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Every night in The Age newsroom at 250 Spencer Street, a sub-editor wheeled several slabs of beer on a trolley into a locker room next to the men’s toilets, and reporters and subs gathered there between editions. Staff called it the ‘Bog Bar’. Nobody can say exactly when it started, but the Sun News-Pictorial (now the Herald Sun) had its own version: ‘the Subs’ Club’, meeting out of sight in a cupboard in the subs’ room, an institution with its own ‘freemasonry of rituals and

Before the NSW Government demolished Willow Grove, its own heritage assessment got the villa's age wrong by more than a decade, and never learned the name of the woman who built it. That woman was Annie Josephine Gallagher, a Parramatta draper and milliner who commissioned the villa from the Sydney architect Sydney Moore Green in November 1890, financed it on her own trade and an inheritance from her father, and built it as a widow after her husband died within the year.

Renters with five or more close relationships in their neighbourhood are one and a half times more likely to renew their lease. That finding comes from a 2022 benchmark survey of more than 1,500 multi-family renters across the United States, run by the resident-experience firm Venn. The same survey found a related result: 57 per cent of respondents named a neighbourhood factor, friends, local businesses, or a sense of belonging, among their top reasons for renewing.

Barangaroo was cremated with her fishing gear beside her. More than two centuries later, nine in ten office tenants making future commitments in the precinct that carries her name chose to stay.

‘Architecture’s role in a Holocaust museum is fraught,’ Kerstin Thompson said in an interview the Melbourne Holocaust Museum published in October 2022. Her practice, Kerstin Thompson Architects, designed the museum’s new building in Elsternwick. Asked how architecture shapes a site of memory, she put this question: ‘Can or should architecture be deployed to speak of the Holocaust?’

Why do developments get opposed or rejected? Often, a project draws opposition because it doesn’t feel like it belongs where it’s been put. Perhaps the design itself sits awkwardly against its surroundings, or perhaps the people living around it feel its history has been ignored. Both are versions of the same failure: a project that hasn’t engaged honestly with what a site already is. Recently at a Gray Puksand panel during Melbourne Design Week, I was asked why a deeper unde