Opposition to the state government’s plan to raze 44 towers is mounting, including from a former Labor deputy prime minister and a 97-year-old industry icon, architect Peter McIntyre.
Victorian Labor’s plan to raze Melbourne’s 44 public housing towers faces unexpected resistance from a party elder and an architectural icon as a bid to have one site heritage listed threatens to disrupt the state government’s scheme to tackle the housing crisis.
97-year-old architect Peter McIntyre at the Carlton public housing flats he helped design in the 1960s.Architects are also increasingly interested in the environmental benefits of re-use – rather than removal – of buildings where possible. McIntyre was working with building firm Clements Langford in the 1960s when it won the contract to build one tower at Carlton.“We built the tower using a standard reinforced concrete frame, sheeted in brick,” McIntyre said. “Well, the Housing Commission were so pleased with the thing, they said, ‘We’d like you to do another one beside it’.”“The exterior of the building hasn’t deteriorated,” he said. “The frame is perfectly good. The exterior walls are perfectly good.
“You’d build a tower with reinforced concrete sheeted with brick or some equivalent material like the brick.”The state government has described the high-rise redevelopment as “the largest urban renewal project in Australia’s history”, eventually housing three times as many residents over the next 30 years in a mix of “social” and private housing – but detail is scant.
“Public policy should always be based on proper investigation, and on something like this you would expect a process of public consultation right from the start.Howe – who as a Methodist minister in Fitzroy in the 1960s when so-called slum clearances paved the way for the public housing towers – criticised the “effective privatisation” of public land by the Labor government.
“They were a real signpost about the value of keeping people living in the inner city when there was a major drift away,” he said.
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