Pain Point

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?’