Apartment Highrise Living - Hobart

This set of apartment blocks in Hobart are a rare example of 1960s highrise living in Hobart.  I really enjoy these apartments, heir design allows them to take advantage of being tall to allow maximum number of residents, but they are not at all demanding on the surrounding landscape.  The glass and aluminum windows are broken up by using colours, brown vertical ones on the apartment block to the left, and green horizontal lines to the building on the right. 

In a period when urban sprawl is placing demands on the very places people utlise such as shops, and recreational areas in Hobart, future planning should be committed to looking at a mix of highrise buildings within Hobart, Launceston, Devonport and Burnie in order to cope with future population booms and demands on city resources.

The post war period, especially the 1950s and 1960s hasn't been given the recognition and credit it duly deserves. The Architects of the period produced innovative ideas through their building designs that incorporated responses such as environmentalism and urban planning issues well before Politicians in the contemporary context caught onto the idea.

The 20th century has to also be accepted as part of our collective history and identity. If all Modernist buildings in Tasmania were to be demolished, there wouldn't be much of Tasmania left!  Similar to the cultural cringe that was evident some 20 years ago in relation to convict history, Modernist Architecture is now suffering the a similar denial, but this time on the premise of considered 'ugliness' or 'not fitting in' .

Accepting Modernism and it's contributions to Tasmania, both positive and negative, will help us to better understand where we have come from, who we are and aid in helping guide us to a better built environments for the future. 

To deny our recent past in favour of some kind of 19th century Tasmanian Utopia is misguided and in the long term doesn't address contemporary issues of city pressures such as urban sprawl.