Innehållsförteckning för March 2025 från Architecture Australia

It is now widely accepted that climate change is a reality and human actions have, over the decades, contributed through our greenhouse gas emissions. All good science points towards catastrophic impacts if not contained. The rising frequency and intensity of extreme heat, flood, wind and other events continue to affect the health and wellbeing of all inhabitants of the planet. This is a global issue and will require a global response, and though countries like Australia are now taking leadership in driving change, it is not comprehensive enough to keep the temperature rise within 1.5 or even 2 degrees Celsius. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Emissions Gap Report 2024 highlights that, to stay on track towards a 1.5 degrees Celsius goal, the world needs to reduce emissions by over…

Powerhouse Place in Mildura has transformed a once-forgotten industrial site and reconnected the city to its lifeblood, the Dhungala/Murray River. Designed by Public Realm Lab, the precinct provides a framework for the community, offering diverse engagement opportunities and establishing a new civic heart for the city. Once home to a coal-fired power plant, and a rare example of early riverfront industry, the original powerhouse building had sat underutilised since its decommissioning in the 1950s. An updated 2019 masterplan for the broader riverside precinct envisioned the site as a larger development, aiming to activate the river frontage as a tourist destination and a place for locals to gather. However, early market research revealed a lack of suitable operators to anchor and sustain such a scale. Alongside funding that was lower than…

The twentieth century saw new developments, of varying quality, filling land and replacing older buildings in Australia’s cities to meet the demands of a growing population. While the pressure to accommodate growth continues, today’s environmental crisis requires a different approach that must work with these built legacies as the starting point. Retention or minimal build is foregrounded when considering the whole-life-cycle carbon footprint of buildings, including the embodied emissions of materials from extraction and manufacturing processes, construction, operation, maintenance and end-of-life. However, a lot of the built environment is functionally, environmentally and sometimes aesthetically underperforming. Likewise, there can be entrenched perceptions – good and bad – of buildings that can shape outlooks and briefs. Today’s conditions require design skill to assess existing buildings and land use, to harness potential and…

Moreton Bay was established first as a penal settlement in 1824 before it was thrown open to free settlers in the early 1840s, eventually becoming the town of Brisbane. Imagine new settlers arriving from the United Kingdom, mainly Irish and Scottish, to take up new pastoral leases with limited possessions. This is where my ancestors enter. They brought herds of cattle and sheep from inland New South Wales via what we now know as the Darling Downs and descended via Cunningham’s Gap onto the rich country of the Brisbane River valley. They had few possessions, materials and tools, and there were no hardware shops on the frontier, but undoubtedly an axe, a crosscut saw and an adze were in their toolkit. How did they build their first houses? By observing…

The Shed is the latest of a trio of recent buildings by Wardle at the University of Tasmania’s Inveresk campus, each forming key new parts of the now largely complete masterplan that has resulted in the consolidation of the Launceston base of the institution into a single location and the effective weaving together of the campus with the immediately adjacent and broader community.1 As one of the last parts of the plan to be implemented, The Shed can be considered as a distillation of the civic and environmental aspirations of the broader Northern Transformation Program (NTP) undertaken by the university over the last five or so years. Located on an urban site on the central business district side of the North Esk River and joined to the main campus precinct…

Architects play a central and important role in addressing the acceleration of the planetary crisis where non-renewable and renewable resources are consumed at unsustainable levels, greenhouse gas emissions are still on the rise and biodiversity is under a growing threat. Climate change, along with the already extreme weather conditions often experienced in Australia, significantly increase the risks of floods, fires and droughts. As global patterns worsen, the likelihood of these threats grows. The increasing awareness of global climate and biodiversity threats among Australian architects and practices has been highlighted by the more than 1,200 signatories (as of January 2025) to the Climate and Biodiversity Emergency declaration organised by Australian Architects Declare.1 In Australia – as in other developed countries – buildings and built infrastructure rely heavily on raw materials, with…

“In art, you ask questions, you speculate. In design, you often solve problems,” says Timothy Moore, curator of contemporary design and architecture at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). He shows me around the gallery’s latest architecture commission: an oversized “house” that looks as if it’s still under construction, complete with a real estate sign with the advertising slogan, “More space than you’ll ever need!!!” If art is cultural reflection and design is cultural production, then Home Truth by Breathe is a poignant and timely reflection on a part of Australian culture that is deeply entrenched in the country’s psyche: “My home is my castle.” The installation consists of a stud frame that replicates the average size of the Australian house – a footprint of 236 square metres – and…

Set within its parkland campus north of Sydney, Macquarie University is emerging as a hub of building sustainability. From the prefabricated Incubator built with design for disassembly in mind, to the mass timber structure of the Ainsworth Building, to the adaptive reuse of the Arts Precinct, a simple walk around the campus will expose you to the kind of low-carbon design approaches and materials our industry is widely calling out for. The latest development to join this cohort is the Michael Kirby Building by Hassell. Here, the part-retention of a 40-year-old concrete structure is combined with a timber extension above, creating an extraordinary building of material richness and precise engineering. As you approach the Michael Kirby Building along Wally’s Walk, the central spine of campus, and you’re greeted with a…

The principle of circular economy sounds obvious – defined, for example, by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation as “a system where materials never become waste and nature is regenerated.” But the roadmap to move from our current “take-make-waste” model of linear economic activity is not well defined, and the first steps toward adoption of this model are neither uniform nor apparent for different members of the built environment value chain. For architects, what would it mean to practice within a circular economy model? What would this look like and how might architects be positioned differently in the construction life cycle of the future? And importantly, how do architects (and their collaborators) get there, and soon? To answer these questions requires a synthesis of topics, ranging from the technological, economic and material…

(CASE STUDY 1) Platforms for Life Intelligent City is a technology-enabled urban housing company based in Vancouver, Canada. At the core of Intelligent City’s approach is its vertically integrated “Platforms for Life” (P4L) product platform. This model replaces traditional and more fragmented construction processes with a systematised and scalable solution that combines parametric design, robotic manufacturing and pre-engineered mass timber building components. In recent years, Intelligent City has developed and certified its building systems and their associated manufacturing technologies to enable the design and delivery of mass timber urban housing at scale. P4L helps solve three of the main challenges facing Canada: the reduction of carbon emissions, the expansion of lower-cost building technologies that create more affordable housing, and support for the forestry industry by establishing innovative, value-added mass timber…

“When your industry is like a small community, there is less competition, more collaboration and the work is more enjoyable and productive.” These are the words of Jake Milgrom-Marabel, a director of “impact investment” company Tripple and the primary client for Sanders Place – a new co-working and event space in the thriving inner-Melbourne suburb of Richmond. The project provides a compelling alternative template for prevailing consumptive development and construction practices. The latter produces a third of the world’s waste and is responsible for 39 percent of energy-related global carbon emissions.1 Sanders Place was created for, and by, a community of future-focused social and environmental changemakers. Fittingly, it is centred on the retrofit of a common warehouse typology – two 1970s brick-and-concrete extrusions, both two-storeys high with pitched roofs and…