Transcriber: Miguel Cisneros-Franco Reviewer: Capa Girl
Four years ago, I came back to Australia, to Sydney.
I was in London during graduate work for about seven years.
Then, I lived in this fantastic shared house in central London.
It was the only way that we could all live there,
we were all sort of 35 to 45, all working in architecture
and teaching, and doing doctoral work,
and doing all this kind of things.
And we noticed, all of us were working,
I was working between London, Beijing and New York,
they were German and French working in Europe
and back in London. At least once a week,
one of us would be gone, and we noticed
in our converstaions over dinner,
that we realized that we could travel anywhere
in the developed world, and in aspirational developing cities
and we could walk into our home, through to the kitchen
and know exactly where the knifes and forks were.
Now, the incredible banality of that,
hides something that I think is quite extraordinary,
that's stopping us from being able to consider
the city differently.
So, this is Sydney, this is the centre of Sydney.
It's 190,000 people living there, it's not at all
like the 4.5 million people that live
in the metropolitan region of Sydney.
Don't believe City of Sydney, when they tell you that this is the city.
But, what I want to describe to you quickly,
is just how the city works. So, it's divided esentially into,
at its most basic level, into public and private space.
So public space is the formal spaces, park spaces,
ceremonial spaces, but it's also the roads and
gutters and pavements, and footpaths, it's all the leftover space.
And then there is private space, and that's
the spaces of our most intimate lives:
our families, our lovers, our children,
it's the space where we raise, and nurture, and love children.
Right in the city can be divided into these two arenas,
and then, in post 19th century, cities divided into 2 poles:
so we've got the core of the city and the periphery of the city.
Now, there's an incredible amount of resources
that are required to keep these things separated,
but also to replicate these things,
to replicate all of the functions that belong to the private.
So that's bathing, eating, leisuring and
recreation and socializing,
and of course there's a fourth one I can't remember,
bathing, sleeping, eating, and, of course, socializing.
Now, this is the scale of Sydney,
and this is the scale that we need to think about --
what is going to happen to the city
and how we're gonna respond to this,
a series of forces that are marshalling on our horizon,
you know, we know what they are:
population growth and climate change.
At the moment, we call on these ideas
of sustainability in the form of compost bins,
bike lanes, solar cells on roofs;
these things are facile, and they're not going to do
what we need to do to become nimble and fleet-footed
in the face of real change that needs to be done in cities.
So, while I agree that they will call to them community,
which is important, right, community only gathers
itself around a problem, they're not gonna be
the things that allow us to respond the way we need to,
to these changes.
So I got some ideas, so this is where I want you
to help me, all of us to think through.
Capital A Architecture can only materialize
and show ideas back to you, we need to have
ideas about other ways of inhabiting spaces.
So the problem is that the city, the suburbs,
the periphery, is constituted of a kind of cellular net,
where things are radically replicated,
and everything is held appart.
So there're a few ways that we can start
to think about undermining that,
pulling that appart, taking the things
that constitute the domestic, and distributing them
accross a different kind of urban field.
So it's easy to think about it in terms of density,
right, and there're some really great new
appartment developments that are starting to do this.
We all know about the shared laundry,
and then there's of course pool facilities,
and gyms, and things like that, games rooms.
But there're now appartment blocks that are
starting to do things like developed libraries,
where there's a table that can be booked for meetings
for people that work at home.
And the one that I love, which is dinning rooms
in an appartment block that have a semicomercial kitchen
attached to it, were you can have that foodie friends
around you to flick your Master chef muscle and
in a way that you can't do at a 6-seated table
in an appartment, or a 4-seated table.
So these are some of the things that are
easy to think about when we're a dealing
with a dense environment. But when we move out
to the suburbs, to this cellular condition,
really, there's some interesting work
that's being done in terms of dividing the house,
an existing suburban house into, say 2 or 4 even,
but that's still keeping things contained
within that single dwelling.
So the thing that I wanna leave you with,
that I think is the way forward, though it's quite radical,
and I want everyone to remain calm with that,
[is] the idea of sharing a kitchen,
is something like this:
Now, this is a project developed in the 1920s,
it's called the Kings Road House,
by an architect called Schindler,
and it's a pinwheel plan
that pivots around the central kitchen,
which is shared by a private space belonging
to two families; so they share a guest room
that they can use, but also a kitchen space
and an outdoor space. So each family has
their own separate living space.
And I think there's something in that; it is the way forward.
So that's it, think about that.
(Applause)