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Friday, 7 September 2007

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From freakiness to mainstream - resource efficient housing in Sydney

Resource efficiency was not always so accepted. In the 1970s it was of marginal concern and was largely the property of the 'alternative' movement, those social dissidents who tried to build a better culture. In those days, Sydney was on the expansion binge that today makes it such a sprawling metropolis. But while the suburbs were eating into the agricultural land of the city fringe, the innovative fringe of Sydney University's architecture faculty did something unorthodox and built what was probably the country first energy and water efficient house. It was 1975 and the building was, let us say, a design that developers would not rush to copy.

The Autonomos House, as it was known, included a number of innovations for the time. It was made of second-hand materials and a tank collected rainwater from the roof - an unorthodox move for the time because rainwater tanks were then being phased out in the suburbs and some municipalities actually disallowed them. This was the era of the Modernist movement in architecture and water tanks, well, they were just so un-modern.

The house

Mark Baxter is a Steiner-influenced architect living and practicing in the Manly. In 1976, an article about the Autonomous House appeared under Mark's and the author's byline in the UK magazine, Undercurrents.

In that article, the Autonomous House was described as a rectangular structure of simple, shed-roof design built almost entirely with scrap and secondhand materials such as plywood offcuts, bricks and bottles. The total cost of the building was a mere AU$800, about half of which went on a Quirk’s wind generator. This was something else that distanced the building from what was then seen as modern architecture - only isolated rural properties produced their own power.

The aim of the student designers and builders was to make a self-sufficient structure that generated its own electricity, supplied its own heating and cooling, recycled its wastes and grew food in a garden. A greenhouse and verandah ran the length of the north (sunward) wall and were separated from the interior by a wall made of beer bottles set in concrete and filled with water. The idea was that during daylight hours the bottles would absorb the heat of the sun, their thermal mass releasing the stored energy to warm the building's interior in the evening.

Rather than using a common flatplate solar collector for heating water, the designers opted for a then-new design - of a parabolic reflector that focused the sun’s rays on a black storage tank. Waste water from the kitchen - what we today call greywater - was put through a sand filter and used to irrigate the garden. As for energy, plans were for other wastes to go into a methane digester constructed of two 200 litre (44 gallon) metal drums from which the residents hoped to obtain about 10 cubic feet of methane a day. It is unknown how well this worked or whether it worked at all.

With its solar water heating and rainwater collection, the Autonomous House was a direct forerunner of today's resource efficient buildings. It stood no more than a couple hundred metres - and 25 years distant in time - from Michael Mobb's Sustainable House. Today, Sydney University's Seymour Centre and carpark occupy the site.

Interregnum

Twenty years passed before the sensibiity of energy and water efficient housing design was realised. Then, in 1994, environmental consultant and landcape designer, Birgit Seidlich, produced the first local government legislation for energy efficient residential building - a Development Control Plan for Leichhardt Council.

Later in the decade the NSW government set up the Sustainable Energy Development Authority (SEDA) to promote energy efficient design. SEDA developed the Energy Smart Homes scheme in which local government voluntarily adopted model policy that mandated energy efficient dwellings in their municipalities. In June 2004, this gave way to state legislation that stipulates housing design that is both energy and water efficient - the Building Sustainability Index.

Even before these developments, owner builders, many from that same alternative milieu that figured in the Autonomous House, were busy along rural backroads building their own energy effiicient houses of mudbrick. Resource efficiency, although that was certainly a motivation, was not always the main reason for building in mudbrick. Economy was - mudbrick houses were easily made by owner-builders with time and energy to spare.

Brian Woodward, an architect who as a student had participated in the Autonomous House project, stimulated interest in the medium by offering weekend courses at his rural property, Earthways. Here, surrounded by forest, Brian and family lived in an impressive, photovoltaic-powered mudbrick house of two stories. And here it was that city people got their hands sticky learning how to make mudbricks and stack them to make a house.

Portent

Although architects were designing energy and water efficient private dwellings in the 1980s, the idea of resource-efficient medium density housing had to wait until the early 1990s when the Stringybark Grove townhouses on Epping Road, Lane Cove, were built.

Passive solar in concept, Stringybark Grove was a truly innovative development of the time. Fostered by the NSW Department of Planning, the then-new tool of Lifecycle Analysis was employed to select materials. Lifecycle Analysis calculates the amount of energy used over the life of a building, including energy consumed in manufacture of materials - what is known as 'embodied energy' - and the reusability of the materials.

This resulted in Stringybark Grove being built of bricks produced (by Boral) using a new process that consumed less energy. It featured concrete roof tiles, Quantum solar water heating systems and minimal use of aluminium, on account of its high energy consumption during production. The only aluminium in the development was sarking in the roof.

Bricks from the old houses that were demolished to make way for Stringybark Grove were ground into agggregrate and reused on site. Significant vegetation was retained as part of the landscaping and a 20 000 litre water tank was installed below the car park to hold roofwater that was returned to the townhouses for non-drinking purposes such as toilet flushing.

Inspiration to many - the Sustainable House

Perhaps the most accessible example of energy and resource efficient building, for a time, was Sydney's Sustainable House, a retrofitted Victorian terrace in the inner-urban residential enclave of Chippendale.

There, environmental lawyer Michael Mobbs opened his house to inspection (it is no longer open). Visitors saw:

• energy efficient, thermal mass, passive solar design
• the use of plantation timbers
• the use of natural light through louvred windows and glass bricks
• energy efficient artificial lighting
• a Dowmus composting toilet and greywater system
• the collection of rainwater and its storage in a tank below the verandah (the house is not connected to the city water supply)
• a grid-interactive, rooftop photovoltaic array generating electrical energy for use in the house and for sale to the energy utility.

Large areas of north-facing glass lets in winter sunlight to warm the interior. Guttering collects rainwater falling on the roof and delivers it to the underground tank.

Mobb's popularised the $40 000-plus of resource efficient refinements in his book, The Sustainable House (Choice Publishing, Sydney).

Medium density in Kogarah

Kogarah Council took the energy and water efficiency lead in the late 1990s with their adoption of SEDA's Energy Smart Homes policy. This established resource performance criteria for the conversion of a council car park into 200 energy and water efficient apartments - the Kogarah Town Centre development.

Opened in 2003 and designed as a passive solar structure with sunward aspect, the group of buildings reaches to six stories and generates electricity from a roof consisting of solar electric panels bonded directly to steel roofing sheets. Roof water is captured and reused and the plaza at ground level is home to small businesses and coffee bars - businesses that attract people. Deciduous pistachio trees line the street and will shelter outdoor diners as they grow. The street has been narrowed to reduce traffic speed.

Do-it-yourself retrofitting

Developments like Stringybark Grove and Kogarah Town Centre are the province of big money. It is EcoHome, in suburban Newcastle, that demonstrates the do-it-yourself approach to retrofitting existing building for energy and water efficiency.

From the street, EcoHome, which is open for public inspection once a month, looks like any of the older, modest weatherboard buildings common to suburban Belmont. But walk around the back and any resemblance ends:

• small windows have been replaced with floor to ceiling glass doors that open the living room and kitchen to the garden
• the doors open to the cooling draughts of summer and, when closed in winter, admit warming sunlight to be stored in the tiled floor of the living area (principle: thermal mass); a deciduous vine-covered pergola keeps out the hot summer sun
• a rooftop solar water heater provides economical hot water
• the lawn has been replaced with a productive, mulched vegetable garden and, immmediately beyond that, a small home orchard of fruit trees with sweet potato growing below.

Newcastle's EcoHome bears a resemblance to the resource efficient, weatherboard display house at the CERES environmental park in East Brunswick, Melbourne. Like EcoHome, the CERES house is typical of those in the area and was moved on site and aligned to the north to make best use of solar aspect, an important move in Melbourne's cold winters.

The CERES house demonstrates:

• solar access design, with large areas of glass to the north to allow maximum sunlight penetration in winter
• a trombe wall - essentially a wall-mounted, thermal mass heat storage warmed by the sun and closed off from the outdoors at night; the interior doors are then opened to allow the stored warmth to flow into the building's interior
• rainwater storage in a large concrete water tank from the edges of which a vine-covered pergola provides shade from the summer sun
• a clerestorey window to let light and warmth into a previously dark kitchen at the back of the house
• an air lock front entrance that prevents the venting of warm interior air when people enter in winter
• an edible landscape with fruit, culinary herbs and fruit trees, including a side fence supporting espaliered fruit trees.

EcoHome and CERES demonstrate that existing housing stock can be made more resource efficient and comfortable, but with the expansion of medium density living in the cities, the examples of Stringybark Grove, the Sustainable House and Kogarah Town Centre are important to demonstrate that higher density living can be energy and resource efficient.

Energy efficient in Manly

Keelah Lam is an environmentalist who has put her money where her convictions lie are made the addition of an upper storey to her Fairlight house energy and water efficient. Keelah went to considerable trouble to acquire recycled building materials and remove nails and fittings to make them suitable for reuse.

Keelah Lam's retrofitted, energy and resource efficient house includes shading over the large glass areas to sunward, solar water heating, photovoltaic panels to produce electricity from sunlight and the use of second hand building materials. The vegetation at the front of the house is part of the blackewater/ greywwater treatment system.

The garden is home to a large galvanised iron water tank and an on-site sewage treatment system. A sunward aspect and solar water heater, and windows appropriately placed and shaded, are some of Keelah's energy efficiency strategies.

From freakiness to mainstream

Energy and water efficient housing has come a long way since its modest beginnings as a student project in the heady days of the mid-70s. When Mark and I wrote that article in Undercurrents, the concepts embodied in the Autonomous House were freaky to many. Now they are mainstream. Such is the journey made by innovative design.