Community: Building Modern Australia

The role of Australia’s community-centred public buildings, from swimming pools to the humble town hall, has sadly been too often ignored, according to Associate Professor Hannah Lewi from the Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning. “Until now, the academic sector of the architecture and urban planning world has focused a great deal on the larger scale planning of cities and also the individual house,” she says.

“However, despite their importance to everyday life, public spaces such as kindergartens, public libraries and swimming pools, have been largely neglected by the discipline.”

A newly published book, edited by architectural and planning history experts Associate Professor Lewi and Dr David Nichols, seeks to change this perception, inviting Australians to re-appraise their local amenities and look freshly upon infant care centres from the 1970s or bowling greens hitherto ignored.

Community: Building the Modern Australia discusses the importance these buildings and public spaces hold in the community: and conversely, the significant role that the community has played in establishing these facilities.

“In some senses, architecture always plays a role in representing, reflecting and constructing cultural identity,” Associate Professor Lewi says.

“We felt that public architecture was under-discussed in terms of its role in shaping national and local identities and historical narratives in twentieth century Australia.”

The project, born of Hannah Lewi’s interest in municipal swimming pools, is a cross-discipline collaboration incorporating contributions from the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, and the School of Historical Studies.

“It was a common practice up until the 1960s for communities to band together with a common self-interest to create these kinds of public facilities and places,” says Dr Nichols. “The buildings were signifiers of a progressive neighbourhood.”

This brand of neighbourhood activism – which ranged from petitioning government funding, to working bees building kindergartens – not only helped to create these buildings and spaces devoted to local needs, but the very process strengthened social ties and fostered community cohesion.

Elaborating on the manner in which communities rallied together to create local amenities and facilities, Dr Nichols says, “Suburbs competed with each other for the more inviting, modern and impressive buildings.

“Being inviting is a major aspect to these buildings,” Dr Nichols continues. “So many of the buildings we wrote about are an advertisement to the wider world for the town or suburb in which they were built.”

There is something so instantly familiar about every photo or description of a local library or swimming pool within this book. Anyone who has ever lived in Australia will recognise their own local neighbourhood in this discussion of public spaces and community.

Any reader unschooled in the field of architecture will be led to the understanding that buildings and public spaces shape our world view and create our daily lifestyle.

Other contributors to the book include the Director of the Melbourne School of Design, Professor Philip Goad, Dr Julie Willis, and Professor Kate Darian-Smith.

All authors essentially use the idea of the local community as a microcosm to make observations about the way in which Australia, as a nation and cultural identity, has been built by the momentum of small communities contributing to “the kindergarten around the corner”.

Associate Professor Lewi comments that, “We are hoping that some of the buildings of the recent past, like those with the ‘brutalist’ aesthetic of the 1960s and 1970s, will again have wider public appreciation.

“We’re hoping that the book guides readers through a tour of appreciation, looking at buildings that could have previously been considered banal and basic, yet are framed by the book’s contributors as historically and socially meaningful, and perhaps even seen as beautiful through their everyday qualities.”