Housing Tactics | Diego Ramirez-Lovering | Thursday 8 March 2012

 Housing Tactics

Diego Ramirez-Lovering

Senior Lecturer and Acting Head of Department, 

Department of Architecture. Monash University

Thursday 8 March

7.00pm

 RMIT building 50

Orr Street, Carlton

This presentation examines spatial flexibility within the provision of volume housing. Spatial flexibility in volume housing, it is argued, can lead to more sustainable housing outcomes within this market. The volume housing market, characterised by conservatism and low cost construction, has historically been delivered with little design input. The presentation presents a body of housing designs that have been developed over 6 years of practice for delivery in the context of volume housing. Through an examination of these housing projects, I will articulate the different strategies for incorporating spatial flexibility in different housing typologies, detached, duplex, townhouse and apartment. It focuses on adaptability, which is characterised by the ability to change use or occupation patterns without costly modifications to the physical fabric of the building. Spatial flexibility presents a particularly relevant design strategy within the highly constrained cost and development parameters of the volume housing and presents a productive strategy for improving the overall spatial design of these housing projects and demonstrating an enhancement to both social and environmental sustainability.

Resilience in Infrastructure & Urban Form | Thurs. 10 Nov. 7pm | by Che Biggs

Thursday 10 November
7.00pm
Building 50
Orr Street Carlton

Che’s talk will focus on system design principles for transformation and resilience in infrastructure and urban form. It will argue that much of our built environment and critical infrastructure has been (and still is) designed, built and managed under outdated assumptions of environmental and resource stability. This dominant ‘centralised’ model is not only unsustainable, it exacerbates society’s vulnerability to climate change, peak oil and resource scarcity. With these global scale contextual disruptions ‘in the pipeline’, we urgently need new design models for the built environment that are adapted to greater contextual uncertainty, volatility and disruption – models that are more resilient.

The talk will explore results from on-going research at the Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab that has identified the ‘distributed systems’ model as having considerable promise. Che will draw on examples from the natural and built environment to explore what this model looks like and how a distributed approach can benefit society in four critical areas, by:

• Reducing society’s base load environmental footprint
• Increasing the resilience of critical infrastructure to shocks and disturbances
• Supporting and fostering behavior change, community capacity and adaptive governance
• Undermining the viability of existing production and consumption systems

The talk will end with an open discussion about the types of opportunities and challenges that people within Architects for Peace may face in enabling distributed systems.

Bio:
Che Biggs is Distributed Systems Research Fellow at the Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab (VEIL). His work focuses on the development of strategies and tools to build society’s resilience to long-term sustainability challenges. A key component of this work addresses the need for new provision systems (for food, energy and water) that strengthen community capacity to adapt to resource scarcity and climate change while enhancing natural capital. Che has a particular interest working with communities to draw out place-based knowledge, envisage common aims and ensure local ownership of development strategies - particularly those increasing people’s relationship to place and nature. Che has a background in environmental science, management and policy and has worked internationally in the environmental sector since 2001 as a consultant, facilitator and researcher.

http://www.architectsforpeace.org/

Council House 2 - Walking tour

"We need a new framework for architecture, in line with current scientific thinking . . . in which the phrase sustainable development becomes sustainable retreat"
Michael Pearce, Design Inc

Date: Thursday 6 September 2007
Time: 6pm SHARP
Place: CH2 building, 200 Lt Collins St, Melbourne






TRANSPORTED is the theme at architects for peace this September, and words @bldg50 is on the move! A year after the opening of Council House 2, and the subsequent launch of the arch-peace pro-bono service, we’ll be revisiting the building to see how it’s performing.

Michael Pearce, lead design architect on the project, will take a walking tour through CH2 and position it within the framework of “sustainable retreat”, that he argues needs to replace the sustainable development catchcry.

Michael has worked in the UK, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Australia and has extensive experience in implementing sustainable technologies in both first and third world environments.

This is a FREE event, but attendance is by RSVP only, and numbers strictly limited, so get in quick! Register your details with eleanor@architectsforpeace.org by August 31 to reserve a place.

The Favela Bairro Project

CONSTRUCTING AN URBAN DESIGN CASE
The Favela Bairro Project: Mending the City Fabric
Wednesday October 4th, at 7pm. RMIT Bldg 50 in Orr Street
Speaker : Meaghan Dwyer, architect
A project with the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.

‘In every city there are qualities that are worth to be lived. These are the qualities that urban design must not steal.’ Wim Wenders

How is the city made and what are current urban design practices? Where do the opportunities for urban design lie, and how are they realised? This presentation outlines the development of a theoretical framework for the presentation of a detailed urban design case, and attempts to elaborate a particular case: The Favela-Bairro Project.

The population of Rio today is estimated to be over 11 million. It is thought that up to 20% of the cities inhabitants live in favelas, or spontaneous informal settlements. The Favela-Bairro Project is conceived as a tool to promote the urban and social integration of the favelas in an effort to reverse the process of urban decline that generally follows the growth of spontaneous low-income settlements in metropolitan areas of the developing countries. With carefully planned and reparative interventions, the favelas are inverted and returned to the city. Unlike past urban planning initiatives in Rio de Janeiro, the Favela-Bairro Project represents a modest practice of mending the city fabric.

This research was undertaken whilst a visiting Scholar at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, as part of the Master of Social Science - International Urban and Environmental Management, at RMIT University, Australia.

(Please not that this month's WORDS is to be held on Wednesday, not the usual Thursday)

Sustainable Architecture in India - June 8th

RMIT Building 50, Orr St South Carlton (near Victoria Street) 7pm, gold coin

Dr. Vasudha Ashutosh Gokhale

Professor, Dr. B.N. College of Architecture, University of Pune India

India is about extremes, vastness, intensity, and paradox - all are qualities that describe this ancient culture. There is a tremendous diversity amongst the people, as there is bound to be in a nation of more than 1 billion people. With 28 states, 18 official languages, hundreds of dialects, India is an enormous melting pot of lifestyles and social and cultural customs.

An extremely high population density with a large percentage involved in agriculture makes land a scarce resource. Buildings in India typically have much lower energy consumption and with more varied comfort conditions. The relatively higher costs of energy in India make building materials more expensive. Indian buildings that use natural and mixed mode ventilation are reported to be comfortable. However, as multinational companies build new buildings in India and as others emulate those building standards and comfort levels, energy use will go up substantially.

The Indian economy is presently on an upswing with consistent growth. An annual growth of 10% in the building industry outpaces the economy by far. With so much demand in this sector, it is easy to lose sight of sustainable practices, which invariably reflect the society’s accumulated wisdom and collective images and are imbued with cosmological and religious values, social and political structure, sensibility and attitude towards time and space.

It is the matter of serious concern which needs an astute scrutiny of climate, culture, economy and prevalent construction practices to develop a system appropriate for the Indian context. It calls for public participation which is not a difficult task to achieve in India, where collective self-expression is supposed to be the common spirit that unites the whole nation, bridges linguistic and cultural divides and geographical boundaries, and lends a unique identity to the very heart and soul of the country.

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on the night:

AFP seminar: OM Solar System

Melbourne - AFP Seminar: OM Solar System

On Monday, August 1st , Hitoshi Takeyama (managing director of OM institution) presented a seminar on the OM solar system. The OM Solar Association and OM Institute was established in 1998 and by mid-2003, more than 25,000 OM Solar homes have been built in Japan.

The presentation involved some examples of different projects built in Japan, where this systems has been tried.

The work produced during the 8 days workshop by UNSW architecture students was also displayed. The system consists of the OM design and the monitoring program.

find more about OM: here

Photos:

Top: Hitoshi Takeyama's presentation

Middle: OM works produced by UNSW'

students during the 8-day workshop

Bottom: Beatriz C. Maturana, Mr Hitoshi Takeyama and Su Mellersh-Lucas