- Even the humblest houses outlive the people who build them or choose them.
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- While city buildings rise and fall, whole suburbs stay much as they were built.
- You can stand in the street in East Melbourne and imagine what it was like in
- 1900, or see the 1920s in a street in Essendon.
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- As you travel out from the city you can see growth rings (with denser knots
- around railway stations) as house styles have changed over time, sometimes
- gradually and sometimes with dramatic jumps.They reflect the attitudes and
- ideas in the air at the time, and remain a built reminder of the collective
- unconscious of each era in Victoria’s history.
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- When we choose to live in a house built in a period other than our own, we
- usually want to preserve at least something of the original, and this booklet can
- help achieve that objective. It describes the main styles of houses still present
- in Melbourne, including their cultural background and key exterior and interior
- features and colours. Knowing this helps us avoid mistakes when we are
- renovating, like putting horizontal windows in a Queen Anne house, or terracotta
- tiles on a Victorian house.
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- It also gives us a deeper appreciation of our built heritage, as we understand –
- for example – that the starkness of modernism derives from a striving for purity
- in the years after World War Two and that kangaroos replaced dragons on
- rooftops at the hands of people flushed with patriotism in the early years of
- Federation.
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- David Harvey
- Architect, illustrator and historical advisor to the What house is that? booklet