Yungaba objection

This is a submission about the current proposal to alter the historic Yungabah building and grounds, and environs. It comments on aspects of heritage, and urban and architectural design. I write as a Brisbane citizen with an interest in these matters. I was a member of the Brisbane City Council’s Heritage Advisory Committee for its first twenty years, the Royal Australian Institute of Architects’ Planning and Environment Committee, the Green Paper Committee which advised on the Goss Government’s heritage legislation, and the Queensland Heritage Council’s Heritage Register Advisory Committee for some years from its inception. Subsequently I have been appointed an Assessor under the current Heritage Act, and have been active in teaching and consulting in heritage since the 1970s. I have some strong objections to the Yungabah proposal, summarized as follows: 1. An inappropriate change of use for a building which physically embodies a major strand of our State’s history, as a benign amalgam of many and varied immigrant and indigenous cultures. 2. The fabric of the building is compromised in ways that conflict with the exemplary Conservation Plan prepared by Jim Kerr some years ago, and used by me as a model for study by students of Heritage and Conservation at UQ. 3. The “new” buildings in the proposal are visually in conflict with the historic Yungabah buildings, and despite recent modifications to the proposal, still compromise their important relationship to the river and beyond. Their nominal obeisance to height limits imposed by supposedly significant sightlines from the Storey Bridge carriageway is nonsensical. 4. The unique townscapes created by the later construction of the Storey Bridge should be respected. This includes the contrast in scale between bridge and pedestrian / domestic elements; and the spatial dramas created by the bridge, its steel understructure and articulated pylons, the river’s meander and significant buildings on the opposite bank. Much of this urban drama is stifled by the proposed residential blocks crowding up to the carriage way height. 1. Symbolic Value The essence of Queensland’s modern history is the contribution of the waves of immigrants, reflecting the world’s cultures and political currents over a century or more; and Yungabah is a landmark in many of their stories. Its strategic riverside location, its axial composition grandly addressing the river, and the generosity and quality of the building design and detail, by our finest architect of the day, symbolize the values placed by our young colony on its immigration policies. 2. Architectural Fabric Yungabah was one of a very small handful of buildings by one of the greatest architects in our short history. The Kerr Conservation Plan draws attention to the need to preserve and present the physical evidence of its history as a significant element of Queensland’s heritage and for its architectural value. To divide up the building into dwelling units, inserting small rooms and mezzanines into some of the grand spaces and turn them into private spaces- no longer accessible to the public or indeed to inspection of their preservation - is on several accounts a denial of the solemn duty of heritage protection required under the Act. 3. New Buildings In my opinion the new buildings form an undistinguished cluster which helps to destroy the scale and urban charm of this little historic peninsula. While I recognize that their maximum height is apparently imposed by a Brisbane City Council ruling about sight lines from the Storey Bridge carriageway, I believe that these rules are, to say the least, misguided. I do not see what they are supposed to protect unless they contemplate a developer’s ambition to go even higher than the bridge, a policy that the Council considered and rejected long ago. The sight lines shown on the Australand drawings seem to contemplate drivers on the bridge needing to admire an uninspiring distant view of New Farm buildings; the view of the river is blocked. The Australand design consequently shows clumsy building elevations whose upper edges trace an enigmatic shallow sloping line towards the east, thus perpetuating this foolish regulation in solid form. Understandably there is no aesthetic acknowledgement of this strange line showing up in the rest of the buildings’ design. At the public presentation of the proposal to the community on a recent Saturday, I witnessed a conversation between an official spokesman for Australand and a couple of design professionals who had asked him if the new buildings were designed to be “sympathetic” to the historic building they flanked. He replied emphatically that that was certainly not the intention. I agree that they are anything but sympathetic, so the developers have succeeded in their aim. It seems that the developers seriously believe that to design a new building to be “sympathetic” to a heritage place is an infringement of good practice. This must be a confused misunderstanding of the Burra Charter principle that new work should be distinguishable from historic fabric in such cases. In many cases this principle means “distinguishable on close examination”, although in many good examples of new buildings placed in comfortable proximity to historic ones, the difference in age is unmistakable and both are excellent, the new not trying to ape the old. In my opinion these new buildings are aggressively unharmonious with Yungabah owing simply to an ignorant misreading of the principles of good design in heritage contexts. It is an indictment of the level of care or competence of those briefing and commissioning the proposal, as well as of the designers. 4. Significance of the Storey Bridge Environs The impact of the proposal on the iconic Storey Bridge structure and setting is also of the greatest importance. Apart from the hypothesized aesthetic pleasure of motorists driving across the bridge (referred to under 3), the height limit allowed by this line results also in the loss of the spectacular view of the bridge from below, against the sky (that part of the structure at the southern end below the carriageway that contributes so importantly to the local townscape). On a smaller scale it is reminiscent of the visual play between the Sydney Harbor Bridge and The Rocks, a hard-won urban landscape that was saved decades ago by community action, and whose correctness is now no longer in dispute.