'The Politics of Public Space' / Interview with OFFICE
OFFICE is a Melbourne-based research and design practice whose projects explore and interrogate the role of the built environment. One of their projects, ‘The Politics of Public Space’, is a print publication that contains a series of lectures presented by design experts -- including Nicole Kalms, Philip Brophy and Tony Birch -- who speak about (and at) public sites in Melbourne. In these talks, the speakers reveal the social, cultural and environmental significances of spaces that we often travel but rarely interrogate.
Kelly Herbison sat down with OFFICE Managing Directors Simon Robinson and Steve Mintern following the release of their third instalment of the series. In this long-form interview, they discuss the built environment as it relates to social agency, the possibility to revise social norms through design, whether there is an obligation to take down certain monuments, and more.
Could you both introduce yourselves and your role at OFFICE?
Simon Robinson: My name is Simon Robinson. I'm an architect and also a director of OFFICE.
Steve Mintern: My name is Steve Mintern and I'm a landscape architect and also one of the directors of the OFFICE. OFFICE is a not-for-profit and charitable organization that explores multidisciplinary design and research practice.
SR: We have six directors, so we're the managing directors and we have a board of directors that sit behind us and oversee the projects that we do and how we conduct our work. We've previously taught at RMIT as well in landscape architecture and architecture. We’ve also done work in design practice prior to doing full-time at OFFICE, including private practice, which is that traditional kind of work for architecture and landscape architecture groups, and which really brought home our dissatisfaction in traditional forms of architecture and landscape architecture. This dissatisfaction was a core reason for developing OFFICE, and informed the objectives stated in our constitution, which revolve around the ‘public good’ – whether through discourse, research, teaching or actually building things.
SM: All projects sit within at least one of those, but I don't know of any project that doesn't seem to cross at least two. Everything we do is completely covered by the objectives of the constitution and it's legally binding. If we don't hit those aspects of the Constitution, we get fined with an enormous amount of money by the government, which is the whole point of setting up in this way, because it means that we can't not work in a certain way.
SR:We don't know any design firms in Australia that are organised in this way, which was kind of the whole point for starting OFFICE, seeing as there wasn't anywhere similarly structured that we could just go and work for. I think it was doing what we wanted to do.
SM:There are more organisations of this type in other parts of the world. Like, in Europe and in the States and in developing parts of the world there are a lot more NGO-type organisations that work in that way, but in Australia it just -- as far as we know -- wasn't a thing.
How long ago did you start thinking about producing this series and start taking steps towards producing the first issue?
SR:Well, as we were saying, the constitutionality of the practice is that we do work around the public good. The project that precedes the formation of OFFICE was looking at the sky-rail around the South-Eastern suburbs. We started an unfunded community engagement project to look at what that space could become and kind of lost a year of our lives doing that... But the result of that was us forming the practice and our interest into the public realm, essentially.
SM:Through doing that, and also throughout our respective Master's projects, we realised how much politics shapes the city and how we as designers don't typically recognise and seriously engage with that, given that we tend to think we’re the ones with agency over the city. We're not particularly interested in the body politic, but more so in politics as a broader thing and how that shapes the city. So through doing that initial sky-rail project and through our university work we developed that same interest in politics and how it shapes public space.
SR:And sitting beside that is this critique on the education system. As tutors, we were struck by this idea that the students and universities are located in the city, but no one really engages with that. We wanted to rethink what a class is and how we could get students, especially some of the visiting students as well, to engage with the city directly, because we see it as a resource and not something that sits solely in the profession of architecture or landscape architecture. But there's a much bigger team of actors that inform the built environment, so we're interested in that as well.
SM:The reason why this is a very roundabout answer to a very direct questions is that there wasn't any direct plan of, 'we're going to hold lectures, then we're going to put out a book'. We started teaching courses and we wanted to get people in to give talks and assist with those, because the idea that your tutor knows everything about the city is just ridiculous. That's not possible. We were very aware of that and we really wanted to bring people who were knowledgeable about certain aspects to present on those. So they were coming into our classes and just talking to about 20 students, but then we had all these students coming into our class for the talks, which made us think that we should take the talks out of the classroom and into the city; to make them publicly open and accessible. We did that in the first two years. And then we decided to produce the publication because people were like, 'I missed the talks, can you send me the audio or video?' Which of course was just not an option because the events are held in the city, so the audio is just an absolute nightmare that you wouldn't want to listen to. So we started working with one of our friends, Tom, who was the editor alongside us and a graphic designer to sort of get the publication off the ground.
Image credit: DLA_ALM
I’d like to get your sense of how discursive social practices function with respect to the built environment. There’s a whole bunch of things that we might aim to do when we say that something is discursively ‘constructed’. What seems common across all uses of the phrase, however, is the intention to fracture the perceived naturality that constructed artefacts have. For instance, saying that ‘gender is constructed’ encourages us to look at the discursive social practices that inform gender, instead of thinking it as something biologically essential. The built environment is interesting in the sense that its being constructed is obvious, but the full extent to which it constructs other things (e.g. sense of belonging, sense of action) isn’t always obvious. Could you say a bit about how you understand the discursive relationship between the built environment and its occupiers, as I take this to be a common thread throughout the series?
SM:The first thing to recognise is that the city is formed by social norms and contracts, but it is also constitutive of those things too. It's a reflexive relationship. We're interested in putting forward a range of ideas about how different people see the exact nature of those things. At the basic level, I’m sure everyone has noticed how our relationship with the city has changed recently, through the pandemic. Something as simple as an 'X' being taped down the street or on a bench changes the way you interact and engage with others on a really basic level.
SR: And this is a hope of the publication – to get the students, and also people interested in the environment, to understand that behind the initial interaction with the city lies sociological and economic policy, which sits below and actually has more of an impact than built design or physical forms.
SM:We're trying to get students to understand that and try to reveal that to a wider audience too. I mean, it's a pretty niche subject, but we've tried to make it as accessible in the way it's edited and designed to try and make it easier to read it.
It really is almost shockingly accessible. I mean, I encounter some of these ideas even though I'm not in this area like whatsoever -- you know, with social theory about what is encoded with the world around you, and how engaging with that often reifies those policies or norms you mentioned earlier. But in those discussions in philosophy as least, you do notice a lack of real-world examples, so to speak. It was really cool to see those ideas, which are generally abstract in nature, situated in the city.
SR:Yeah so in the first issue we did, we actually paired a speaker with a specific site that we thought would be interesting to cover. We researched contested public spaces that had a history that lay below the surface level and then teamed speakers with those specific spaces. Whereas for the second one, we approached the speakers and they chose a specific location that they wanted to speak on.
Did you notice a difference when it was an allocated space versus a space that the speaker nominated themselves?
SM:I think it depended on the speaker. Some people, like Nicole Kalms, are having larger conversations about issues that pop-up in a variety of public spaces, whereas some of them need to be at a particular place because that place is integral to the issues they want to discuss.
SR:For instance, the theatrical backdrop of the William Barak building during Libby Porter’s lecture was essential, as was the Shrine behind Tony Birch during his. Those talks in particular felt like they needed to occur where they did.
Were there any spaces that were brought up throughout the series that you had previously had some kind of like personal relationship to? For me, the talk on Lincoln Square was interesting to read in the sense that I do have a relationship with the space. When I was an undergrad student, it was the place we went to smoke ciggies and escape the university space between classes. Reading about Lincoln Square’s importance to skateboarding subculture was interesting because I suppose it contextualized my use of the space as a sort of symptom of what was already going on there, there was this really significant and youthful ecosystem that existed there before it was gutted and redesigned.
SR: Similar to yourself, I used to go there and watch the skateboarding, and then I watched the demise of it and took photos of that. So I was very aware of what happened there and that was why we were really keen to have Mark Jacques give a lecture on it.
SM:Definitely. He was standing there being like, 'see that new apartment building? The lady who ran the campaign against [the former] Lincoln Square lives in there, and that's the reason why this place is now covered with unskatable surfaces.' To the public, the whole renovation of the area would just look like a new apartment block and a revamped park space. So to hear Mark explained the clear relationship between those two things (the apartment block being built and having a tenant who overlooks Lincoln Square campaign for its transformation) was really cool.
SR:There is a comparison to be made with live music as well. Designers are going into these areas that have character and significance for the music community and then building apartments so close by that noise complaints and other grievances are bound to arise.
While we’re on the topic of the significance of public space for social organization (how Lincoln Square offered the physical backdrop upon which skating subcommunities could grow), do you think that designers have an obligation to design spaces in ways that leave the possibility for social organization open? I suppose it is hard to foresee exactly how a space will be taken up, but I'm thinking in particular about the talk by Nicole Kalms, who explains how seemingly innocuous features of design -- things like lighting and cramped areas -- actually plug in to existing social systems in a way that contributes to the lack of safety and fear experienced by marginalised folks. Do you think there is an obligation to design in ways that acknowledge and challenge, as opposed to merely reflect (and, as we've learnt, reinforce), particular relations that already exist?
SM:Yeah, absolutely. I think what's really interesting is that we need public space designed for us. We don't currently see that because the design of public space often looks very private; the developer builds a building and they have to put a certain amount of public space (or what they consider public space) on the ground floor. Most 'public' space is designed as the outcome of these private projects. So, the question is then how do you occupy that position as a designer for these (sometimes pretty horrible) private companies to produce public space that is meaningful? It's a responsibility that you have to take on when you're intervening in the public realm. It's reckless to not think about these issues.
SR:Yes, traditional practice is private capital to make more private capital. Most design opportunities require that you are a part of that machine. To get the chance to design within the public realm is really not a very common thing. Especially if you work in the city, where it's mainly private space.
SM:And I think that in the publication the question of ‘what is actually public and what is partly owned?’ is a recurrent theme. At the moment, The City of Melbourne is building its first piece of public space since Federation Square. It's not done yet and it is being conducted by a private organisation. A big reason why the public space is happening is because, If you put in a tower that's 20 stories tall and say you will build some kind of public space on the ground, the state government will give you an extra 10 stories to work with. And what usually ends up happening in these kinds of scenarios is that this so-called 'public' space that gets built is attached to an enormous building and never feels very public.
SM:You end up with a privately-owned public space, but it's got private as the first word, and you really see that impacting the way that the space ends up being used.
Image credit: OFFICE
Do you think this privatized aspect of public design stifles the potential for the public to define how they want to use the space?
SR:It's a tricky one. I think Mark talks about it on his chapter on Lincoln Square with the ideas of, 'strong tactics for the weak' and 'weak tactics for the strong'. So that idea of inserting things in design that appear to be the catalyst for the next operating function.
SM:I think that the possibility for designing in this way is different depending on who you are, who you are designing for, and how you can work. So, the framework offered by those concepts of tactics for strong and weak would inform how Mark sees his ability to design for publicness, but Nicole Kalms might have a completely different approach, which instead focuses on research and advocacy.
SR:She has a completely different way of trying to change the city that is informed by her working with government and from more of a public space perspective, whereas Mark's background is working with private capital. So, it really does depend on who you are and where you can intervene and do things in a different way.
SM: I think it's a tricky one because, I mean, public space is a space for 'everyone', but that brings up the question again of whether a true public space even exists? You can't design to everyone.
SR:It's just not possible. When you're designing for the public, you do have to define things such as 'Who is the public? How can I serve that group so defined?' Because those questions are so hard to answer, there really isn't that much public space that is designed with resistance in mind. There's not a lot of land to sort of deal with these things. So, it really makes it even more important to go back to your previous question that the people who do get the chance to design these cases, to really make sure they think about who's going to engage with the space and how they're going to use it.
I wonder what that engagement work would look like?
SR:A lot of the work that we discussed earlier, like the sky-rail work, was looking at community groups along this train line and getting their input. We're interested in bringing those groups and discussions into the design process as well, which is trickier than you might think. When you do community engagement, you'll write a report, which a design firm will then take on and use to inform their design, but often those transitions from the community to the design firm means that a lot gets lost in translation. A primary interest of ours is how you can bring those two things closer together to minimise that loss.
SM:And a lot of that is about empowering people to be able to engage with these things. If you think about the people that need a space of resistance, it's generally not those people who have been allowed to access the resources and information that allows them to be well-positioned to engage in the design process. Traditional kinds of public engagement usually involve consulting with a wealthier person who owns the house, for instance. It’s really important to ask those questions about how you can reach those community groups, which is really difficult.
SR:Alongside the lecture series we teach our students about design intervention, and the most common misconception is that they think they need to design the space for everyone, which is something that no one can do. No matter what you put in a space, you're excluding someone. You have to choose your audience. You have to understand who'sgoing to use this space and then do as much research as possible to anticipate howthey will use it.
SM:Not everyone wins all the time, but there are trade-offs as well as opposed to just losses, and I suppose the goal is to figure out how you can balance out those trade-offs in better or worse ways.
Image credit: OFFICE
I want to discuss those kinds of cases where you are designing for the public, and you are designing with the interests of the majority in mind, but those interests might themselves be worth contesting. I'm thinking about monuments here. People might feel like it's quite important, like in terms of 'Australia's identity' or whatever, to have these immortalized figures in the public space. And that might be trivially true in terms of the majority of people thinking that. But it’s not obvious that we shouldcare about the majority in those situations. There is a bunch of disagreement about how exactly statues and monuments work in tandem with social structures, but one theory that I'm familiar with from Karen Jones suggests that monuments function to invite us into affective states of admiration that function to bolster our endorsement of the figure displayed. If this is right, then we should be wary of monuments and might even have an obligation to challenge them when the figure we’re invited to admire is a symbol of, say, colonial violence. Is there anything in design theory that articulates the limits on our obligation to design in the interests of the majority, when those interests are harmful in the way that monuments or statues can be?
SM:I mean, first of all, we aren't experts in terms of this, to be honest. But I do find it all really interesting and important. For me, the idea that we can't possibly take monuments down because of their cultural significance or whatever is quite interesting, because a lot of the monuments in question are really new. Like, appealing to the idea that they have immense cultural significance seems odd when many of them are less than a century old. And I guess this isn't any accident either, as it directly relates to this false belief that our current idea of what history is absolute. And that's probably bullshit. Like, it continues to change as we challenge particular narratives. The way we would think of what history is now will be very different to what we think of it in 20 years. So, I think that if you think about a monument as a memorialisation of a time or space in history, then that needs to change as our understanding of what those histories are changing. If something is immortalised in a monument and then is proven to be erroneous or false in some way, then we ought to correct that. And as we continue to make new monuments and things of that kind, we need to keep this in mind. I guess the example we have in [the series] is the Batman obelisk that's down in Queen Vic park, that contained the phrase 'unoccupied land' in the original, but which has since been corrected.
SR:Yeah, corrected to say that these lands were actually occupied.
SM:Which is a very mild correction, but nonetheless demonstrates a tactic that we can use to correct something that doesn’t involve toppling it into a river, even though toppling something into a river can be totally appropriate in some cases. I think it's very much a case by case thing. Like, in some cases, keeping the original monument there with a corrected plaque or something is going to allow people to understand how history has changed and maybe that has a value as well, in that it can make people understand that what they think is right and true now is not what might be right and true in ten years. You have to continue and understand and change the way you view history. It is very hard to change and update monuments in a subtle way, but I guess that has something to do with, as you say, the kind of attitudes they function to reflect and endorse. I think that the way we design monuments is changing, though. They are changing to be more like spaces that are experienced, as opposed to particular figures or moments that have been immortalised in a grand way.
Are you interested in looking at public spaces in the rural setting, or will your series continue to focus on the suburban landscape?
SM:We're actually both from regional Australia. We didn't grow up in cities.
SR:Which is interesting and maybe why we look at the city in this way I think. There's intrigue and uniqueness about a city that perhaps other people who grew up here don't have.
SM:Yeah, I guess we're seeing it with fresh eyes. We do have some projects outside of city in regional areas, we work with the Culpra Milli Aboriginal Community near Mildura and do quite a lot of different projects for them. So that's a very, very long way from the city; it's about a a seven-hour drive for me. But I mean, we live here, and there's a reason that we don't live in regional Australia. Which isn't to say that it's bad, it's just that it's so different from the city.
SR:Yeah. And this project did arise from a classroom setting and was aimed at getting students out and involved in the city around them, so in that sense it is true to the project's aims for it to remain focused on the city. You know, it's about giving the students the time and structure to engage with the spaces around them.
So I'd like to quickly touch on this idea that came up in Philip Brophy's lecture, which told the story of City Square, and how it was originally designed in this really over-the-top way with extravagant fountains, with the view of getting the public to engage with the space in a sort of playful or recreational way. But that didn't end up happening -- people ended up urinating in the fountain and the whole design was just totally ineffective. It seemed to suggest that, at the end of the day, you can't design people into behaving in particular ways (in some settings). It's interesting for me to hear the limits of prolepsis in design, probably because I'm coming from a different background, where it’s not unusual to think that we feel compelled to become the kind of person that people expect us to be. Like, if you forgive someone who hasn't apologised yet, sometimes that can be a really powerful tool to get that person to become self-reflective and realise that they want to be the kind of person who wants to do the right thing moving forward.
SR:Doing any kind of permanent work is extremely nerve wracking; its going to be there for a long time and people are going to adopt it in any way they please. But I think you can always go back to recent studies and inform what should be done in that space. You have to question the architect that did that project and what their intention was for designing something ostensibly for public use, but that was so out of touch with the public. There's designing for the public use and good, and then there's designing to make the thing that is most exciting for you personally. And I think we as designers aren't usually very good at getting that balance right. A lot of the time it looks like designers end up creating things as a way to stamp themselves and their identities on a space, and not necessarily because that was the most valuable thing for everyone to have. Going back to that idea of responsibility, if you're designing for the public you have a responsibility to do something that is accessible and yet it's going to perform, I think. As much as there is an unknown in terms of how people interact with these places before they exist, there are things that you can use to inform the process so that what you produce tracks the interests of the users as closely as possible. And a huge part of that I guess is checking your ego and thinking less about what you personally feel is a cool design and instead think about what is actually going to service the people who will occupy the space.
In one of your final interviews, you looked at the idea of 'human-centric' design and how that ought to be challenged. How has your attitude towards design changed in the context of climate change, COVID-19, or any other events that have posed a threat to how we understand and use space?
SR:We just completed a project looking at ecological corridors [editor’s note: ecological corridors are connections that connect nearby wildlife habitats that are largely separated by human structures or activity] in the South Eastern suburbs. So that involved looking at nine different councils, and basically, we were using data to map ecological corridors with the idea of missing links between these corridors --
SM:-- creeks, nature strips and powerline easements; those spaces that you would never even notice as being anything important if you just walked past them. It's the land that gets left over when the city gets built up, I guess.
SR: And the outcome of that was to say, well, hang on, this space is really important let's hold onto it. Some of the development that is coming out of those areas, like the new estates, are just eating up those green areas. So, we're interested in looking at a lot of infrastructure spaces as well as ecological corridors and saying that they have value.
SM:I think ultimately, hopefully, it has changed, and will change, how we see the value of these spaces. Because let's face it, you can get angry at apartments, but there's not a lot you can do about it. So we need to ask, where are those openings? Where can we focus our resources to do something of value?
SR:Which I think is something that continues across our practice, whether it's a book or a research project or whatever. And it can take many different forms, too; it can be a matter of just highlighting these issues to people rather than indulging our individual creative visions and designing fountains.
SM: And in terms of relationship to public space in lockdown, I suppose I really noticed the significance of the Merri creek. We've walked easements, we've walked park tracks, and done a lot of research into this land that which sits within urban environments more broadly, but in lockdown I personally made the most of them in a way that I hadn’t really done before I guess.
SR:Yeah that uptake and revised valuing of public space has been really cool to see.
Here’s to park hangs! Let’s talk about the design of the series. It's a super interesting design. Like, the colours are stunning and the text is quite large, as are the margins on each page. Was there any reason behind that?
SR:We wrote a pretty specific brief for the designer, which focused on three points. The first was that it should be able to fit in your pocket, so that you can take it with you around the city and visit the places from the lectures. The second is that it should be thick, because we were really interested in having something with a substantial spine; something that had a presence on the bookshelf.
SM:And also, we were really concerned with accessibility. You know, a book titled 'The Politics of Public Space' won't really jump out to a lot of people. Plus, I own a lot of books that have a title related to politics and space, and they just look really boring. If you weren’t already interested in it, you just wouldn't take a book with that title off the shelf. So I think the colour and larger fonts worked to offset that sense of unattractiveness that might normally come with texts on these topics.
And, finally, what can we expect from you guys in the future?
SM:We have one more in the series coming out, and we're calling it after that. The final book in the series will come out in April, maybe, depending on how big, and that'll be the final one in the set of four publications.
SR:So all of our work is interested in research and being within the university in some respect, but then also maintaining a relationship to the built environment or creating something tangible. We’re hoping to turn this into something more than the book series – potentially a public intervention of some kind, and we’ve just received some funding to pursue that through Test Sites.
SM:With that, we're going to try to develop ideas about physical ways of doing what the publication's doing. You know, trying to reveal certain things about the city.
Amazing! I reckon that’ll do it. Huge congrats on everything you’ve done so far, and I look forward to seeing what OFFICE produces in the future. Thanks so much!
If you want to follow the work that OFFICE is doing, you can follow them on Instagram. Their series ‘The Politics of Public Space’ is available to purchase online and in select Melbourne bookstores, including Metropolis Books.
Interview and words by Kelly Herbison
Header image credit: OFFICE
Thank you for reading this article. Before you leave the page, we’d like you to take a moment to read this statement. We are asking our readers to take action and stand with the BIPOC community who fight and endure the oppression and injustice of racial inequality.
Here in ‘Australia’, Indigenous people are the most incarcerated population on Earth. Countless lives have been murdered by white police, white government policies and this country’s white history, institutionalised colonialism and ongoing racial oppression. Racial injustice continues today under the phoney, self-congratulatory politics of ‘Reconciliation’ and the notion that colonialism is something that must be denied and forgotten, an uncomfortable artefact of the past.
Feeling guilty is not enough. We must take action, pay the rent, educate ourselves and acknowledge that empathy and sorrow for past actions is insufficient if this does nothing to prevent our current reality from extending into the future.
Please consider making donations to the following organisations (the list is so small and the work to be done is so large, do your research to find more grassroots, Indigenous-lead community organisations):
Indigenous Social Justice Association - fighting to stop Indigenous deaths in custody
Firesticks Alliance - who campaign for Indigenous land management, cultural burning and looking after Country