“The more work I got, the cheaper I could build, because I could use standardisation and mass production and the more I built, the cheaper they got, and cheaper they got, the more I built, and this was a sort of vicious circle in reverse.” [1]

From the early years of the Swan River Colony, wetlands were used as convenient repositories for rubbish dumping.

In later years, municipal authorities gazetted wetlands as rubbish tip sites, and metropolitan rubbish was dumped into the wetlands until they were full. They were then flattened and used as sports grounds, parks and ovals.

Lake Poulett was drained in 1872, and after serving as the town rubbish dump and then Chinese gardens, was partly used for the formation of Birdwood Square in 1914 (Seddon 1972).

By 1901 the clay pits east of Plain Street had been transformed into Queens Gardens but directly across the road was the East Perth rubbish tip filled with water, overflowing with rubbish and surrounded by mud and decay, it was a standing disgrace. In 1904 the tip was covered with sand and transformed into sports playing fields which are now the Western Australian Cricket Association grounds (WACA) (Stannage 1979).

The Eastside Gardens in East Perth is the the first building in Australia to be constructed entirely from slipformed concrete. To achieve greater heights beyond the scope of brick construction, architects Krantz and Sheldon, commissioned by the Bond Corporation. developed a construction technique that was superior in the speed of construction which significantly saved costs. This new construction technique allowed Krantz and Sheldon to benefit in the economies of mass production.[2] For the first time in Perth, a building could be constructed at a high output of efficiency and speed. In this regard, bulk orders of building fittings and fixtures such as doors, windows, stoves, furnishings, locks and the like, were ordered at a high turnover and therefore at a cheaper rate. Krantz could design and construct buildings cheaper and quicker than anyone else in Perth, and was based on the ability for standardization in their buildings.  Their desire to continue building flats at an ever increasing rate through methods of rationalized efficiency became the norm, taking this building as one of the first to what we see today in contemporary apartments.

Notes:

[1] Jane Fleming, “Krantz Interview”, 1981.

[2] Crist, Graham, “Krantz and Sheldon: Modernity and urbanism. Flats in Perth 1930-1980”, (Dissertation, University of Western Australia, 1990), 62.