Magnifying the Terrace: David Saunders and the Cross Street Co-Operative Housing Development

ABSTRACT

This paper traces the influence that pioneering Australian architectural historian David Saunders (1928–1986) exerted over the development of the University of Melbourne’s Cross Street Co-operative Housing Development in Carlton designed by Earle, Shaw & Partners (1970–1971). Cross Street is one of a number of public–private medium-density housing developments that were constructed on large sites resumed by the Housing Commission of Victoria after World War II. While the Housing Commission was demolishing large areas of inner Melbourne for tabula rasa high-rise modernist development, Saunders argued for the retention, adaptation, and acculturation of urban form, exemplified in the house he and architect wife Doreen designed for themselves in Parkville (1962). Saunders took an active role in commissioning Cross Street and his influence meant that it became the first large-scale urban project in Australia that consciously articulated an understanding of its historic environment. The project demonstrates many of his key urban ideas such as the importance of the nineteenth-century terrace form and shared pedestrianised spaces. This paper argues that the project presaged the so-called rediscovery of the city in Australia, emerged amidst the rise of local architectural history as a discipline, heritage activism, and an institution positioning itself for expansion.

KEYWORDS:

• Housing
• medium-density housing
• public-private partnerships
• situated modernism
• postmodern architecture
• historic city
• heritage activism
• architectural historians
• non-collegiate student housing;
• co-operative staff housing

Introduction

Amidst the many social transformations that occurred in 1960s Australia, the form of Melbourne’s inner suburbs was profoundly remade. Nineteenth-century urban fabric was razed and replaced with modernist high-rise towers constructed by the Housing Commission of Victoria (hereafter referred to as the Housing Commission), yet increasing numbers of migrants from Southern Europe, professionals and bohemians were refurbishing inner-city terrace houses. Between these divergent approaches, a new architectural form was taking shape: one that combined modernist aspirations and amenity with a regard for historic urban forms. This paper charts the development of such a building, the University of Melbourne’s Cross Street Co-operative Housing in Carlton designed by Earle, Shaw & Partners (1969–1970). In stark contrast to the Housing Commission tower slabs that faced it on the opposite side of Lygon Street Carlton, Cross Street’s tan brick volumes were articulated with split-levels, its gabled and broken pitched roofs surrounded courtyards and planted terraces (Fig 1 and 2). It was “designed to be in sympathy with the feeling and character of old Carlton and to create an environment for people.”¹ It was the first large-scale urban project in Australia that consciously articulated an understanding of its historic environment;² and pioneering Australian architectural historian and academic David Saunders (1928–1986) took an active role in its commissioning. The case of Cross Street documents a rare moment when an Australian architectural historian significantly influenced the urban environment and illustrates a complex process of knowledge production and exchange which occurred during Saunders’s tenure at the University of Melbourne.

Figure 1. Cross Street Co-operative Housing, Earle Shaw and Partners, photograph ca. 1970. Photographer Peter Wille. Image courtesy of the State Library of Victoria. H91.244/1839 Stratum Development–Co-operative Housing. Cross Street. Carlton. Vic. Earle, Shaw & Ptnrs. 1970. Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria.

Figure 2. Cross Street Co-operative Housing. Photograph by Philip Goad, 2021.

This paper argues that the Cross Street Co-operative Housing development presaged the so-called rediscovery of the city, emerged amidst the rise of both local architectural history as a discipline and heritage activism, and the University of Melbourne’s plans for expansion. To illustrate this pivotal moment in Australian urbanism this paper historicises Cross Street. The paper first examines the urban and socio-political contexts in which Cross Street emerged, including the Housing Commission’s infamous but unrealised Perrott Plan for the demolition of much of Carlton. This introductory section contains a historiographical review of the extant literature of inner-city medium-density housing development in post-war Melbourne. The paper then charts the development of Saunders’s sophisticated and forward-thinking urbanism, in particular his belief in the importance of the role of the terrace house in the inner city. Next, Saunders’s role on the University of Melbourne’s Student Housing Board is documented. The paper concludes with an analysis of the design and reception of Cross Street itself. Archival records of the University of Melbourne’s Student Housing Board and Finance Committee form the empirical source material for the paper alongside: archived student studio design projects led by Saunders; interviews with Saunders’s daughters Merelyn Saunders, Gus Saunders, Helen Marton and Lyn-K Saunders, and Robert Fleming, one of the architects at Earle, Shaw & Partners who documented the Cross Street development; Saunders’s writings; and contemporaneous media representations of Cross Street. Ultimately, this paper contributes to understandings of the development of situated modernism and postmodern architecture in Australia, and to the fundamental shift from demolition to preservation of the inner city, early heritage activism in Australia, public-private partnership development of medium density housing; and perhaps most importantly for Fabrications and the Society of Architectural Historians of Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ), it is the first scholarly article investigating the important influence of SAHANZ foundation president David Saunders.

The 1960s in Inner Melbourne, the University of Melbourne and the Student Housing Crisis

The 1960s saw the demographics of Carlton and Parkville change rapidly. As Graeme Davison has written, increasing numbers of university staff and other professionals moved into the area between 1958 and 1975: indeed Saunders’s own house (1962) designed with his architect wife Doreen née Densham (1928–2004) in Parkville was part of this shift.³ Alongside rising student numbers, continued migration from Southern Europe to the inner suburbs of Melbourne, and the Housing Commission’s slum reclamation activities, the number of houses available to students was rapidly diminishing. Stephen Pascoe argues that “at the University of Melbourne, this period [from World War II until the mid-1970s] saw an intense amount of activity through various institutional channels to provide dedicated housing for students, giving birth to experimentation with novel models of provision.”⁴ Saunders who joined the University of Melbourne’s Student Housing Board in ca. 1963 was party to many of these experiments.

The Student Housing Board’s 1964 Report Noted That:

Because of our inability to find lodgings students are being forced to use agents in distant suburbs and to take lodgings that are unsuitable physically, geographically, socially, and in some cases morally.⁵

The report later warned that these students were, “particularly vulnerable to the temptations of the bottle, the pep pill, and in extreme cases the dope pedlar.”⁶ The Student Housing Board’s ultimate position was that:

The student housing situation is so grave that much of the money and effort now spent on teaching is lost because of the environment in which many students live. The proper housing of students must be seen not as in competition with the development of the whole University, but as a necessary part of it.⁷

Parallel to the University’s concern for student accommodation was the problem that the institution’s growth was constrained by its original 1853 Parkville site. By the 1950s the University and planning agencies believed it to be “poorly off with regard to space” and by the 1960s, “the cramped conditions on campus” were contrasted with the desired “dynamic outward growth of metropolitan Melbourne.”⁸ With expansion as its aim, in November 1964, the University entered into a relationship with the Housing Commission, an institution that had the statutory power to forcibly acquire inner-city land that contained slum housing.⁹

Slum Reclamation, the Housing Commission of Victoria, and Public–Private Partnership Medium-Density Housing Developments

Slum clearance, often described as urban renewal, was an essential part of the Housing Commission’s enterprise. Since its inception in 1938 eradicating large areas of what it deemed sub-standard housing in the inner city, in particular Carlton, had been one of its key goals.¹⁰ World War Two and the severe housing shortage in the immediate post-war period meant the Housing Commission’s attention was initially preoccupied with constructing single dwellings on the suburban fringes as it was the fastest and most affordable solution to the housing crisis.¹¹ However, by the mid-1950s there were increasing calls for the Housing Commission to commence slum reclamation. There was widespread belief that the demolition of housing considered slum-like was an imperative part of modernising the infrastructure of the city. A typical example of the media discourse on slum housing is contained in an editorial from The Age, then Melbourne’s leading centre-left newspaper on 18 August 1955:

the squalid, insanitary, crime-breeding slums are still there, [made] worse

than they were by 20 more years of decay.

Slum reclamation is as important as a new railway or an irrigation

dam.¹²

Public outcry escalated until the state government convened a slum reclamation conference in April 1957.¹³ The primary outcome of this conference was that the Housing Commission finally commenced large-scale resumption, demolition, and construction in inner Melbourne.¹⁴ The majority of the Housing Commission’s inner-city estates were medium- and high-density public housing which were intended to house workers close to industry and commerce and limit the growth of suburban sprawl. The histories of this social housing are well documented.¹⁵ The Housing Commission, however, lacked the funds to redevelop all the land that it had a government mandate to clear, and from 1958 to the mid-1970s it collaborated with private developers and institutions to develop affordable medium density housing across inner-city Melbourne. Cross Street Co-operative Housing Development is one of these public–private partnership developments. As with the Housing Commission’s high-rise towers, these public-private developments were a conspicuous incursion into Melbourne’s historic urban fabric. Amongst these developments were seminal projects such as Hotham Gardens, North Melbourne, 1959 (Architects: Grounds, Romberg and Boyd; Yuncken, Freeman Bros., Griffiths & Simpson; Bates, Smart & McCutcheon; Mockridge, Stahle & Mitchell; and John & Phyllis Murphy); Cardigan Street Housing for staff of the Royal Women’s Hospital, Carlton, ca. 1970 (Architects: Mockridge, Stahle & Mitchell); City Edge, South Melbourne, 1971–74 (Architects: Daryl Jackson & Evan Walker); and City Gardens, North Melbourne, 1976 (Architects: McIntyre Partnership). These public-private estates also included the De Murska Street medium-density housing, Prahran, 1959 (Architects: Office of Frank Heath), and the Lee Street apartment complex in Carlton ca. 1970 that were architecturally unadventurous yet still substantial and controversial interventions into nineteenth-century inner city fabric.¹⁶ All were built in inner-city Melbourne on slum clearance areas, with the state subsidising the construction of inner-city apartments for key-workers and middle-income earners. As a group they make a significant contribution to the city, and the high-quality architectural designs had architectural and urban framings entirely different to both the Housing Commission’s public housing and privately developed apartments of the time.

Surprisingly, given the significant scale and urban vision of these projects, they have received little academic investigation. While there are occasional mentions of these public-private projects in architectural texts,¹⁷ all do so in passing without reference to the procurement model, and without divulging the history of their large consolidated inner urban sites. Notably, when these projects are mentioned the commentary is always positive. Prior to its lapse into obscurity, Cross Street Co-operative Housing received positive attention from the professional and popular press. The development was initially feted in The Age, Architect, Cross-Section and Living and Partly Living; a more detailed discussion of Cross Street’s reception closes this paper.¹⁸ The first detailed scholarly investigation of the public–private partnerships undertaken by the Housing Commission is Townsend and Walker’s chapter “Public-private partnerships and medium-density housing in North Melbourne: from Hotham Gardens, 1959 to Northside Communities, 2021” in Housing and the City, Borsi, Ekici, Hale and Haynes, editors, 2022.¹⁹

There are excellent studies in the wider fields of histories of apartments, public housing, and student housing in Australia, even though the historiography of Australian architecture is dominated by the privately-owned detached house. One of the few texts to focus on the history of apartments in Australia is Caroline Butler-Bowdon and Charles Pickett’s comprehensive architectural and part-social investigation Homes in the Sky: apartment living in Australia, 2007.²⁰ The history of public housing in Victoria is documented in detail in Renate Howe’s edited collection New Houses for Old. Fifty years of Public Housing in Victoria 1938–1988, 1988 and Peter Mills’s 2010 PhD thesis, “Refabricating the Towers: The Genesis of the Victorian Housing Commission’s high-rise estates to 1969”. The larger Australian context is well covered by David Hayward, “The reluctant landlords? A History of public housing in Australia,” 1996.²¹ Stephen Pascoe’s Master’s thesis, “The social and spatial construction of student housing: the University of Melbourne in an age of expansion,” details well the history of student housing at and around the University of Melbourne in the post-war period.²² However, the primary interest of these public and student housing texts understandably is housing and social policy, rather than architectural form. There is considerable emerging sociological scholarship, alongside concurrent development, of state-led new public–private partnership medium density housing.²³ The current Victorian State Government’s Public Housing Renewal Program is resuming public housing and redeveloping it through public–private partnerships in strikingly similar ways to the post-war public–private partnership medium-density housing developments. Yet despite the contemporary importance of the typology and procurement model, architectural and historical analyses of medium-density public-private partnership developments is lacking. This article’s investigation of the Cross Street Co-operative Housing development extends the discussion of the impact of these public-private projects on inner-urban Melbourne, with particular regard to architectural form, the rediscovery of the historic city, heritage activism, the influence of David Saunders, and the Perrott plan for the urban renewal of Carlton.

The Perrott Plan for Carlton and the University of Melbourne

The demolition and modernisation of much of Carlton became one of the Housing Commission’s central inner-city urban renewal projects. The local architectural firm of Leslie M. Perrott & Partners was tasked with preparing a plan for 360 acres of Carlton. Its objectives were typical of modernist urban renewal of the time:

The objective in comprehensively redeveloping this area of Carlton is to create an environment in keeping with the technological and social advances of the 20th century.²⁴

One of the perceived key benefits of urban reclamation on large sites was that it would enable “intelligent replanning of streets and services.” ²⁵ The Perrott plan rationalised the existing intricate nineteenth-century street pattern of Carlton into large superblocks serviced by the existing main roads.²⁶ The Housing Commission and the Perrott & Partners’ office liaised with several government departments and the “two largest public institutions in Carlton, the Women’s Hospital and the University of Melbourne” when preparing their comprehensive plan for Carlton.²⁷ The University of Melbourne eagerly took part in these discussions, seeing them as an opportunity to finally expand their campus beyond its 1853 boundaries. Members of the University’s Student Housing Board were included in these talks and Stephen Pascoe has written that these representatives were:

sensitive to the growing appreciation for Carlton’s historic housing and social diversity, [and] remarked to Perrott and the Commission officers that Carlton had a distinctive “atmosphere” or “character” that was largely the product of its “ethnic composition” – a reference to the Italian, Greek and other Mediterranean communities who had put down roots in the area. They expressed concern that these “now admired qualities of the area may be lost in redevelopment.”²⁸

These comments at first seem at odds with a large institution intent on increasing its landholdings at the height of modernist planning ideology. Yet they came from Student Housing Board Member David Saunders, who had already developed a sophisticated approach to heritage that argued for the retention, adaptation, and acculturation of urban form.

David Saunders, the Development of His Urban Thinking

David Arthur Lewis Saunders was a pioneer in the development of Australian architectural history, and Cross Street stands as the largest physical testament to his important influence on the Australian urban environment (Fig. 3). A full reckoning of his career is beyond the scope of this paper. Rather, it provides an overview of his career with particular attention to the development of his thinking on heritage and urbanism while in Melbourne and demonstrates his influence on Cross Street.

Figure 3. David Saunders. Image courtesy of the Saunders Family.

Saunders studied architecture at the Melbourne Technical College (Dip. Arch., 1952) and the University of Melbourne (B. Arch., 1951; DTRP, 1954; M. Arch., 1959).²⁹ As an undergraduate student at the University of Melbourne he undertook a study of the nineteenth-century Melbourne architect Joseph Reed (1852–1890) in 1950.³⁰ After working for Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, and in London between 1952 and 53, Saunders worked in 1955 as an assistant-curator at the National Gallery of Victoria.³¹ He joined the teaching staff at the University of Melbourne in 1956 and became one of the first academics to specialise in Australian architectural history.³² He was an early and active member of both the National Trust and the Parkville Association: listing and classifying historic buildings and editing the Trust’s Historic Buildings of Victoria, 1966.³³ At the end of 1967, after Cross Street’s plans were nearing completion, Saunders resigned from the University of Melbourne to take up a position as Senior Lecturer at the Power Institute of Fine Arts at the University in Sydney alongside its recently appointed founding Professor of Contemporary Art, Bernard Smith. In 1977 he was appointed Professor of Architecture at the University of Adelaide, where he taught until his early death in 1986. A stalwart of architectural history, heritage, and conservation, Saunders remained active in the National Trust of Australia, as president of Australia ICOMOS from 1978, as a key author and promoter of the Burra Charter (1981), and as founding president (1985–6) of SAHANZ, the scholarly society which, with others, he established in 1984.

Saunders’s allegiance was to what he considered to be well-designed and thoughtfully considered urban form, rather than any specific movement be it historic conservation or architectural modernism. Throughout his career Saunders took a systematic approach, quantifying and mapping typologies, analysing and describing them from historic, economic, technological, and design viewpoints, prioritising street-architecture or urban design qualities of urban form and the way people experienced the city. His first involvement with a publication was The National Trusts of Australia: Preserving our National Heritage, 1958 on the conservation of historic buildings. Yet his next published work in June 1959, “Office Blocks in Melbourne”, was an enthusiastic investigation of contemporary modern architecture: a systematic mapping and analysis of every high-rise office building constructed in Melbourne’s Central Business district between 1955 and 1958 alongside a brief history of the typology in Melbourne. Saunders sustained an interest in both historic and high quality modern architectural urban fabric for his entire career.

Alongside émigré photographer Mark Strizic (1928–2012), Saunders curated a photographic exhibition for the newly formed National Trust in the Childers Gallery at the National Gallery of Victoria, Russell Street, Melbourne, 4–15 August 1958.³⁴ Strizic’s photographs, along with a small number by Athol Shmith (1914–1990), were the centrepiece of the exhibition “Melbourne’s Twelve Best Historic Buildings.” In Values in Cities: Urban Heritage in Twentieth-Century Australia, 2022, James Lesh notes that this exhibition succeeded “in presenting conservation not as static and unchanging, but rather as vibrant and forward-looking, operating in an exciting modern urban context.”³⁵

In conjunction with his modern outlook, another of Saunders’s urban preoccupations that was later expressed in Cross Street was his abiding interest in inner-city terrace housing which emerged in his M. Arch. thesis in 1959.³⁶ In this, he painstakingly catalogued and mapped almost every group of terraces constructed in inner-city Melbourne. In November 1959, he opined that “Eventually people will start moving back into the city. And then Melbourne will get its first real taste of high density, multi-story [sic] flat living.”³⁷

Saunders was reported as saying this just as it was announced that he was one of six recipients of a 1960 Nuffield Dominion Travelling Fellowship. Saunders’s topic of study was high-density housing in England. His plan was for his family to live in one of the large-scale blocks of flats recently constructed in London by the London County Council. However, they were instead housed rent-free by the Nuffield Foundation in a one-bedroom flat in a group of terrace buildings opposite Regent’s Park, arguably “in what will prove even more densely populated surroundings.”³⁸ The travel Saunders undertook on this fellowship in Britain included time in Edinburgh with Percy Johnson-Marshall who was then Senior Lecturer in the University of Edinburgh’s Department of Architecture.³⁹ Johnson-Marshall and Saunders shared an interest in the regeneration of inner-urban areas, yet each conceived of differing solutions. Johnson-Marshall was a leading figure in the Society for the Promotion of Urban Renewal, a group that campaigned for urban reconstruction, which at the time meant widespread demolition of inner-urban areas and tabula rasa development.⁴⁰ Johnson-Marshall had spent a decade in charge of Comprehensive Development Areas at the London County Council. Yet by this time Saunders’s urban thinking was moving beyond this rigidly modernist perspective.

Saunders’s first book Melbourne: A Portrait, another collaboration with Strizic, was published in 1960 and demonstrated his urban concerns: the importance of the historic city, civic spaces, and an appreciation of high-quality modern design. The book contained around 70 exquisitely composed black and white photographs of Melbourne by Strizic, juxtaposed against minimal but lyrical blocks of text by Saunders, and with a cover designed by artist Leonard French. The book was a Melbourne version of Mark’s father Professor Zdenko Strizic’s similarly beautiful visual ode to Zagreb – Svijetla i sjene. Jedna monografija Zagreba (Light and Shadows: A Monograph on Zagreb) that appeared in 1955 with photographs taken by the elder Strizic and texts written by him in Serbo-Croatian, French, English, and German. Melbourne: A Portrait was similarly multi-lingual with text in English, German, and Italian and was the first published hint of the internationally attuned nature of Saunders’s scholarship, though the translation of his text was not undertaken by him.⁴¹ Both books were visual appeals to the public for renewed appreciation of the historic city—not just in terms of individual buildings but also the shared spaces and places of the city—steps, laneways and the artless grace of the vernacular, and the sheer beauty of sun and shadow in highlighting the human-scaled places of the city. For Saunders, deeply immersed in the activities of the newly established National Trust, and Mark Strizic, a contemporary art and architectural photographer committed to documenting Melbourne’s historic buildings, their book also highlighted new modern buildings—the aim was to engender a love for historic buildings plus acknowledge the city’s acquisition of high-quality progressive design that through light and shadow might evoke similar emotional reactions.

Returning to Australia at the time of the public release of Melbourne: A Portrait Saunders now made a different form of commitment to Melbourne’s terrace housing. David and Doreen Saunders designed a new house for their young family next to a row of existing two-storey terrace houses (Fig. 4). Its first public review in May 1962 was from none other than British academic and New Brutalism advocate Dr Reyner Banham, who promptly declared “But this is not an Australian house.”⁴² Banham had been visiting Australia at the time and made the public observation that the terrace house as a typology was worth exploring for its architectural and climatic potential.⁴³ The Saunders house was first featured in February 1963 in Cross-Section, then edited by fellow academic colleague Neville Quarry, along with external and internal photographs by Mark Strizic. Quarry noted that it:

Respects its neighbouring terrace houses by not pretending to look like them, but captures nevertheless some of their essential urbanity and dignity…A powerful silhouette and firm, emphatic interiors, a fine example of architecture unadorned.⁴⁴

Figure 4. Saunders House, Gatehouse St Parkville, ca. 1963. Image courtesy of the Saunders family.

Inverting the normal planning of the nineteenth-century terrace house, entry was not from the front but from the centre of the house off Morrah Street where stairs and bathroom formed a service core. Materials were frankly expressed: reconditioned slate roofs, dark grey concrete bricks (possibly a contemporary reference to bluestone), stained timber stairs, internal walls lined throughout with old hand-made “Hawthorn” bricks, and an off-form concrete slab ceiling. In the children’s bedrooms, exposed off-sawn timber trusses were stained black, and there were no ceiling linings other than the exposed aluminium foil insulation. Outside, the Saunderses deployed a cast-iron palisade fence and more handmade Hawthorn bricks for the high garden walls to Morrah Street, the back lane and to Gatehouse Street: all materials salvaged from demolition sites and wreckers’ yards around Melbourne.⁴⁵ Overall, what the Saunderses designed was a contemporary version of the nineteenth-century terrace house but wholly adapted through planning to modern indoor-outdoor living conditions and with contextual and textural reference in material and form to the historic city. They understood how to complement an existing urban morphology with new architecture. Similarities to contemporary English domestic architecture were obvious but in Melbourne such a house was rare. Importantly, Saunders used the house as a pedagogical tool and it was frequently visited by his colleagues and students for drinks and discussion. Socialising in the Saunderses’ house amongst the heady mix of new Brutalism, historic fragments and contextual understanding would be for many Melbourne architects their first encounter with a new vision for inner-urban architecture, arguably a form that Sarah Williams Goldhagen would consider “situated modernism” or proto-postmodernism.⁴⁶ Shortly after the construction of the Parkville house Saunders joined the University of Melbourne’s Student Accommodation Committee, later known as the Student Housing Board on which he would exert a profound influence.

Development Plans for Carlton and Student Housing

The entwined narrative of Cross Street, David Saunders, and the development of his approach to historic conservation begins with a letter by Saunders to architect Grahame Shaw (1928–1983) on 13^th November 1959. Shaw would later become one of the architects designing Cross Street—and also gain notoriety as one of the authors of the Shaw-Davey Report of 1960 that recommended the demolition of 1000 acres of inner suburban housing in Melbourne—but in 1959 he was a young architect working for the Housing Commission of Victoria.⁴⁷ In his letter Saunders made the case for the preservation of sound houses of architectural quality in inner-city Melbourne. Saunders wrote that he was delighted that Shaw had corresponded with him to inform him that the Housing Commission was willing, “where cases could be proved worthy, to consider retaining old buildings for historical and architectural reasons.”⁴⁸ Saunders indicated that he believed preservation was warranted for buildings of architectural interest that had a life expectancy of 40 years after simple renovation, and he attached to the letter a hand-drawn plan of an area of Carlton, which the Housing Commission was soon to demolish and replace with public housing (Fig. 5). Saunders wrote:

I do not presume to criticise the decision to use the area for high-density housing, but the report is offered as evidence that if that decision had not been made, the portion examined could be rejuvenated successfully. To have a rejuvenated area next to, or amongst, new development might enhance the Commission’s reputation for sincerity, in that it would indicate to the public that slum demolition is its primary aim and that demolition is only part of the technique.⁴⁹

Figure 5. Feasibility sketch of Neill Street block redevelopment, David Saunders, November 1959. 1973.0001 Box 1, David Saunders Collection, University of Melbourne Archives, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria. Image courtesy of the Saunders Family and the University of Melbourne Archives.

This letter and plan clearly set out Saunders’s thinking on preservation and the needs of the city in 1959. He was a pragmatist, keenly aware of the requirement for increased public housing in Melbourne and the advantages of density, yet advocating a way that this could be provided so as to displace fewer residents from their communities, and left more of the city’s important nineteenth-century terrace heritage intact. He was arguing neither for total preservation nor demolition, but rather for both the development of tower-blocks alongside important constituents of the city’s architectural heritage interspersed with infill housing sympathetic to the local character. Saunders’s interest was not limited to the preservation of individual buildings but rather “group[s] of buildings and their immediate surroundings.”⁵⁰ Saunders was the first architect in Melbourne to advocate for this type of “group” or streetscape urban rehabilitation. Clearly his interest in Melbourne’s historic architecture and involvement with the National Trust predisposed him to consider such strategies. However, his move from simply valuing individual buildings of merit to urban groups is a significant shift in appreciation of heritage.⁵¹ Saunders would also have been aware of resident-led resistance to the demolition of slum areas, and proposals for rehabilitation that made their way onto the pages of Melbourne’s daily newspapers The Age, The Herald and The Argus throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The majority of the wider architectural profession in Australia, as elsewhere, dismissed such proposals and was preoccupied with urban renewal, the demolition of inner areas and consolidated modernist development of large sites. Indeed, Saunders’s intervention did not save this area from demolition. Throughout the 1960s—opposite the Cross Street site—the Carlton Estate was constructed by the Housing Commission as a mixture of tower blocks and mid-rise walk-up flats. The site was treated as a tabula rasa where all traces of the housing and streets that once stood there were obliterated. The only sections of the site left untouched were Joseph Reed’s Norman Romanesque Wesleyan Methodist Church of 1869–1870 and a Victorian-era hotel on the corner of Drummond and Princes Streets.

Around ca. 1963, Saunders joined the University’s Student Accommodation Committee that had been established to resolve the student housing shortages discussed earlier in this paper.⁵² Saunders’s first activities on the Student Accommodation Committee essentially saw him as the Parkville Association and the National Trust’s infiltrator, and he ceaselessly advocated for the purchase and retention of historic terrace housing in Parkville, and sometimes Carlton, for student accommodation. Numerous houses in these areas were saved from demolition by Saunders’s and the Student Housing Board’s advocacy.⁵³

As a member of the Student Housing Board, Saunders was also privy to the discussions between the Housing Commission, Perrott & Partners and the University regarding the Perrott Plan for Carlton and the University’s expansion. Saunders’s response to the threatened demolition of much of Carlton was characteristically systematic. He prepared a report for Perrott & Partners as an entrée to discussion on how to combine redevelopment and preservation in inner Melbourne.⁵⁴ His report included mapping “buildings of worthwhile character” that merited conservation, outlined large areas “proposed for a sympathetic development zone,” photographed groups of buildings and streetscapes that contributed to the character of Carlton, and a written analysis of the historic conditions and social affection for Carlton.⁵⁵ Saunders was clear that Perrott’s redevelopment plan’s “aim must be to create a new atmosphere with some of the qualities of the old, not to freeze an area into a museum condition.”⁵⁶ Moreover, he shared the modernist belief in the benefits of consolidated sites and decried Carlton’s “excessive number of streets, so traffic filled.”⁵⁷ He even wrote that “none of Carlton’s buildings has great individual merit.”⁵⁸ Yet his report furthered his notion of the importance of groupings of historic buildings outlined in his earlier letter to Shaw of 1959 and staked a claim for the importance of the general character of Carlton writing:

The character of the district is a strong one. A character created by the repetition of plastered and painted houses, most of them verandah’d and iron-decorated, in streets which are unexpectedly broad and surprisingly tree-lined.⁵⁹

Saunders appealed to the expertise of British historian Asa Briggs, a leading specialist on the Victorian era who had likened Carlton to Bloomsbury in Victorian Cities, 1963,⁶⁰ and stressed the importance of the squares of Carlton as landscapes with now mature and magnificent trees.⁶¹

Saunders’s report also contained an important development in his appreciation of heritage which foreshadowed the Burra Charter’s notion of social significance within conservation. He promoted social character and people’s affection for Carlton as of heritage significance and further evidence of the need for conservation noting:

Carlton has strong association, not all pleasant but usually very vivid for those who have lived in it. It seems always to have been a place of active life, attractive to writers and painters and acceptable to immigrants from even livelier cities…There is a large force of Australians now widely scattered who look on Carlton with nostalgic affection.⁶²

Ultimately he argued that:

The product of these thoughts is to argue that there are strong grounds—partly general architectural character, partly social and cultural—for retaining the Carlton character as far as possible. To lose it would be to sever a way of life and end an environment whose growth has been long and interesting and whose character is attractive and productive and is suited to improvement rather than replacement.⁶³

Saunders concluded his report by reiterating his notion of sympathetic development and the importance of retaining old buildings and encouraging new ones that would complement the existing character.⁶⁴ Surprisingly, Perrott was receptive to Saunders’s advocacy. Perrott wrote in his monthly report on the Carlton re-development project that:

The study is a valuable pictorial record capturing the visual character and atmosphere of the better parts of Carlton and suggesting how this character and scale can be preserved.⁶⁵

Saunders’s heritage activism had a direct impact: contrary to the Housing Commission’s earlier (and later) urban renewal projects, Perrott’s schemes (albeit unrealised) for the renewal of Carlton hereafter included sympathetic development zones.⁶⁶

Saunders’s next intervention in the redevelopment of Carlton was the development of plans and guidelines to illustrate to Perrott, the Housing Commission, and the University what constituted sympathetic modern development. The typology these plans investigated was the University’s architectural solution to the student housing shortage. It was developed by Saunders with John Bayly, in their architectural and town-planning teaching studios. Bayly was one of the first full-time lecturers in town planning in the Architecture Faculty at the University and a fellow Student Housing Board member. It was common at this time for lecturers to engage students to further investigate their research questions and Saunders and Bayly led design studios of third and fifth-year Bachelor of Architecture, and Diploma of Town and Regional Planning students examining options for student housing across sites adjacent to the north-eastern corner of the University. At a time when architectural form and heritage were largely determined by British thought, Saunders’s thinking on student housing was, in part, internationally informed. Two articles now located in his Student Housing Board file at Melbourne University Archives guided his thinking. The first was “Wie wohnt die junge Generation? – Wie baut die junge Generation?” (How does the young generation live? How does the young generation build?) Bauwelt, 51/52 (21 December 1959), which included Hermann Fehling, Daniel Gogel, and Peter Pfankuch’s Studentendorf Schlachtensee at Freie Universität Berlin, Steglitz-Zehlendorf, 1957–1959, and several other post-war German student accommodation schemes.⁶⁷ The Studentendorf Schlachtensee consisted of groups of one- to three-storey apartment blocks in residential groups, each consisting of accommodation for 30 students arranged around a village square with a community centre, auditorium, and cafeteria, the large site being mostly pedestrianised. The second article that influenced Saunders was from the “Residential Spaces: Hostels and Halls of Residence” issue of The Architects’ Journal Information Library (7 April 1965), titled “Hostel Planning. The social unit as a basis of planning” by Phyllis Allen, which examined “the desirable size for students’ living accommodation and its breakdown into social units.”⁶⁸ While all the students’ studio work razed the entire site, many schemes included pedestrianised areas and low-rise row housing in clusters that were mindful of the compositional rhythms of the surrounding terraces. Their schemes illustrate an amalgam of the urban thinking of the aforementioned articles, alongside Saunders’s continuing interest in terrace and row-housing.

In September 1965 Saunders prepared his own plans for Perrott, the Housing Commission, and the University. His student housing scheme covered a site adjacent to the University bounded by Swanston, Elgin, and Lygon Streets and Cemetery Road East, and provided accommodation for 2,205 students. This included three 20-storey towers and five-storey dormitory blocks, but the majority of students would live in “studerraces,” three- and one-storey houses with private gardens. Notably the scheme retains only a small portion of the area’s historic housing, and new row housing, with a compositional scale similar to the existing terraces dominates the ground plane of the site. Figures 6 and 7 illustrate the scheme, cross-hatching indicates historic buildings to be retained, parallel hatching demonstrates row housing, and unfilled forms represent slab and tower block high-rise apartments.

Figure 6. Carlton Redevelopment: University Residential Feasibility Study September 1965. Plan, David Saunders. 1973.0001 Box 1, David Saunders Collection, University of Melbourne Archives, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria. Image courtesy of the Saunders Family and the University of Melbourne Archives.

Figure 7. “A ‘Student House’ for 18” David Saunders. 1973.0001 Box 1, David Saunders Collection, University of Melbourne Archives, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria. Image courtesy of the Saunders Family and the University of Melbourne Archives.

In this scheme masses of Lilliputian row-housing crowd the heels of the high-rise buildings which tower, Gulliver-like, over the other housing typologies. Astonishingly, given his earlier scholarship on Joseph Reed, Saunders proposed to demolish Reed’s Gothic-polychrome St. Jude’s Anglican Church, 1866–1874 in Lygon Street. As such, this highlights the importance that Saunders attached to intact historic nineteenth-century terraces as he retained a few groups of noteworthy terraces facing both Swanston and Cardigan Streets. Presumably Saunders’s proposed demolition was largely a utilitarian one that acknowledged the possibilities that this portion of the site offered for a point high-rise tower given the expanse of land and road surrounding the church. In clear divergence from Saunders’s earlier scheme for the Housing Commission’s Carlton Estate in which he retained the historic urban streetscape, the urban morphology of the new student housing area is entirely reimagined. Saunders turned the focus of the site inwards, leaving the major street frontages of Swanston and Lygon Streets dominated by at-grade car-parking and the rear fences of row-housing. The heart of the student precinct was Cardigan Street, now a pedestrianised plaza surrounded by clusters of low-rise housing which clearly echoed Fehling, Gogel, and Pfankuch’s Studentendorf Schlachtensee. This pragmatic mix of modern amenity and pedestrianised spaces amidst remnants of nineteenth-century heritage clearly set the arena in which the Cross-Street brief was developed and illustrates Saunders’s vision of the importance of public shared spaces, and the adaptation and acculturation of urban form rather than the unmediated preservation of historic areas.

The Cross Street Co-Operative Housing Development

Cross Street was one of many projects—locally and internationally—at this time that were moving past existing highly structured models of residential colleges and halls of residence to cope with the post-1945 boom in student numbers and changing expectations of university life.⁶⁹ In Great Britain, Europe, and North America, progressively designed student residences were increasingly being defined by a focus on creating opportunities for informal interaction and the creation of small social units within larger complexes. Several of these projects such as John Andrews’s South Residences at the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada (1965–8), and Denys Lasdun’s student residences at the University of East Anglia (1962–6) gained considerable publicity within the architecture world.⁷⁰ Andrews would extend these ideas in Australia with Toad Hall at the Australian National University in Canberra (1970) where student rooms in groups of six were planned around shared common facilities and arranged along a meandering internal “street” and his student housing at the Canberra College of Advanced Education (later University of Canberra) (1973), where the complex was designed as a “hill-town” of self-catering shared student apartments.⁷¹ What made Cross Street different as student housing in the Australian setting from these celebrated examples—all located on greenfield sites—was its projected insertion into the nineteenth-century inner-city fabric of an Australian city.

1966 and 1967 saw the Student Housing Board’s proposals for student housing development refashioned by external temporal factors. The Housing Commission provided the area that would become the Cross Street site bounded by Lygon, Cardigan, Elgin, and Lytton Streets to the University for student housing. The contemporary State Bolte and Commonwealth Menzies-led governments created multiple mechanisms for providing affordable housing to middle-income earners and to this end the University was approached by both the National and Commonwealth Savings Banks offering generous loans for university staff to purchase co-operative housing developed by the University. Thus, staff housing came to be included on the Cross Street site as a way to partially subsidise the construction of student housing. Eventually little student housing was included in the final built development at Cross Street as the Australian Universities Commission (AUC), upon which the Student Housing Board was relying to fund the project, determined in 1967 it would not fund the construction of non-collegiate housing. Cross Street proceeded as state-subsidised housing for staff at the University. Even so, the urban conception of the student housing brief was directly carried through in the project’s realisation as co-operative staff housing.

Saunders was central to the development of the brief for Cross Street, and the minutes and correspondence of the Student Housing Board place him at the majority of key University meetings.⁷² Furthermore, he attended the discussions that took place between the University and its appointed architects Earle, Shaw & Partners and many of his urban considerations were displayed in the development.⁷³ Cross Street was designed to be constructed in several stages culminating in a tower (unrealised due to the AUC funding shortfall) with nine stories of student housing (Fig. 7). Just as in the Studentendorf Schlachtensee “emphasis has been heavily placed on the group concept” with students arranged in small groups around nuclei common areas (Fig. 8).⁷⁴

Figure 8. Cross Street Co-operative Housing Perspective. Earle, Shaw & Partners ca. 1967. 1973.0001 Box 1, David Saunders Collection, University of Melbourne Archives, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria. Image courtesy of the Shaw Family and the University of Melbourne Archives.

Earle, Shaw & Partners envisaged the site as six rows of highly articulated housing each facing inwards to a street-like plaza and separated into three discrete buildings by generous areas of garden all atop a basement car parking level at the street level of Lygon Street. Ultimately, only the central block was constructed. It consisted of a mixture of 68 bachelor, studio, one, two and three bedroom apartments housed in buildings ranging from two- to five storeys high joined by a seven-storey block with a lift. The architects’ statement on the development is particularly revealing:

The width of the structural bays, the pitched roofs and the undulating building profiles will establish a relationship with the older terrace houses in the area and eliminate any feeling of an institution which can result from a series of slab-type buildings.⁷⁵

Writing of the plans for the development in 1968 in The Age, Ray Davie noted the marked contrast between Cross Street and the Housing Commission’s adjacent Carlton Estate and that:

Even the colours will help blend this new area with older parts of Carlton. The predominant warm brown brick tones will be there, and the tiles will match their slate counterparts. Many of the buildings will look very like traditional Carlton terrace houses updated.⁷⁶

Clearly the architects’ intention was to update the form Saunders thought was most suited to inner-city housing: the terrace. The development reads as unmistakably contemporary architecture. At the same time, this was, for Australia, an early instance of architects reinterpreting historic forms on a large, urban scale. At Cross Street the terrace was magnified, abstracted, and rotated to follow the sun and its entire morphology and traditional urban setting destabilised, much as the Saunderses had done in their Parkville house. As built, the internal street (running east-west) echoes Saunders’s earlier scheme for pedestrianising Cardigan Street, and the development similarly turns its back on the major street frontages. On the north side of the pedestrian street, elevated above the car-parking half-basement, were double-storey terrace houses (“studio flats”) with steep skillion roofs and private north-facing balconies. On the other side, four- and five-storey gable-roofed flat blocks with north-facing balconies flanked a taller block in the centre of the development where an open plaza, stairs, and gently arched openings to an undercroft lift core and bicycle-storage area imparted a feeling that was and still is distinctly urban, gently scaled and people-friendly (Fig. 9). Oriel bay windows to the bedrooms on the south faces of these medium and high rise blocks give further visual variety and texture. The design for Cross Street is clearly the work of Earle, Shaw & Partners. Yet the inclusion of so many of Saunders’s preoccupations: compositional rhythm and balance; human scale; inversion, adaptation and acculturation of historic forms of the terrace; and the importance of public shared spaces all point to the influence of an especially engaged and knowledgeable commissioning client.

Figure 9. Cross Street Co-operative Housing. Photograph by Philip Goad, 2021.

The Reception of the Cross Street Co-Operative Housing Development

Cross Street was initially met with considerable professional and public acclaim amid a sea-change in the appreciation of architecture and the city. Ahead of the development’s construction Ray Davie wrote “Carlton Planning for a Bright Future” in The Age, 21 September 1968, in which he commented that “Broken roof profiles and varying slopes will help to avoid a monotony in views” and “Pleasant strolling, Continental style, will be possible in the traffic-free spaces of a pedestrian mall” concluding that “this is how many sections of older Melbourne could be made delightfully liveable.”⁷⁷ Cross-Section also noted the forthcoming building in its January 1969 issue.⁷⁸ Architect in September–October 1970 commented on the newly finished buildings that “it is obvious from the first glance that something unique in inner suburban high density housing is being achieved.”⁷⁹ In a thinly veiled critique of the Housing Commission towers facing the development, Architect commented that “the design attempts to re-create the type of community life once enjoyed in Carlton, but significantly absent from most redevelopment projects today.”⁸⁰ Robin Boyd wrote favourably of the complex in his chapter in Living and Partly Living (1971). Even so, his text leaves no doubt that Boyd believed Ian McKay’s suburban development at Swinger Hill, ACT, was in 1971 the more prescient and appropriate approach for Australian housing.⁸¹ Praise for Cross Street culminated in the receipt of a Special Commendation in 1971 at the RAIA Victorian Chapter Architectural Awards, one of the suite of buildings to receive awards, including Graeme Gunn’s 1969–1971 Plumbers & Gasfitters Employees Union Building, that marked the “cyclical changing of the guard with respect to notions of sanctioned architectural style” as the profession’s appreciation moved from the “moderate Modernism of the 1960s to the off-form concrete Brutalism of the 1970s.”⁸² For a project of such size and accolades, Cross Street is unusual in that so little has been written about the project since its construction. Yet the destruction which this larger, more expansive, urban typology required in Melbourne meant it soon faded from the profession and the public’s imagination as heritage appreciation burgeoned in the 1970s and Melbourne’s development became ever more suburban.

After Saunders took up his post at the University in Sydney in 1967, the public’s aesthetic taste began to shift and the recognition of the value of Melbourne’s nineteenth-century heritage grew apace. In 1968 the Carlton Association, which sought to preserve “the local environment” and strengthen its society, was formed.⁸³ Saunders’s successors at the University of Melbourne, architectural historians George Tibbits⁸⁴ and Miles Lewis, took active roles in the association. Tibbits and Lewis were less interested in the reinterpretation of historic forms and New Brutalism and instead were particularly involved in the Carlton Association’s community activism that, in tandem with longer-standing inner-city residents, effectively halted the Housing Commission’s demolition of inner Melbourne. For the community activists of the 1970s, developments such as Cross Street represented the destruction of community and irreplaceable nineteenth-century heritage, rather than the sophisticated reinterpretation of the historic city that provided increased numbers of people with affordable housing in a central location close to jobs and services. As the Housing Commission stepped away from its slum clearance role in the late 1970s, large-scale housing developments on consolidated sites such as Cross Street became impractical, entirely unaffordable, and of little relevance to a profession concentrating on infill or suburban housing.

Conclusion

David Saunders was well aware of the activist possibilities of his architectural research and noted in the introduction to his M. Arch thesis that, “This subject relates directly to contemporary activities which may be assisted by such knowledge from the past.”⁸⁵ Indeed Lesh has described Saunders’s career (in tandem with that of John Maxwell Freeland (1920–1983)) as being a particularly “productive period of cross-fertilisation between architectural history and heritage conservation.”⁸⁶ Seen from the vantage point of the twenty-first century it would be easy to recast Saunders’s larger career, not fully documented in this paper, as entirely preservationist. Yet the early Melbourne period of his career, the design for his own house, and his role as an enlightened client for Cross Street indicate that his appreciation for historic form was more mediated than protectionist and warrants contemporary scrutiny now that further inner-city public-private housing developments are contemplated by the Victorian State Government. Saunders’s career ushered in the notion that heritage conservation could in fact be progressive. His sophisticated understanding of social values and emotional attachment to place within heritage conservation presages not only the Burra Charter but twenty-first-century developments in the history and conservation of emotion.⁸⁷

The case of the Cross Street Co-operative Housing development charts the unusual instance of an architectural historian and theorist acting as a client for a large urban development. It illustrates the remarkable agency Saunders had within urban redevelopment institutions and the multiplicities of routes through which critiques of modernism permeated into inner Melbourne in the late 1950s and early 1960s. At one level, the genesis and reformist agenda of Cross Street exemplifies, what Sarah Goldhagen describes as a “situated modernism”, where tradition—in this case, the typology of the terrace house—was deployed “only in the interest of rationally conceived aims” and in a language that was arguably “entirely contemporary.”⁸⁸ Manfredo Tafuri would call Saunders’s role in it a form of what he describes as “operative criticism,” where there has been an “attempt to actualise history, to turn it into a supple instrument for action.”⁸⁹ At another level Cross Street can be read, more provocatively, as one harbinger among many, of post-modern architecture’s emergence in the 1970s Australian city, a phenomenon driven by previously mutually exclusive ideals: the recognition of the historic city and the need to provide more and better housing for all.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank our interviewees Merelyn Saunders, Gus Saunders, Helen Marton, Lyn-K Saunders, and Robert Fleming for their generosity and willingness to submit to our ongoing questions about David and Doreen Saunders, and the Cross Street Development. Thanks are also due to the Saunders Family, the Shaw Family, the University of Melbourne Archives, and the State Library of Victoria for granting us permission to publish the images in this paper. We would also like to thank the reviewers for their helpful advice. Their insightful comments greatly improved this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research received funding from the University of Melbourne’s Hallmark Affordable Housing Initiative.

Notes

1. Earle, Shaw & Partners, architects’ statement on Cross Street Co-operative Housing Development in Ian McKay, Robin Boyd, Hugh Stretton, and John Mant, Living and Partly Living (Melbourne: Thomas Nelson, 1971).

2. An earlier but smaller Australian urban project that acknowledged its nineteenth-century context in form and morphology was the cluster-planned St John’s Village, 96 small flats for the aged, in inner suburban Glebe, Sydney (1964) designed by architects Hely, Bell, and Horne. See “St John’s Village, Glebe, NSW,” Architecture in Australia, 54: 3 (September 1965): 107–112; Tom Heath, Glenn Murcutt, and Barry Davis, “St John’s Village – an appraisal,” Architecture in Australia, 54: 3 (September 1965): 113–114.

3. Graeme Davison, “Carlton and the Campus: The University and the Gentrification of Inner Melbourne 1958–75,” Urban Policy and Research, 27:3 (2009): 260.

4. Stephen Pascoe, “The social and spatial construction of student housing: the University of Melbourne in an age of expansion,” (M.Phil Thesis, University of Melbourne, 2011), i.

5. University of Melbourne Student Housing Board Report, June 1964, 3. 1973.0001 Box 1, David Saunders Collection, University of Melbourne Archives, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria.

6. University of Melbourne Student Housing Board Report, June 1964, 7.

7. University of Melbourne Student Housing Board Report, June 1964, i.

8. Stephen Pascoe, “An ‘enlightened urban renewal’?: the University of Melbourne, the Housing Commission of Victoria, and the contest for Carlton in the 1960s,” in David Nichols, Anna Hurlimann, Clare Mouat, and Stephen Pascoe (eds), Green Fields, Brown Fields, New Fields: Proceedings of the 10th Australasian Urban History, Planning History Conference, (Melbourne, Victoria: The University of Melbourne, 2010), 457. Much of this conference paper is reproduced within Pascoe’s “The social and spatial construction of student housing: the University of Melbourne in an age of expansion,” (M.Phil Thesis, University of Melbourne, 2011) in “Chapter 4: A revolution in governance: 1957–1964” and “Chapter 5: The contest for Carlton: 1964–1971.”

9. Pascoe, “An ‘enlightened urban renewal’?,” 457–459.

10. Pascoe, “The social and spatial construction of student housing,” 92.

11. Catherine Townsend and Paul Walker, “Public-private partnerships and medium-density housing in North Melbourne: from Hotham Gardens, 1959 to Northside Communities, 2021” in Housing and the City, eds. Katharina Borsi, Didem Ekici, Jonathan Hale, and Nick Haynes (Oxfordshire, England; New York: Routledge, 2022), 148.

12. “Slum Reclamation Must Go On,” The Age, August 18, 1955, 2.

13. “New Slum Authority Must Be Set Up, Says Housing Minister,” The Age, April 5, 1957, 3.

14. Townsend and Walker, “Public-private partnerships,” 150.

15. Renate Howe (ed), New houses for old: fifty years of public housing in Victoria 1938–1988 (Melbourne: Ministry of Housing and Construction, 1988); Peter Mills, “Refabricating the Towers: The Genesis of the Victorian Housing Commission’s high-rise estates to 1969,” (PhD Thesis, Monash University, 2010); and David Hayward, “The reluctant landlords? A History of public housing in Australia,” Urban Policy and Research, 14: 1 (1996): 5–35.

16. The attempt to save the Lee Street Block was one of the Carlton Association’s key campaigns against the Housing Commission in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This is detailed well in Renate Howe, David Nichols, Graeme Davison, Trendyville: the battle for Australia’s inner cities (Clayton, Victoria: Monash University Publishing, 2014).

17. Howard Tanner, Australian Housing in the Seventies (Sydney: Ure Smith, 1976); Ian McKay, Robin Boyd, Hugh Stretton and John Mant, Living and Partly Living (Melbourne: Thomas Nelson, 1971).

18. Ray Davie, “Carlton Planning for a Bright Future,” The Age, September 21,1968, 25. “Contrast in Carlton,” Architect, 3: 10 (September–October 1970), 13–14. “Stratum Development (Melbourne University Staff) Cooperative Limited was the successful tenderer for the Cross Street, Carlton,” Cross Section, no. 195 (January 1969), np. Robin Boyd, “The Neighbourhood” in McKay et al., Living and Partly Living, 38–39.

19. Townsend and Walker, “Public-private partnerships.”

20. Caroline Butler-Bowdon and Charles Pickett, Homes in the Sky: apartment living in Australia (Carlton, Victoria; Sydney: Miegunyah Press in association with the Historic Houses Trust of NSW, 2007).

21. Howe (ed), New houses for old; Mills, “Refabricating the Towers” and Hayward, “The reluctant landlords?” 5–35.

22. Pascoe, “The social and spatial construction of student housing,”

23. Simon, Pinnegar, Ilan Wiesel, Edgar Liu, Tony Gilmour, Martin Loosemore, and Bruce Judd, 2011, Partnership working in the design and delivery of housing policy and programs, AHURI Final Report No. 163, Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute Limited, Melbourne, https://www.ahuri.edu.au/research/final-reports/163. Accessed May 28, 2021. Kate Shaw, Peter Raisbeck, Chris Chaplin, Kath Hulse. 2013. Evaluation of the Kensington redevelopment and place management models: Final Report. https://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/images/stories/committees/SCLSI/Public_Housing_Renewal_Program/Kensington_estate_evaluation_Jan_2013.pdf Accessed September 1, 2020.

24. Submission to HCV by Leslie M. Perrot & Partners, November 6, 1964. PROV, VPRS 1808, Unit 47. As quoted in Pascoe, “An ‘enlightened urban renewal’?,” 454–457.

25. Cross-Section, 100, February 1961, 2.

26. Pascoe, “An ‘enlightened urban renewal’?,” 455.

27. Pascoe, “An ‘enlightened urban renewal’?,” 454.

28. Memorandum of meeting, 6 May 1965, Addendum 2 to Monthly Report to May 10, 1965. Leslie M. Perrott, quoted Pascoe, “An ‘enlightened urban renewal’?,” 460. Perrott & Partners. PROV, VPRS 1808, Unit 47.

29. Judith Brine, “Saunders, David Arthur Lewis (1928–1986),” Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/saunders-david-arthur-lewis-15756/text26944, published first in hardcopy 2012, accessed online 1 July 2022.

30. David A.L. Saunders, “Joseph Reed. Architect, Melbourne 1852–90,” (B.Arch Thesis, University of Melbourne, 1950).

31. Brine, “Saunders.”

32. Technically, Sydney architect/academic Morton Herman (1907–1983) can be considered Australia’s first career-based architectural historian, publishing his undergraduate thesis (1930) as The early Australian architects and their work (1956) and teaching at Sydney Technical College (later the University of New South Wales) from 1946. However, in terms of formal graduate level training in architectural history, Herman completed his M.Arch research thesis while holding a visiting position at the University of Melbourne in 1960. Saunders completed his M.Arch thesis on terrace houses the year before in 1959. See Philip Goad, entry on Morton Herman in Philip Goad and Julie Willis (eds) The Encyclopedia of Australian Architecture (Port Melbourne, Vic.: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 329–330.

33. David Saunders, (ed), Historic Buildings of Victoria, (Brisbane: Jacaranda in association with the National Trust, 1966).

34. “News of the Day,” The Age, August 4, 1958, 2.

35. James Lesh, Values in cities: urban heritage in twentieth-century Australia (New York, NY: Routledge 2023), 79.

36. David Saunders, “Terrace Housing in Melbourne,” (M.Arch Thesis, University of Melbourne, 1959).

37. David Saunders, quoted in “News of the Day,” The Age, November 30, 1959, 2.

38. “News of the Day,” 1959, 2.

39. Merelyn Saunders, Gus Saunders, Helen Marton and Lyn-K Saunders interview by Philip Goad and Catherine Townsend, 15 March 2022.

40. John R. Gold, “A SPUR to action?: The Society for the Promotion of Urban Renewal, ‘anti-scatter’ and the crisis of city reconstruction, 1957–1963,” Planning Perspectives, 27:2, 199–223, (2012). DOI: 10.1080/02665433.2012.646770

41. Authors’ correspondence with Merelyn Saunders December 2022. Strizic spoke several European languages and may well have translated the text.

42. Reyner Banham, quoted in Neville Quarry, “House: Corner of Morrah and Gatehouse Streets, Parkville, Victoria,” Architecture in Australia, 56: 3 (June 1967), 449.

43. Reyner Banham, “Men and Buildings,” Architecture in Australia, 51: 3 (September 1962), 59.

44. Cross-Section, no. 124 (February 1963), n.p.

45. Heritage Council Determination, “Saunders House, 90–92 Gatehouse Street, Parkville,” Heritage Council Victoria, 1 December 2016, 10.

46. Sarah Williams Goldhagen, “Coda: Reconceptualizing the Modern,” in Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Réjean Legault (eds), Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 315.

47. Howe, Nichols, and Davison, Trendyville, 22. A larger discussion of Grahame Shaw is beyond the scope of this article, however his varied and theoretically engaged career warrants further scrutiny. For biographical details on Shaw’s career, see Built Heritage Pty Ltd, “Grahame Shaw (1928–1985),” Dictionary of Unsung Architects, https://www.builtheritage.com.au/dua_shaw.html (Accessed online 19 December 2022).

48. David Saunders to Grahame Shaw, 13 November 1959, 1973.0001 Box 1, David Saunders Collection, University of Melbourne Archives, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria.

49. Saunders to Shaw, 13 November 1959.

50. Saunders to Shaw, 13 November 1959.

51. Pascoe, “An ‘enlightened urban renewal’?,” 461.

52. 1973.0001 Box 1, David Saunders Collection, University of Melbourne Archives, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria.

53. Minutes of the Student Housing Board 1973.0001 Box 1, David Saunders Collection, University of Melbourne Archives, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria.

54. David Saunders, “Carlton,” Architecture and Arts (June 1965): 30.

55. Saunders, “Carlton,” 31.

56. Saunders, “Carlton,” 30–31.

57. Saunders, “Carlton,” 31.

58. Saunders, “Carlton,” 31.

59. Saunders, “Carlton,” 31.

60. Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (London: Odhams, 1963).

61. Saunders, “Carlton,” 31.

62. Saunders, “Carlton,” 33.

63. Saunders, “Carlton,” 34.

64. Saunders, “Carlton,” 34.

65. Monthly Report to May 10, 1965. Leslie M. Perrott & Partners. PROV, VPRS 1808, Unit 47.

66. Pascoe, “An ‘enlightened urban renewal’?,” 461. Pascoe notes that these maps are available for view at PROV, VPRS 1808, Unit 47.

67. “Wie wohnt die junge Generation? – Wie baut die junge Generation?,” Bauwelt 51/52 December 21, 1959).

68. Phyllis Allen, “Hostel Planning. The social unit as a basis of planning,” The Architects’ Journal Information Library, April 7, 1965, 851.

69. For the British, European, and American context, see Stefan Muthesius, The Postwar University: Utopianist Campus and College (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 31–40; 64–83; 138–174; 206–216; and Carla Yanni, Living on Campus: An architectural history of the American dormitory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 153–218. For the Australian context, see Philip Goad, “Living on Campus,” in Andrew Saniga and Robert Freestone (eds), Campus: Building Modern Australian Universities (Nedlands, WA; UWA Publishing, 2023), 221–245.

70. See Philip Goad, “Open Field, Open Street, Open Choice: John Andrews and the South Residences, University of Guelph (1965–68),” in Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand: 30, Open, eds. Alexandra Brown and Andrew Leach (Gold Coast, Qld.: SAHANZ, 2013), vol. 2, 639–650; Peter Dormer and Stefan Muthesius, Concrete and Open Skies: Architecture at the University of East Anglia, 1962–2000 (London: Unicorn Press, 2000).

71. John Andrews and Jennifer Taylor, Architecture: A Performing Art (Guilford: Lutterworth Press, 1982), 123–132; and Philip Goad, “Greenfields and Urban Systems,” in Paul Walker (ed) John Andrews: Architect of Uncommon Sense (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Design Press, 2023), 104–133.

72. Minutes of the Student Housing Board 1973.0001 Box 1, David Saunders Collection.

73. The minutes of SHB meetings show that Saunders was responsible for the long-term planning of student housing 1973.0001 Box 1, David Saunders Collection, University of Melbourne Archives, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria. Saunders’s involvement with the architects is shown by his inclusion at client discussions such as Earle, Shaw & Partners Memorandum of discussion Student Housing Cross Street Project 3 August 1967. 1973.0001 Box 1, David Saunders Collection, University of Melbourne Archives, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria.

74. “Report to the vice-principal from the student housing board” September 1967. 1973.0001 Box 1, David Saunders Collection, University of Melbourne Archives, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria.

75. Earle, Shaw & Partners quoted in Davie, “Carlton Planning,” The Age, September 21, 1968, 2.

76. Davie, “Carlton Planning,” 2.

77. Davie, “Carlton Planning,” 25.

78. “Stratum Development (Melbourne University Staff) Cooperative Limited was the successful tenderer for the Cross Street, Carlton,” Cross Section, no.195 (January 1969): 2.

79. “Contrast in Carlton,” Architect, 3: 10 (September–October 1970), 13.

80. “Contrast in Carlton,” 14.

81. MacKay et al., Living and Partly Living.

82. Philip Goad ed., Judging Architecture. Issues Divisions Triumphs. Victorian Architecture Awards 1929–2003 (Melbourne: Royal Australian Institute of Architects Victorian Chapter, 2003), 275, 288–289.

83. Howe et al., Trendyville, 43.

84. Tibbits had worked as a graduate architect on the documentation of Cross Street Robert Fleming interview by Philip Pender, Jack Davies, Philip Goad, and Catherine Townsend.

85. Saunders, “Terrace Housing,” 1.

86. Lesh, Values in Cities, 231.

87. Rebecca Madgin and James Lesh (eds), People-centred methodologies for heritage conservation: exploring emotional attachments to historic urban places (Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2021). Katie Barclay and Jade Riddle, Urban emotions and the making of the city: interdisciplinary perspectives (New York, NY: Routledge, 2021).

88. Goldhagen, “Coda: Reconceptualizing the Modern,” 315.

89. Manfredo Tafuri, Theories and Histories of Architecture (London: Granada, 1980 [1976]), 149, 158–160.