Crown’s new casino building (did we vote for another casino?) planned for Barangaroo is a placeless monolith that looks like it could have been been transplanted from Dubai – it reflects nothing of where it sits on the shores of Sydney Harbour.

Crown casino building – in Sydney or Dubai?

Place responsive design is usually lost in global cities like Sydney. Over the years modernism, and more recently the new internationalism, have created cities that by and large have no discreet character. Paul Kelly gets it right when he sings “Every f*#@*%n city looks the same.” There are exceptions of course, and Spain seems to have more of these than anywhere else.

The Opera House has come to define Sydney, but Utzon conceived it in response to what he saw in the Harbour – a built response to the nature and natural dynamic of the vast estuary, that does not pretend it is not a building, but celebrates the context in which it sits.

Does the vast glass tower at Barangaroo do the same? I think not. It is placeless, a pretentious orphan sitting loud and proud piercing a jewels that humbly does not shout back. The jewel will continue to do its thing, with no real interaction with the tower. Much like Blues Point Tower, nearly opposite: a dull cubist monolith that looks exactly like it was lifted from some dreary estate in Manchester. Sorry, Harry, I have never been a fan, but rest in peace – we can always change it.

Trevor King, a building designer, heritage consultant and thinker, and I have done a fair bit of work on place based design: we call it ‘localness’. It is what has hitherto made the world such an interesting place. Well, to be fair, Trevor has done nine tenths of the work, or more. I present his work as often as I can. Together we wrote a definitive paper on the subject, with a specific emphasis on how real localness assists in producing more sustainable buildings. The text can be found here, and although there no pics on that page, a book is coming that will expand on the theme, with oodles of photos showing exactly what we mean!

There is another article here, among many more on the topic, at Architecture & Design.

On September 14, a referendum will be held to determine whether local government should be recognised in the Constitution. Currently it exists at the whim of state governments – did you know that?

This week the O’Farrell government is attempting to push a Bill through the NSW Parliament* that would hold local councils hostage to the whim of any current or future government.

Is there a connection? Is there an attempted pre-emptive move here?

For various reasons – some good, some bad – state governments find local governments annoying. Too many NIMBYs, too small to be viable, too quick to point out the state’s failings, always too loud in crying poor. It’s a fact that local government is the most immediate tier of our unwieldy governmental structure, the most connected to the community. This is a good thing. In fact, it’s essential to have a tier of government which is awake to and acting on the dodgy footpath in Ramsay St, the village renewal in the shopping centre, and the number of places and staffing in the local childcare centre. Any government which is beyond the local level loses touch, and the community feels left out.

What is also essential is a national government. Defence, foreign affairs and trade, health, education, major catchments and ecosystem management, national energy markets and long range strategic planning – all these sit naturally on the relevant desks in Canberra.

So what is state government for? What can state governments do that either local or national governments can’t? You tell me, because I can’t find a thing that they can do better than either of the other two. Why do we have them? Because they are a historical artifact of colonial days: Henry Parkes could not convince the various Premiers to merge into a truly national form, and so we are stuck with the legacy of poor vision from 1898. Excellent reason for state governments to exist. Brilliant.

Which leads back to the question of the Bill currently making its miserable and Machiavellian way through the NSW Parliament.

I suspect it’s an attempt to hobble the referendum, to weaken local government before it has a chance to finally grow up on the national stage. Deny it if you will Barry O’Farrell, but the evidence supporting my suspicions is compelling.

* Local Government Amendment (Early Intervention) Bill 2013

Another take on the situation can be found in The Fifth Estate, here.

Pittwater Food Wine & Sustainability Fair was a hoot of day! Held on Sunday 5 May at Winnerreremy Bay, Bayview/Mona Vale, we had 10,000 visitors (not all at once thankfully).

Envirotecture was there with some really interesting material. We shared a stand with Collyn Rivers, guru of all things small scale renewable energy and camper-touring, and Redarc who make all things hi-tech for small scale renewables in Adelaide.

Moondog was there, giving photon-powered joy rides around the bay – people took the opportunity to let the future float their boat!

Insideoutback Campers was there too, showing that you can travel Australia with low emissions, low fuel consumption, and low impact, and really be connected to the land you set out to explore and enjoy.

More info and location map is here.

Hope to see you there again next year!

Moondog, Envirotecture’s solar powered workhorse, took a well earned break from powering the office. We enjoyed a short promotional tour of Myall Lakes in late March 2013. The lakes were still in flood from the big wet of late summer, and the water level was at least half a metre higher than normal, but had been over a metre higher than that in the preceding weeks!

Using Moondog’s catamaran platform is ideal for exploring, camping, and swimming from. We made a fun HD video with some great music, here.

Moondog’s normal 9 to 5 job is powering the computers in the Envirotecture drawing office, and the whole idea of the project is to demonstrate the very practical uses that solar power can be put to.  You can read the full techie story here.

According to new figures from the country’s grid operator REN almost three quarters of the electricity consumed in Portugal during the first quarter of the year came from renewable sources.

54% of Europe’s energy comes from zero or low emissions ources, which makes a mockery of the debate in Australia over our rather measley 20% by 2020 target.

Full story here.

If we have the technology (almost) to ‘print’ buildings, can we make them all different, so they respond to the place they are in?

A giant 3D printer – squirting concrete from its print jet – can now build a building. It is very precise, saves a lot of wasted material and energy. And it is fast – think in terms of one day to build an average home. Because computers can carry out a long list of unique tasks without confusion (well, maybe not your average home PC!), such a machine could build a street full of unique houses.

Animation of CRAFT Contour house builder at work

Or more appropriately, when in Bermagui it could build a house designed specifically for the temperate climate and the cultural context of the NSW south coast, and when in Broome, it could equally build a lovely troppo home that responds to the dry season breezes and can hide from cyclones – all without getting the least bit confused.

This presupposes that the humans who input the CAD modelling get it right! And place based design is critically important for a number of reasons, not just the energy efficiency of site specific passive design. It is also a cultural thing: Broome should not look like Bermagui, nor vice versa. Yet so much of current suburbia and cityscapes are placeless lookalikes. And this has happened when we build with ‘sticks and bricks’ – hand assembling most of the building on site. If ever there is an opportunity to get a place-responsive design right it is when building on site. Yet we (and I dissociate Envirotecture from that genralisation – hopefully that does not appear arrogant) too often get it wrong.

3D printing a moon base?

The possibility of Computer Aided Manufacture (CAM) in building has been explained most eloquently by one of its leading researchers, Behrokh Khoshnevis. He is a professor at the University of Southern California, and is the Director of the Center for Rapid Automated Fabrication Technologies (CRAFT) at USC Viterbi. He has a TEDx talk here with animations of the CRAFT machine at work.

The importance of place-based design, or place responsive buildings, has also been written about by Trevor King (mainly) and me in several journals, including a full series in Building Designers Brief. Fundamentally the theory says that if you look into the climate, topography and flora of a site you will find the necessary clues to design in a place-responive way – including by inference passive design. Overlay any appropriate or valuable human heritage (note this allows you to disregard crappy development) and you have the whole design pallette at your fingertips.

Sample page of Trevor King’s “Littleton Gardens Artists Design and Style Guide”

Combining these two disciplines is possible. Will it come to pass? Time will tell, but if it does, Envirotecture and hopefully many others will be ready to engage with the technology in an effort to secure a really good result.

A new take on the eco-village idea is on the scene at Kew, just south of Port Macquarie NSW. Like all eco-villages, it looks after its own resources, and makes great use of its beautiful riverside site on the Camden Haven River. But this one also provides business opportunities for residents.

It’s called The Chimneys, in honour of the heritage listed remnants of early settler cottages that sit at the top of the site. All that remains are the brick chimneys, and the subdivision wends its way around these and down the gentle slope to the river below. It really is one of the most beautiful pieces of country I have ever seen.

The heritage chimneys that give the development its name.

The Chimneys website says this: “A sustainable sub-division can be practical, profitable, financially viable, and quick to build, when compared with a conventional unsustainable subdivision. It’s called sustainable village living.

“A sustainable village is designed to achieve the highest levels of ecological and environmental sustainability with a holistic approach to the basic site selection, sub-division planning and construction, through to the requirements of the built environment.

“A sustainable sub-division is independent of council’s water, sewerage and road systems, recycle all water for reuse on site, generate most of its own energy and make major contributions to its residents’ food needs.

“Each building cluster shares its own small community space, and those clusters in turn are loosely arranged around a large central common open space, with shared amenities and facilities close by.

“The design guidelines of a sustainable village incorporating building clusters, will ensure that the overall vision and objectives are achieved: that all homes are energy efficient, safe and comfortable; that residents’ investment and quality of life are protected; and that a physically and socially cohesive community will flourish.”

Have a look, and make contact with them if it steals your heart like it has mine.

The beautiful original home on the site will remain, designed and built by Ian Bailey and Annie Georgeson.

And right at the end comes the biggest shock of all.

Watch – enjoy the awesome spectacle, and weep for a glacier in its death throes.

Chasing Ice – largest ever glacial calving event on film

Envirotecture is pleased to have provided some advice early on in the design phase, and we are one of many who have contributed – but really, these younge architecture and building students have done the really hard yards themselves, and we wish them well – they are worthy global contestants!

The University of Wollongong has teamed up with TAFE Illawarra, to form Team UOW. Team UOW is the first team from Australia to win a spot in the finals of the Solar Decathlon! From their website:

Team UOW is taking an aggressive and original approach to the Solar Decathlon China 2013 competition. By demonstrating how to retrofit an existing home, Team UOW is taking up the challenge set by the U.S. Department of Energy, China National Energy Administration, and Peking University’s goals to “accelerate the development and adoption of advanced building energy technology in new and existing homes”.

OUR MISSION

Team UOW’s core philosophy is to inspire the Australian community to embrace sustainable refurbishment technology, and to remove existing social and financial barriers to the implementation of these solutions. As an embodiment of this philosophy Team UOW will build a world class retrofitted house that will transform the past into a sustainable future.

THE COMPETITION

Lie back and think of England – or dance naked on the coffee table?

Another flood-punctutated fire season is in full swing and all we can do is hope Elvis the skycrane is around and the wind change is favourable. Otherwise, we just lie back and think of England, as it were. And that is the problem – after 225 years we are still thinking of, or more accurately, thinking like Englishmen. And now we are accepting mega-fires as an inevitability. When will we start thinking like Aboriginals in how we manage this country. Let’s begin by asking how come Aboriginal people do not have a long sad history of ‘Black Saturdays’?

I do not mean to belittle the efforts of firefighters. They are courageous, dedicated and self sacrificing heroes. But like the heroes at Gallipoli, I fear their sacrifice is too often in vain, and in the long sweep of history, misguided. I am a volunteer with a Community Fire Unit with Fire & Rescue NSW, and have battled bushfires since 1979, and while that does not give me the same level of personal experience as many RFS or CFA members, I have stared down the throat of the roaring monster, felt the guttural fear generated by a force way beyond my control, and I have witnessed at close quarters the destruction and loss wrought by fires big and small, including the immediate aftermath of the Black Saturday fires. In fact, those experiences reinforce my growing conviction that the effort and sacrifice of the fireys should not be squandered.

In 1788 the Australian bush was a parkland. It was possible to ride a horse at full gallop in the as yet untouched country behind the Sydney Cove settlement. (Watkin Tench, A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson, 1793) The first overland crossing from the early settlements at Hobart to Launceston was made by bullock dray, with not one tree felled to make room (in The Biggest Estate on Earth, Gammage, Allen & Unwin, 2011). The surveys and drawings of the early explorers show lines of dense vegetation separating areas of pasture, like broad fencelines. And everywhere they recorded smoke in the distance, and “blacks making fire” (Gammage, 2011).

Professor of History at ANU, Bill Gammage, in his landmark tome “The Biggest Estate on Earth”, says that the vegetation was managed to create a variety of crops over the course of the year, some of which were harvested directly, and others (pasture mainly) left to attract and fatten game, for hunting. And the tool for managing all of this was fire, used to the same effect that Europeans achieved using fences and ploughs. And yet this intensively managed landscape also maintained the full biodiversity that the ‘settlers’ inherited, and which we are losing at an increasing rate even now.

The crushing reality is that with very few isolated exceptions, there was no such thing as wilderness in Australia. It was mostly managed land. Culture and nature, hand in glove, in a very sustainable balance. This is a shock to many of us, especially when we have hung our hats on a particular notion of ‘wilderness’ for so long. Really, we should be shouting out about protecting ‘country’ – the word used so evocatively by Aboriginal people, like ‘mother’. For Country is a land in balance – managed, not exploited. This may in fact be one of the most effective and literal interpretations of Genesis 1: ‘to be a loving husband to the land’, traditionally misinterpreted as ‘to be an abusive exploitative chauvinist who cares nothing for the land’s wellbeing but looks for every opportunity to squeeze whatever he can from it.’

A major benefit of having a mosaic of different flora, with varying fuel loads, is that if a fire starts, before it gets too far out of control it will run into an area recently burnt and/or of a less combustible vegetation type. With enough of these slow points holding progress back, a cool change would come and with careful back-burning, the beast would be contained. Had this, or something very like it, not been the case, Aboriginal culture would be full of harrowing stories and local extinctions. Neither of these is the case, and so it is self evident that mega-fires did not occur. Of course there are stories about fires that should not have occurred, but these are isolated, with strong points of law attached to them.

Colonialisation changed that mode of management across nearly the whole country. Old ways are mostly forgotten, the law and culture shattered. A romantic but inaccurate notion of ‘wilderness’ has taken over. From 1996 to 2006, NSW Premier Bob Carr proclaimed a swag of new national parks. Many of these were marginal grazing country, since destocked and allowed to return to their ‘natural state’. But it had not been in that state for the previous 40,000 years. Yet neither Carr nor any subsequent Premier expanded the National Parks and Wildlife Service budget and staffing to manage this extra real estate. And even then it would have managed it the wrong way. This is a familiar story in most states.

But not quite everywhere. In the Kimberley – that blessed wild region the size of Victoria where hardly anyone from ‘down south’ goes, where WA Premier Barnett is hell bent on drilling and digging and fracking to extract yet more minerals and fossil fuels – there is a an area about the size of greater Newcastle-Sydney-Wollongong which has begun reverting to traditional fire management.

Mornington Sanctuary (the old Mornington Station since bought by Australian Wildlife Conservancy) in conjunction with several adjoining cattle stations and a national park, has re-engaged the local community to burn Country according to the old law and culture. This is done in a very hi-tech way, with satellite mapping and photography, helicopter fire drops, and careful on-ground sampling and measurements. I nick-named it ‘sat-nav firestick’. And it is having surprisingly positive results.

Under the old regime, there would be regular late dry season wildfires, that burned way too hot, over unplanned areas, causing stock losses, wildlife losses, and poor pasture management. Now, they have measured a strong bounce back in small marsupial populations, have no out of control wildfires, and the stations are making more profit in spite of carrying less stock. So far, the only downside is that nobody south of Fitzroy Crossing has taken much notice.

So how do we get governments and the community to take notice, to question the inevitability of mega-fires, to seek what remnants there may be of the old ways?

A 2013 study released by the ANU (“Investments in Fire Management: Does Saving Lives Cost Lives?” ) questions the money currently spent on fires generally (both building and bush fires). Lead author Brian Ashe (a standout case of nominative determinism if ever there was one!), on behalf of the insurance industry, argues that we already have a low death rate due to fires, that $16b is a high price to pay for the benefit, and that if this money was partially diverted to other social benefits (education etc), there may be a greater net community return. It’s certainly true that for all the onerous upgrades in the revised Bushfire Construction code (AS3959-2009), nothing but nothing will stand in the way of a mega-fire front. Apart from the moral problem of putting a dollar value on life, this study may jamb a useful crowbar under the hitherto unmoved mass of the status quo, whatever one makes of its conclusions.

This is not about “burning off”. Miranda Devine et al need to understand this is a much more complex management issue than will fit into any shallow argument, and it is not about politics or what the “greenies” have not allowed in the past. Indeed as Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies at UT Jamie Kirkpatrick points out very clearly, mere fuel reduction makes very little difference. This is about a complete rethink on landscape management. It is a challenge for conservationists, as it turns the long held notion of wilderness on its head. It is equally a challenge for bush-conquerors, as it forces them to acknowledge that Aboriginal knowledge refined over millennia was foolishly and  utterly disregarded by white supremacists, who now must eat very large slices of humble pie.

Bill Gammage’s seminal work should have been enough to start a fire of debate, but neither he nor I have seen much come of it yet. Bruce Reyburn has blogged, and the odd letter has appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald. Maybe Miranda Devine will prove useful after all, even if only to add publicity to the need for a rethink. I once attended a bible study lead by a dynamic woman who was infuriated by people not engaging in discussion, or testing ideas. “What must I do to get them to say something – dance naked on the coffee table?”

Sometimes getting a serious scientific debate going in Australia (note the double emphases, Devine et al) is like pulling teeth! Where’s that coffee table…

Dick Clarke

Director – Sustainability

Building Designers Australia

This blog was first published in The Fifth Estate on 24 January 2013.