Merchant Builders

Name: Merchant Builders
Brand: Melbourne University Publishing
Price: 100.99 AUD
Availability: PreOrder

This is Not Subtopia!

By: Alan Pert, Philip Goad

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Hardcover | 10 November 2026

At a Glance

Format
Hardcover

Dimensions(cm)
31.5 x 21.5

Hardcover

RRP $140.00

$100.99

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Available: 10th November 2026

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Founded in 1965, innovative development company Merchant Builders pioneered cluster housing and townhouse prototypes that reimagined suburbia as relational rather than purely private. Their design briefs called for ambiguity: interiors that resisted rigid functionalism, and exteriors that blurred thresholds between house, neighbour and landscape. Pergolas, verandas and sunscreens created spaces of in-betweenness-sites for encounter, neighbourliness, and shared amenity.

Edited by Alan Pert and Philip Goad, Merchant Builders: This is Not Subtopia! reframes the story of suburbia, drawing on newly uncovered archives, photographs and first-hand interviews. It positions Merchant Builders' suburban experiments as a profound, if under-recognised, response to the problem of subdivision, and connects their legacy to today's urgent debates on affordability, sustainability, and the endless expansion of suburbia.
More than nostalgia, Merchant Builders is a call to arms: a reminder that our suburbs can be designed for sharing, ecology, and community.

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