On December 8th, 2020 viaARCHITECTURE participated in the Melbourne Affordable Housing Challenge hosted by Beebreeders.

The 1960s saw both a rejection of the monumental vision for public housing and a dissolution of the political responsibility to continue creating it. Aldo Rossi’s critique was at the center of the European rejection. Architecture of the City was a protest against the aesthetic functionalism that had been embraced by the public housing industry. Rossi rejected the architectural avant-garde’s attempt to turn the ordinary into an agent of revolution. He declared that

“(…) housing must be ordinary, something that recedes into the fabric of the city, and not something that stands forward from it; that residential buildings are fabric, not monuments, and only by continuing to be fabric can they make a positive contribution to the city as a collective work.”

The Victoria State Government established its Housing Commission in 1938. In spite of the failure of tower-in-the-park modernism in both America and Europe and the success of its own prefabrication plants, it would choose to abandon its lower rise, higher density track record for Melbourne. Between 1964 and 1970 twenty-eight sites across nineteen suburbs in inner Melbourne would be cleared and developed with forty-seven 20-30 story high rise housing blocks situated in unadorned natural landscapes.

This proposal seeks to provide new affordable housing by re-urbanizing Melbourne’s public housing sites- introducing a new low-rise infill to both engage the surrounding streets, integrate certain commercial and retail adjacencies, offer 2nd floor amenities and services for the larger constituency and better define its landscapes, the now intra-block gardens, to better allow for recreational leisure.