Yet it’s so on-trend. Concrete is the new black. We used to deride the concrete box. Now it seems we all want to live in one. Culturally, it is coming at us from four directions: the revival of mid-century brutalism; the contrary vogue for voluptuous expressionism; the plague of cookie-cutter resi-towers driven by the fallacy that development booms reduce prices (they don’t); and the idea that a rich-person’s house should possess the warmth and appeal of a campground shower block. I’ve always had a weakness for mid-century Brutalism, although most of what is now touted as that is neither of the style nor vey good, but merely brutal. I always admired the Atelier 5 stuff in Berne, the Howell Killick stuff in London and one or two bits in Australia. Also of course Corbusier’s La Tourette. But they’re lovely for their discipline, their austerity. It’s a look, and maybe it’s fine for workspace, but really – is it where we want to live? Loading Around Sydney’s comfortable east-burbs, house building once involved teams of carpenters and brickies. Now it’s a six-year-old boy’s sandpit fantasy, a full-macho exercise in cranes, excavators, pile drivers and queued-up concrete trucks drilling and pumping God knows how many cubic metres of concrete into the earth, much as a dentist fills a tooth.

Three and four storeys, these mansions typically occupy the entire width of a site that once wrapped lush gardens around a large veranda-tiered villa. I’m surprised this site-stuffing is still allowed, so efficiently does it block the view from the street. But what surprises me more is the concrete itself, erupting across the site in shards and cliffs and cantilevers. I’m surprised that people who could have anything want this. Naturally, to get the look, the true, soul-scouring industrial chic, you must leave the concrete bare; walls, floors, ceilings, inside and out. Such houses, with their glass balustrades, pitiless spotlighting and ubiquitous infinity pools can look stupendous. All very 60s LA cocaine-set snuff movie. But the feel? The feel is emaciated. Comfortless. Gaunt. This is weird. Encouraged by our ever-more visual media, we’ve started to behave like vision is our only working sense. Acoustics? Pah. Touch? Phooey. Experiential knowledge? What even is that? Concrete was a great material for Harry Seidler. Credit:Robert Pearce Concrete is the photographer’s dream, and the architect’s. Coercible into almost any shape or surface, concrete can do glorious things with texture, colour and light. It can be dramatic or nuanced, emulate glass, wood, or velvet. It can do Tadao Ando’s cubist planes, Luis Barragan’s brimming Mexican colour, Corbusier’s light- washed walls, Harry Seidler’s moulded beams and open-tread stairs, Zaha Hadid’s wild, voluptuous curves.

Concrete is the medium of ego and object. But a house is, above all, subject. Something to love and look forward to, to imagine your way into and feel nurtured by, soul to soul, a dwelling is supremely experiential. This is architecture’s essence, but it can’t be photographed. You can’t put it on Vogue, or even Insta. My funny old Redfern terrace had timber floors and stairs with great turned newel posts. In storms it’d creak and groan like an old ship. I loved that. It was doing its work, protecting our family, holding us in its maternal belly. It might complain, but it never felt gaunt, brittle or just plain dead. So perhaps, I wonder, the fashion for concrete is a form of self-punishment, a boot-camp yearning for the whip of necessity on our defenceless domestic flesh. Celeb-chef Simon Bryant has an ultra-gloomy Soviet-inspired concrete house with a proudly “prison-like” wash room with cattle-grid drain. “It’s a little bit get f----d,” he quips. Mostly, in fact, concrete is very get f-----d. It’s acoustically horrible, especially in multi-unit dwellings where sound reverberates around you like a trepanning drill. It resists change, makes hanging pictures a huge palaver and – cement being the third-highest producer of anthropogenic CO2 - is ecologically abysmal. Plus there’s an alternative. CLT is cross-laminated timber. It should be New Zealand’s gift to the world but has actually evolved in northern Europe and Scandinavia. It uses a renewable resource that sequesters carbon. While concrete monsters are swallowing Sydney – the highrises popping up across the world so fast the manufacturers can’t keep up are made of timber.

So far, the highest is Vancouver’s Tallwood House student housing (18 storeys). There’s one at 14 storeys in Bergen, ten-storey versions in Brisbane and Melbourne and six-storeys at Barangaroo in Sydney. Sumitomo, meanwhile, says it plans a hundred-storey (350m) CLT building in Tokyo. Walking into these buildings you smell forest. They’re acoustically soft, absorbent. And, counter-intuitively, they do well in fire , where the massive tree-scale timber columns char and self-protect. They’re also nice to be near. They have feel. They have warmth. Build me terrace houses in timber. Apartment buildings. Condos. Build that clifftop mariner’s house in timber, quirky as you like. I’ll be there like a shot.