Postcard to Italy

摘要

The mountains of our last project in Italy have been replaced by suburban blocks filled with houses and backyards. The urban environment is different, but the problems and frustrations are rather similar: urban policies and community groups (including movie actors nostalgically rallying for 'urban villages') are conservative and ignorant. Average design apparently 'in character' with historical 'styles' - always and irrefutably of imported white colonial traditions - are preferred to speculative works that investigate the consolidation of built and open environments as a strategy towards urban sustainability. Peripheral land - sometimes brownfield areas, sometimes ex rural fields -continues to be developed. Louise and I are feeling more and more like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (Louise being of course Don Quixote) in our alternative attempts. The natural environment has increasingly become the condition that guides our approach; it is a global condition, but I feel it is particularly poignant in Australia as the land of indigenous people to whom land is essentially sacred. I send you two images of a small project: it is a shed in the Barrabool Hills, behind Geelong.