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The trick to opening doors
Lucky view: Participants have to enter a ballot to win a tour of the Flinders Street Ballroom
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Lucky view: Participants have to enter a ballot to win a tour of the Flinders Street Ballroom. Courtesy of Open House Melbourne
Open House Melbourne has counterparts in many cities of the world, including London, New York and Tel Aviv.
Director and initiator Tim Leslie said that he himself had been involved in Open House London.
Back in 2008, he participated in the Committee for Melbourne's 2008 Future Focus Group.
The Committee's aims, according to him, included making sure that Melbourne remains viable as a city by identifying the 'type of things that the government should focus on, in terms of making sure that Melbourne was a vital place for business.'
During the two year course of the Future Focus Group, Leslie worked with a group of people from varying backgrounds, including those from nonprofit sectors to those from the financial industry.
As part of the course, the participants had to come up with ideas for projects to benefit Melbourne, and Leslie come up with Open House Melbourne as a proposal.
'If you want to explain a city or explain the history of a city we can do so through architecture quite successfully. You can see the boomtowns in Melbourne through the gold rush for instance, so open house seems to be the logical step,' he said.
The inaugural event began with eight buildings in the city, all in close proximity, and it gathered 30,000 visits, owing its success partly to their partners, which includes the Melbourne City Council and the Yarra Trams.
This year OHM drew 130,000 visits to the 111 buildings and sites it featured. The Melbourne Town Hall and Offices was reportedly the most popular, clocking over 9,400 visitors, while the Port of Melbourne Tour, which on the second day had to see some participants walk away empty handed due to limited capacity, came at number eight with almost 3,000 visitors.
Sponsors and partners this year include Heritage Council Victoria, Dulux and Shell Australia.
Aside from tours, the sixth OHM also included a number of talks about design concepts straight from architects' mouths.
Selection of buildings are done by using criteria and typology aiming for a wide range of building types, as well as by taking into account various architecture and sustainability award winners.
Leslie said that while the event accepts promotions, be them for environmental friendly messages and commercial designs alike, it is unlikely that OHM will become an arena in which real estate developer's race for property purchases.
'The key component for us is they open the building for free. We don't see it as our role to stop that communication, but the main thing is about the experience that the visitors have, so it is not meant to be a profit gaining property. We do have developers put forward projects that perhaps we cannot take on because we don't think they are of the appropriate quality that we want to be communicating with the public,' he said.
One thing that OHM tries to do, according to Leslie, is 'unlock ideas about fear of change,' in terms of an already built up environment.
He said that many people feel more comfortable with heritage buildings and less so with contemporary ones.
'...What you want to do is have the buildings ideally side by side and allow people to make a connection between the two and understand how things have progressed ... evolution and change are very important aspects of open house to communicate that the city does change and that is not necessarily bad,' Leslie said.
' JP/Dina Indrasafitri
