He came around the front of his desk for the interview, rather than talk across it. He has a fair amount of space at his offices in Mugga Way. He is the chief executive and national director (practice) of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects. However, he is more interested in what you do with space than how much of it you have.
Australia, of course, has a lot of space. But as most of the population is packed into the south-east corner it is becoming more precious. The pressure is on for higher density living.
Peck sees a danger in this.
“”Behavioural scientists have done experiments putting animals closer and closer together,” he said. “”Rats if forced to live closer together become canabalistic and kill each other.”
He is sure the same anti-social behaviour applies to humans deprived of their personal space and sense of privacy.
If densities are to increase, he argues, design becomes of greater importance, he argues. It is not just a question of visual privacy, but also acoustic privacy and building and landscape design good enough to give people a sense of being away from other family groups.
“”There is a real danger in our drive to increase densities to just look at block size and say how much can we jam on to that, rather than looking at the total question of amenity,” he said.
The Deputy Prime Minister and minister in charge of the Better Cities project, Brian Howe, has acknowledged the need for better design if densities are to increase. But local government and individuals are way behind.
Peck’s institute is in a bit of dilemma over this. The political climate is still a bit dry for them. Free-marketeer deregulators still stalk the Industry Commission and Trade Practices Commission. They argue that economic efficiency demands that the monopolistic closed-shop tendencies of the professions and trades must be opened up to competitive forces.
In that climate it is difficult to suggest that it should be compulsory to have professional design before any building goes up, whether it is a spec-built home, and extension, a major building or roadworks.
Once you talk about compulsory architecture, it leads to accusations of closed shops and breaches of freedom to do what you like on your own land. It is the sort of thing the Trade Practices Commission have been damning among real-estate agents, lawyers, surveyors etc.
But there is another side to the argument: the public interest in ensuring that professionals who put out their shingle with “”dentist”, “”lawyer”, “”architect” or whatever on it are properly trained and skilled in providing the services to the public.
Peck says: “”The whole point of our education system is to create a human resource for society that provides them with medical services, dental services, accounting services and design services. Architecture schools are there to enable a certain number of our fellows to competently design our environment.”
He goes further and says there is a general public interest in seeing things are designed properly, on several counts. Badly designed built environment costs more. The community ends up picking up the tab for energy-inefficient and unsafe buildings and for the social cost of badly designed living spaces that make people behave like rats.
MLA Helen Szuty agrees. She thinks that planners responsible for design and siting should knock back poorly designed projects, especially those done by builders and occupiers with no design skills.
Eventually everyone would get the message that professional design is required to get plans approved.
Szuty has just returned from looking at new developments in other capitals with the Assembly’s Planning, Infrastructure and Development Committee.
Peck would like to see people voluntarily recognise the value of professional design through education. However, he says his members and the design professions generally are frustrated at the lack of progress in Australia in the past two decades.
The trouble is that “”in Australia we are still very close to our pioneering origins. we were in a big country we could make our environments without a great deal of attention to design resolution.”
We are still often putting things on virgin territory so believe the building must be an improvement even if it is not well-designed. However, if a new hospital is replacing an old one or a house is on a renewal site you have to build a better hospital or a better house before you can assert you have improved the environment.
“”As cultures become more developed they become more aware of the environments they create and the impact those environments have on the quality of life,” Peck says.
But it is not happening quickly enough in Australia, especially as we are doing far more renewal now than 20 or 30 years ago.
The result is that architects are blamed for bad design, even though the bad design is more the result of not having architects at all, not calling them in early enough or short-term political and economic decision-making that skimps on design costs or skimps on overall costs.
And we are not talking solely about the big monumental buildings usually associated with architecture. Take a swimming pool being built by a council. The architect will advise tiles because draining will be needed only every 15 years. There is lower maintenance and down-time costs. But the council wants to meet a tight budget, so its uses cement and paint which has to be repainted every three years.
Inevitably the maintenance does not get done. The paint flakes after eight years and the architect is blamed.
Peck would like to see design incorporated into the grain of decision-making. Expert committees after the event do not work. The solution needs to evolve out of the process rather than judging the process afterwards, he says.
As to people putting up buildings (usually houses and extensions) with little or no design, he estimates a majority of his members would vote for compulsory architecture. Not because they want a closed shop, but because they have seen education is not working and that compulsion might be the only way to get a better built environment.
Moreover, compulsion would also be a form of education. By and large people who get something designed professionally will see their money well spent through resale value and better quality of life for the same money spent on materials and building labour.
Peck acknowledges compulsion has its drawbacks. In some countries where it is compulsory a few rotten-apple architects spend their professional life signing el-cheapo builders’ “”designs”. It’s just like the few rotten-apple doctors who exploit Medicare.
“”Architects should not sit back and not take part in structural decisions now being taken by bureaucrats and economists and people who are not design-orientated,” he says. “”We need more architect legislators and architect regulators. They bring a different perception. Without designers in the system, people on councils do not even ask the questions of amenity, orientation of energy conservation and how this relates to topography and the likely built form. . . .
“”The tragedy is that government is not responding. Architects are viewed in the same light as contractors. The decision will be made without any design input to build a building and then tenders will be called.”
By then, of course, it is too late. A whole lot of siting and other options have been closed off.
The new ACT Legislative Assembly building are the hospice are good examples. In each case a political decision was made to site them where they are going and then the architects were brought in. In each case the architects have done imaginative things with what they were presented, but how much better if they had been brought in earlier.
David Lamont, the chair of the Planning, Infrastructure and Development Committee, said that after looking at what was being done elsewhere, the ACT could do better.
He hoped that the committee would be able to put some of the good things it saw into practice when looking at the Kingston foreshore. It needed high public amenity and access, but to be sensitive to the Jerrabomberra wetlands.
He saw some intelligent use of land, such as three high schools sharing with the community sport, theatre and other facilities in South Australia. In North Adelaide the committee saw ways to protect the essential character of older areas.
He thought it might be better to give each developer bigger tracts of land to provide suburbs with a consistent theme and avoid bit-by-bit development
Szuty said that some of the things seemed small, like attention to brick colour and use of small roofs over windows to break up barracks-like lines. However, they added up to a better redevelopment.
Both wanted the ACT to take a longer view of development and to try to get consistency of the built form in some areas. Szuty acknowledged that might mean insisting on things like the red tiles and whitewash in Reid, but she hoped people would see the value in doing that voluntarily. She said another committee member had thought there might be difficulty with people from other countries who might want to bring some of their home countries built environment to their new homes.
Lamont thought Canberra had to do better with areas next to its lakes.
As Canberra moves to more renewal the challenge is to ensure we do not become like Michael Pecks anti-social rats but ensure intelligent design becomes ingrained in the creation of the built environment so we can get a better quality of life with a shrinking amount of available land.