Chief Executive Officer, Urban Taskforce Australia
BArch (Sydney), MBuiltEnv (UTS), MArch (UNSW), MCultHerit (Deakin

Chris Johnson addressed graduates from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building in the Great Hall, University of Technology, Sydney on Wednesday 1 May 2013, 2.00pm.

Our speaker today is Mr Chris Johnson.

Chris is a former New South Wales Government Architect and former Executive Director at the New South Wales Department of Planning. He has extensive experience in the planning system and the delivery of significant projects.

Chris was a member of the Central Sydney Planning Committee for 10 years, and the New South Wales Heritage Council and has represented New South Wales on many national bodies.

He was Director the Chris Johnson Special Projects for three years undertaking consulting services in the areas of architecture, planning and urban design. He was also the recipient of the Byera Hadley Travelling Scholarship Award for 2011

He is a Life Fellow of the Australian Institute of Architects and a member of the Planning Institute of Australia. Chris received the Order of Australia in 2012, has written 14 books on planning and architecture and has been an adjunct professor at three universities in New South Wales.

Chris has a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Sydney; a Master of the Built Environment from the UTS; a Master of Architecture from the University of New South Wales and a Master of Cultural Heritage from Deakin University.

It gives me great pleasure to invite Mr Chris Johnson to deliver the occasional address.

Speech

Today, graduating students are moving into a very different world to the one I graduated into when I received my Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Sydney many years ago.

I began my course with the traditional teaching of drawing in Indian ink onto tracing paper, and moved through 5 years of intense education. Even in those days we wanted to produce a better world with a better built environment. We listened to lectures by futurists like Buckminster Fuller and humanists like Aldo Van Eyke.

After a time spent exploring the world, I ended up working in the NSW Government Architects Branch in the early 1970s, in a fine bronze clad building designed by Ken Woolley. It has since been demolished and replaced by the flowing glass of Renzo Piano's buildings.

The office was big. It had over 1,000 staff designing hospitals, schools, courthouses and university buildings like Michael Dysaght's tower building we are in today. Back in those days, the government had all the good projects and many young architects developed their design skills in the government offices. We won all the awards from the Royal Australian Institute of Architects, as it was in those empire connected days.

Fast forward 20 years or so, and I had worked my way up the system to become the NSW Government Architect, where I stayed for the next 10 years. The office was quickly getting smaller as the private sector developed expertise and schools, hospitals and universities begun to select their own architects. My role changed from a designer of buildings to a designer of systems, and influencing policy.

An example was the Houses of the Future project in 2004. Here, we got six architects to design six futuristic houses in six different materials. There was a timber house, a clay house, one in concrete another in steel, a glass house and amazingly a cardboard house. We built them in factories and transported them to the forecourt of the Opera House where tens of thousands of people poured through them. We were exploring concepts of mass production like the Toyota House that rolled off the car manufacturer’s production line in Tokyo. Another system project evolved when I was asked by then Premier, Bob Carr, to look at how to improve the standards of apartment design. We changed the planning rules to require the use of architects, and established the design principles that drove what was a fast growing housing type. I wrote books on "Greening Cities" and on housing production called "Homes Dot Com".

Fast forward another 15 years to today and I am well out of government, and a champion the private sector as the CEO of Urban Taskforce Australia. We represent the private developers who are battling government bureaucratic systems. I am now keen to minimise rules and regulation to maximise innovation.

To some extent, I have moved from the left to the right over my career, from a regulator to free market supporter, from working in government to the private sector. Change is happening exponentially faster these days, and the whole concept of governance is changing with the internet and modern global communications.

In Melbourne, architect Ivan Reijevec is developing a cloud based internet dating system to find like-minded people looking for special apartments. Ivan has reversed the normal process of designing an apartment building and selling individual units to begin with people who are thinking of a new apartment, and connecting these people to his team of architects and builders.

Also in Melbourne, architect Nonda Katsalidis has taken the Toyota model and is proposing to build a 108 storey residential tower in a factory and assemble the parts on site, saving over a year in construction time.

Sydney is changing its housing typology fast with the urban apartment now representing nearly 30% of households, and fast heading towards 50%. I am about to launch an "EcoDensity" campaign to promote the value of urban density and the lifestyle that goes with this. Researchers from your faculty of Design, Architecture and Building are modelling the parametric kit of parts that can explain to communities the various types of density.

Universities are increasingly becoming key players in the real world market place. Just look at the rich program of architect designed buildings your university has been driving under the leadership of Vice Chancellor Ross Milbourne, and Chancellor Vicky Sara. Buildings by Frank Ghery, DCM, Draw and many others are demonstrating leadership in the realm of ideas and innovation.

As I look back over my career, I am amazed at the changes that have occurred in the way an architect operates, the way the private and public sectors interact, the way technology is changing the practice of work and even of how we interact as a community with governments.

The changes I have outlined over my career are happening even faster as you begin your careers today. What a good university education does, especially in the areas of design, architecture and building, is give you the skills and the attitude to move with the changing world into roles and projects you cannot even imagine today.

Good luck to today's graduating students. Make sure you take opportunities that will open up as you set out to make a better world.