Ask the wrong questions - get the wrong answers. That’s how to judge the just announced winners of the Pattern Book Design Competition (PBDC), run by the NSW Department of Planning Housing and Infrastructure (DoPHI), and Government Architect (GA).

Of all the current housing crisis issues, standardising solutions has got to be one of the least important, or effective. Wrong in every way.

Firstly, pattern designs were touted as a way to speed up approvals by bringing certainty to the design outcomes, enabling Councils to do a ‘tick and flick’. But that’s the wrong way round; rather than codify the solutions it would be far better if Councils better codified the controls. A far more pressing issue for the NSW DoPHI to work on are clearer and more precise planning instruments, so architects can work with clarity.

Secondly, the time taken for assessment by Councils is ludicrous, and should be addressed. The painfully slow approval process, for even compliant schemes, causes blowouts in holding costs, and blowups in architects’ and owners’ time and patience.

More and better trained assessors is the answer, not simpler applications. That’s where NSW DoPHI’s attention should be, not dumbing down the richness of the architect’s work.

But wait, it gets worse; applications to the Land and Environment Court take precedence over non-appeals in Council planners’ work flow. Expect Council to treat all applications equally and fairly? You choose, you lose. On the upside, the court’s mediation system shows just how quick and orderly approvals CAN be, if only Councils worked more efficiently.

And thirdly, more attention should be paid to the dogs baying for simpler controls, in both planning and building. Criticism of ‘SEPP 65’ and the ‘Apartment Design Guide’ is coming from several quarters. Not all is warranted, but the code is often bloated, increasing costs, and developers sense blood. Rather than ignore the attacks, or defend their ‘gold standard’, maybe a DoPHI competition should focus on a better apartment code. Best do it now, before the Productivity Commission does it for you.

Fourthly, the recently promoted TOD developments, (Transport Oriented Designs / Developments), look set to deliver underwhelming results. Recently the deputy secretary of NSW DoPHI admitted that barely 6,000 dwellings would result in the eight or more TODs. Maybe a competition to develop community progressive buildings, with more housing at major rail centres, would be a better use of time.

Nevertheless, despite better options, the NSW DoPHI and GA forged ahead: a PBDC has been run and won. Expressions of interest were whittled down to six winners, but before we get to them, let’s look at the competition itself.

Patterns as a basis for design have a long history, but always from small elements to bigger schemes, not the other way round.

Most often cited are 19^thC townhouses, called terraces as they adapted to the topography (a key attribute), adopting standard elements, such as the step in plan to provide light to an internal room, whilst having a wide variety of designs (narrow, single room or double loaded corridor) and a standard façade elements, adjusted and repeated, all purchased from the Bunnings of the day.

In pre-WW1 in Brisbane, you could buy a ‘Redi-Cut’ timber house, built up from a number of standardised house plans, that were in turn based on smaller elements, such as ‘cook-outs’ or shade hoods. The essence of Brissie’s timber and tin.

Through Edgar Gurney’s brilliance at combining standard rooms, and limited facades, into differentiated houses, Albert Jennings built the entire basis of project homes. No two were the same, and yet all were based on a limited set of components and combinations. It made ‘AV’ very rich and Gurney became Australia’s most prolific house designer.

The key lesson is this: for a pattern based approach to work, for it to be universal, it needs to be built up from small, discrete parts, not the singular whole. Nowhere better explored that in Christopher Alexander et al seminal book, A Pattern Language. It’s a mathematician’s catalogue of all the good constituent elements that go together to make a good town, building, home and room.

Alexander posited that, for a building to work well it needs to respond to the users’ brief and the particular site, by choosing the right components. And he spent years with his collaborators refining those components, those patterns. His aim was standardised elements, that combined in unlimited ways, could lead to a unique solution on the particularity of the site - as every solution should be.

But that is not what the DoPHI PBDC did. They chose specific sites for whole buildings, based on codified typologies. Choosing sites and briefs was an admission that any attempt at standardisation was abandoned. The pattern book competition veered away completely from the idea of patterns.

Architects instinctively knew that the PBDC was an insult to their profession, suggesting that a standardised typology could be used in multiple projects, doing away with a core specialty of architects. And the competition authors knew it too, by giving the premiated winners particular sites they were not addressing the fundamentals of pattern based design at all.

Thus the answers to the wrong questions all seem less than underwhelming, as you can see here and here and here and here (sorry, no one site carries all the images, and no plans). A detailed critique seems pointless, although some elements seem silly, verging on the ridiculous: doors open to reveal the terraces best room is the carport; non-compliant climbable balustrades on one apartment scheme; or costly overreach with multiple brutalist shade blades.

It’s always a bad sign when professional schemes hide behind too much greenery (FLW’s admonition that surgeons bury their mistakes, architects grow vines) and when the student scheme is the best. Even more damning is a winner in the New Zealand Architecture Awards released last week, where a low-cost two and a half storey townhouse development seems an ideal patentable solution.

One rumour was that the GA didn't want to conduct the PBDC, but was forced into it by the politicians. Another rumour is that the GA had so lost confidence in their own competition, that they secretly commissioned eight architectural firms to prepare ‘behind the scenes’ back-up designs to supplement the likely poor outcomes (as has eventuated). Sort of surrogate schemes.

The eight firms were asked to prepare schemes across the four typologies, two to each: duplexes, ‘manor homes’, terraces and low rise apartments.

Duplexes hardly need a study: thousands that conform to the CDC controls have been built, over 30 in one street alone in Sydney’s Matraville. The patterns are already made. By contrast, the ‘manor home’ envisaged in the CDC is a massive failure. Industry sources suggest that less than 20 have been designed and approved, but only half that built, and most by the Land and Housing Corp. The one we got approved in Springwood never stacked up commercially.

Terraces always fail without a rear lane if carparking is required (hence the silly solution that won). And the secret to apartments is codifying all possible plan layouts first, so that a project can meet the ADG requirements on widely varying sites. But as we have seen in the comp, that is not the route taken. None of these surrogate designs have been released publicly, and their reveal presents a major PR issue for the GA ‘- did they tell the competition competitors?

At this point I make a full disclosure - we applied, but were not chosen. Hardly surprising given my trenchant criticism of the idea of the PBDC, in the Sydney Morning Herald and twice in A&D. Who wants to hear the critic? But we thought we might get a gig in the tent. But no, so here we are out in the cold.

Here is part of our submission, showing research we undertook with a major apartment developer, to analyse all the different layouts to apartments .This is how we would have approached the competition. Clearly not desired, but hopefully this is pudding proof for everything written above.

Next week is a discussion of the one typology NOT examined, not allowed, but the one that is the most promising in the missing middle, the most sustainable one, and the most effective: three storey walk-up flats.

design-i #8, 4 Dec 2024. Researched and written by Tone Wheeler, architect / Adjunct Prof UNSW / President AAA. The views expressed are his. design-i is a new column that replaces Tone on Tuesday. Old ToT columns can be found here, and you can still contact TW at toneontuesday@gmail.com.

Tone Wheeler

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