The Underlying Social Value of Number 10 Murray
Wednesday, July 7th, 2010
[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”.
