Over at my Flickr photostream I’ve put together an image set called Canberra’s Top Twenty—a list of Canberra’s most important modernist houses. The images are geo-tagged, and I’ve created a KML file for you to play in Google Earth.

While some may argue that the list is arbitrary, it is substantially based on significance according to the Royal Australian Institute of Architect’s Register of Significant Twentieth Century Architecture and nomination to or listing on the ACT Heritage Register. It is open to debate, of course, and a colleague has already taken me to task for initially including Robin Boyd’s last Canberra house at 12 Marawa Place ahead of Noel Potter’s house at 3 Arkana Street, Yarralumla. But it’s an interesting exercise, nonetheless.

Looking at the tour, it’s interesting to see the geographic spread of the houses around Canberra. While many are located in the inner south and date from the 1930s to the 1960s—modernism’s golden age if you like—there are examples in some of the newer suburbs, or areas developed since the late 1960s. It finishes around the mid 1970s, in line with the general feeling that heritage has to be older than 30 years to qualify as such.

It also highlights how few of Canberra’s houses are of heritage significance. When one talks about heritage listing (and more importantly) preserving houses, it’s not as though we’re talking about locking away vast tracts of valuable land from developers. Of Canberra’s total housing stock we’re only talking about protecting and conserving a tiny handful of houses from the mid twentieth century. And if we’re unable to do that it reflects badly on us as a community.

So, download this KML file and view Canberra’s Top Twenty in Google Earth. Let me know what you think.