Tag Archive for 'fibro'

The Fibro frontier

Published on December 14, 2010 by Charles Pickett in Architecture and Urban Design. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , .
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House at Monterey, Sydney. Photo by Andrew Frolows. Collection:Powerhouse Museum

The NSW Ombudsman Bruce Barbour has just released a report about asbestos and its terrible legacy. According to the report asbestos-related disease will soon be killing more people in Australia than car and traffic accidents. Although production of asbestos products was discontinued during the 1980s, decades can pass between exposure to asbestos dust and the onset of cancers. By 2020 it is expected that more than 13,000 people will have been diagnosed with the lung cancer mesothelioma, which is invariably fatal.

I have an interest in this subject because in 1997 I published a book titled The fibro frontier: A different history of Australian architecture. Fibro was a good book for me. It wasn’t the first book I’d written but it was the first to give me a real reputation outside the Museum. It was also a good book for the Powerhouse, which co-published it with Transworld Publishers. Along with Australian Dream, Beyond architecture and others, we had a good decade of titles which engaged with design and culture in unusual ways. Unfortunately detours into vanity publishing eventually killed all that.

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Wunderlich ‘Durabestos’ catalogue, 1955. Collection: Powerhouse Museum.

Fibro is not primarily about asbestos and its consequences. It focuses on the architectural and social impact of fibro, arguing that the fibro house is the most distinctive expression of Australian domestic architecture. When I was working on Fibro we considered calling the book ‘Fabulous fibro’ though fortunately we changed our minds, aware that fibro is anything but to people suffering from asbestos diseases.

But I’ve had plenty of occasions to ponder the relationship between fibro – asbestos-cement – as the building material which by the 1960s clad one third of houses in NSW and fibro as the material which condemned thousands to a painful death. I’ve spoken at conferences of asbestos disease lawyers and I’ve written expert witness opinions for law firms acting for and against James Hardie, Australia’s main manufacturer of asbestos products and the company which for decades avoided its responsibilities towards cancer sufferers, setting a new low in corporate behaviour. Many careers have been built on the basis of asbestos-induced suffering, not a comfortable thought even for someone on the fringes of that bonanza.

Gideon Haigh points out in his award-winning investigation Asbestos House: The secret history of James Hardie Industries:

‘Fibro has a rightly honoured place in Australian life, history, culture, even aesthetics – Charles Pickett’s 1997 book The Fibro Frontier is a splendid introduction’. But Haigh also argues that fibro’s cultural and architectural significance is not necessarily dependant on the suffering it produced: ‘That asbestos has improved lives and taken lives are separate propositions’.

The amount of asbestos fibre in fibro was reduced during the 1950s and 1960s because of rising costs and a need to increase the material’s flexibility. But James Hardie did not seek to completely replace asbestos until the company’s future was on the line during the late 1970s; until then the company preferred to cajole, obfuscate and threaten its critics and plaintiffs.

Today there are still thousands of houses clad or lined with fibro. In addition many brick or timber homes have fibro used under eaves, in gable ends and ceilings while asbestos often turns up in unexpected places such as tiles, floor coverings and insulation. Fibro is generally safe when left alone but as the Ombudsman points out, no coordinated warning or inspection system exists to reduce the risk of people unintendedly releasing asbestos dust when renovating or altering their homes. There are no laws preventing home owners from working on their homes regardless of the presence of asbestos.

Mesothelioma is not just incurable; it is also capricious and pitiless. Many people (including my father) frequently exposed to asbestos dust suffered no adverse consequences; others were condemned from fleeting encounters. After picking off many who mined asbestos, made asbestos products or worked as builders, mesothelioma now ravages home renovators who carelessly meddled with fibro. In its terminal stages mesothelioma is brutally painful, rendering every breath a struggle against pain. As a judge of the Dust Diseases Tribunal wrote:

‘Those who suffer it reach a stage where it is necessary to fight for every breath, with every breath accompanied by pain so dreadful that the only way to avoid it is not to breathe. The choice between breathing and not breathing is no choice at all’.

If you have renovation ambitions, remind yourself of that frequently.

Collecting Buildings

Published on January 6, 2010 by Charles Pickett in Architecture and Urban Design. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .
Fibro house wall

Collection, Powerhouse Museum.

Framing our private and public worlds, the designed environment is too big a subject to ignore.

The Powerhouse collection has plenty of of design drawings, models and photographs, but it also has many of parts of buildings. In contrast to most of the structures documented in our collections, this one comes from the humble end of the built environment. It’s the front wall of a fibro house, built in 1926 at Caringbah in Sydney’s southern suburbs.

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Photography by Penny Clay, © Powerhouse Museum, all rights reserved.

The house was built for Harry Waring, a poultry and vegetable farmer, and family when the Sutherland district was composed of small farms and holiday shacks rather than suburbs. For a couple of decades the house was home to six people despite consisting of just one bedroom, kitchen, living room and an enclosed veranda. Mr Waring’s son Reg, a council worker, lived in the house until his death in 1991.

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Photography by Penny Clay, © Powerhouse Museum, all rights reserved.

About to be demolished for a set of townhouses, its survival into the 1990s was slightly miraculous in a street of two-car garages and (no doubt) en suites. Especially as the house retained its extreme minimalism: the basic timber frame was clad only on one side, not uncommon in the 1920s. This type of timber frame is the basic element of Australian cottage architecture, economical and uncomplicated compared to its international equivalents.

Timber framed construction dispensed with the expensive skills of masons or bricklayers. Using nailed joints, the Australian ‘stud’ frame didn’t require the carpentry skills needed for a heavier mortise and tenon frame, nor the labour required to lift heavy beams into place. Timber frames are adaptable to a range of cladding materials. These days they are generally disguised by a single layer of bricks, hence ‘brick veneer’, a type of cladding rare outside of Australia. It was satisfying to have the staple element of Australian domestic architecture embodied in the collection, rather than solely represented via photos and drawings.

I spent some years researching the cheap end of housing design and production for the book The Fibro frontier. In many respects this project was a work of finding photographic and oral records from home builders and owners. But it also scooped up a literal piece of the book’s subject matter.

When The Fibro frontier was launched in 1997, the house wall was erected for a few weeks in the Powerhouse Museum foyer. The photo shows the wall with Tim Morris, Dave Rockell and Carey Ward of the PHM Preservation department, who removed it from the Caringbah house while it was being demolished.

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Photography by Sue Stafford, © Powerhouse Museum, all rights reserved.

The Powerhouse holds a great variety of architectural collections. They give a range of viewpoints of the design genre that shapes our lives more than any other: design drawings require a trained or intuitive eye, while photographs, models and moving image are more accessible but also create a different experience, valuable in itself. Somewhat removed from the structures they document, they are distinct art forms with their own histories and appeal. Lucien Henry’s architectural designs, featured in the PHM’s Visions of a republic exhibition and book, are a great example.

Some of the world’s most-visited museums – the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert, the Centre Pompidou – feature high-profile architecture galleries. Of course they have the advantage of collections documenting well-loved buildings and a constituency with little doubt that environmental design deserves its place alongside masterpieces of the other arts.

Of the PHM collections, perhaps only the Sydney Opera House photographs and models carry this sort of appeal, despite the fact that the collection holds work by some of our leading contemporary and modern architects including Glenn Murcutt, Harry Seidler, Phillip Cox and John Andrews.

However the most distinctive PHM collections are perhaps those that document the design of domestic spaces, the most familiar and comfortable genre. Australia’s formidable investment in domestic life is embodied in these collections, which include Ken Woolley’s Petit & Sevitt archive and JA ‘Jack’ Ray’s archive of the work of a suburban building contractor. The fibro house wall comes from the same world.