Vision Magazine
26
Was there a point when you felt you finally cracked the design? I don’t think we were ever overly confident because retrofitting hadn’t been done before and of course we wondered what the judges would make of it. Once we began to receive media coverage we realized we were on the right track and perhaps stood some sort of chance. What about price for such a house? A full retro-fit of this scale would cost around $300K but this can be significantly reduced if commercialized. This is the ultimate solution and there are many tiers to the retro-fit and so there are various budget options that can be made to fit and stretch. Any other benefits to flow from your success? It shows what you can achieve when so many people share the same goal. Everyone involved learned so much from such hands-on experience and to have it recognized in this way is really beyond our wildest dreams. Actually that’s a good point - it taught us to dream the big dream. Credits
Project The Illawarra Flame House Builder Team UOW - with support from Matt Jolley Builders Structural Engineer Scott Redwood. Service Engineer Michael Whitehouse Other CSR products used Gyprock SupaceilTM Plasterboard Principal Glass Provider Viridian Principal Glazing Double-glazed doors and windows Viridian PerformaTech E™ IGU with dual Low E coating
The premise of using an existing ‘shell’ seems fundamentally sound. There is a lot of embodied energy lost if you simply start designing and building from scratch. The philosophy of recycling is a major strength of this entry. Of course the clip on end pods are new but we retain enough of the original to make major savings for the buyer and in energy consumption during construction and operation. Given you had to ship the house to China, presumably it demanded absolute simplicity and a really modular, pre-fabricated construction? It had to be broken into around 27 major pieces and quickly re-assembled Meccano-like. The concept is that we can do this even more easily in Australia to an existing house and that it can be implemented using a tiered approach with various extents of the retrofit, affecting the cost and payback periods. The winning model is fully optioned and comes with ‘the works’. One of the challenges of successful Green design is to strike the balance between amenity and a wide range of technical performance criteria. How do you find that right balance? That was really crucial at every step. It had to work, look good and feel like a terrific place to be. You work towards that balance of performance and amenity and an ability to connect with the environment. It’s trying to overcome the best technical solution with a very acceptable aesthetic solution. One needs to convincingly complement the other. What other strategies did you use to reduce embodied energy usage for example? All of the materials use d already existed or were locally sourced such as Viridian’s double-glazed units for windows and doors. That definitely helped our sustainability cause because it reduced the embedded energy costs of transport and inherent energy production. It’s a top-level performance glazing system that allowed us to be expansive rather than introverted. We definitely relied on sponsors to help get this over the line and ensure the prototype worked so well.
Right Viridian double-glazing was critical to achieving such high energy performance.
Supreme Green