The Covid -19 pandemic has been nothing short of a monumental experiment. Within weeks, workplaces were forced into changes that would normally take years to implement. Reactions to the current…

Jeremy McLeod was a key signatory to the influential Architects Declare movement. He says sustainability might be seen as complex by some people but there are simple ways “that everyone…

Throughout Australia, when land is rezoned from industrial to high-rise residential, a charge is levied to help fund the required infrastructure. In NSW it is called an infrastructure contribution. The…

For an industry that involves climbing ladders and working in confined spaces, construction seems inaccessible for someone in a wheelchair. But according to construction academic from the University of South Australia, Jonathan Fritsch, this isn’t always the cas

Natural ventilation, or lack of. The modernist triumph of bare-arse glass for fully airconditioned office buildings has become the ubiquitous answer for high rise residential. Brisbane is now plagued by…

One of the key speakers at Flick the Switch next Wednesday, Stiebel Eltron’s Glenn Day, will tackle the potential of heat pumps to pave the way to net zero. But it’s not easy: the hurdles are tough, especially for existing buildings.

When the topic of robots in the workforce gets brought up, it’s easy to feel a little uncomfortable. After all, we commonly hear comments like, “one day when robots are…

The truth is, governments have the power to solve social housing shortages and homelessness. But once social housing becomes a bloody-minded numbers game of delays, deficits, and denials, it invariably degenerates into the dark art of political obfuscation.

 It’s exciting that on nearly every front where we can see problems there is almost equal energy expended in finding solutions. Call it the optimism gene but it’s working for us!

According to Professor Janis Birkeland, green building rating tools are improving but they are only improving upon a flawed conceptual model.

What Covid’s doing to our working habits is not all bad.

A 2017 United Nations report focused on the “financialisation of housing”, with structural changes where housing is treated as a commodity, a means of accumulating wealth and often as security for financial instruments that are traded and sold on global markets.

For the first time in NABERS’ 20-plus years, the government’s environmental benchmarking scheme is updating how it accounts for the emissions profile of grid electricity to reflect booming renewable penetration.

Clare Parry, who will be a panellist at The Fifth Estate’s Flick the Switch event on 5 August, is a director of the Australian Passive House Association (and founding chair). She’s been weathering the lockdown periods in her recently built Passive House in Melbourne, and is thrilled not to be in the “dumb” double brick house she lived in before.

Plans for one of the largest “passive house” social housing estates in Europe have been approved in Ireland. But the designers could still learn a thing or two about the…