The term “neighbourhood character” heavily features in debates around the gentrification of our inner-city suburbs and, increasingly, our regional centres as we test the potential of escaping the grasp of the city. It seeks to define how the qualities of “place” might be maintained during development and how new additions to the street might choose to respond to the existing built environment.
Understanding neighbourhood character, and designing in response to it, requires careful and highly tuned observational skills as well as time to document, consider and speculate on the inherent qualities of the assembled context. This might include built form and materiality, yet it can equally consist of the rhythm of the street, fences, trees and the natural environment, or historical layers and human stories embedded in place. To define these complex qualities, we must examine examples of how our suburbs can evolve with contemporary architecture that is responsive to the past yet maintains architecture’s commitment to exploring new territory. Divided House by Jackson Clements Burrows Architects (JCB) provides a compelling exemplar. An experimental approach to a new single-family house for JCB director Jon Clements and his family, the design is driven
