Merchant Builders Legacy with Professor Alan Pert
With a strong relationship with Merchant Builders and a long-standing academic career at RMIT, Professor Alan Pert was perfectly placed to write Merchant Builders: This is not Subtopia, a book to be published in June by The Miegunyah Press, an imprint of Melbourne University Press.
How did the book come about?
It happened after I worked with Graeme Gunn and David Yencken back in 2015 on a Merchant Builders exhibition at the University of Melbourne. Philip Goad and I ran a masters research elective with students helping to design and curate the exhibition.
The exhibition titled, Towards an Archive was about celebrating the 50th year anniversary of the launch of the company and attempting to assemble an archival record of the company, the people and the projects. We worked closely with Graeme Gunn and David Yencken on a detailed chronology that became a focus of the exhibition. The students helped to source a variety of archival plans, marketing brochures and other materials, which we sourced from a variety of private and institutional records including the State Library of Victoria, RMIT’s Design archives, David’s private collection, photographer John Gollings archives, the Nexus Designs archive and various other private collections – students also placed adverts in local papers hoping to reach Merchant Builders homeowners. We received a lot of positive feedback from the 2015 exhibition, and we produced a small catalogue using the assembled material. A number of visitors to the exhibition suggested that it would be great to produce a comprehensive book to permanently capture the history of Merchant Builders; we made a commitment to David and Graeme that we would embark on this, then spent a couple of years discussing a possible format and structure with David.
What themes run through the book and what inspired the title?
We realised that through some of the interviews with David and Graeme that there was a deeply complex story to tell. There was a story about people, about a way of working, and about a practice that was radical in its approach to project housing. It was also a story about the Australian suburbs, and about the birth of a certain form of integrated design in Australia – this was a unique approach that integrated architecture, landscape architecture and interior design. The Merchant Builders approach is still relevant to the problems we face today, such as how do we densify suburbia and how do we look at new forms of collective housing? It’s important to note that together David and Graeme realised that ‘design’ alone would not be enough. They recognised the need for changes to planning policy and collectively, they developed the Cluster Title Act and had it implemented. They used ‘Winter Park’ in Doncaster as a prototype for a new form of subdivision and further tested these ideas through ‘Elliston’ in Rosanna but the first development to utilise the new cluster code was at Vermont Park South. The title of the book incorporates the term, “subtopia” fist coined in 1953 by UK architectural critic Ian Nairn. Nairn used it as a derogatory term for the changes that were happening in the UK countryside and the uncontrolled expansion of suburbia. David believed what Merchant Builders were doing in Australia offering a positive alternative to suburban sprawl and hence the title, ‘This is Not Subtopia!’
What and whom did you want to acknowledge in the book?
Graeme sadly passed away a few months ago, but he managed to read the book cover to cover in September last year. The book captures many of our conversations where he emphasises the need for the integration of landscape, architecture and interiors and I hope this comes through strongly in the book. Merchant Builders recognised that to successfully change the way people think about project housing in Australia it wasn’t led by an architectural solution, instead, it required a fully integrated approach to how you site and design a house and its surrounds. The company also nurtured careers; the fact that Ellis Stones was the first landscape architect to come into the company is significant, as was the entry of Janne Faulkner, when Graeme and David realised there was an opportunity to consider interior fixed furniture as an important component of the home from a functionality and aesthetic point of view. Janne then went on to found Nexus Designs, which grew into an important interior and design company, in a similar way to Tract Consultants which began as a development arm of Merchant Builders and then a landscape and planning division before establishing itself as an independent company in 1978.
What is the legacy of Merchant Builders?
It was a group of people comprising a radical form of practice who realised that the Australian suburbs were a unique condition that required an integrated design approach. At the time the company was founded there was a lot of negativity coming from the architectural world around the standardisation of suburban housing and the notion of private gardens; introversion was the standard model. Merchant Builders were keen to introduce other housing types that were appropriate to the Australian context – the cluster housing and townhouses that they prototyped are still to this day some of the best examples of densification of suburbia and different ways of living in a suburban context.
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