As long as there have been cities, people have been reimagining how we might live in them. Co-ops with communal kitchens, apartments with shared gardens and whole suburbs engineered to foster social interaction have been established. As populations keep growing and cities sprawl wider, the desire for alternative forms of housing is only stepping up.
All over Australia you can find design competitions, challenges and architectural commissions looking at how we can make our new homes more sustainable and affordable, and how these homes might help us live longer, healthier lives. The best ideas have gardens filtering through. These gardens might be large and communal or so small they are for looking at rather than lingering in.
Some are entirely made up of raised vegetable beds. Others even have an orchard. An internal stone wall and gate in the garden of Jen Vardy.
Credit: Justin McManus With the NSW government having recently invited architects from around the world to compete with designs for “pattern book” Australian houses for the 21st century, and with the National Gallery of Victoria unveiling its 2024 architecture commission that considers new ways of building smaller homes next month, it’s timely to consider one of the more trailblazing urban design experiments of last century. A century ago, the late great landscape designer Edna Walling, only in her 20s, created a village on what was then farmland in Mooroolbark in Melbourne. She imagined a community of like-min.