IN the fading light of the 20th century, the old Treasury Building site had become a metaphor for municipal Adelaide: a neglected relic, devoid of life and any obvious purpose. One of South Australia’s most important colonial buildings, built in 1839, was the work of architect and state father George Kingston. After eight major redevelopments up to 1909, one building had become six, commanding a fair lump of the historic and visual heart of Adelaide. A setting for affairs of state for many decades, especially in the Playford era, by the mid-1990s it was unoccupied and unloved.

Enter the State Government. Enter developer Toga Group. Enter conservation architect Ron Danvers.

The Government wanted its building tenanted and restored, more specifically a long-term tenant that appreciated the historical significance of the building and was committed to the level of restoration required. The Toga Group, as developer, wanted to create a high-quality link in its chain of Medina hotels. It had Melbourne architects and interior designers SJB; it needed veteran Adelaide heritage consultant and conservation architect Ron Danvers for the challenges that lay ahead.

Fast-forward to 2003 and the Royal Australia Institute of Architects state awards night in Adelaide: for Heritage, an Award of Merit to Danvers Schulz Holland in association with SJB for Medina Grand Adelaide Treasury. Two months later, from a field of 22 entries from nine countries in the UNESCO Asia-Pacific Heritage Conservation Awards, Danvers Schulz Holland received an Award of Merit, one of nine winners and the only one from Australia.
As the heritage arm of the consultant team, Danvers Schulz Holland can tell of running the gauntlet of a highly sensitive planning and development process, and the full gamut of special-interest emotions, from doubt and skepticism to the inarguable position of those who see old buildings as museum pieces not to be sullied with the here and now. Rather than outline the saga of questions asked and answered, here is the verbatim citation on the UNESCO award, issued last August 19:

“The sophisticated conversion of the historic Adelaide Treasury building into a high-end hotel complex successfully demonstrates the commercial viability of reusing historic building stock. The project displays exemplary standards of conservation work, with a thorough archeological survey that has guided the restoration and interpretation work. Modern services and programs have been sensitively inserted, respecting the integrity of the original building fabric. By opening the building to the general public, this conservation project secures an important chapter in the history of SA.”

For a city that otherwise needs a white cane to find its way around, here, in the Year of the Built Environment, seems to be one clear way forward. “We’re too precious about our buildings,” says Danvers. “Heritage authorities need to work with architects and developers to explore more radical solutions for adaptation to increase the life and economic value of buildings.”

Around the world UNESCO promotes the adaptive reuse of heritage buildings so long as the integrity of the building and its historic significance is respected. The foremost protector of world cultural heritage does not believe in treating buildings as monuments. This, says Danvers, has been a failing of the heritage movement, in that it has concentrated on the building fabric and not its role as a contributor to city life. “Ours is a living culture. Empty or neglected heritage buildings on key sites create a dead zone around them. We need to get life back in the city. If we have to trade off a bit of heritage dogma, so be it.”

The way to do it, says Danvers, is to change the paradigm. Historically, buildings have adapted to the social and technological evolution of society. Now is the time for life to adapt to buildings; we have the technology to compromise. The trick is to develop clever ways to practice what he calls the “radical intervention” process required to enable old and fragile structures to support highly serviced human lifestyles; to hide modern mechanical, electrical and telecommunications operations within the building structure. Like at the Medina.

The “precious” label Danvers assigns to Adelaide is given context when he talks of the “radical, more radical than what we do here” adaptation work going on in Rome, Venice and Florence. These icons of human culture and achievement are in a constant state of evolution, utilizing modern design theory and modern materials fused seamlessly with the historic fabric. They also inspire Danvers as model for Adelaide; as a future that maintains the past. He talks of the old ANZ Bank, Commonwealth Bank and Elders buildings in the CBD, all empty and ripe for rejuvenating.

If, as St Augustine said, patience is the companion of wisdom, Ron Danvers may be the wisest man in the land. For the past 20 years he has observed and been involved in the many schemes trumpeted for Victoria Square and the Central Market, millennium towers and ridiculous spires, without any coming to fruition. He has heard the city called a “desolate provincial place” by Chilean artist Juan Davila without necessarily disagreeing. He has heard the thump of the Landry report as it landed next to the Gehl and Girardet reports on the shelves of the civic archives.

Yet he believes Adelaide will get it right; he sees light, opportunity, a new age. The key is thinking smaller. “Grand plans tend to fail. For Adelaide, the strategy should be incremental improvement. We need to be patient. When we think big we don’t get it right.” The push to close off the east-west corridor through Victoria Square was a classic example of the crash-through or crash mentality plaguing the city. “We don’t need to shut roads, just reduce and slow traffic flow.’’

THE real reason, Danvers concedes, for embracing the adaptation/think-small model lies somewhat deeper than its proven success with the Medina or the lead provided by Venice et al. It’s Adelaide: we have never had the intellectual capital required to make the big decisions on design and development.

“Adelaide has no design culture in the way Melbourne, for example, does. Melbourne has a tradition of valuing and appreciating good design. Adelaide never has,” Danvers says, resigned to this truth. Then a handful of salt for the wound. “There is no great architecture in SA – not one example.” His point is: how can Adelaide or the state make valid and good decisions on the design of major buildings and developments if the informed culture required for such decisions does not exist. “We haven’t got a design culture – but we could develop one and nurture it to maturity.”

In support of this notion he offers a modest urban design project in Hurtle Square, where Danvers Schulz Holland is redesigning the public landscape into a series of human-scale gardens and spaces that will better serve the increasing local residential population. The plan is the result of considerable community consultation and repeated show-and-tell until all parties were happy. Danvers says the process represents the cultural element of design so often missing from larger projects. Being staged over a number of years, it also represents his concept of incremental achievement.

The alternative is to continue with the relatively secret processes of the big development, where the rights of property owner, developer and consultant team are seemingly pre-eminent, and the public interest is merely a nuisance rather than a resource to be harnessed for the good that may flow. Such is the way unpopular development is hatched; or how “bad judgments”, as Danvers calls them, are made. His list of bad judgments is too long to list here but familiar to all.

This is not the typically disillusioned Adelaide architect jaundiced by years of being put through the planning and development mincer. Danvers was the government-appointed founding chair of the State Urban Design Advisory Panel and collaborated with SACON International to establish a strategy for the protection of cultural heritage internationally. He has received state and national awards for the conservation and restoration of significant buildings such as the Mortlock Library and Ayers House. His academic and professional successes and associations fill pages. These are the observations of patience and wisdom personified.

There are architects, however, who have given up on Adelaide. They are more likely to subscribe to American author Lyman Abbot’s theory that “Patience is passion tamed”. But, for the time being, the Medina Grand is our best clue as to whether Adelaide is at the start of a golden age or at the ends of architectural despair.