-Bowdon and Pickett, urban demographers predict "that by 2030, 45 per cent of Sydney households will be living in flats". Homes in the Sky is an affectionate review of domestic architecture's poor cousin. "We see quite often through history, flat dwellers are part of the floating population of big cities," Butler-Bowdon says. "I think for many flat dwellers, their apartment is their castle. They just love their flat."
Homes in the Sky: Apartment Living in Sydney, Museum of Sydney, May 12-August 26, is curated by Caroline Butler-Bowdon.
Source: The Australian
