stevenclark.com.au

[This article was the last of three articles I submitted in late May for my Media Writing unit in the post-graduate Journalism Specialisation. Unfortunately the first two contain confidential information I am not privileged to share in public.]

Architects called it Number 10, locals affectionately called it the Milk Crate and Michael Aird called it “a bad example of brutalist architecture” – but who owns Tasmania’s best example of a 1960s modernist office building?

Dirk Bolt and later David Hartley Wilson, a pioneer of architectural environmentalism, designed 10 Murray Street in 1963. It was a modernist office building that displayed a brutalist influence.

The term brutalism meant the building capitalised on an aesthetic of raw concrete.

Professor of Sociology, Adrian Franklin, said in his opening speech at the ‘Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’ exhibition on May 4th that he does not accept politicians should be allowed to make decisions about our cityscapes.

“They are short term people… cityscapes contain our memories, our souls, our joined pasts, they are the shape that we wake up to in the morning and they’re what we consider when we become homesick overseas.”

‘Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’ was a fund raising event organised by the Save 10 Murray Campaign to raise awareness and protest at the impending demolition of the often misunderstood 10 Murray Street.

Dr Franklin said any move to sell or demolish 10 Murray Street will “rob them [our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren] of something that is rightfully not ours to dispose of”.

“We cannot allow them [the Government] to bracket in and bracket out whatever buildings they feel like because that’s our history, that’s our culture… We wouldn’t allow them to do that with our history as it’s recorded and as it’s taught to children in school,” Dr Franklin said.

“[10 Murray Street] was chosen by people who should be in a position to decide what is a significant building”.

The people who should decide are the experts in architecture, historians “and perhaps sociologists like myself”, he said.

On May 6th Hobart architect and chair of the Australian Institute of Architects’ 20th Century Buildings Committee, Paul Johnston, said on ABC Radio that 10 Murray was “identified as one of 60 buildings nominated to the Register of the National Estate in a survey of 20th Century buildings that was done by the Institute of Architects and the University of Tasmania in 1996”.

“As a consequence… it has been included in the Sullivan’s Cove Waterfront Authority’s heritage listing as a place of cultural significance.”

Mr Johnston said the buildings of the late 20th Century, those of the modernist movement, are the most susceptible for demolition because they are the least understood and least protected.

“You have to understand that heritage and the idea of heritage… changes over time,” he said.

“Typically what we need to find is a level of generational change that allows buildings to be placed in a social context and then they become rediscovered by newer generations because they can relate the buildings to their circumstances.”

The decision to demolish 10 Murray Street is subject to an appeal by the Save 10 Murray Campaign before the independent Resource Management and Planning Appeals Tribunal in June, with a verdict expected in July.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 7th, 2010 at 7:24 pm and is filed under environment, photography, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.