Green Magazine #72 March-April 2020

As our cities rapidly densify, opportunities for new forms of multi-residential housing arise. This is the time for innovation in sustainability, both material and social – and also to look to the past for inspiration on successful forms of shared spaces. We take a look at five developments that we think got the recipe just right. Our cover home is a machine for living, pushing self-sufficiency well beyond the norm. Clinton Cole of CplusC Architectural Workshop has built a house to sustain and connect on a 90-square-metre wedge in Sydney’s inner-west. Within an iconic Melbourne block in the city’s heart, architect and furniture designer Adam Markowitz has gently reworked the layout of one of the apartments and, using fine craftsmanship, elevated the interior to another level. Rather than max out its site, a…

Convergence The latest collaborative project from avant-garde object designer, Trent Jansen with designer and Nyikina man, Johnny Nargoodah captures the two’s differing sensibilities and skills in working with animal skins. Shown as part of Melbourne Design Week 2020 by Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert, ‘Partu’ (2020) – the Walmajarri word for ‘skin’ – presents a range of pieces, of which this chair is one. trentjansen.com gallerysallydancuthbert.com Round Sydney designer-maker Max Harper’s eye for detail guides his interest in lighting and furniture. “Big Round” is no exception, with its texturally-intriguing cork top resting on a slender base of powder-coated steel. maxharper.co Tassie’s Finest The Tasmanian Design Awards bring together emerging, established and professional designers to honour their excellence and, crucially, pursuit of sustainable practices. The following works from last year’s finalists attest to the talent of makers down south. designtasmania.com.au Isaac Williams Rebirthed Tub…

Pilot and co-director of consultancy firm SFM, Dave Wise regularly flew over the timbered river valleys flooded in the 1980s by Hydro Tasmania and wondered what could be recovered from the drowned forests. Many moons later, after feasibility studies and funding from state and Federal governments, Dave and business partner and botanist Andrew Morgan launched Hydrowood. The brand is a marketing dream, recovering high-quality timber from beneath the surface of Lake Pieman without requiring logging in Tasmania’s native forest. A variety of timber is harvested and due to the depth, pressure and lack of light and oxygen, the wood does not rot. It is estimated there is 150 000-cubic-metres of product in the 60-kilometre-long Lake Pieman including celery top pine, sassafras, Tasmanian oak, myrtle and blackwood. Huon pine logs are rare…

LIVEABILITY 537 Elizabeth by Woods Bagot is billed as a “prototype” for compact, urban living – but given how dextrously this project accommodates 12 one-bedroom-plus-study apartments onto a Sydney microsite measuring roughly six-by-30 metres, it arguably qualifies as an exemplar. Each of its seven floors holds two apartments replete with bespoke joinery components and a fully curated furniture package developed by Woods Bagot and Living Edge. Indeed, much care has been lavished upon the details of 537 Elizabeth, from custom-designed letterboxes to a dedicated bike lobby with individual timber-clad secure storage areas (off-street parking isn’t provided given the site’s inner-city amenity). Passive environmental design solutions are implemented to manage environmental conditions – operable windows are provided to all rooms, cross ventilation is achieved in communal spaces and balconies on the east…

“A house must be a machine for sustaining life if we are to survive the next 100 years,” says Clinton Cole, referencing Le Corbusier’s famous statement: “A house is a machine for living in.” Clinton is director of CplusC Architectural Workshop, and his new family home in Darlington, Sydney, integrates nature, energy, water and food into the architecture, so that it generates and stores solar power; harvests and recycles rainwater; and produces fruit, vegetables and fish. “This house brings meaning back to architecture and connects people with landscape, food production, energy and rainwater capture,” Clinton says. The house is located on a 90-square-metre wedge-shaped site that Clinton would walk past on his way to University of Sydney where he studied architecture. He long had his eye on the derelict property for…

Architect CplusC Architectural Workshop cplusc.com.au Passive energy design Designed with the building’s lifespan in mind, Welcome to the Jungle House is built to last. The steel structure, although higher in initial embodied energy, requires less maintenance and will long outlive the alternative timber structural elements. With careful orientation, the building intelligently reacts to the microclimate of the location, heating the spaces with passive solar heating and thermal mass when needed, and cooling with transpiration-cooled predominant breezes when needed. The façade oriented photovoltaic system is fixed in place with a clip system, allowing panels to be serviced and/or replaced with future models that may have higher efficiency, meaning the home can adapt to the newest technologies in the future. Provisions are made for electric car charging as the popularity of electric cars continues to…