John Wardle

hallowed ground of a family home just seems wrong to me so it is it is a golden rule and after the third failure I think it is one we'll stick to from now on it's a thorny subject and complex and there is certainly a place for competitions but I would say for our practice not for a family home do you despair for the average Australian who would like an architect to design them a home

Yes, it's a real disappointment and fascination about why architects are disconnecting with the set of values that produces suburban homes.

One thing is the mass process of building.

You just can't possibly get the sorts of things that we would bring to a project in for the same sort of price.

but it is a pity and partly because people want so much in a family home.

Cox and Carmichael, the only job I had, were about to do a celebration of their amazing work.

Incredible firm of architects.

Peter could design a family home all zoned spatially with no passageways.

Just amazing technology.

Amazing, yes, civic homes and merchant builders and so forth, landmark homes, a series of them.

They did beautiful homes.

But the frailty of that era and why so much is being lost is a kid's bedroom was 2.7 by 3.6.

There was no en suite.

Things were small and modest and there were shared bathrooms and things.

And it partly is the want of all of those other extraneous things that's made building so expensive.

And if you want that, I don't think it's hard to get the value that an architect will bring to a modestly, or to sort of tract housing or project homes.

And also there's some very fine, particularly young practices that do great work on a modest budget, but that's not, your question is really on that tract housing, the mass housing that architects have little impression in.

Well, I think you've got to bring meaning into a family home, particularly if you're bringing kids up into it.

You can see so many of these houses, everything is like these homeware shops that have these kind of beige and white objects that you'd go and sit one on a sideboard and another on the coffee table and that's adorning your home.

I just have a belief that you adorn it with things that represent a family