The Plumbing & Pipe Trades Employees Union sits behind Melbourne's neo-classical Trades Hall like a fossil in an undeveloped lot. Three stories of concrete, cast and assembled as if by archaeologists. I uncovered it accidentally, hidden in its neighbour’s cool shadow, while walking through Carlton. The building stood out to me for its lack of pretension: A monolith built for the people, ill-placed in a city eagerly aspiring to be old-world. It was designed in the late 1960s by local architect Graeme Gunn and since its completion in 1972 it has sat, brutal and unchanged, for 50 years. Brutalist architecture is perhaps something I am drawn to because there is a lot of it in Canberra (including my local library growing up). Something about the placid utilitarianism of it feels both calming and aspirational to me. Perhaps my environment, growing up relatively poor, being quite an isolated child, meant that the feel of public spaces had more of an impact on me, particularly their suggestion of community and inter-connection. I would lie awake at night listening to cars go past imagining screenings at Center Cinema, concerts at the School of Music or exhibitions at the National Gallery of Australia. People meeting, celebrating, connecting. Our reliance on a tangible space (or even a virtual one) springs from this goal of connection, a way of bringing us together. No longer isolated territories, but entire continents, depending on each individual and growing because of that, not in spite of it.
Brutalism, despite its name, was a societal leveller, providing multi-purpose spaces for living, working and connecting to other people. Commission flats, office buildings, communal spaces; trades unions such as this one. Spaces like these are not meant to be status symbols, looked upon but not touched, rather, they are meant to be used. To serve us and our community, and let us form around them, like so many years of ivy.
Under an external staircase carved into the union’s facade is a rock garden, sheltered from the elements. Cardboard bedding and a change of clothes are safe and dry. This is not a residential building, but perhaps it is not so different from the student accommodation built nearby at the end of the same decade? Temporary housing, for when you need it. I sit on the steps above and breathe in the space. Sound, moving up the stairwell from the traffic below blurs into white noise. I realise I am inside a shell. This building hears us, curls the sound around and returns it to us, as though it were a fax approving a holiday. Places like these may seem cold, but in truth they nurture us. They provide us with a place to unionise, a place for us to strive to get what we need.
The PPTEU building hasn’t changed so much since it was built, the option for the extra story that was drawn into the plans was never needed. Although the porous surface has grown greener with plantlife, partially graffitied, streaked with half a century of rain, it still remains, standing stoic beneath it all. The artificial woodgrain of the concrete lulls you into a sense of security, seemingly naturalistic, yet a building like this could almost be 3D printed, readymade. The tension between natural and artificial grounds the building squarely in the mid-century, pulls me back to my childhood, further, further still… Something about the stony feel of the concrete, the fecundity of its cold damp smell, makes these buildings seem as though they are emerging from the ground, have always been there, know some universal truth. Perhaps this truth is that all we need is a place to connect.
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