As the countryside vanishes under a top-dressing of chemicals, and as cities provide little more than an urban context for traffic intersections, the suburbs are at last coming into their own. —J. G. Ballard, 19711
We architects have tended to see the suburbs as either a problem to be “solved” or somewhere to be avoided. Robin Boyd famously railed against the stifling limitations of life in a suburban house: “Is it just that the Australian public clings to its depressing little boxes because it knows no better, has seen no better design?” Gabriel Poole said, “The suburbs we’re putting up are just bloody inhuman, how people live in them I just don’t know.” And according to our only Pritzker Prize winner, Glenn Murcutt, “It’s appalling housing, it’s appalling spatially. It’s not architecture, it’s merchandise” – as though excusing us These three architects are accomplished designers of homes in the singular; it seems to be the aggregation of the suburbs that troubles them. We decry suburbia’s sameness, the apparent lack of culture, the sprawl, the cars and the airconditioners. Some architects even refuse to work there, claiming it’s bad for the portfolio, as Simon Sellars discovered to his own frustration (see page 60).
