Amity Sands-Morris

More Than a Roof Over Heads

Rental housing is in crisis. People are constantly on the move, without a sense of home. Long term, stable housing is falling out of reach.

Social housing is failing to meet the current demands of not only availability and accessibility, but liveability. Apartments are small, poorly ventilated, and often lacking in amenity. Spreading out of high-rise apartments and into suburbia allows social housing to take new form, one that priorities good architecture and quality of life. The Australian notion of home, embedded in cultural psyche, is one of stability and permanence.

In the suburb of Hawthorn, the typical social housing of high density, multi-level buildings lacks a contextual concern. The typology was generated through the need for post war efficiency, and while it has its place in other areas of suburban Melbourne, it lacks a certain humanity. In increasing density and efficiency, there is compromise. This project navigates the intersection of housing and home, in a way that responds to the ground plane in the context of middle ring suburbia.

Rooms are provided with a shared bathroom and private balcony, access to public outdoor space and shared laundry and bike facilities that allow people to live together comfortably. Modules can be moved, joined, added and removed as needed, much like residents will come and go over time. Four strangers can live together across a dwelling, or a family can have their own. Terracing of the site controls privacy and threshold, while dealing with the slope. Site arrangement takes navigates the site linearly, where recreation, and community, emerges from the spaces in between. A sense of home is allowed to develop when architecture is sincere and generous, and lives are allowed to be stable.