Heritage committee natural urban comment.

1. Heritage Committee: Tas Chapter AIA
Comment: John Latham – Toward a fuller & better connected heritage 25 March 14
Architecture is more than building.
Buildings are in curtilage and built and natural contexts. They are in part directly related to and
interdependent with these.
Urban amenity & town planning are inclusive of and are included in Architecture.
Architecture is powerfully relevant cultural currency and future. (it is not perfect and is oft
compromised at the ‘architect’/’buildingdesign’ margin)
A building is not a flat iron. Building use is primarily continuous.
Architectural heritage in pragmatic renovation and addition is valued with architectural currency and
futures. The value assessment is more than “as little as possible – as much as necessary” it is owner
and political wholistically weighted (often incalculable) sacrifice of one for the other. Sacrifice of older
heritage for currency and also currency for older heritage. And of course heritage is adopted as part
of currency.
Our key worry in Tasmania is that our architectural currency is politically located in the backseat. The
heritage body and the green body are focused firstly at their core motives and this is the wedge that
has saved what it has saved.
The architects’ wedge is built cultural development (meeting heritage is part of the design).
The City Hall is built on a nexus point of history, connective geomorphic context and current design
challenges. Rhetorically: to build a cable car takeoff on the roof of the City Hall to ride to the Pinnacle
would cause more concern for the City Hall as a sacred cow than it would for the Pinnacle as a useful
geomorphic urban design tool or the opportunity for the highly nuanced Architectural Currency and
Future Heritage possible in adaptation of the City Hall in conjunction with the vicinity’s natural
heritage through design connections.
Usually the unseen and so unacknowledged is the Architects’ vision to make the natural and built
heritage connections in the fabric of renovated currency: if it breathes it is politically viable but
butterpaper to others doesn’t breathe.
We as a committee are facing these matters with our buildings.
We should face them more vociferously in our urban and country designs.
The Heritage Council in all its wonder is due for Renovation.
FIN