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The connection continues with the very latest episodes featuring two of Viridian ’ s star performance products – LightBridge TM and MirraEcho TM Bronze . Julian Brenchley and Vision ’ s Peter Hyatt discuss the architect ’ s role where contestants must become design gladiators .
How do you create energised , fresh versions of The Block ? Over the years it ’ s been more of a function of what buildings we find , and are looking for , but quite often the buildings find us . We ’ re not waiting at a bus stop . We go out and get aggressive about it . We don ’ t look for old heritage buildings every year . How do we keep it fresh ? It ’ s always going to be new , it ’ s always going to be different . We just don ’ t know what we ’ re going to find , essentially .
“ You get it wrong , and , I mean , no one ’ s perfect , but if you get it wrong , you ’ ve got to live with it and make the most of it . Time , is what it ’ s all about . That ’ s the nature of a show , it ’ s the nature of the gig , and it ’ s high pressure , but it ’ s fun .” – Julian Brenchley
How critical is it that your buildings have a good skeleton – good bones ? Pretty essential . This is a massive building to be putting only six apartments in . It ’ s obviously really well made and it ’ s been around for the best part of 100 years . We ’ re lucky to be in it . As far as great bones , there ’ s still a lot of work to be done in these buildings . Before the contestants turn up , there ’ s two or three months of underpinning and structural retrofits and unimaginable damage before we put it back together again .
Your approach embodies this notion of sustainability in that you ’ re not demolishing , excavating and starting all over again . Well it is adaptive . That ’ s one of my fundamental kick-off points of sustainability through adaptive re-use . We steer away as much as we can from a greenfields site , or building from scratch . We look for buildings that have character . From my point of view , to have the opportunity to work with some of these really beautiful old buildings in adaptive reuse is fantastic .