Species of Suburban Spaces
Continuing an ongoing survey into the Australia's suburban development, this exhibition highlights different typologies, approaches and architecture as part of Melbourne Design Week 2024 programming.
The suburbs are constantly in flux.
Agents of Architectural Archives (AAA) - Alan Pert and Theo Blankley (Melbourne School of Design) present research from the ongoing Excavating Modernism research project as part of South Space.
Species of Suburban Spaces explores a spatial excavation of the archives where one-off houses, townhouses, walk-up apartments, and a market-hall resist typical suburban stereotypes.
As they densify it is easy to watch significant ‘suburban species’ inadvertently disappear. Species of Suburban Spaces explores the significant contribution of a group of architects who practiced in the South-East Melbourne suburbs throughout the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s. The critique of suburban life was replaced by this group of architects as they each shared an interest in the centrality of the suburbs in Australian life – they were genuinely attempting to engage in suburbia as sites of a rich and diverse range of histories, cultures and spatial ambiguities.
The exhibition explores a myriad of suburban locales and presents their suburban spatial practices including: one-off suburban houses (Ernest Fooks, Harry Ernest, Holgar & Holgar, Graeme Gunn, Robin Boyd), the townhouses of Merchant Builders (Graeme Gunn, Max May), the six-packs and apartment blocks of a range of émigré architects (Ernest Fooks, Kurt Popper, Herbert Tisher, Mordechai Benshemesh), the retrofit of Maples Warehouse in South Yarra by the Largga partnership (Grazia Gunn, Graeme Gunn, Andrew Reed, Jean Miller, Ross Ramus, Suzie Boyd) and finally Prahran Market (Graeme Gunn) – as a collection these projects burst the myth of the Suburbs as a mundane and generic spatial condition.
As an index of Australian culture and as a site, that has been both maligned as the epitome of banality and recognised as the site of a substantial regional culture there is no question the concept of suburb|suburbia needs a lot more work.
Curated by Agents of Architectural Archives (AAA), the exhibition explores a range of illustrative mediums exploring the archive, both analogue and digital.
AAA views digitization as a crucial enabler of archival access and broadcasting. The archive is important as it allows us to continue to shine a light on the making and remaking of our built environment. As The Architectural Review recently suggested, “Whether private or official, physical or digital, or left behind in the ashes and soil on which buildings once stood, the archive has always been profoundly spatial.”
AAA performs as a curatorial entity at Melbourne School of Design and beyond. AAA views exhibitions as necessary for the presentation and representation of architectural research as well as archival practices – exhibitions are also a particular mode for rendering critical thinking in a creative, visual, and experiential way. The exhibition format can as such help us to move Architecture forward by providing an important outlet (as it has historically in times of economic recession) and being a tool to approach questions that architects and audiences should be asking about today’s built environment.
In 2024, AAA will launch The Total Environment, a publication capturing the legacy of project housebuilders Merchant Builders - curated over the last 8 years. The book is a repository, a record, a chronology, and the making of a new, publicly accessible resource. It also represents a prolonged and rigorous process of uncovering information, unearthing ideas, interviewing people, reconnecting people, digitizing collections, and analysing the archetypal suburban spatial intelligence through over 121 suburban house plans.
AAA has been teaching Critical and Curatorial Practices in Design as an MSD research elective subject since 2014. Exhibitions by AAA include MOTEL (2014), Towards a New Archive (2015), The House Talks Back (2016), X-Ray the City (2016), Stylistic Species (2017), Excavating Modernism (2019), Ideas of Subtopia (2022), New Horizons (2023), and The Endless Interior (2023)
This exhibition, designed and produced by Alan Pert and Theo Blankley for Melbourne Design Week 2024 is supported by The Jock Simmie Architectural History, Urban and Cultural Heritage Research Fund. Its generosity furthers knowledge and access to architectural history, conservation and heritage.