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University of Queensland Presentation

2018 Architecture LectureJames LeggeHeld on 27 March 2018

by:

Adam JeffordManager APDLMC

Janina GosseyeResearch FellowMC

Kelly GreenopLecturerModerator

James LeggeArchitectKeynote Speaker

Chris LandorfLecturerModerator

Adam Jefford:Good evening. Hello. Thank you. Great to see you all as always on a Tuesday night, last

Tuesday for a couple of weeks as well. To begin with I would like to acknowledge the traditional

owners of the land that we're meeting upon tonight and pay my respect to their elders past,

present and emerging. My name is Adam. For those of you new in the building tonight or online,

lots of people watching online, hello to you too.

I think it should be a great lecture tonight. I'm excited about it. I'll be sitting in the stairwells again

watching keenly and moderating questions. The questions - if you haven't been with us yet, I'm

going to skip ahead and get loose here, questions online. If you want to join us and ask some

questions of tonight's speaker slido.com the code is 'P002', outdo yourselves with insightful,

deep, difficult questions and our moderators tonight are going to do their best to moderate those

questions to James.

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Presentation2018 Architecture LectureJames Legge – 27 March 2018

Also thank you to those of you who have been providing reviews. We're just starting to publish

the first couple online. I think Jonathan Kaminski was the first review in of Kelly Shannon's

lecture. It's a great review. I encourage you to get onto it, have a read and of cause we're looking

forward to your reviews of last week's lecture and tonight's lecture as well.

Alright, done that one. Janina, would you like to talk about tonight's lecture?

Thank you.

Janina Gosseye:So good evening. I would also like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we

meet tonight and pay respect to their elders past, present and emerging. Welcome everyone to

the third of eight talks in the 2018 UQ Architecture Lecture Series. Tonight's talk is our last before

we take a two-week break for Easter and the Commonwealth Games. The series will restart on

April 17th with a lecture by Peter Walker from the Hobart-based architecture practice Cumulus

and there's four other lecturers after that. They've just gone for sale today, so please make sure

to register.

Now for those of you who haven't heard the theme of this year's lecture series is In-terre-vention,

not intervention but In-terre-vention. We have invited practices whose projects we believe are

highly sensitive to the context that surrounds them and this is the reason why the middle syllable

of the word intervention has been changed to 'terre', the French word for earth. In doing so,

emphasis in this year's lecture series is also placed on the invention component that goes hand-

in-hand with each intervention as the projects featured in this series demonstrate.

Now as curator of this year's lecture series I have received a great deal of support from my

colleagues at the UQ School of Architecture and tonight for instance, Chris Landorf and Kelly

Greenop have generously agreed to take you to the stage after the lecture to post all your difficult

and insightful Slideo questions. So make sure to keep them coming.

For those of you who don't know Chris and Kelly, Chris is an Associate Professor at the School

and Kelly is a Senior Lecturer and currently also Director of Research. Finally and most

importantly I'd like to introduce tonight's speaker James Legge. James is one of the founding

directors of Six Degrees Architects who are based in Melbourne and over the past 25 years

James and his partners have developed the practice into a nationally-recognised design firm

whose projects focus on ideas around human needs, community and memory. The title of James'

lecture tonight is 'Density, Urbanity and Community' which is music to my European ears.

So without further ado please join me in welcoming James.

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James Legge:Thank you for the introduction. Thanks for having me up here. It's great to be in Brisbane.

I'll start with a Jane Jacobs quote. 'There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city.

People make it and it is to them not buildings that we must fit our plans.'

I'm sure many of you know who Jane Jacobs was, but for those of you don't she was an

American Canadian grassroots activist. She wrote the Death and life of great American cities.

She introduced sociological concepts such as 'eyes on the street' and 'social capital' to urban

design and prevented Robert Moses from pushing the Lower Manhattan Expressway through

Greenwich Village, Soho and Little Italy in the 1960s. So she was an architect. She wasn't

actually an urban designer but she had some pretty good ideas and she'll pepper this talk a little

bit.

I want to start at the beginning of our practice really. In the early '90s we started and in about the

mid '90s I think Jeff Kennett changed the liquor licensing laws in Melbourne actually to enable

Crown Casino to function with more than one license essentially. But we at the time were recent

graduates and we felt there was nowhere in Melbourne to drink. It was not quite true. There were

plenty of pubs in Melbourne to drink out of obviously but that's what there were. There were

pubs and you could go there and there'd be bands playing, but that was it.

We'd all travelled, we'd all been overseas, we'd been to various continents around the world and

we felt that Melbourne was crying out for small bars. So places that had a greater level of

intimacy to them that you could sit quietly and have a chat that wasn't a thumping great big pub.

Because the liquor licensing laws had changed we were able to do that. So we half shut the

practice for about eight weeks and with six of us and six of our friends we constructed - we got

Melbourne's first little laneway bar going which is called Myers Place.

We constructed it essentially out of scraps that we found in various dumpsters around Melbourne

from renovating large building sites. We put this bar together over a series of weeks and it was

an architectural assemblage. But what we were doing and what was interesting, I guess why it's

a formative project for us, was that at each stage of the design were trying to - we had no

comparators really. We had nothing we could base it on. We weren't trying to think, 'Well what

does a '90s bar look like?' What we were trying to do was work out how we wanted to drink, and

how we wanted to socialise, how we wanted to create spaces that we'd feel comfortable in and

we thought our friends and our families and everybody else would feel comfortable in. So it was

examining really how you interact with the streets, how you create small pockets, how you create

larger pockets, what the bar does when you come in, does it compress you before it opens out

into another larger area out the back? So these were the sort of discussions we were having.

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That process was quite informative because for the rest of the - we moved on to do many, many

other bars and always throughout the process it's around talking about how people actually

interact with the architecture rather than lines on page and what it looks like. Obviously it looks

like something, there's architecture there, but the key drivers really are about the density, where

we can create pockets of density and how people interact with the architecture.

So then we went on to do many more bars and restaurants around Melbourne and at each of

these points really, all these bars as I said are about how people occupy the space, how they

occupy the space both internally and externally and how you go about creating spaces for people

to occupy. As an example, the discussion that we might have is 'What happens if you come to a

bar or restaurant when it's empty? They've just opened the doors and you turn up as an

individual. Do you walk in and then turn around and go out because there's nowhere comfortable

to sit or have we created a pocket somewhere around the back of a column that you feel

comfortable, you can sit in a little nook?' Or you turn up as one of two or one of three or one of

10, and so each of these groups has someone comfortable. So it's that kind of process we were

trying to work out, where people might sit, how they might actually feel within a space.

That led to all sorts of hospitality work and that led onto precinct development where there are a

number of precincts in Melbourne we've worked on. Again it's been this interaction with the

street, it's the interaction with the urban environment around it. So it's not just the bar itself, or the

restaurant itself but how it spills out into the street, how it occupies space that's public space,

how it adds to that public space and then questions around whether or not you're taking over that

public space come into play or whether or not you're adding to it.

So there's the nuances around that which then start becoming important as well. This is a boat

builders yard down near the Polly Woodside on the riverfront. Then there's all sorts of other

things we've kept kept going along the way as well. So projects for a street hospitality project

recently down in Collingwood and then high-end bars, a little hole in the wall bar we've done

recently, another precinct which is the base of the Western Hotel in the city square, a precinct

along there which we've set up a series of different bars and restaurants. Then at one stage just

before the Commonwealth Games, Federation Square had been built and they came. They

asked us to look at the precinct down on the river's edge which faces south but faces the river.

Fantastic old bluestone arches. It was one of the last places in Melbourne you could still actually

get mugged or score. So they were interested in cleaning that up before the Commonwealth

Games.

So we went about essentially looking at how to create a precinct out of that and how to then start

interacting with the river and occupying that space. They're very shallow vaults or bluestone

vaults. They were originally used as a bit of a retaining wall or water buffer for the city but also it's

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for storage essentially. So we've put services through there, put a bar in there and our offices

were down there for a number of years as well, but again it was about occupying that space

outside the building as well as inside the building and how you start creating that space in that

urban environment around it.

Likewise this is the project that's underway at the moment on the other side of the river, again

around ground plan activation, creating different pockets, different environments for people rather

than just – I guess one of our pet hates is landscape architecture's tendency, not always, but

tendency to draw things from a helicopter point of view, where you've got these beautiful lines on

a paper and you've got bench seats which are 40 metres long which in my opinion are completely

useless because you can only sit there as two people. So as soon as you've got three people on

a bench, then you have to do that, so it doesn't work. So it's thinking about things from that sort

of perspective.

So this is a little map of Melbourne and you can see there the grid. You can see Melbourne's grid

and these are all the hospitality projects that we've done around and about Melbourne. This then

led onto somewhat counterintuitively university work and it led on in a way in which it seemed

almost entirely appropriate though as well. So we've been doing a lot of university works since

and that was taking I guess '70s campuses, so the large '70s campuses with massive spaces in

between the buildings and trying to put modern, I guess contemporary programs into them,

libraries that no longer needed to be quiet, libraries that were becoming the core or the heart of

the university and spaces in between the buildings that were essentially just brown grass and

then trying to create pockets and environments that could be occupied by the students. So these

ideas around a sticky campus where you're trying to get students to come to a campus and stay

there rather than come to the the campus, go to a lecture and go home.

So that fed in quite well, into the thinking and the training I guess that we'd got from our

hospitality where we're looking at how people like to occupy space, whether they like to occupy

space, in what numbers and how they do it. The same thing happens in terms of studying, that in

the sense that if you're studying these days there's a lot of group study happens these days. So

you may well be studying by yourself but you may also want to study in a group of two or three or

five or in a room where you're all working together.

So occupying various different parts of the library in different ways, in different sized study groups

etc. So we took that those sorts of ideas through into our tertiary education work and also into our

secondary education work. So this is a project called Albert Park College Environmental Arts

Hub. It's actually the Year 9 campus for Albert Park College and it's a couple of old heritage

buildings. One's a drill hall and one's an old post office. The school has been shoehorned into it.

It's a fantastic project. It's a lovely set of buildings to work with and it's about I guess, inserting a

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modern day or contemporary program into this building, again looking for opportunities where

you can create different pockets for the students and the different cohorts of students, and

different ways in which they can occupy the space rather than just a great big playground.

This is all leading onto some residential work that I want to talk about Here's Jane Jacobs again.

'Two parents who say nothing of one cannot possibly satisfy all the needs of a family household.

A community is needed as well for raising children and also to keep adults reasonably sane and

cheerful', which we all understand. So this next project is a project called Heller Street Park and

Residences and I'll explain how it came about in a minute but just as a bit of background I spent

a year as a 10 year old living in a small English thatched cottage village on the Thames, sort of

very idyllic, almost Enid Blyton, even to the extent of I remember jumping the fence and pinching

apples from the local manner, but it had a village green. Me and may my mates used to hang out

on the village green and play soccer on the village green and it was this great communal space

that was in the middle of this tiny little village, a bit like this. So this is an example of an English

green.

So what we did was we created something similar. So Heller Street Park and Residences came

about. It was an unused bit of land that the council, City of Moreland owned. There was an

expression of interest which we entered and then a tender which we won. You can see it here but

essentially houses surround the site. It's a large block of land. It started its life as a clay pit in

Brunswick – there's a lot of clay pits in Brunswick – it was used for pottery. Gilbrook Pottery

occupied this area down here and up until about 1905 it was used as a clay pit for various bits

and pieces of pottery that were sent back to the old country or use for pipes and all sorts of

things like that. Over the next 10 years up until about 1915 it was used as a dump and burn tip

for the council. By that stage, by about 1915 it was full. So it then became surplus Council land

and they used it as a nursery and depot and these sorts of things, gradually as the suburb built

up around it.

Before we became involved the Council decided they wanted to get rid of the land. The locals

thought of as their land and they wanted a park. The council said 'We can't afford to make it a

park because we have to remediate it.' Anyway, in the end they ended up cutting a deal where

they would have an expression of interest and a tender which is where we became involved.

So what we essentially had to do was to remediate the entire block of land from the

contaminants, develop the front two thirds as a park and then we were allowed to develop the

back third as 10 or up to 15, but we put on 10 townhouses. Now our approach to this was to

develop essentially 10 family centric townhouses. This come about because we had been, me

and a number of people at Six Degrees had been looking around the inner city suburbs. We were

all getting to the stage we were having young kids and we couldn't afford anything. We were

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looking for somewhere where perhaps we could buy a block of land that was large enough to put

two or three or four houses onto and then we could share amenity, we could share the back yard

rather than the pokey little courtyard we might otherwise be able to afford in something close to

the city.

So this came up and it wasn't that, it wasn't what we thought we were doing, but this became a

different type of opportunity. This was a fantastic opportunity to essentially have a park on our

doorstep.

The diagram that's there starts to show the base of the contaminant. So we had to remediate the

block of land. This just gives you an idea about essentially what's going on. We had to drill holes

down the bottom a clay pit in a grid across the site. The clay pit at its deepest point was about

18 metres and then you test the soil for contaminants. From those tests you then go back and

drill holes around where you found the contaminants to a point where eventually you get a three-

dimensional map or image of where the nasties are and what you need to get rid of. We argued

that we wanted to keep as much of it on-site as possible just to get rid of the worst of it and then

we'd put a clay capping on it, otherwise it'd become somebody else's problem somewhere else.

So we said 'Well why don’t we just keep it there if it's not too bad?'

One of the parts of the development team, so it was myself and my partner were one third of the

development and Six Degrees were doing the architecture. McCorkell Constructions were

another third and they were doing the building. Environmental and Earth Sciences were the

remediation crew and they were the other third. So we had some ideas about what might be

down there. It was pre the petrochemical industry, so most of the contaminant – and also there

was no PCBs, there was no asbestos – these sorts of things weren't there. So the really nasty

things didn't tend to be there. There were things like partially burnt coal ash, hydrocarbons, lead

flashings, copper flashing – these sorts of things. What you see in front of you is a diagram of the

pockets that we needed to get rid of.

So then we went through the process of digging down until you got to those pockets and then

they would be taken off to a contaminated landfill site and then we'd basically terraform the park

and started the development.

So what were trying to do really was to create as I said, 10 family centric townhouses. Essentially

they're terrace houses really, a contemporary terrace house, essentially with the living spaces for

the families opening out onto the park. Because there was so much earthmoving equipment

going around that we had to use, then the approach we took was to actually lower the building

into the soil. You can see the natural ground plain is the levels there and the street level here.

We've dug a semi basement so that we could get rid of the cars, so we didn't have a wall of car

parks or garage doors facing the park and so that we got our living space and our living level at a

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level which opened then out of the park. Then all the soil from there we could then start using to

terraform the park.

This was important because what we were trying to do again is look at how people would live.

How do you create a public park abutting a private dwelling? How do you make sure that it

doesn't feel like it's completely private, or that if you're on the private, that you feel as if you're

completely on show? Then we started looking at 'Well, what we can perhaps do is to start

creating what is obviously a very public zone through here, a berm in between and then what is

an area which is semi private, semi-public and then our front terraces which are completely

private. So you can start to see that you mediate this connection between what's public and what

is private.

We had issues with Council who didn't believe that we should have a private open space or POS

facing north, facing a park. They suggested that we put a fence up, just here. I said 'But it's facing

north and it's a park. Wouldn't you want to look on the park?' They agreed that you would but

they also said that the requirements were that you needed to have private open space. So we

managed in the end to define this small pocket down here on the south side of the building where

our clothesline is and our hot water service as our private open space which we only ever go out

to hang up our laundry and check the hot water service. So this is not private open space but we

managed to get it through. Now of course they think it's a fantastic idea and that is their idea and

they use. Anyway.

Some of the other things we're doing, very basic sustainability initiatives. So crossflow ventilation,

ventilation up through the thermal open stairs so we get some thermal chimney effect going up.

We collect all the rainwater and that goes into 100,000 litre water tanks which we then used to

irrigate the park. We did interestingly try to use the fresh water from the roof for our toilets and

then we were going to use the grey water on the park. Everyone thought that was a great idea

until we got to the Health Department at Melbourne City Council who said 'No.' We could do it if

we wanted to install a treatment plant that would get it to Grade A portable water which seemed a

little bit counterintuitive. So we didn't do that and it was expensive. So we used the rainwater

instead to irrigate the park.

So this is the park under construction. For a while we moved in while the park was still being

built. So it become a giant sandpit for my children. One of the other things we were looking at

along the way is really another reason why we set up in the way we did is this idea of the front

porch and the front terrace. So these are the Greeks and the Italians across the road, immigrants

from the '50s and they hang out on their front porch all summer. They sit out there and they say

'hello' to everyone, they say 'hello' to you. They know everyone who's coming and going and this

is what we were trying to get across to the planners at Melbourne City Council. We were saying

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'No, we want our spaces out the front to help generate community. We want people to walk past

and people to engage with each other. We don't want to have a fence. That's part of the problem.

We actually want there to be engagement with your neighbours.'

So we were taking I guess a leaf out of their book and doing the same sort of thing. This is the

front of one of our terraces. This is now another leaf we took out of their book really is this

pergola's completely covered in grape vines and this faces north. This is our privacy I guess. We

don’t get a lot of privacy between here but it is mediated with that berm to the degree now that

you can start to see from the park, there's the park, there is actually planting in between us and

our private open space. So it's quite clear now what we're trying to do and we feel we've

mediated those two different conditions. That's it currently.

So just some quick interior shots as well. It was a development. It had to meet various

development – and we were trying to do it so we could afford a place to live. It was actually quite

a nice tension between us and the builder because the builder was essentially put in charge of

making sure it still stacked up. Of course I wanted to live there, so I was drawing everything and

I'd have various arguments with the builder grumbling 'We can't bloody afford to do that' and 'We

can't do that', 'We can't do that', and I'd have to try and negotiate my way through.

So, as a consequence things like timber bulkheads got put in because you couldn't really value

manage that out. Bulkheads turned around and went upstairs to become – that's the stair just

there actually, to become bookshelves. The bookshelves were built in. They're part of the

balustrading, so we couldn't really get rid of them either. So various joinery items you could get

rid of but there was plenty of stuff you couldn't get rid of. Then everything else – I just drew

joinery that I wanted to put in there and if we couldn't necessarily fit it into the project then it

became an optional extra for the purchasers. If they wanted to buy it they could. So it was a way

in which I could still make sure that we got a decent level of finish. Also we were using materials

which were relatively expensive. So this [00:28:57] and Formply and various other things.

Something else we also do in our projects a lot and you'll see it coming up in lots of our projects

is that we like to I guess, we like to involve artisans in the project but we do this because we like

the idea that you don't pick everything out of a product book or a product supply book, that

essentially it's clear that people and builders and craftspeople have actually touched the building,

that it's been made by people. So contemporary stained-glass we quite often used in small

sections and it's particularly nice in these sorts of instances because even though it's only a small

amount and the initial photo of the light fitting in the beginning of this Heller Street Project, every

of the units gets a different light fitting, slightly different light fitting. So there's I guess that

bespoke nature to it and it feels if it's not just coming out of a copybook. That's it really.

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Because of that, it's developed a great community. There are 20 adults and I think 19 children.

So we're not quite outnumbered yet. That's the Heller Street luge race and Christmas drinks just

before last year. So, a fabulous community that's built up in a way that we hoped that it would. It's

been great.

Moving onto the next project, this is similar in a way and this is actually more like a project, what

we thought we would be doing which essentially is – and this is under construction currently, so I

don’t have any finished images of this, but this is in Thornbury and it's on two lots. You can see

the typical lot size here and here. This was essentially two other lots, so large suburban blocks of

land not far from the city, although Thornbury is getting a bit further out but this is the more

affordable area that you can now get into, close-ish to the city. So, what we put in here

essentially is six townhouses, two-storey townhouses and a couple of single bedroom dwellings

above the garage here.

Again, what we've done is kept the vehicles off the site. They come down a laneway here and

then just enter through there. The rest of it is pedestrianised. So we've got our six different

dwellings. They've each got their own private little courtyards or their own private little decks, but

as as well as that there's a whole lot of space in between that's shared. So they get shared

amenities. So rather than the typical development of this sort of nature in Melbourne which would

be a driveway down the middle peeling off to six different garages and essentially all that open

space becoming for the car, we've tried to instead turn it into amenity for the occupants instead.

They're just a couple of shots of the project under construction but this is the idea about that

central area that will be shared amongst them.

Now all this I guess has started to lead to larger projects and what we're trying to do as these

projects get bigger is still look at these sorts of ideas around community and around how people

occupy space, and what that might mean. So what happens when you move to a larger scale

and you're looking at 80 apartments?

This is a project in West Melbourne under construction at the moment that we got essentially off

the back of some of these other projects we were talking about. It's a church group, or it's a joint

venture between Brunswick Group developers and a church group. The church had a large block

of land that they wanted to turn into some housing, but they also want it to be decent, have great

sustainability outcomes and also good community outcomes.

It's an odd shaped block of land, triangular almost so that leant itself to the possibility of starting

to build almost a campus style. Again the cars are removed but they're underneath. This is a

section through the site really and this is an internal courtyard. So what we started looking at

early on was 'What happens if we…' – I guess I'm not sure if you're familiar with Melbourne

apartments. What's been happening over the last 10 years is dreadful and a lot of the apartments

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are absolutely tiny, borrowed light, borrowed ventilation. You have a corridor that goes down the

middle and feeds off into apartments and the apartments only ever get one aspect outwards, so

no cross ventilation and light from one side.

So we thought 'Well what happens if you instead start looking at some of the older precedents

and start having open walkways, open corridors where you get to your apartment, that you don't

enter the building, go up in a lift and you're inside and you stay inside. Instead you have open

walkways?' What could the open walkways do? Obviously they'd start to provide light and

ventilation from more than one side of the building, but what could also those walkways be? So

this is the courtyard inside and you can start to see above some of these ideas around open

walkways.

Then we started looking at 'What could those walkways be? Although the residents will have their

own terrace facing out to the street, that's their private terrace, what happens if these spaces

becomes semi private, semi public?' So you can for example, chase the sun around one of these

terraces or one of these walkways. In the morning you can go out there because the sun

happens to be on that side of the building, because you live on the west and you're getting east

light here, so you can sit there and read the paper and hopefully bump into one of your

neighbours who's doing the same sort of thing. So providing opportunities I guess for community.

One of the things we always say is you can't create community but you can provide or you can

encourage it and you can provide the means for it to start to develop.

Also the street as I said previously, is important to us. So one of the things we try and do is to

keep that level of detail and again you can see here a little bit of stained glass, but that level of

detail and craft comes in at street level in particular. So you've always got an argument with the

developer who says 'We can't afford it', or 'You can't afford that level of detail', and you say

'We're just doing it here where people bump into it, where pedestrians use it, where the public

and in the local residents who live in the neighbourhood see it.' That's the bit that's important.

That's the bit you bump up against. Three or four floors up you don't see the detail to the same

degree. It's not as important.

Moving to larger scale again, the GTV9 site, this is a feasibility that didn't actually happen, but we

were looking at – this is a much larger development, more like 200 or 300 apartments. We were

looking here about 'How do you start to do the same sort of thing in an even bigger apartment?'

How do you perhaps create open walkways between and then create micro neighbourhoods

within a much larger building? So you start to create environments or pockets or communal

spaces, one per every 30 or 40 apartments perhaps. So you do start to break it down into

smaller, micro neighbourhoods. Then again, importantly the ground plane, having detail, been

activated, having a relationship with the streets and a relationship with the interior landscaped

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areas as well, and again creating berms to start clearing privacy as you need it, these sorts of

things. So it's looking at those sorts of things. So how do you do it on a larger scale?

We also got a project which is much, much bigger and this is not quite under construction but it's

currently out for sale. So it's it's about to go into documentation. This is a tower down on our

Docklands. I'm not sure if you know our Docklands, but they've been going up over the last 15-

20 years and to mixed success, I guess you could say. There's certainly been a problem in terms

of just how much activity there is on the ground plane and how occupiable they are, what sort of

urban environment has been created there. We won this project essentially by telling the

developer that we felt that essentially what they had there was a pine plantation. There was no

undergrowth and there was no ecology – there was nothing happening on the ground, that

essentially it was just a series of sticks and that there wasn't a whole lot of other stuff going on.

Jane Jacobs again. 'To generate exuberant diversity in the city streets and districts, four

conditions are indispensable. One - the district and indeed as many of its internal parts as

possible must serve more than one primary function, preferably more than two. Two - most

blocks must be short, that is streets and opportunities to turn corners must be frequent. Three -

the district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition including a good proportion of old

ones so that they vary in the economic yield they must produce. This mingling must be fairly

close grained. Four - there must be a sufficiently close, dense concentration of people for

whatever purposes they may be there.'

Now obviously that sort of thing builds up over time and we didn't really have time - this is a

single project – but what we did do is we looked at various blocks if you like, city blocks around

the world. There's Copenhagen, Tokyo, New York and Melbourne. Then we also looked at what

was happening essentially typically down at the Docklands. Typically down at the Docklands

there was a car park essentially, which was the podium and the building came out the top. What

we were arguing really was that we wanted to create another one of Melbourne city blocks which

is essentially a dense and complicated and diverse series of buildings on the ground, and then

the apartments come out of the top of that. But the car parks themselves should be sleeved.

They should be invisible as much as possible and that it shouldn't be a clean, crisp design. It

should actually be quite complex. Ideally it would happen over 200 years. 'We're not doing it that

way, so let's just mix it up a bit', was the approach that we took.

We also looked at the perfect points if you like, and this is what we do in all our projects. We say

'Where are people coming from?', 'Where are they going to?', 'Where they coming from in order

to…', 'Where are they catching the tram or the train?', 'Which direction are they going out?',

'Where's the morning sun?' What tends to happen and this again is a generalisation, but what

tends to happen with many developers is that they have their eyes set on this Excel spreadsheet

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in the sky that they sell, and what happens on the ground plane, and a lot of architects I think fall

into this category too. To a degree they've got their eyes set on this brand-new building. It's a

massive building they've got and no one is paying attention to what's happening on the ground

plane.

So what we're looking at is where the sun is coming, where is a great place for a café or for a

restaurant or somewhere for the morning sun and what's on the way to the station so you can

drop your laundry off and these sorts of the things. So it's looking at those bottom five floors

which are the most important in lots of ways. So in this particular – you can start to see the plan

here, we've created a laneway through here. There's a pocket here which opens out onto the

morning sun and we've basically put Soho around the edges here. The only bit of car park and

services really are in this back laneway back here. Everything else is quite active.

So there you can start to see an early concept sketch. The argument really is that the

apartments, it's not that important. The apartment buildings will be up there. Anyone can do an

apartment building. It's the bottom five floors that count. It's the bottom five floors that you're

connected with the street. It's the bottom five floors where you can see activation and it's the

bottom five floors that contribute to the built environment and the urban environment around you.

That's where we put the effort and so that we get that complexity I guess to the streetscape by

having different types of environments and different types of built form going in there, different

scales, different size tenancies and try to get that complexity and I guess build a bit of fake

history in some ways to it as well.

What I'm going to talk about now is a whole other project. You've probably heard about

Nightingale and essentially I'm going to take you through the ideas behind Nightingale and also

take you through Nightingale 1 which is not one of our buildings. It's one of Breathe

Architecture's. Then I'll take you through Nightingale 2 which is ours, which is currently under

construction.

So Nightingale came about essentially because there was concern amongst a group of us and

this was started by Jeremy McLeod from Breathe Architecture who essentially had a concern.

We had been talking about it as architects that we weren't happy with the way in which

necessarily architects got pushed away from some of the decision-making of multi-residential

housing and development.

There's an issue essentially in Melbourne's population growth. Melbourne's growing currently at

120,000 people per year. We're currently approximately 5 million and we're heading for 8 million

in 2050. So we've got a staggering number of people coming in. Currently the choices as we

hear, as we have currently are essentially renters in small, pretty tight apartments and owner

occupiers in big houses out in the suburbs, either urban compression or urban sprawl and I

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guess the idea really is that urban compression in here, arguably too tall, and urban sprawl out

here, arguably too sprawled – we need a dingo fence around Melbourne – and then perhaps

there's a place in between, so the inner suburbs where you can get a moderation. This has

happened everywhere around the world. All the cities we love Europe are like this – five or six

floors, lots of people living there, great street activation, connection with the street from where

you're living. In New York as well. So it happens all over the place and it's a fantastic place to

live, and it happened in Melbourne to a degree as well.

So this is not our building. I should say this is Breathe Architecture. This is the Commons. The

Commons was the precursor to Nightingale and the Commons was done by Jeremy at Breathe

Architecture for this reason. Now the Commons was a precursor because the GFC hit and he did

actually have a – he was working out the financials and a developer became involved at one

point and helped him finish the project. But essentially it stands there as a way of exploring what

it is and where the savings are that you can make in a Nightingale project.

So the whole idea really is that you build less and give more, or you take some elements away

from the building which take costs away from the building so that you can either pass those costs

on to the purchasers or you can improve the quality of the building. So as an example, these

buildings where we can, Nightingale projects are built near on, or near railway stations so that

you don’t need car parking. Inner city suburbs, well serviced by bike paths, trains, trams, buses –

these sorts of things. The Commons is right next to a railway station. So no car parking. That

saves about half a million dollars.

No laundry. That gives people a larger space in their living room. Have a shared laundry instead

on the roof which inadvertently ends up being, now inadvertently, ends up being a means of

engaging and encouraging community because you meet people up there. Interestingly when the

Commons opened apparently no one had any undies because there were no undies on the line

for the first six weeks until people became comfortable with who they were living with and they

started hanging their undies out too.

Natural ventilation, so no air-conditioning. This is in Melbourne. If you've got a well-designed and

good firmly performing building then with good natural ventilation and ceiling fans you can get

away without air-conditioning. You don’t need to have it. Good heating is important in Melbourne.

Good air-conditioning is not vital. There will be a couple days where it will get a bit hot. Cool

changes always come through, and if it's performing thermally well then that's fine. In fact if you

think about it there's really no need for - it makes perfect sense that apartments do perform well

thermally provided they're well ventilated because they're surrounded by others. If what we're

trying to do is keep them cool or keep them hot, they're insulated essentially, or the ones in the

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middle are at least, to the degree where we've got 8.9 stars on NATA System 4 and this is for

Nightingale 2, without doing particularly much, just by being careful.

No ceilings, so again, exposed thermal mass but also getting rid of that ceiling and exposing the

surfaces, giving people more ceiling height. Then in the Commons they've also done away with

chrome and they've got rid of tiles as well. So some of these sorts of things. These are the

people who live there. A community has built up. This is their blackboard that's down in the lobby

where they leave messages for each other and this is their productive roof garden that sits on

one side of their roof up the top. So some of the savings essentially went to them making a

fantastic roof deck for them. This is their laundry area. Some of the occupants.

So pretty simply. Formply joinery and exposed services. So what we learned is good design is

only part of the equation. The decision-makers in property developments the goalposts and in

particular I think it's important to realise that quite often the architects have let themselves be

seated at the kids' table with the crayons and the grown-ups are making all decisions at the

grown-ups' table and the architects often aren't there.

Property development is a business, not an urban housing provider. So with a typical

development, the way in which it works essentially, I'm sure plenty of you who work for

developers understand this, essentially you've got the developer and the bank over here, a

project manager and architects, marketing team, real estate agent and purchaser. Purchasers

are way over here and there's a whole lot of stuff between the purchaser and the architect. They

never get to talk. They just buy something and they don't see anything again, for months and

then they move in.

What we're proposing instead is that there's a direct connection. We have ethical investors over

here and an ethical lender. There's an architect who essentially runs it. There's nothing in

between us and the residents and we use our database and we can talk to the residents about

what it is they might need as an individual or as a family.

Current development model, arguably possibly accentuated slightly. Financial return all

important, sustainability not so and liveability not so much. Obviously there's a spectrum of

developers out there. So I'm not going to bag every developer. There are plenty of developers

out there who are trying to do some of the right things but what we're trying to do is Nightingale

essentially is that it has to make a financial return or the banks wont lend us any money. We're

saying equally it has to be sustainable and liveability is just as important as well.

So the way in which it works is that there are a bunch of investors. So we essentially work within

the same paradigm. We have to work within the same paradigm or the bank wont lend us any

money. We have to have investors because we have to be able to buy the block of land and get

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to a point where the banks will eventually lend us money in order to build it. In order to do that we

have to essentially have the planning permit, the land, the purchasers and a builder with a signed

contract. Then we go along to the bank and say 'We have all these things. Can we borrow some

money?' and they say 'Well let's have a look at your feasibility. You have to be showing a roughly

15% return for your investors, otherwise we're not going to lend to you.' So that's the minimum

return we can show to our investors. So that's what we do.

So our investors who come on board in order to invest in the Nightingale project, and these are a

bunch of other architects or family or clients and these sorts of things. As an example,

Nightingale 1 which Jeremy's just finished, I was an investor. He was an investor. One of my

colleagues at Six Degrees is an investor. All sorts of other architects, Claire Cousins was an

investor and Mark was an investor. All sorts of architects and friends of his invested, the idea

being that it might be a mid-career architect can put $100,000 on their mortgage and lend to as

an investor, and invest in this thing.

Now what they're basically told as an investor is that what we're aiming for and what we have to

show to the bank is a 15 percent return for you, or $45,000 roughly over three years, and that's

all you're getting. It's still property investment, so you might not even get that, but that's what

we're modelling. If we manage to make more than that and most property developers will be

aiming for 20 or 30 percent, if we make more than that, then you're not getting that. It's going into

either making the building better or into decreasing the price of the properties for the purchasers.

So that's our investors. So they had to labour this point slightly because the investors are not the

purchasers. The purchasers we have now came about from essentially people liking the idea of

the Commons and then asking Jeremy if he had another one, and then a database starting up

and a bunch of us starting to get together and doing Nightingale projects and the database

getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So now we have about 5,000 people on the database and

we've got about 40 apartments under construction. So we need to make it bigger.

So these are our investors. Here's the architect and here are the purchasers. So it's finance,

triple bottom line. It's financially, socially and ecologically sustainable and it's replicable is the

idea. So general Nightingale model savings, just as an example there's some significant savings

here. So no marketing team or advertising fees, no real estate agent which is pretty good

[00:51:56], no displays. As an aside here, the real estate agent – the thing that I think gets in a lot

of architects' claws is they come along and do about a five-week sales period, and they make

more money than the architect who speak last five years doing the project, and they make it in

three weeks which is crazy. Anyway, so we get rid of that cost. [00:52:15] We get rid of that cost

essentially because we have a database of lots of people. We get rid of this because we've got a

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database and because we have architects who can say 'This is my work, this is what we do. This

is the sort of thing we're doing and we'll show you some pictures of what we're proposing.'

No display suites – that's another couple of hundred thousand dollars. No parking to appropriate

locations – half a million. No air-conditioning, no second or third bathrooms. So all the stuff that

the real estate agent tell you you have to have, apparently you don’t. If you give people a choice

and say, 'Do you want a second bathroom or do you want to save $40,000?' and they say 'I'll

save $40,000 and I'll have a bigger living room.' Shared instead of individual laundry, shared

services to allow bulk purchases of electricity, PV cells and possibly batteries to minimise shared

electricity costs and where possible the retention of a ground floor tenancy to provide an ongoing

income from the owners' corporation there by lowering owners' corporation fees. So that's one of

the things we've been trying to do is essentially if there's enough money left in the pot that we

can keep a small tenancy on the ground floor for the OC. Then it starts minimising their ongoing

costs and maintenance costs.

Here are some of the savings. So $50,000 – marketing. This is just an example. Display suite -

$100,000, real estate agent - $250,000, second bedrooms - $200,000, car parking - $500,000,

air-conditioning $150,000. So it's a lot of money. If you spread it over 20 apartments, it's

significant savings of $62,000.

We're still operating as I said within the same paradigm. So we still start with a land price that's

the same, consultants' fees are the same, we have no marketing team, no display suite, no real

estate agent and we still have a construction cost, but we take less profit, and it's financially

transparent. So at the various stages throughout the project we talk to our purchasers and say

'This is what's going on', 'This is where the money is going', 'What would you like to do?', 'Do you

want to put the price up slightly?', 'We'll put the price up slightly if we're going to have the 15 kW

of solar panels or should we get rid of some of them?' 'No.' So we have these sorts of

discussions with them. Because we put in an embedded network it means we can get our

running costs, so during operation it's 100 percent fossil free. So it won't be using any – we just

basically essentially buy green power at bulk rates which means they pay less for their green

power than the people next door would be paying for black power.

Because ideally we end up selling these things to people less than market which is what's

happening and ideally depending on the project and as it's developing we're getting better and

better at doing this, there's a possibility I guess that we could be selling well under market and it's

a better apartment and performs better. So we've put in place a restrictive covenant because this

comes up as a question quite often. 'What stops people from simply just profiteering and selling it

three months later?' So essentially the restrictive covenant means that they need to sell it back to

Nightingale and that they can take a profit – the profit that they take on there or the increased

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purchase price or sale price that they're allowed to get is essentially based on what they paid for

it, plus whatever improvements they might have made to the property, plus the indexing of the

suburb in the area. So if the homes in the suburb have gone up, then understandably their price

has gone up as well. So we're not stopping them from getting profit on their place. We're just

stopping them from profiteering them.

So this is Nightingale 1 just completed and some quick shots. As well as that we take them on

tours all the way through the project. So they're engaged at the beginning and they get to see the

project go up. They get to see their homes being built. They get to meet the builder. There's

obviously then some pressure on the builder to do the right thing as well and it's all good.

This is Nightingale 2. This is our one which I'll show you in a minute. Nightingale 3 which is

Andrew Maynard or Austin Maynard which I think it's just gone out to tender. So they're about to

go under construction. We're under construction. This is Nightingale Brunswick East. So there's a

number of architects who have been involved early on and now a lot more architects are

becoming involved as well. These are some of the shots of them putting in the plants etc at

Nightingale 1, and these are some internal shots of Nightingale 1.

Nightingale 2 which his what we're doing is located next to a railway line. That's Fairfield Station.

It's on a corner here. It's an unusual site in that we have nothing around us. So nothing will be

built up around us. So essentially it's a five-storey building built on a corner and so we have

access to light and ventilation from all four sides which is fabulous. We also have a railway line

going along next door and a whole lot of authorities which were a completely bloody nightmare.

There's good and bad with every project I guess.

Now it's under construction. Now again, looking at what we did here, looking at the site, on a

corner, precinct activation and connection is incredibly important to us. So, we inherited this site

or purchased this site with a planning permit to build an office block, a five-storey envelope which

we had with zero activation on the ground floor and essentially just cars. We're not putting a car

park in because we're next to a railway station and instead we've got three tenancies going in at

the bottom. We're activating the entrance to the station, providing passive surveillance to the

entrance to the station and providing a whole lot of streetscape activation to this little precinct

that's developing in Railway Place here.

We then split the building into a couple of different buildings to get more access to light and

ventilation as well and to break the building mass up. We wanted to get as much activation on

the façade as we could as well, so that you can actually see people coming and going. So there's

a connection between the people living there and the streets – getting back to some of these

ideas that I've been talking about, and that you've got a good activation on the ground as well.

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Then also some common and shared areas. So you can look up at the building and you can see

where people are actually – the spaces that they're using.

The ground floor, retail shop, our entry, bicycle parking. Our entry is through here, sort of a crack

that goes through the building and then two other retail spaces here. The typical floorplan where

we've got various two-bedders. Again you can see that we've got - this one has three sides that

are open or active, or sorry, three sides which have access to light and ventilation. These ones

have all got at least two sides and we've got two-bedders and one-bedders. Then a rooftop, a

multipurpose room which we're negotiating currently with the purchasers what that might actually

be used for, the shared laundry, an area this side for their clothes drying and then across a

bridge to a recreational and veggie area on this side. Then 15 kW of solar power and some quick

images of it.

So really that gets us towards the end of what I wanted to talk about but essentially I guess I

think we need to look at the way in which we occupy cities and the way in which we embrace

density. Density can work well. This is just various shots of Barcelona. Complexity at the

streetscape works well and density and community within these sorts of urban environments. It's

about I think for us as Australians learning how to start living in this way and learning how you

can create decent urban environments with an increase in density. It doesn't have to be 30-storey

towers. In fact I think it generally works better when it's five or six storeys of four or five or six

storeys. Those sorts of spaces then can be active and dynamic and full of community.

That's it. Thank you.

Adam Jefford:Thank you James and maybe Kelly, welcome. Chris, can we swap over to the Slideo? There's

already some great questions. I've been watching as they come through. So please if you see

something there that you like, click that little thumbs-up button. If you do need to leave could I

just request you go through the back, right hand door. It's much easier to get out than going

through the front door.

Alright, shall we look at some questions? Let me operate this.

Kelly Greenop:Shall I start while we're waiting?

Adam Jefford:Thank you Kelly.

Kelly Greenop:Thanks so much James. I really enjoyed your lecture.

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Maybe we'll start at the end and we can work backwards?

James Legge:Sure.

Kelly Greenop:I really enjoyed hearing about the updated version of Nightingale because so many people have

been talking about it and it's very popular. I know we've got somebody up here in Brisbane,

James Davidson who is working on a Nightingale project. I wonder if the Nightingale ideas like

shared laundry and some shared spaces are going to morph eventually into a cohousing kind of

model which we see from Europe in the 1960s where there is a lot more intentional shared

living? Do you think that's what people in Australia want or do you think they're happy with the

level that you're going for at the moment?

James Legge:I think there's room for everything. I think that's the point really that you can set it up either way.

The next thing as you've probably heard is there's a Nightingale Village which is seven architects

and seven sites. They're putting that together. What that then gives you the ability to do is shut

down the whole street and turn that into – or have any parking that there is might be at the

beginning of the street and the rest of the street becomes an open open parkland for whatever

kids are living there essentially.

But also a couple of the projects in that are Bowen Group projects. So they are looking at those

sorts of things. The issue we've had up until now essentially is the banks and banks getting their

heads around what's feasible, what people do and what they'll accept. When you go to the bank

and say 'I've got this great idea. We want to do this cohousing thing', usually the banks will go

'Well, no.'

Kelly Greenop:Yeah, which is why you've needed those angel investors.

James Legge:That's right. So I think it's a matter of I guess proving it, proving up the model as it stands which

is which essentially operates within the existing paradigm that the banks expect. There's no

surprises there other than it's not a developer. So they can see that, they can understand that,

they know what the risks are and they can lend you money. It's the other ones that we have to

start – I mean I think once you've got a few of the Nightingale's built as well then they'll start

getting more acceptance around some of the other models that are out there as wel.

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Kelly Greenop:So it's almost as much about educating that financial community as it is about engaging with

architectural and community issues?

James Legge:Yeah, completely.

Kelly Greenop:Really interesting.

I'll start off with the top question here.

How can efforts to change Council minds become permanent in planning codes? So this links to a question I've got and that is how are you researching what you're doing to prove

to councils and others because community is a really slippery kind of term?

James Legge:Yeah, it is.

Kelly Greenop:And you talk about it.

James Legge:Because it seems to go away. It's almost the opposite of privacy too in some ways. From a

planner's point of view it's like…

Kelly Greenop:Yeah and how do you measure it? How do you go into your apartments, your buildings and

measure it? But this issue of influence, you're touching on it there in terms of investors but

influencing planning and councils as well, you have had some success. But how do you go about

getting this sort of thing into codes and council, kind of planning law?

James Legge:I think it's a generational thing. I think the architects and I guess the community that's ready for it

now as well, lots of people have tried to do communal housing or more communal based housing

obviously over the years. There's plenty of it in the '70s and things. I think that maybe it's just got

its day now. There's more people believing it. There's an acceptance that we can live in

apartments and maybe should be living in apartments rather than just spreading forever out into

the other suburbs. So then I think we have to start learning.

One of the things that surprises me is that over the last 20 years I think Melbourne has been

learning how to build apartments, or Australia in lots of ways has been learning how to build

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apartments. We had some quite good ones from the '20s and '30s that no one seemed to be

looking at, and lots of them oversees that no one seemed to be looking at. We just seem to be

reinventing them and doing quite a bad job of it sometimes, to the point, I mean just as an aside

the whole borrowed light and borrowed ventilation issue in Melbourne which was just appalling

for a while and it has left a whole lot of apartments with bedrooms that don't have windows, that

just have doors that are glazed doors and they get their light and their ventilation from across the

other side of the room.

That came about for a perfectly reasonable reason in that during the '90s they were redeveloping

a lot of the old warehouses. So you'd have a great big space and the argument would be 'Well I

want to put a bedroom in there, so I'll put a mezzanine in. I need to borrow my light and

ventilation from across this great big space to the great big windows that are over there. So I

don’t want to actually push my bedroom up against the windows. I'm borrowing it', and that kind

of makes sense in a great big warehouse type environment. But that went into code and so now

it was okay to borrow light and ventilation because is says so in the code. So that you translate

that into a completely different environment where you're building apartments and it's not okay,

but it's still in the code, so you can get away with it. So I think I've cone completely off the

question.

Kelly Greenop:No, not at all. Not at all.

James Legge:But I think we have to catch up. Wuite often the code has to catch up. I think the codes are

catching up but there's always a bit of a lag. Personally I think the politicians, unless you happen

to get a good one who is interested in urban design and interested in the outcome and built

environment, most of don't give a… They're just not interested. It's not on their radar and it's a

pretty rare politician who is, who then starts instigating. I think Bob Carr introduced the Good

Design Guidelines in Sydney because he saw some rubbish going up. I don’t think any politician

in Melbourne's ever seen something and thought 'I'd better do something about it.' I think most of

them have just gone 'Good, let's have more of it. It's bringing money into the state.'

So they see it as a different equation. The equation is it's bringing jobs, it's bringing money, don’t

stop it, just keep it going. I think that's the thing we have to resist.

Kelly Greenop:I think sometimes they're probably thinking about it in terms of mass, just production of housing.

That turns to the question I guess, it's one that's come up on this Slideo here, how important is

culture and connection to place? I ask that. I guess I've got a take on it which is the inhabitants of

Nightingale and a lot of these developments and projects that you've put up to day, all seem to

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be professional, inner-city, white, small families. What about people from other cultures? There's

a lot of migration into Melbourne. There's a lot of cultures who've got non-Anglo ways of living,

non-Anglo ways of cooking, different forms of privacy, more kids. How are they being catered for

in the market or is that something that Nightingale is looking towards? Or is that not something

that's on the radar yet because of who you're able to deal with?

James Legge:It's a multifaceted question I guess. Theoretically Nightingale deals with it, perfectly. If they are on

our database and they said 'We want to do this and this. This is what's important to us', they're

not – they don’t believe they tend to be on our database if we're [01:08:13]. What we did think

though was that for a while there were a few articles saying that Nightingale is about hipster

housing. But interestingly when it came down to the people who ended up living in both the

Commons, Nightingale 1 and Nightingale 2, the purchasers, is actually quite a wide spread in

terms of them being young individuals, young couples without kids, couples with kids, single,

middle-aged mums with kids and some retirees. We're looking at there's potentially an 80 year

old who's interested in one as well, in a Nightingale project.

So we've actually got quite a decent spread there. I suspect they're interested in community and

they're interested in sustainability and they're interested in these sorts of things that we're talking

as well. So that obviously is I guess a cohort, but it seems to be quite a broad cohort. I think it

could be broader but I think we've only just begun the conversation really. Lots of developers are

very interested in what we're doing because they see they're taking a lot of the risk out of it

because we've got a database of people who want buy property. So they'd love to have that

database, but if they started the same thing and marketing to a particular cohort that they could

then say, 'We'll transparently only take 15 percent and here are the financials', then they'll

probably get a database too and maybe they could get a different group. I don’t know. I'm not

sure how to answer the question in terms of how to broaden the spectrum of people who might

be living there. But in theory there's no reason why it shouldn't be broad.

Kelly Greenop:No, I agree. I think in theory, but I think it's also about people who know about architects and

architecture. So it's interesting to think about how we might take those conversations to a broader

group of people like the outer suburb dwellers too.

James Legge:I agree and what we are doing though is we're now incorporating 10 percent affordable housing

into Nightingale projects through housing associations. So we're getting housing associations

involved and then 10 percent of the Nightingale product will be affordable housing.

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Kelly Greenop:Fantastic. That's a great innovation.

James Legge:Again, it's important to procure or to ensure that the people who are going to move into those

apartments are interested in community as well.

Kelly Greenop:Yeah, of course.

James Legge:So they do need to be carefully looked after by the Housing Association.

Kelly Greenop:Yeah, great.

This issue of architects in our loving life or position in society is an interesting question here from

anonymous.

You suggested that architects are losing power/perceived importance within the development process. Do you think this is going to get better naturally or is there some other thing that should be done?I think the hint there might be possibly at legislation which New South Wales did bring in for

certain buildings over a certain height that had to be – but it gets back to that issue of how do you

measure good design.

James Legge:Yeah, that's right. I think again, it's a tricky one because measure good design are you) I think I

think it is again that this is a tricky one because understandably as architects we want to provide

the best architectural outcomes that we can and we always feel like we're fighting against

budgets and we're fighting against value management from the developer and these of the

things. But I think we have to take some of the blame in that we don't understand necessarily

yes, that you can have a very greedy developer but there might also be – this has been a fast

learning curve for us because you do understand that you actually have to show a particular

profit otherwise there is no building. It just doesn't happen. So you have to have a profit on the

feasibility essentially that the bank will agree to lending you money. I don't think we're very good

at going 'Okay, we understand we have to save money. We don’t want to save it there. We want

to save it there', and because we haven't, I think, again it's generalising, but because I think

we've never, or we tend not to want to have a negotiation, the development managers tend to

just make us take this, this, this and this out.

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So I think it's two things. We have to push back and say 'We want to be involved in the

discussions. If you need to save money we want to be involved in where those savings are

coming from.' The real estate agent is not always right. You need to take some more lead from

the people who are going to be living there because perhaps they don’t need two bathrooms and

perhaps they don’t need an internal laundry, whatever, so various things. So perhaps there are

other savings we can make rather than you stripping the guts out of it and making it a piece of

rubbish.

That's I guess what I was talking about trying to get to the grown-ups' table in that you need to

have some financial discussions around it as well and I think we have to fight for that.

Chris Landorf:Can I just extend that because I've noticed students since Jeremy was up last year or somebody,

students are certainly asking questions about the architect's role in this and 'Why aren't we

getting taught more of this stuff out here versus…'

James Legge:It's pretty boring but it's incredibly important, and the financial stuff…

Kelly Greenop:Yeah. Do you think that we need to get onto being handy with spreadsheets rather than only

handy with beautiful design?

James Legge:I think we do and it would have horrified me as an architectural student but Excel's really not very

hard and it's just a list of things and a list of cells. It's not hard. Just a list of costs and a list of

profits and at the end of the day it stacks up or it doesn't.

Kelly Greenop:It's more a realisation that the people with the money are the people who are going to make the

decision. If you don’t have a seat at that table, you're gone.

James Legge:You can't argue with it if you've got none. So to the extent where we have done – and I know

Jeremy does it quite a lot on his projects – he'll have an argument with a developer because he's

done the feasibility as well. So this is his other projects, not Nightingale projects. The

development manager's done a feasibility and Jeremey's gone 'Well no, I've done one here and it

seems to work. It seems fine. What's the problem?'

Kelly Greenop:He understands it, yeah.

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James Legge:'Unless you want 30 percent which seems a bit unreasonable?' I think there's ways around it. If

we can do that, that'd be great. We've started to try and do that, but we need to get more fluent it.

So I'm not suggesting that every architect out there is going to be instantly doing feasibilities but

it's something we should I think, start working towards understanding these sorts of things.

Chris Landorf:Okay. I'm going to combine a few of these questions together, addressing the issue of

neighbours. So somebody's asked…

What's the optimal number of neighbours?

…and I've got to say there's some of my second-year students who are doing architecture in

society, writing essays for me, just after the holidays about neighbours, neighbouring, private and

public space. They're going to be really happy to have come to your lecture tonight. So maybe

some of these questions are from them. So they're asking questions like, 'What's the optimal

number of neighbours?', 'How are people coping with this idea of losing privacy by having car

parking all gathered in one spot and then you have to walk to your apartment rather than driving

in and then you're in your apartment?' How are these kind of cultural change issues which are

away from that model, how are they working? Are people loving them and what do neighbours

think? Do neighbours hate having the Heller Street apartments? Did they accept it or were they

initially worried? How is that whole community interface working?

James Legge:I think we jump at shadows quite often. So quite often there's this idea that what happens if you

can't drive in and you can't get out of the car in a garage and walk inside? What happens if you

park on the street? But people all over the world park in the street. You live in Paris and you park

the next suburb if you've got a car and you walk back.

Kelly Greenop:And sometimes it's snowing.

James Legge:Exactly and everyone seems to cope. I think we get used to ideas that aren't necessarily – I

mean I just think back to the idea when I was at university where people started talking about

apartment buildings and building apartment buildings. There was all this talk about 'No one in

Australia's going to be prepared to live in apartment.' Then they start building them and it's like

'Well they're for investors and there'll just be investors renting them out and stuff, but no one will

live there for anything more than a year or two and then they'll move out.' Now people are living

there quite happily for a while and now they're bring up families in them.

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I think culturally we change gradually and also I think if you give people good exemplars that

obviously then those people can start to see 'Well actually I could live like that.' I think that's

important I guess, that that's a way in which people can start understanding how they might want

to live.

The idea when I was growing up of not having two cars in a family was astonishing. Everyone

had two cars and now I have one car. I've got a family and I've got three young kids. Whenever

we need a second car then we use a flexi car or a go-get. That whole vehicle landscape,

transport landscape is changing massively. So again in another 10 years it'll be different again

with autonomous vehicles coming in. I think also just the younger generation now, more people

are moving into Nightingales. A lot of them are like 'Well I'd rather save the $15,000', or $12,000

or whatever it is a year, 'in not having a car because I live in the inner city and I don't need one.'

That seems to be quite prevalent in certain demographics.

So I think things change and people get used to culturally changing. In terms of how people

accept things like Heller Street or Nightingales going into the area, there's always this fear I think

that it's something else. The neighbours around Heller Street were pleased to be getting a park

and they'd done the negotiations before we became involved really, about what was going to be

there. There were still some people that we were abutting who thought that we should put, as an

example, we should push the building all the way to the street front, but that was just so that they

didn't have it up against their fence. It was a bit silly really because they wouldn't have been able

to get to the park. It would have been nuts.

So sometimes it's selfish or self-interested and other times it's a bit of a fear as to what's going to

be the outcome, but for people who live around Heller Street now, love it and use it. That's great.

I think the same thing happens to a degree around multistorey that understandably if you're

growing up in a suburb and you've lived there for a long time and it's two stories, then it's a bit

confronting that larger buildings are moving into the area. The trouble is the alternative with the

population growth is that it just goes out and out forever. That means the people who have to live

out there have no services and have a terrible sense of community because they're miles away

from anywhere. They have to drive anywhere, both to their work and that they spend three hours

in their car every day. So, there are reasons.

I don’t think we're very good as a society or as politicians in explaining the reasons why we need

to increase density in certain areas and why it will work in some areas and it's been encouraged

there and not in other areas. I think that could be better done.

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Kelly Greenop:Getting back to the architectural practice question, how much additional time is involved for an

architect to work on a Nightingale model kind of project versus a traditional developer comes to

you and says 'I want 60 townhouses on this lot'?

James Legge:A bit. I guess it's becoming less as more systems are set up. So there's now Nightingale Housing

which has been set up over the last year which has an independent board and looks after the IP.

So essentially if someone's doing a Nightingale project we can go 'Well this is the process you

need to go through.' So that's becoming easier.

But there is certainly engagement with the owners or the purchasers. So there is more involved,

but we're also looking at putting together a standard fee, architectural fee and then the other side

of it as well. So there'll be an additional fee for the time involved in the engagement with the

purchasers whose homes you're going to be building.

Kelly Greenop:There's an interesting question here. People love this question of profit and profitability.

Instead of imposing a profit threshold on the developers will it be possible to create highly profitable affordable housing? What do you think?James Legge:No.

Kelly Greenop:No? It's not going to be affordable then?

James Legge:No.

Kelly Greenop:That was a good one to just clear the air. Just in case that's somebody writing an essay on that,

probably no.

James Legge:Fifteen percent return is not bad really. It's better than you get most places.

Kelly Greenop:It's a lot more than you're getting even on the stock market, right?

James Legge:Yeah probably, but obviously it's not guaranteed.

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Kelly Greenop:No.

When dealing with architects though, as the users of the building, what do they want that's different from what real estate tells us?So we've seen those changes that Jeremy's first design had – no tiles, no chrome, that kind of

stuff. Is that staying consistent across the new Nightingales that you're engaging with people

about?

James Legge:There's a certain number of prerequisites which are things like seven and a half stars and no

fossil fuel during use. So there's these sorts of things which are the specific things with

Nightingale that you have to operate within, in order for it to be a Nightingale project. Beyond that

it's up to the architect involved as to where they're doing it. So Jeremy has no tiles. We have

tiles. We wont put chrome in. We like brass. So that's fine and we do like the patina of these sorts

of things. But there'll be variance and difference between the different architects involved.

Kelly Greenop:Right, but in terms of what the end users are telling you, are they quite happy with all those

changes? Do they have particular preferences?

James Legge:No, well interestingly I guess, one of the first places we start really, because let's say as an

example the Six Degrees project, Nightingale project, at that time we were looking around for a

site. We were doing feasibilities on various sites. We had our investors. So we'd already gone

and found our investors and had commitments in terms of money. So we knew we could buy a

site.

We found a site eventually in Fairfield, the one we purchased, and at that point we could go out

to the database and say 'Okay, Six Degrees are doing a Nightingale in Fairfield. Who's

interested?' So immediately you then to a degree, you're self-filtering because some people will

go 'I don’t want a bloody Six Degrees building. I want a Kennedy Nolan one or I want a [01:23:08]

one', or someone will go 'Great, I want a Six Degrees one.' So you get a group of people who

may or may not know us, but say they want to live in Fairfield and some people want to have a

Six Degrees one. So you I guess self-filter to a degree, and even if they don’t, plenty of them I'm

sure, didn't know who we were. But we then present to that cohort of people from the database

and say 'This is what we're proposing' and 'This is what we're aiming for', 'This is our work and

have a look at it. If you don’t like it, then go and find another Nightingale project, the next one or

wait for the next one.'

Page 29 of 30


Kelly Greenop:When do you bring the builder in on all of that?

Adam Jefford:I said that I was just going to lurk up on the stage when we're getting close to time.

Kelly Greenop:Alright, you've worked.

Adam Jefford:I think we could listen all night as well in some ways, but I think we need to wrap.

Kelly Greenop:I'll ask you that question because I think it's one of my assignments that's probably…

Adam Jefford:The builder? I'll be quick. It's a standard procurement. We tender to three builders at about

80 percent. Then we work with the winning builder from that, for the last 20 percent docco. So

basically at that stage we go – which is not dissimilar to what happens generally in the market,

but we go into the builder, 'Okay, if you've got better ways of doing it, we've got a value manager

obviously because you all came in more than we thought you would. So we're working with you

now. Where are we going to get it off? What are we going to do?'

So you work with them then to get to a point where you can sign it up.

Chris Landorf:Excellent James. Thank you. Alright, thank you.

Adam Jefford:Well join me in thanking James and the panel.

We'll look forward to seeing you at the next lecture and of course you can go and book for all of

those lectures right now on the SLQ website.

Have a good evening.

[End of Transcript]

Page 30 of 30

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