My name is Benjamin Law. Welcome to 100 Climate Conversations. It’s such a privilege and honour to be here with you all on the beautiful lands of the Gadigal, which is part of the great Eora Nation. First Nations people on this continent have been sharing knowledge for tens of thousands of years, and together they constitute the oldest continuing civilisation this planet has ever seen. And we are enormously grateful to Elders, past and present that we can continue sharing knowledge here on what is and what will always be Aboriginal land.

Now, today is number 88 of 100 conversations that happen here at the Powerhouse every Friday. This series presents 100 visionary Australians that are taking positive action to respond to the most critical issue of our time: climate change. We’re recording live today in the boiler house of the Powerhouse museum. Now, before it was home to the Powerhouse museum, it was the Ultimo Power Station. It was built in 1899 and it supplied coal powered electricity to Sydney’s tram system in the 1960s. So, it’s in the context of this architectural artefact that we’re shifting our focus forward to the innovations of the net zero revolution.

Now today’s guest is the co-founder and director of Breathe Architecture, a Melbourne-based firm known for its commitment to environmentally responsible and socially conscious design. Breathe are the instigators of Nightingale Housing. They’re a not-for-profit entity that aims to reshape the housing industry for the better. And he was also a founding signatory of industry action group Architects Declare Climate and Biodiversity Emergency. And we’re really, really thrilled to have him here with us today. Could you please join me in welcoming Jeremy McLeod?

Now, Jeremy, I’m really interested in your origin story. It makes you sound like a superhero already, doesn’t it? But a lot of us know about Nightingale Housing. We might have heard about Breathe as well. But I’m interested in you personally, what led you to work in and advocate for sustainable architecture?

Yeah, well, I guess, you know, we’re all the product of our environment, you know, to some extent. And I was lucky enough to have hippie parents in the 70s. And they cared deeply about the planet and they cared deeply about humanity and other people. So, you know, when I was five, my father worked in a homeless shelter, working with people that were that were experiencing homelessness. And he used to take me to work and I would meet these men and realise that they were kind and nice and they were just hard out in their luck. My parents took me to rallies to protect forests. You know, when the Franklin Dam was being dammed, it was a big topic of conversation in my household. And so, I guess my parents instilled in me a care for the planet and a care for other people.

And so, when I went to study, I studied an undergrad in environmental design, which looked at building physics, how to build sustainable architecture. And the funny thing about that was that what we saw in the first year was a history of architecture. That Romans and people building in what is now Iraq were building sustainable homes 2000 years ago. And in the 70s in Australia Michael Mobbs was leading to great sustainable houses being built. And then somewhere in the 80s and 90s, we lost our way, probably with the cheap imports of air conditioners, and we decided that we could glaze anything and we didn’t need to worry too much about the outside and we could solve it with technology.

That’s really interesting to hear because I would imagine some would assume that maybe the arc has been sustainability wasn’t necessarily a preoccupation. And then it’s become because climate change is at our doorstep. But you’re saying that sustainable architecture, sustainable design kind of already was there, embedded in the field and then it fell away and what, we’re picking it up now?

Yeah, I think that what’s changed is that, you know, in the 70s in Australia that those that kind of push for sustainable homes back then was based on the idea of, you know, stopping deforestation and stopping logging, just people basically looking at resource conservation. There wasn’t a conversation about climate change because until kind of, you know, NASA started reporting on global warming, it just wasn’t a conversation that was being had in the 70s or the 80s, even when I was studying in the 90s, you weren’t talking about climate change.

But towards the end of my studies there, it stopped being about resource conservation and it started being about this idea of carbon and climate change. So, my interest in sustainability I guess was about this resource conservation, about protecting our beautiful landscape that we live in. But I think that what’s become abundantly clear to me is that, you know, it’s the C word, right? It’s carbon, and we have to focus on that and solve for that. And so, after I finished studying environmental design, I went on to study architecture, went out into the world to practice architecture and realised that the built environment is the single biggest emitter of carbon. Like 37 per cent of global emissions come from the built environment. And so many of the places that I was working or the colleagues that I was working with weren’t engaged in any form of trying to solve for that.

The built environment is the lowest hanging fruit. It’s the simplest thing that we can solve for. And that’s what kills me. That’s what’s so frustrating about it, right? What’s hard is changing agriculture. Changing transport, particularly air transport. Changing manufacturing of very specific things, you know, that technologies don’t even exist for. But to solve for carbon in the built environment, we know how to do two thirds of that right now. And we don’t.

Let’s get into the specifics of that, because if you’re saying it’s low hanging fruit and two thirds of it can kind of be addressed right now, what does that actually look like?

So, it’s not hard at all. We can all do it today. So, step one is electrify everything. So, the pathway to net zero for us and the lowest hanging fruit is we electrify everything firstly, and then at the same time, and the bigger, harder piece of that is then decarbonising the electricity grid. And we can wait for our big emitters like AGL, Energy Australia and Origin Energy to change the way they generate power. Or we can make our own choices and buy 100 per cent certified green power. Which is government audited. And then that forces the energy generators to invest in large scale renewables.

So, for us as architects, we want to solve two thirds of that 37 per cent emissions. We make a choice never to plumb gas into a building ever again, easy. We use 100 per cent electric induction cooktops, heat pump technology for heating hot water, heating our air and cooling our air, easy. And then we should be educating our clients to buy 100 per cent certified green power. And if we’re working with developers to build apartment buildings, we need to be educating them to write into their owners corporation rules that the power that is supplied to the building has to be 100 per cent certified green power. It’s easy.

So, if that’s the two thirds, that’s easy. What’s the one third that’s tricky?

The one third that’s tricky is the hard stuff. So, that’s embodied carbon and that’s all the stuff that goes into making the building. And so, what are the big– I guess there’s three big pieces of carbon in that. So, one is in concrete, the cement that goes into concrete to bind the sand and the aggregate and the steel together. For every kilogram of cement that’s made, a kilogram of carbon is emitted into the atmosphere. So, if you can use less cement in your concrete or less concrete or geopolymer concrete, which there’s a place in Southeast Queensland using that has zero carbon in it. So, concrete is not the problem. Cement is the problem. Then there’s steel. And again, I can get 100 per cent recycled steel, so green steel from India, but I can’t get it from Australia yet. But, you know, ideally BHP would stop using coking coal, start to look at different – I mean and again, the technology doesn’t exist yet, so it’s difficult for them. I acknowledge that. But how do they run their furnaces? Can they be induction furnaces? Again, technology is not there yet. And can they use recycled steel rather than iron ore? And then I guess the other one is aluminium, which is interesting because we use aluminium for single use cans all the time.

But very recyclable.

So, aluminium has six times the embodied energy, so six times the carbon as the equivalent kind of size of steel. One of the good things about aluminium though is that it doesn’t rust. So, there are certain applications that it’s very hard to get away from aluminium for. But you know, for our single residential houses for example, we could be building those now with no concrete, no steel, no aluminium. So, there are replacement products for all of those things.

We’re now starting to see supply chain intervention so I can buy carbon neutral bricks, carbon neutral benchtops, carbon neutral taps, carbon neutral door hardware, carbon neutral insulation. And we can be cynical about, you know, how do they get to their carbon neutrality, but they’re all paying, you know, whatever it is now, you know, $39 a tonne for their nature-based carbon offsets. But what it’s telling me is that suppliers are now handling carbon their side. So, as I start to bring in elements into my building, I can choose who I want to interact with as suppliers to solve carbon their side. And then ideally, as we decarbonise the electricity grid, someone manufacturing products in Australia would ideally be buying 100 per cent renewables out of the grid instead of, you know, a mix of coal and gas.

As I hear all of this, I’m also mindful that right now inflation is going through the roof. Cost of living is really high and I’m imagining and assuming that the status quo is usually cheaper and that change costs money. So, how do you ensure projects that implement change and are pivoting towards sustainability actually remain affordable for practice, for clients, for all the stakeholders?

Really good question, Ben. So firstly, just on the green power thing, everyone listening to the podcast, just stop the podcast now and talk to your energy provider. Switch to 100 per cent green power. We buy green power for our practice and in our home, in our home it costs us $4.90 a week on average. So, it’s 4.5 cents a kilowatt hour in addition to the black power, right? So, it does cost more. As an architect, how do I get a for-profit developer to commit to building sustainably? Our approach is one of a sustainability of reductionism rather than a sustainability of additionality. For context, in Australia, we have the biggest housing in the world, so on average bigger than the United States, bigger than Canada.

In the last 50 years our houses have got kind of four times bigger. But our household sizes generally have halved. So, in Australia, 26 per cent of people live in single person households, but only six per cent of our housing is one bedroom housing. So, we’ve got lots of single people living in very big housing. So, how could we solve for a net zero built environment or a massive reduction in cost? We could, instead of delivering on size, we could deliver on quality. Reduce the overall size of the house by 25 per cent, increase the build quality, increase the design quality, increase the insulation, the orientation, the shading, the efficiency and deliver a way better housing outcome with a way lower embodied carbon footprint on the way through and a way lower operational cost for the end user. So, the developer wins because it costs him less to build. The end user wins because it costs them less to pay for their bills and every other person on the planet and every other species on the planet wins because we’re pulling carbon out of the atmosphere.

You founded Breathe in Melbourne in 2001 with Tamara Veltre. The mission statement, I believe, is use design as a weapon for good. What does that mean? What does that look like?

It’s just what’s on the wrapper. So, we get to choose every day what we design, and so we will be given a brief, you know, by a government client or by a developer or by a gin distillery, saying, this is what we want to do. We believe that humanity – like my parents, I believe that humanity and the planet matter. And that’s kind of one of the core principles of Breathe. And so, we take that thinking into our meetings with our clients and we explain to the clients that we serve three clients when we work for them. So we work for the client that pays us. We work for the client, which is the community that we exist or that building exists within. And we work for the client that is the planet, and that all three of those things can coexist. And then using a reductionist approach or a minimalist approach rather than a technological sustainability approach, adding in complex technologies which cost more.

We pride ourselves on getting everything built that comes through our door. Like, you know, we build 90 per cent of the work that comes through. We don’t often do feasibility studies or business case studies that don’t get built because we understand if we want to have impact, it can’t just be a great idea. It has to exist in the real world. And to do that, we are incredibly, I guess, fiscally conscious and kind of financially aware. And, you know, Bonnie Herring, who works with us, has got this kind of rigorous mantra, if we don’t need it, we take it out. And so sometimes you walk a fine line about an apartment building or a prison cell. I’m only kidding. It gets pretty minimal sometimes. But by taking those things out, we build really tight feasibilities. So, we’re still building, you know, apartments in Melbourne at the moment when most other projects have gone on hold because construction costs have gone through the roof post-pandemic. And that’s through taking things out, not adding things in.

You mentioned that humanity is a key concern. So, we’re hearing a lot about the environmental, sustainable kind of considerations that you’re taking into account. But how do you ensure projects not only reduce the environmental impact but also improve that idea of social well-being?

Well, I guess let’s talk about physical well-being first. So our director of interiors, Bettina, has spent the last 10 years building kind of a low carbon, high indoor air quality materials palette. And what I mean by that is it’s cheaper to put down vinyl flooring, it lasts a long time. You can hose it out. But historically, the plasticisers in vinyl flooring were causing renal disease or kidney disease in children, right.

Oh geez.

Yeah, right? So, if you think about how we specify materials and that new car smell, which is, you know, volatile organic compounds off-gassing in your apartments. Those things are incredibly bad for human health. So, our team rigorously check everything that they specify. So, our materials library is small from a human health point of view. What are the things that humans need to thrive? Good indoor air quality, good acoustics, believe it or not. Good natural light and ideally the ability to connect to nature. So they’re pretty simple things.

So, we bring that through in all the projects we do. So, for example, when we’re building an apartment building, it sounds simple, but every one of our buildings, one of our kind of, you know, one of our tick box metrics at Breathe is that everyone has to have a planter box, a big planter box. It has to be connected to computerised irrigation and drainage, and it has to have the ability to flourish. And what – I mean, why does that sound like a big deal? Because when you’re working in a commercial market with a developer, the developer says, ‘Maybe it’s cheaper, just not to put that in there and someone can put a pot plant there.’ But in a warming urban environment, it makes it very, very difficult for plants to flourish and thrive. And if biodiversity is important to us, so how do we encourage native insects? You know, bees, pollination, all of those things. It means we need some biodiversity in our buildings. The other thing is that with biodiversity and planting comes kind of urban cooling. And so, to create tree canopies, to create enough soil volume for the plants to grow, you need those things. It’s so simple, it’s stupid.

I’ve talked a little bit about how we try to solve for the human condition within our buildings. We also try to build when we’re building multi residential housing, so apartments, an opportunity for community to happen. We can’t obviously make community happen; that relies on the people that live in that building. But simple things like a beautiful rooftop garden and a beautiful rooftop laundry that engages with that garden. A laundry is a thing, you know, like we all need to use it. It’s a thing that we have to do. And so, when we’re there, but we’re engaging with a great garden, we’re engaging with our neighbours just in a simple thing of, you know, this is what we’re doing.

And we keep our community sizes down small. So, if we’re doing 200 apartments, we break that into six buildings. So, there’s only like 35 apartments in each building and maybe 60 people that live there. We do some induction sessions with the residents, so they all get to know each other. And then we have places for them to dine together, to cook together. And then we work with our landscape architects to make little break out spaces for someone to sit alone or two people to sit there or four people sit there. You can choose to come together, or you can choose to be alone as an introvert. So, you don’t have to be an extrovert to live in these buildings. But even the introverts have to wash their clothes. And that’s an opportunity to build really simple connections. And so, we think about community within the building and community size.

And then more broadly, we soften the edges of all of our buildings. So, wherever possible, where our building hits the ground, we just set the glazing line back in by 600 millimetres to make a seat, you know, we think about what happens on the ground floor. We work to kind of with the developer to cross-subsidise one of the ground floor tenancies, to get a social enterprise to come in, teaching some kids how to work in hospitality at a concessional rent a $100 a week. So, we do a bit of design of the feasibility model that would mean a bit of civic generosity, some other organisations coming in. So, it’s not just as architects, we’re not just designing the building, we might be designing the owners corporation rules to say, ‘Here’s the clause that says you’ve got to buy 100 per cent green power. Here’s the clause that says you’ve got to do an annual carbon audit.’ And that gets baked into the OC rules.

And then in the feasibility, we have an intelligent conversation with the developers about who should come into the ground floor. Is it a not-for-profit organisation which is teaching kids how to play piano? And what’s the benefit of that and why does that help you as a developer sell your apartments? Because suddenly you’ve got a building that means something, and people want to be there. So, the developer wins, the community wins, the kids learning how to play piano win.

So, I hear like two guardrails there. One, you can force some things through regulation and through documentation. And the other thing is like foster things through design and design principles. I like that. This is a nice segue to talk about Nightingale Housing because Breathe were the instigators of Nightingale Housing in collaboration with six other architecture firms. Tell us about Nightingale Housing and what are the fundamental principles that underpin it?

As architects, we thought that the answer to – I mean, we were naive, right? So, we thought the answer to climate change, to a housing crisis, to kind of this social isolation epidemic. We thought the answer was in architecture and that you could design your way out of it. You know, you design a building that would be cheaper to build, so you’d sell the affordability piece. You use an architecture of reductionism so that you could solve the sustainability piece. You’d be designing the things that I talked about. So, kind of an active ground floor plane and some place for residents to come together so you could sell the community based.

But the bit that we didn’t design in that first building, The Commons, which was the prototype before Nightingale, we didn’t design a financial model around it. Which means that when you bring someone else in with money to deliver that, their basic mode of operation is to extract financial value out of that proposition. And when the core principle is making a profit, not delivering housing, there’s mission drift. And so, what we realised is if we really wanted to deliver on sustainability, on affordability, on social connection, then we needed to control the purse strings and we need to take profit out of the agenda. And instead, we need to see housing as a basic human right.

And how does that even work in a system, in a country, in a government that really does see property as, you know, equated to profit? So, you’re working within that system. You can’t break the system. So, what does it look like to remove profit from the equation, at least with one project?

Can I digress for one minute?

Please.

The 2016 census says that we as the third wealthiest country in the OECD nation had 116,000 people experiencing homelessness. So, Finland has a housing first policy where the aim is to have zero homelessness.

And the idea behind that is like, well, you can’t do all the other things with life unless you have the house over your head first, right? So, they’ve gotten rid of primary homelessness.

Correct. And you know, and the multiplier, from an economic point of view, you spend less on correctional facilities, less on policing, less on health care, less on all the other wraparound services you need when you’ve got hundreds of thousands of people experiencing homelessness. And the federal government just set aside $10 billion for the HAFF, the Housing Australia Future Fund. That’s great. But they’ve also just set aside $364 billion to build submarines that may or may not be ready by 2050.

What I’m saying is that homelessness in this country does not need to exist. It’s a political decision. And under Menzies there was this great idea that Australians would own our own houses and we would be this aspirational country. And so, I guess from the 50s through to the 90s, that was the plan, right? Everyone would buy their own home, and everyone would be upwardly mobile. It was great. In the late 90s, capital gains tax exemptions came in. And the funny thing about Australia is that if you sell your house in Australia, you get 100 per cent tax free gift. So, you buy a house for $100,000 in 1980. You sell it for $1,000,000 in the year 2000. 20 years later, you’ve made $1,000,000 and you pay 0 per cent tax. It’s a very unique tax position. And what it’s essentially done has changed Australia’s housing from housing as a basic human right to housing as asset and investment class, because, you know, everyone’s financial adviser will tell you that, you know, the best investment you can make is in your primary place of residence.

We are having this conversation in Sydney where the dominant mode of conversation is about real estate as an asset. So, with that structure and system in place, going back to Nightingale, what does it look like to make a not-for-profit housing model? How does that practically work?

Okay. Yeah. So again, it depends on where you think you could have agency in your life. And so, you know, can I lobby federal or state government to fix the housing system? I can try. You know, we can all try to do that. We get to choose when we go to the election to try and do that. Or we can play with the cards we’re dealt, which is you’re right, we operate within a system where it’s been decided that the housing market, the property market, the property developers will be used to deliver housing to our people. I mean, it’s kind of insane as an idea.

So, in Vienna, 70 per cent of housing is owned by the state. Great quality housing and there’s no ridiculous kind of house prices. Everyone’s housed well. Anyway, so Nightingale is an attempt to hack or to use design. So, we design a financial model to hack the system. So, if the system is broken, design a new system. And the big play in that is just taking profit out of the equation. So, we go and source our money from, you know, impact investors, people that care about the city, care about the environment, care about homelessness. We ask them to put in money. We agree to pay them a return on that money. But we cap the upside. So, we cap the return on that. We don’t cap the downside so they’re still taking risk on that. And then we build our own environmental guidelines because the national construction code is nowhere near what it needs to be, like we’re 10 years behind Europe in terms of energy efficiency or electrification.

So, to build an apartment, normally you would need to have minimum of five stars. In Nightingale, it’s going to be a minimum of seven and a half stars. To build an apartment, you know, generally like in Sydney, you can plumb gas in, in Nightingale, it has to be 100 per cent electric. To build an apartment generally, you can buy the dirtiest black power you want. If it’s a Nightingale, it has to be 100 per cent renewables. If I’m building in London or in New York, there’s an inclusionary zoning requirement which says I have to build in 20 per cent affordable housing or social housing as part of the housing mix. So, 20 per cent affordable housing, 80 per cent market housing, and that needs to be 10 year blind so that, you know, all the apartments are the same. And so, we’re delivering for all sectors of society. So, in Nightingale, 20 per cent of the housing is social housing and 80 per cent is market housing. And we’ve really done that to prove to, you know, to our governments that –

That can be done.

It can be done. And so, if you go to Nightingale Village, where there’s 203 apartments across six different buildings, and if you talk to any of the housing tenants from women’s property initiatives about what it’s like to live in a beautiful, sustainable, architecturally designed home that looks the same as everyone else’s. You know, I could give you report after report of how this has changed their life, you know, because they feel part of society not kind of on the edges of our society.

So, what I hear is like Nightingale has become like a physical testament that other stakeholders don’t have excuses, including government, right? And I think that’s really, really cool. I mean, can you paint us a picture of where Nightingale was when it started to where it is now? Like, what’s the evolution been over that span?

Yeah, sure. So, you know, when we started it was tiny, right? So, we finished this prototype building The Commons that we thought was about architecture. We realised we need to solve the financial model. We wrote this kind of manifesto about how we needed to solve the financial piece as well. And then people started – we had The Commons open for tours and we had – open houses Melbourne is held in it was held in July in that year in Melbourne. It was a typical Melbourne day, windy, you know, sleet, it was horrible. And 100 – no 1016 people came through an apartment building in the back blocks of Brunswick to see what a different future would be like. Which is pretty interesting for us. And then of those, a bunch of people wrote to us and said, if you’re going to do another building like that, can you let us know? Because I could imagine myself there.

Whereas before that in Melbourne, it hasn’t been a great history of apartments either. Apartments are investors and houses are for people, you know, like that’s kind of how it was seen. So, people wrote to us, we had a list of 57 people and so I went and knocked on the doors of every architect in the city and said, ‘Here’s the manifesto, come on a ride with us. Here’s the call to arms. We can’t wait for other people, as architects let’s be part of the solution.’

So, you are the Pied Piper. A benevolent cult leader. And people got on board.

Yeah, and it was hard right, I pitched to, like, I pitched all day, every day to every architect that I knew for six weeks. And I got six leading Australian architects to put in $100,000 each.

Wow.

And the idea was that they would come along the journey with us, see how we do it, and then go and lead their own projects. And nearly all of those architects now have gone off to lead their own project. Anyway, we finished that building. Sorry, the 57 people end up coming to a bunch of information sessions with us. No real estate agents, just truth. We just tell them all the great things about the building that we’ve designed and all the not-so-great things. So, the things that we’re doing, the things we’re not doing.

So, we take out all the basement car park to save $40,000 apartment and to save a whole lot of carbon. We designed the building to operate without air conditioning. You know, our hydronic heating panels are recycled from the former Collingwood TAFE, you know, so we’re not sure whether it’s going to be hot enough but we think it is, but they’re really cool. And so lots of conversations like this. We have the ballot, and we sell 100 per cent of the apartments in one day, which is incredible. Without a real estate agent charging 2.25 per cent, which would add $15,000 to everyone’s apartment without a display suite, without the cost of marketing. And so, the residents save all of that because –

So, just to rewind the ballot system is if you want to be in this come in, it will be randomly drawn. And from that you get every time like 100 per cent of the apartments actually go to people enrolled in the ballot.

Yeah, historically, every time. But as we’ve started to do – like Nightingale Village is 203 apartments like the Northwalls Project, you know, which is currently kind of we’re working on in the background, that’s 280 apartments. So, yeah, let me get back to you on 100 per cent every time.

So, Nightingale is where now? Like where can you find a Nightingale development.

Yes. So, we started in Brunswick, so that first building we delivered 20 apartments. It won the national award for housing, the national award for sustainability. And then from there, we then helped one of those architects go and start Nightingale 2, which is also in Melbourne. And we helped another architect from there go and start Nightingale 3, which is also in Melbourne. We work with a developer to do a joint venture which was Nightingale Brunswick East, which is also in Melbourne. And then while I was still working in Nightingale, I went and saw some sites in Brunswick.

In this particular area in Brunswick it was really horrible. It was called the angsty urban village on the Brunswick Structure Plan. So, I started acquiring sites in that area, one after the other, like, you know, quite poor quality sites, but in close proximity to each other. And so, The Commons, Nightingale 1, Eight Florence Street, Nightingale Anstey, Wurru-Wurru Vic, Nightingale Village and North Walls all of those projects exist within 300 metres of each other. So, this incredible kind of density to it. And so, that sense of urban generosity. And so Nightingale Village is, you know I bought 11 sites, brought in five other architects, broke it down into six buildings. Those buildings all face over a common street. We worked with the council to stop all the traffic in the street and pedestrianised the street.

Out of those 203 apartments, there’s only 15 share cars, 450 bike parks. But the street has no driveway, no cars. It’s all about pedestrians, humans, kids, dogs, you know, Japanese restaurant, Japanese grocer. Like it’s, you know, not for profit bike shop. Lots of great things all happening on the ground level. So, Nightingale currently has delivered about 420 apartments, there’s about another 400 in the pipeline. I finished up as managing director there last June and Dan McKenna, the new CEO, is heading up Nightingale, doing a terrific job in a really tough market. We just finished a project last year in Bowden in South Australia. A project in Fremantle was finished last year and the first ever Nightingale project in Sydney is happening in Marrickville at the moment with great Sydney architects SJB. Working with the not-for-profit organisation called Fresh Hope, who worked with their church arm. I mean, the property market, the housing market in Sydney is so cooked, it’s not even funny. So, the only way that Nightingale could come to Sydney is with a church group putting its land in for free.

Look in this series, we’ve also spoken to Zena Armstrong. She’s President of the Cobargo Community Bushfire Recovery Fund, who is supporting the recovery of her community after the Black Summer bushfires. Can you tell us about Breathe’s Cobargo Santa Project?

Yeah, I mean it’s a funny name for a project, Cobargo Santa Project. So, I think like everyone, we watched the Black Summer fires with kind of shock, not really disbelief because I think we all saw this coming – in terms of climate change we knew was getting hotter and drier, you know, and I think that – anyway, it was it was still incredibly shocking for us. As a practice we got together, we came back from the summer break and we said, what are we going to do about this? We’d seen the footage of Scott Morrison going to Cobargo and trying to shake that the fireman’s hand and he wouldn’t shake hands with him. And then Scott Morrison said, ‘I think he was – I think he was tired.’ And the fire chief said to him, ‘No, he’s just lost his home.’

So, Madeline Sewall from our practice wrote to the Cobargo RFS. And so, we didn’t know how to solve everything. And we said, but what are we good at? We’re architects. We are good at fixing some things. And so, we’re going to tailor and focus our efforts onto one thing. So, we can’t fix the three and a half thousand homes that burnt down. But maybe we can fix one of those things for someone who really deserved it. We wrote to that firefighter and said, ‘Can we help you? Can we offer our services to help you rebuild your home?’ And he wrote back to us and said, ‘Thank you so much, but I’m fully insured. I’m actually covered. One of our other volunteers, lost everything. He is also the town Santa.’ And so, he wrote a little bit about this guy Dave, and him and his wife Barbara have at the moment, like five adopted children or fostered kids living with them. So, these incredible, kind of generous humans –

Pillars of the community.

Yeah. And, anyway, so he said, could you help him? And we said, of course. And when we asked them from a brief, what did they want, they didn’t care. They just wanted a home for them and their kids that were so unegotistical about it. And so, we just then spent the next two weeks calling everyone that we knew asking for donated materials. And so, we literally got the wall cladding, the windows, the appliances, the paint, everything got donated. And obviously nearly everyone said yes, but we built a spreadsheet of all the things that we had. And then I said to Maddie, ‘Okay, here are the things that we have, build a house out of this.’

You mentioned that he wasn’t too concerned about what kind of house it was, just as long as they had a roof over their head. But I imagine one primary concern is one that is I guess climate proofed or has some sort of protection against disaster. Can you build a house like that? What does that look like?

Well, to be totally honest, I don’t think you can. I mean, it’s a real challenge, right, because people want to live close to nature. One of Dave’s neighbours told us that his house didn’t burn first. It was torn apart by, you know, essentially incredible wind speeds in the centre of this kind of fire. So, fires generate their own weather systems, you know, at that scale. And so, as it tore his house apart, it then burnt. So, it didn’t kind of come through the window. So, how do you build a fireproof house? I think it needs to be a concrete bunker with steel shutters on it. That’s I think that’s what a real fireproof house looks like.

Can you build a house that is resistant to fire? Absolutely. And that’s what we did for a Dave and Barb, so it was a simple corrugated iron shell on the outside. We put a sprinkler suppression system on it. So we got big water tanks on there and made sure the water tanks were steel, not plastic, because their other water tanks had burnt to the ground in the fire. And importantly, we wanted to build a house that wasn’t going to add to climate change. So, we educated Dave and Barb, salt of the earth, about the importance of electrification and the importance of green power. And then, you know, Talia from our office spent time with them talking to the energy provider to make sure they got 100 per cent green power. And again, they had LPG bottles on site previously. So, basically you know explosive devices in a push. Instead, now they’ve got now you know solar battery storage, electric heat pumps, induction cooktops, electric heat pump, hydronic heating. So, everything’s electric.

So it’s not climate proof, but it’s climate resilient, it sounds like.

Absolutely. And incredibly well insulated. You know they’ve never had double glazing before, it’s double glazed. All the glazing from the north and the west shaded. And the house wasn’t super big, but it’s super-efficient. And you know, fortunately we had a lot of people that gave a lot to that.

Well, Santa gives so much. It’s good to give back to Santa. Now, if Breathe is the band, Nightingale is an album that Breathe has put out. What other albums are in the works?

Well, I think that for us, if we think about agency, you know, and so thanks for having us here. I want to thank the Powerhouse for having us here. The conversation about electrification and green power is one that I’ve been having with the Institute of Architects, and I have been trying to make sure that that message is heard. In an environment where Victoria has banned gas for new connections, the ACT has banned gas for new connections, the City of Sydney is trying to do it. But Chris Minns has said that they’re not going to do it for New South Wales, not at the moment. So, most of the states in Australia you can still plumb gas in 2024 into new buildings despite our carbon reduction targets. So, I’ve stopped going to architecture conferences and talking about everything that’s sustainable. Because I used to talk about big complex matrixes about all the things that you can do to make a building sustainable. I even don’t talk about the embodied carbon thing much anymore. I just talk about electrify, electrify, electrify, 100 per cent green power, 100 per cent renewables.

Because it’s a simple message that’s within reach.

Yeah. And I just want everyone just to do that one thing and then we’ll come back around, and we’ll deal with the embodied carbon piece. So, to that I worked with a local electrician in Brunswick of course. He was talking about – he wanted to start this thing called Goodbye Gas. So, 5 million homes in Australia still have existing gas connections. So, as architects we can solve – and developers and the government – can solve for new buildings. But what do we do with all of the existing houses, with the existing gas infrastructure?

And everyone is nervous about trying to get trades in, particularly after the pandemic and homebuilder where it was tough to get trades in. It seemed difficult. So, we got this young guy, Ben Russell, we worked with him. We did a little capital raise, and we started a company called Goodbye Gas. And then we put one of our great strategic thinkers from Breathe, Marcella, and we placed her in that organisation. So, she works there, and she leads most of the home consultations to explain to people the simple things they can do to electrify their home. And then she works client side so that she organises everything. So, it’s effortless.

So, the tradies turn up on time, they take their boots off, they come in, they change the induction cooktop, they change the heat pump, water heater, they might change the old gas heater for a high efficiency split system air conditioning. When they finish, they wipe down all the benches. Marcella makes them vacuum everything. They go back out, they put their boots on, they give a nice handover. And then Marcella goes through everything with the client. And when it’s done, she’s like, okay, that’s done. So, it’s meant to be effortless.

Yeah. And you’ve definitely sold the Asian Australian market with just noting that they’re taking their boots off as they enter the house. So, that’s something that’s happening right now. 100 Climate Conversations is partly a conversation about the present and partly a conversation about the future. So, let’s project say into the future 10 years, because 10 years things can change a lot for the better or the worse. What would you like to see happen in the next 10 years when it comes to Australian design and architecture?

Can I – I’m just gonna ‘blue sky’ think. There’s going to be a federal government and a state government, and there’s going to be alignment on that. We’re going to build housing for all Australians. We’re going to change the way that we see housing. It’s going to be a basic human right, not an asset class, to be traded for profit. And every one of those houses is going to be right sized. People are going to get what they need rather than what they want and what they’ve seen in a magazine. And I think every Australian is going to take it upon themselves to do the simple things that they can do in their everyday lives to solve for climate change. So, no one’s left there sitting there saying, ‘I don’t need to be part of that.’

And what I mean by that is that we can all buy 100 per cent power even if we’re renting. We can all change our superannuation from we don’t care what our super company invests in into saying we want the ESG stream of that. We can think about who we bank with and does our bank, you know, lend to fossil fuel exploration or does it not? So, we can all take those things, we can all eat less meat and we can all eat more vegetables. I’m not saying don’t meat at all. We can all fly less. We can all catch a train. There are all these simple things that we can do, and none of them need to be hard. So, I think that that’s the thing. I think that we should all do the simple things.

So, there’s a vision there. There’s homework for all of us. But speaking of which, you’ve taught various units at Melbourne University over the years. What are you instilling in tomorrow’s architects when you teach them? What are the lessons they need to be aware of?

So, the world is changing so fast, and I think historically architects studied architecture, thinking that they would be designing big houses for wealthy people. And I think that that’s not that meaningful today. So, when I take a thesis class at Melbourne University, I start by showing all of the slides of my previous graduates that have gone on to work in housing policy or sustainability or to make video content, which talks about impact and change. Some of them work for social housing providers. So, I think that architecture is such a great way to study design to solve problems. But that problem isn’t necessarily designing a building. Our problems are bigger than a single house, you know, on the cliff edge. So, the way I try to ask my graduates and my students, you know, what’s the future that you want to create and how do you get upstream to design that future? And sometimes it’s not drawing anything.

That’s a really good place to leave it. Jeremy McLeod, thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us at 100 Climate Conversations.

Thanks heaps, Ben.

Could you please join me in thanking a wonderful guest today, Jeremy McLeod everyone. To follow the program online you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And visit the 100 Climate Conversations exhibition or join us for a live recording, go to 100climateconversations.com.

This is a significant new project for the museum and the records of these conversations will form a new climate change archive preserved for future generations in the Powerhouse collection of over 500,000 objects that tell the stories of our time. It is particularly important to First Nations peoples to preserve conversations like this, building on the oral histories and traditions of passing down our knowledges, sciences and innovations which we know allowed our Countries to thrive for tens of thousands of years.

*According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics 2021-22 average was 239.4 square metres per dwelling