Cover Image: Designing Spaces for Culture forum in Hackett Hall at the WA Museum Boola Bardip. Left to right: Host Victoria Laurie, Lea Bennett, Stephen Woodland, Helen Curtis, Geoff Warn and Randal Humich.

One of the highlights of this year’s Perth Design Week was a session entitled Designing Spaces for Culture, in which a group of professionals across the Western Australian design and business spectrum gathered in Hackett Hall at the WA Museum Boola Bardip to talk about our culture palaces and the spaces around them.

Leading architect Stephen Woodland argued that cultural spaces now have to be more versatile in order to respond to shifting demands. A building must have the ability “change its whole persona over a relatively short period of time, for it to be at one moment an auditorium, at another for it to be an exhibition space or a community centre,” said Woodland, Creative Director for Cox Architecture.

High-profile property investor, developer and philanthropist Randal Humich regaled the audience with a sorry story about allowing one of the several empty buildings he owns in the Perth CBD to be used by a group for a performance only to have the event jeopardised at the last moment by the City of Perth because they had not obtained the correct permit. “There are always hurdles,” sighed Humich, chiming with the night’s overall anti red-tape vibe.

Geoff Warn, a former  Government Architect of Western Australia, decried  the lack of a unifying vision or the central city of the kind that has been embraced at Curtin University, which has become a vibrant, functioning precinct. “It’s incredible. They are actually making a city. They have a vision and everything is channelled through that vision,” said Warn. 

First Nations furniture and interior designer Leah Bennett complained about the lack of visibility for Aboriginal design apart from spaces where it is meant to fit. “We are home to the world’s oldest living culture and it is hardly seen, “ said Bennett.” You can’t walk into a high-end space and find Aboriginal design.” 

And Helen Curtis, founder and director of the creative consultancy Apparatus and a fearless champion of quality public art (she led the fight against the Brendan Murphy’s Boonji Spaceman replacing Paul Ritter’s Ore Obelisk in Stirling Gardens and the battle to save  Lorenna Grant’s The Arch), emphasised that there was little point investing in cultural spaces if that money is not matched by investment is what goes into the those spaces.

The argument that there should be as much support for art and artist as there is for buildings and spaces was the backbeat of the entire evening, so I drilled down on this key issue with a follow-up conversation with Curtis.

“In Perth there is a disconnect. We continue to design and invest in spaces for culture — theatres, precincts, the public realm — but we are not funding the cultural life that animates them,” argues Curtis, who spent many years heading the arts team at the City of Perth (in other words, she knows how the bureaucracy that Humich complained about).

“Without sustained investment in artists and creative practice, these spaces risk becoming empty shells. Right now, the part of the system that actually produces culture  — the artists themselves  — is going backwards, and that undermines the very purpose of the spaces and places we’re building.

“The result is a growing imbalance,” continues Curtis. “We are getting better at designing spaces for culture but worse at sustain the cultural life that fills them out. Without meaningful investment in artists and creative practice these spaces cannot fulfil their purpose — and our capital city is particularly impoverished.”

Curtis is not against continuing investment infrastructure, which is extremely important. But we need to change the way we think about the art that takes place inside our cultural palaces and spaces.

“Arts should be regarded as essential infrastructure,” argues Curtis. “A play or a dance or musical performance  is as vital as the stage they perform on and the building that houses it.

“The latest World Cities Culture Report shows that cities are no longer treating culture as ‘nice to have’. Culture is being actively deployed to address the defining challenges of our time: climate, health, education, social cohesion, economic resilience, even the loneliness epidemic.  Across more than 40 global cities, culture is positioned as essential urban infrastructure – a tool for shaping better, more connected, more resilient places.” 

And because culture is important to well-being as any other form of infrastructure it is not something that should be left up to the private sector, says Curtis.

“Philanthropy is often positioned as a solution to the problem of supporting the arts. It is important but it simply does not operate at the scale required to keep the culture as healthy as a society needs it to be,” she contends.

“Private giving represents only a small fraction of total arts funding and cannot make up for reductions in public investment. 

“More critically, philanthropists increasingly want to shape outcomes, tending to favour established institutions, possibly less challenging work, and often only supporting and therefore magnifying those voices that echo the philanthropists values, which risks narrowing the diversity and critical voice of culture itself.”

It is also vital that government support doesn’t remain static but needs to keep up with inflation and rises in the cost of living and other economic changes. 

“Government funding for the arts has not kept pace in real terms, with investment now sitting at its lowest point in almost a decade, and failing to keep up with both inflation and broader economic growth,” she says, citing The Australia Institute’s recent submission to the Commonwealth Inquiry into arts and cultural philanthropy,

Curtis is especially critical of the City of Perth’s cultural policy, which she believes has shifted its focus away from supporting artistic practice to orchestrating attendance-grabbing events and chasing bums on seats.

“We’re reducing culture to attendance. We need to be supporting all kinds of cultural production, ideas and discourse,” says Curtis.

“There is a lot of talk about culture delivering economic, social and urban outcomes. But the way not to achieve this is by sprinkling around imported events — firecrackers and lightshows — but nurturing ecosystems that make the culture. Culture is not something imposed by bureaucrats. It flourishes in soil that is nurtured.

“Without the arts, we don’t have culture — we just have infrastructure, which is boring. I don’t want to live in that place.”

What the city could with proper investment and visionary thinking was demonstrated by the last Perth Festival, according to Curtis.

“When I walk through the city at five o’clock most nights, it’s just roller shutter after roller shutter going down. It  doesn’t feel safe. It looks and feels really neglected. But when I was walking through the city when the Perth Festival was on there was the PVI Collective doing a show in Barrack Street and there was STRUT Dance doing their amazing show in Forrest Place,” remembers Curtis.

“It was full of life and it was exciting. There was a real vibe. Imagine if we had that all the time. Imagine that any time you went into the city there was something on and the place was alive.

“It is such a wasted to have places in the city like Forrest Place and not programme events in there. We need to fund a more active cultural life in the capital city that will draw people in. Culture can by a catalyst for the revitalisation of the city.”

Like Humich, who owns a number of buildings in the CBD whose top floors are crying out to be activated, Curtis believes that bureaucracy and red tape is making it difficult for those who want bring their practices to central Perth.

“The City is chasing its tail and not paying enough attention to being a great capital city. It needs to reduce the bureaucracy so that artists can do what they do and not spend all their time grappling with red tape,” says Curtis.

“It is the role of the City to create the conditions so artist can flourish and those cultural spaces can come alive, which will draw people into the city. It is all part of an eco-system. It just needs the City to keep out of the way and let it happen.

“Cities around the world are choosing to invest in cultural life as core urban infrastructure. They are aligning policy, funding and planning and they’re doing it in innovate and creative ways and they are seeing the results. It is what we need for Perth.”