SYDNEY OPEN: Sydney’s community on the weekend was treated to an open day around the theme of adaptive re-use, checking in on some of the more dramatic examples of heritage buildings transformed to modern use.
Among the buildings open for inspection were White Bay Power Station, The Brewery at Central Park, 50 Martin Place, and the controversial Sirius building converted from social housing to luxury apartments.
At the Martin Place Sydney Open, managed by Museums of History NSW, leading sustainability architect Caroline Pidcock hosted a talk with panellists Phillip Oldfield, head of the built environment at the University of New South Wales, Alan Croker, director and principal architect of Design 5 Architects and Michael Mossman, an Indigenous associate dean and lecturer at the University of Sydney.
“We’re on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator,” Pidcock opened. “Wouldn’t it be great if this weren’t true? …but that’s certainly not the case”, she added, referring to Spain’s devastating floods in the past days, and she might have added the US election result had the event been held just a week later.
In the face of that reality, it was critical to focus on doing what we can, she said.
“The value of embodied culture and resources that lie within the country we are on, and our constructed cities, buildings and materials present an opportunity to find ways to incorporate them into and enrich the future we need.”
First, what is embodied carbon?
Phillip Oldfield shared some humbling statistics on that and explained what embodied carbon meant in lay terms.
He explained that while New South Wales was committed to solving the housing crisis by building 50,000 homes a year, buildings were “inherently environmentally bad”.
“Buildings are responsible for 37 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions. The materials we use to build often are highly polluting and highly greenhouse gas intensive.
“Cement, for example, is responsible for 8 per cent of all CO2 emissions. That’s higher than the maligned aviation industry, which is about 2.5 per cent. We are all told not to get on planes, but we [are] not told not to use cement in every square metre of building we create – as [it] impacts the environment.”
Embodied carbon generates the emissions associated with building and materials construction. Examples of embodied carbon included extracting raw materials, extracting iron ore, manufacturing these ores into steel and fabricating, transporting and hoisting steel beams.
And then we have operational carbon, Oldfield said. That included lighting, heating, cooling, airconditioning, and all the electronics used daily in a building.
When the industry was still in its infancy, “we all thought 80 per cent of emissions were operational, and 20 per cent was embodied,” Oldfield said.
However, today’s emission figures are closer to 50 per cent for both.
“[But] our building regulations [are] still focused on energy efficiency, there’s no building regulations on embodied carbon really. We don’t really even measure embodied carbon.”
And what we need, Oldfield said, was for the national construction code to recognise this and to be committed to net zero by 2030. “This is the greatest challenge certainly in my industry of the 21st century.”
So, how do we tackle this?
There are different solutions:
- build nothing – “we need new housing and new schools, but do we need a 300 metre tall casino? We need to start questioning fundamentally when we should build, when we need to build, and how big we should be building as well.”
- build less – “we can adaptively reuse, what we’ve already got is already there. It embodies labour, energy, and memories, and we can make better use of it.”
- build clever – use low carbon materials such as timber, cork, hemp, and cellulose – there is lower carbon than what we are using today
- build smaller – Australia has some of the biggest homes in the world, said Oldfield.
“The average house is about 220 square metres. If that was 180 sq m, you can reduce embodied carbon by 20 per cent.
“And it’s these kinds of small moves, but cumulatively, over thousands of buildings, that I feel will contribute to us taking on this really big challenge that we face.”
What is embodied culture?
According to Alan Croker, embodied culture, a subject often overlooked in sustainability, was the history, evolution, culture, artistry and memories embodied within the building.
Croker said that many would opt to replace existing structures for “more energy efficient and use less carbon.”
The fabric of the building embodies these values. “If you were to replace that, you would lose these layers…it’s what makes our places rich, what makes them so exciting.”
Croker then provided examples of adaptive reuse that still embodied culture in its buildings, such as St James church, White Bay Power Station and the Tasmania Museum and Art Gallery.
But whose culture is being embodied in these buildings?
Michael Mossman, on the other hand, talked about his experience with architecture and buildings, which always had a “very strong colonial influence present.”
“It’s always certainly a very strange interaction [where] you’re moving around this place and seeing these strange looking buildings that have these histories and traditions that come from very far away,” Mossman said.
“For me, they’re from another place, and so it doesn’t register in a cultural sense or the embodied culture those projects possess, which means I couldn’t make any connection to how they could be here in Australia or how I could be interested in the way that those buildings were presented in particular storylines.
“There’s a whole population of people whose stories have been hidden away from, and that, to me, brings home this idea of what happened here in Australia.
And that was now Mossman’s mission, to educate and inform students and the next generation of architects and practitioners that “what the built environment is could have the possibility to be the potential carrier and to contribute to the truth.”