NSW Chapter President, Andrew Nimmo

July 2017

I’m sure you will join me in congratulating Shaun Carter (Immediate Past NSW Chapter President and Chairman of Save Our Sirius) and Millers Point Community Assoc. Incorporated on the successful legal action against the former Minister for Heritage over his failure to respond to the Heritage Council’s recommendation to list the Sirius building on the State Heritage Register.

This was the first time the Heritage Act has been the subject of an action in the Land & Environment Court. The judgment found that the Minister had failed to address the State heritage significance of the brutalist social housing building and that the loss of revenue to the NSW Government from the sale of its site was not a valid reason to refuse the listing.

It was a wonderful example of crowd funded community activism which the Australian Institute of Architects was proud to support.  It has raised the profile of architecture, architects and the Institute and that can only be good for our profession.

This decision is a testament to Shaun’s leadership of the strong campaign to save a major building, but the fight is not over yet. Sirius is still vulnerable because the government is determined to get rid of it.

Better Procurement – but how?
NSW procurement processes are in a parlous state. It’s a subject that features in just about every conversation I have with members, with a common litany of complaints:

• requiring excessive amounts of information at EOI stage;
• limiting the architect’s ability to negotiate by requiring acceptance of conditions of agreement at the time an EOI is submitted;
• unloading unreasonable levels of uninsurable risk on to architects;
• requiring the submission of design ideas without reimbursement and a formal competition process;
• asking for lump sum tenders with insufficient information to define a scope of works; and
• expecting architects to directly engage all sub-consultants.

The list goes on. There is something wrong with procurement in this state, particularly in the public sector. Despite a lot of hard work put in over recent years by the Chapter with Consult Australia and the Association of Consulting Architects, examples of poor procurement seem to be growing and getting worse.

Chapter Council has therefore agreed to set up a Procurement Taskforce to collate examples of poor procurement and engage directly with client bodies on what are the benefits of better procurement. The first Procurement Taskforce meeting was held last week and we intend to invite members in the near future to inform us about current and upcoming tenders or EOIs that are examples of poor procurement. Once we have gathered sufficient data, we will then be in a position to better articulate our grievances, supported by evidence.

Andrew Nimmo
NSW Chapter President

NSW Chapter President, Andrew Nimmo

July 2017

I hope you enjoyed our Awards presentation in the Big Top at Luna Park last Saturday as much as I did. This was a memorable night celebrating notable achievements in the things architects do best – designing buildings and spaces that contribute to making the world a better place. I particularly appreciated the skilful hosting by journalist and broadcaster Virginia Trioli.

Many thanks to the members who produced the work for the 211 entries, the jurors, the awards committee, our supporting partners – BlueScope, Dulux, Bondor, AWS, Smeg, Waste Wise, Big Ass Fans, and Bespoke – Hannah Burgess, Rosanna Scarcella, the volunteers and many others behind the scenes who helped to make this such a successful event.

Congratulations to the 27 projects awarded commendations on the night and best wishes and good luck to the 39 award winners whose projects now proceed to the national awards.

Honouring the people’s hero

This year my first President’s Prize acknowledges an individual whose impact on the fabric of this city is perhaps greater than any other. Not because of the buildings he designed, or commissioned, or built – but because of the buildings he saved.

Jack Mundey is now clearly on the right side of history, but in the 1970s there were many who saw him as a dangerous radical and “henchman”.

From the world’s first Green Ban in 1971 to save Kelly’s Bush; and subsequent Green Bans throughout the decade that saved buildings and precincts across the city, from The Rocks to Woolloomooloo and beyond, Jack Mundey, in his role as Secretary of the NSW Builders’ Labourers Federation, was the face of the Green Bans movement and a hero to many.

Along the way he was elected to Sydney City Council as an Alderman in 1984; appointed Chair of the Historic Houses Trust by Premier Bob Carr in 1995; named a National Living Treasure by the National Trust in 1997; awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Western Sydney, the University of NSW and a Master of Environment from University of Sydney and appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2000.

Jack has continued to advocate for the preservation of places steeped in history, culture and social networks. He reminds us we can never take conservation and heritage protection for granted, that we must always be prepared to fight for what we know to be important.

Jack Mundey is truly a man of the people.

He used his position in the trade union movement to support the residents of entire neighbourhoods like the Rocks, Millers Point, Victoria Street and Woolloomooloo to save their houses from demolition.

He’s also a democrat. His union invoked a green ban only after it had received a formal request from the local community AND a vote of members had agreed to the ban.

And he hasn’t given up the fight.

Last year he joined Shaun Carter and the local community in their bid to save the Sirius building, a place designed and built to house residents of the Rocks who had been displaced by a government determined to redevelop the area.

The story of that campaign for a social housing icon is not yet over.

As Jack himself said while he was Chairman of the Historic Houses Trust 20 years ago: ‘Too many of the best 20^th century buildings have been lost and others are under threat of demolition. In this period there is an opportunity to lift the level of debate about society’s responsibility to protect the best of our built environment and heritage.’

For his extraordinary contribution to the preservation of our built heritage through his activist advocacy for nearly 50 years, Jack Mundey is a worthy recipient of the 2017 President’s Prize.

Andrew Nimmo
NSW Chapter President

NSW Chapter President’s Message 22 May 2017

It was the American philosopher and reformer John Dewey who said: ‘Democracy has to be born anew every generation….’

Dewey’s maxim is particularly relevant in the light of the current prevailing attitude of the NSW Government to the protection of our built heritage. You have to go back more than 40 years to the Askin government to find another administration so in thrall to dollar values and so indifferent to protecting the public interest in the State’s built heritage, or even to the concept of public interest itself.

Thanks largely to the energetic public campaign led by my predecessor, Shaun Carter, the government-owned Sirius building has become the symbol of popular unrest against a government that neglects not only the maintenance of its own property but also its historical and architectural importance. The long-suffering community of Millers Point is being torn apart because of the government’s determination to sell properties they have inhabited for decades, despite the same government’s neglect of the houses they live in.

In the case of Sirius the amnesia is so complete that the government ignores the very reason for its design and construction as custom-built housing for local residents who would otherwise have been thrown on to the streets. The building is a celebration in physical form of the meaning of the Green Bans campaign.

But to this government it’s the $70M income from its demolition that matters, not its architectural, social or historical significance.

Fencing has recently been erected outside the Sirius building       Photo: Ben Peake

Similarly, the long-term lease of the Bridge Street sandstone buildings, so fundamental to Sydney’s understanding of itself, is symptomatic of a government that sees no value in maintaining public buildings for public purposes. Even some of the arguments used as justification – that the private sector would make a better job of the buildings’ conservation and maintenance than the government itself – betray an existential despair that devalues the very concept of public interest and the public domain.

The government is not just a group of elected lawmakers. It is a corporate entity that has a symbolic value representing the continuity of the administration and public life of the community reaching right back to the landing of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove and the thousands of years of prior Aboriginal occupation and management of the land we now know as New South Wales.

The frustration here is that, as the government operates a heritage management system for the community, it should be government itself that sets the standard for both retaining and conserving government-owned buildings – buildings that are managed on the community’s behalf. With the Sirius non-decision, it has actually achieved the opposite; it has signalled to the rest of the community, particularly the private sector, that heritage protection is of no value if it prevents the owner from reaping a financial windfall from the sale of the site.

When a government administration is so neglectful of the value and significance of its own history you begin to realise the validity of Dewey’s observation. What is the meaning of our democracy in the 21^st century? Is the conservation of our built heritage still relevant in a globally interconnected world? What is the value of retaining these elements of our collective past? How do we make their significance relevant to contemporary life?

John Dewey helps us to answer these questions. The full quotation is: ‘Democracy has to be born anew every generation – and education is its midwife’. Education right across the board. It’s not only the community that needs to rediscover the meaning and value of democracy, but also the government and the public sector. We should all be participants in this enterprise, not combatants.

Knowledge is power; it also builds cohesion, understanding and respect.

To give credit where it’s due, the government’s former Planning Minister, Rob Stokes, has proposed including the sustainable management of built and cultural heritage as one of the objectives of an amended Environmental Planning & Assessment Act. This would help to fix an anomaly that’s bedevilled heritage management for the last 40 years: heritage and planning are in two separate pieces of legislation that don’t relate well to each other. Making heritage management an objective of the planning legislation would help to knit them together more effectively.

It’s perhaps ironic that the Wran Labor government created the problem in the 1970s, but there’s a chance that the Berejiklian Coalition government will now close the gap.

Student Awards

As if we ever needed a reminder that heritage is something that we keep producing, I recently chaired the NSW Graduate & Student Awards jury along with jury members Steve Kooloos, (Marsh Cashman Kooloos), Dr Karen Burns (University of Melbourne), Deborah Hodge (Durbach Block Jaggers) and Michael Wiener (Mirvac Design).

These awards are an important measure of the design excellence exhibited within the four NSW schools of architecture. In line with the NSW Architecture Awards process, this year students had five minutes to present their work, in addition to the physical submission of drawings and models.

As expected, the standard of the award winners was very high, but it was some of the work of the first degree students that particularly stood out and really excited the jury.

These awards are precisely the reason that the Institute holds education as one of its key pillars, and with it our shared aspirations of a culture of excellence.

The work is on display at Tusculum until the end of the week.

Andrew Nimmo
NSW President

Last week I was inaugurated into National Council with a mentally exhausting but constructive three days in Canberra attending a series of meetings and briefings. This included a general National Councillor induction, Parliamentary breakfast, National Council meeting and Institute strategy session. The breakfast event at Parliament House and was attended by 50 Federal members and their advisers. The theme of the event was Affordable Housing and National President Ken Maher delivered a wide ranging speech on how architects need to be part of the discussion and have much to offer. The speech can be viewed here. I took the time after the breakfast to chat with John Alexander, perhaps the most vocal federal Liberal member on the issue, and I hope to catch up with him again in future to reinforce Ken’s message.

Thursday’s strategy session was a time for some high level thinking about where the Institute is heading in the next few years, as we consolidate after the recent restructure and flesh-out the three pillars of Advocacy, Education and Membership. What was clear from the general discussion was that everything we do should be about membership as that is what we are – a member organization. 

I attended the Newcastle Architecture Awards on 9th March and it was fantastic to see both a great selection of projects from a range of practices being recognized, and the buoyant mood of the profession in Newcastle. There seems to be a general feeling that Newcastle is going through a bit of a renaissance, and that architects are playing an important role in that process of change. There is so much untapped potential in the built fabric of Newcastle that we can add value to.

Thursday night was the Sydney launch of ‘Chasing The Sky: 20 Stories of Women in Architecture’ by Maven Publishing held at Tusculum and attended by eleven of the twenty featured architects. Showcasing twenty of Australia’s leading women in architecture, Chasing the Sky presents the voices and wisdom of some of Australia’s most dynamic practitioners both as acclaimed individuals and as a diverse collective.

Last Friday Past President Shaun Carter, Heritage Committee Chair Hector Abrahams, Executive Director Joshua Morrin and I met with the Shadow Minister for Heritage, Penny Sharpe MLC at her request. We spoke about the importance of meaningful protections for heritage; that heritage is more than just the physical and financial value of buildings and that we need to expand our thinking beyond the individual items to think more about precincts and place making. We of course spoke about Sirius and why it is critical that governments take the advice of the experts that they have put in place to advise them; such as the Heritage Council. The battle for Sirius is not over, with the upcoming court challenge to have the Minister’s decision annulled – supported by the Save Our Sirius Foundation and Millers Point Community Association through the Environmental Defenders Office – set for the first week in April.

Shaun Carter officially handed over the reins of the NSW President’s role to me three weeks ago. On behalf of all NSW members, my sincere thanks once again to Shaun for the amazing job he has done arguing for the public interest in good design and heritage conservation over the last two years.

The Premier Gladys Berejiklian has said that affordable housing will be a major focus for her government. I strongly believe that the profession has the knowledge and skills to help frame a sensible discussion on this very important subject.

I was interviewed live on Sky News on Saturday 11^th February specifically to discuss this issue. I emphasized that it was not sustainable for the supply of new housing to come from new fringe land releases. If we want a livable, walkable and efficient city, then new housing must come from within the existing city footprint by increasing density in strategic locations. Sydney is a low density city by world standards and the urban sprawl should not continue as a lazy solution to housing supply. This is something that I plan to advocate strongly on directly to the NSW government in the coming months.

It is awards season again. Best of luck to all those who submitted their entries last week. We held an Awards Jury briefing session at Tusculum on 13^th February with the nineteen members who make up the five separate juries.

Last Wednesday we hosted GET: Flexible at Tusculum, part of a series of three talks organized by the NSW Gender Equity Taskforce to explore approaches to more equitable working practice.  Misty Waters from Bespoke Careers, along with Adam Haddow (SJB), Najla Khoury (BKA) and David Melocco (Melocco and Moore) spoke about the benefits and common challenges of a flexible workspace, and then participated in a facilitated discussion and Q&A.

The Greater Sydney Commission has recently celebrated its first birthday. I attended the inaugural GSC Planning Awards last Thursday. The GSC has also issued draft district plans for comment; the Institute’s Built Environment Committee is currently preparing a detailed response. I encourage all members to familiarize themselves with the GSC website http://www.greater.sydney/ and the work they do, including the district plans.

Andrew Nimmo
NSW Chapter President

Welcome to 2017. I hope all members had a safe and enjoyable holiday break.

We’d all heard the rumours, but did we really think we would have a new Premier within the first month of the year? Never has that much-quoted adage – a week’s a long time in politics – been so appropriate. I am sure that we are all pleased to see the new Premier announcing housing affordability as the key issue for her term in the top job.

This is also one of the key priorities for the Institute this year. Our national advocacy priorities have been grouped around built outcome quality, climate mitigation and adaptation, affordable housing, infrastructure planning and funding and reducing red tape.

Amendments to planning legislation 
Following the release of the government’s draft architecture and design policy and medium density design guide last year, former Planning Minister Rob Stokes hit the ground running with the release of draft amendments to the state’s planning legislation earlier this month. The key recommendation affecting our profession is the intention to make good design an objective of the Act. 

This is not just legal window-dressing. It potentially gives design considerations legislative teeth, enabling them to be used as the justification for refusing or amending development proposals.

It also creates opportunities for architects to play a much greater role in the planning system. Following the recent cabinet reshuffle, we will take this up with the new Planning Minister Anthony Roberts.

Architects in the planning system
Just think about it.

Who do developers turn to if they want to prove their good design credentials? Architects.                                          
Whose practical visualisation skills give 3D reality to strategic planning? Architects.                                
Who can best advise the community on the potential impact of development proposals? Architects.
Whose design expertise makes the greatest contribution to design review panels? Architects.                  
Who can best assess the impact of development proposals on the local context? Architects.              
Who can provide the design expertise needed by independent hearing and assessment panels and other expert development consent bodies? Architects.                                                                             
Who can fulfil the role of certifier while also understanding the design intent of the project? Architects.     
And finally, who can objectively explain the meaning of ‘good design’ in a court environment? Architects.

These are some of the opportunities that will open up to the profession once the new objective is legislated.

Awards
I’m confident this will be another great year for the NSW Architecture Awards. Make sure you get your entries in well before the deadline of 22 February. Many thanks to our Newcastle members for the 30 entries we received for this year’s Newcastle Architecture Awards.

Australia Day Honours
I was delighted that John McInerney AM FRAIA was recognised last week for significant service to town planning, and to architecture, to professional organisations, to local government, and to the community. John has been a Fellow of the Institute since 2003 and a member since 1998. I have had a close working relationship with him in his role as Chair of the Millers Point, Dawes Point, The Rocks and Walsh Bay Residents Action Group. He has been a driving force behind the campaign to save the Sirius building. We owe him a great debt for the way in which he has applied his extensive planning skills and experience in the interests of heritage conservation and the long-term interests of the wider community.

Shaun Carter
NSW President