Sustainable design a passion for award-winning architect
Peter Stutchbury is one of Australia’s most awarded architects. With entrepreneur Oscar Martin, he now produces prefabricated homes, the Dimensions X range, which sit lightly on the land.
What’s your definition of sustainability?
Sustainability is a broad thing, a cultural thing, a living thing. It’s not getting the door seals right, it’s not producing an energy sheet saying, ‘We are losing less energy’. With solar power, we are going to have bags of energy but what we need to do is to bring respect and responsibility back into our culture. [Culturally speaking], sustainability is social, emotional and practical. These are all aspects of living that maintain a healthy condition, and that healthy condition varies for every person. At the moment we’re going through a mental crisis with young and older people, but mainly younger people.
How do we sustain mental health?
Emotional sustainability is something that we don’t pay enough attention to in the design of our buildings. We designed a house for my family, which is intergenerational, so it can adapt as people come and go. I lived in Papua New Guinea for a couple of years and they had a very good system where the men live with the men in the village and the women with the women. And there’s sharing of food and caring of the kids. If a family got on particularly well, they spent all their time in the garden house – a house away, out in the garden. As a family, they just spend their time out there; people can visit them, which is socially very sustainable. It maintained the family. We put so much pressure on the family unit that it’s not as sustainable as it has been.
Is it about design?
In Japan, the grandkids are looked after by the grandparents, they have kindergartens in old people’s houses. There are all these techniques that have been developed traditionally that work. In the case of Aboriginal people, there are systems developed over thousands of generations to maintain or sustain society. We’ve inherited our design organisation from England but its climate and landscape are radically different from ours. Our landscape is ancient and yet we continue to put buildings, places and habitation here that don’t understand where they are, and don’t respect it. That’s a better word for sustainability – respect or responsibility.
But there’s a lot of interest now in sustainable housing, isn’t there?
The passive house has been pushed, but it relies on insulation from the outside to reduce energy, singular. My concern is that this insulation will cause detachment and disassociation not only from the place, but from nature, which is our best teacher.
Can you ever change the direction of mass housing in this country?
[Only] if government gets behind it. At the moment, we’re producing a prefabricated building [through Dimensions X] and it’s carbon negative, it’s beautiful, it’s economical, it’s toxic-free, it’s almost all Australian-made. And yet, we’re finding difficulty because people are so programmed in terms of the way they see a house; developers build the cheapest houses they can. We’ve sold our first five houses but only people who think of a sustainable future will buy this house. Again, it’s responsibility.
What should government be doing?
The trouble with government is that it changes every three or four years, so you’ve got no continuity, and continuity is a key to sustainability. When you have contiguous thinking, you get resolution. When you have disparate thinking, you get moments of history, that’s all you get.
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Concrete has a high level of carbon emissions, yet your new home in Sydney is part-concrete. How do you justify that?
Technically, it’s a big carbon footprint but with any building, you’ve got to design for place. If you don’t design for place, then the likelihood of that building sustainably surviving is low. Like if you go to hill villages in Italy, the buildings are 400 or 500 or 600 years old. You’re not allowed to knock them down, you have to renovate them, and they’re in stone. Very few people can build in stone these days because it’s so expensive, but you can build in concrete. So yes, the house has a carbon footprint, but I did use green concrete and galvanised reinforcements so that it’s not going to fail. But that building is over designed by a factor of 20 per cent so that it won’t suffer from concrete cancer. As long as all goes well in the world, the frame of that building will be there for a minimum of 400 years. But yes, we have to be careful about the use of concrete in housing and the Dimensions X product doesn’t use concrete.
You’ve talked in the past about the isolation you experienced as a child when you stayed with relatives on a remote property in NSW. What did that teach you?
The main thing it developed was an ability to read the landscape. My cousin would put me in a 5000-acre paddock of virgin bushland and hills and say, “There’s 1200 ewes in this paddock, can you bring them out?”. I had to look at the landscape and work out how I use it to help me, and that’s a really powerful experience. I realised that if I looked at the landscape and understood, it would give me lessons, and I use those lessons to underpin my approach to design. If we teach people to read, understand and appreciate the landscape, then we can put buildings on the land that are a lot more suitable to place.
Can we save the planet?
I have always thought society is going in two directions – one is money and one is nature. Unless we start respecting these systems that have been in place for hundreds of millions of years and start caring for our oceans and our deserts and our waterways, then everything we do will be for a very different sort of survival. We will slowly remove ourselves from surviving with nature to just survival, which will be growing plants inside the house and it will be like living on a moon surface. You’ll find fish dying and ice caps melting. It’ll be a whole different ball game.
You did your masters on Aboriginal culture. What did it teach you?
I can’t praise it enough really. It continues to come to the surface. When I did my thesis on Aboriginal culture, I started to see how people could live in this landscape. How it continues to affect me is by making me aware of the importance of respecting what we have in nature and its relevance to holistic survival.