The Thinking, Applied

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

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