Welcome everyone to 100 Climate Conversations. This is number 22 of 100 conversations happening every Friday. The series presents 100 visionary Australians that are taking positive action to respond to the most critical issue of our time, which is climate change. We’re broadcasting today in the Boiler Hall of the Powerhouse museum. Before it was home to the museum, it was the Ultimo Power Station. Built in 1899, it supplied coal powered electricity to Sydney’s tram system right up until the 60s. In the context of the architecture of this building, we shift our focus toward the innovations of the net zero revolution.

The Powerhouse acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of the ancestral homelands on which our museums are situated. We respect their Elders past, present and future, and recognise that continuous connection to Country.

My name is Paddy Manning. I’m a journalist and author, most recently of a book called Body Count: How Climate Change Is Killing Us. The person sitting next to me is Ninotschka Titchkosky, who I have the pleasure of speaking with today. She is co-CEO of BVN Architecture, where she steers the firm’s research into robotics and digital fabrication. She is passionate about decarbonising the construction industry and is co-leading the design of one of Sydney’s most talked about building projects, Atlassian’s future headquarters at Central Station. We’re so thrilled to have you join us today. Welcome, Ninotschka.

Thanks Paddy.

What can an architect do about climate change?

A lot. What we do understand is that 40 per cent of global carbon emissions are a result of construction. So, that means I’d say we have a pretty significant role to play.

That’s higher than most people would think, isn’t it?

It’s a lot higher than most people would think. It’s massive.

We hear a lot about the need to transform energy, transport, manufacturing, agriculture in the race to net zero emissions. Much less about property development.

Yeah, it’s a bit of a sleeper, I think, at the moment. And interestingly, actually not a lot of venture capitalist funding goes towards construction. One of the, I think, the reasons for that is it’s a complex industry. It’s a large part of how governments deal with labour issues, but it’s also one of the least digitised industries on the planet. So, there’s tons of scope, I think, in the construction industry, in the design industry to rethink how we do things.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself Ninotschka, your family, your upbringing and how you became an architect?

I think I’m probably a little bit of a mash up, I guess, which is not a bad thing. You know, some people say mongrels are always the best kinds of dogs. But no, I have a father who was a Qantas pilot, my mum was in fashion and quite entrepreneurial and I did grow up in Sydney. I’m one of a family of five, number four, so the very much the forgotten child I think, and making up for lost time. But my upbringing was relatively middle class, reasonably straightforward, I’ve always been quite drawn to creative pursuits and probably always been a little bit of a challenger in terms of trying to push outside of the box. And I haven’t particularly ever been the kind of person that categorises myself as one particular thing.

So, and I think that probably is true to how I live my life now, even though when you’re younger, you don’t think about it that way. And then I ended up going to Sydney University, studied architecture there, worked over in London for a little while, came in and out of practice in Australia. Took a few years off, rode some horses, travelled around Australia, tried to mix it up a bit. And I’m currently with BVN and I’ve been with BVN and for quite a long time. But I think what I really love about being with BVN and why, in fact I’ve been there for so long, is because you can kind of have careers within that practice and sort of shape different pathways even within a single organisation which has been really rewarding.

You were apparently a bit of a renegade at university, giving your lecturers grief. What drew you to architecture?

I mean, fundamentally what drew me to architecture I think, was just the creative problem solving, is what I really like. I initially explored the idea of being a graphic designer, and then whilst I absolutely love graphic design, I just felt like there wasn’t quite enough meat on the bones for me. And so, with architecture, the problems that we’re trying to solve, they are incredibly complex, and I think they’re very much whole systems problems and I kind of really, I really like solving the complexity of that and trying to distill it into something that makes sense. And also, the amazing thing about architecture, which I don’t think you appreciate when you go into it, is how much you get to learn about the world. And I think we’re just so incredibly fortunate because we meet amazing people, we work with incredible organisations, you’re working with government, you’re kind of understanding society, people’s behaviour. Like there’s, it’s a sort of limitless vessel of learning, really, to the point where even after 25 years of practicing, you’re still thinking you don’t really know that much.

When did the significance of the climate challenge, you talk about 40 per cent of the climate problem being related to construction, when did that form part of your thinking as an architect? When did it really hit home?

I think probably really hit home, more seriously for me, in about 2016. Although looking back, I think I always had a reasonably strong focus on it, but not quite as intensified as it is at the moment. And I think that the marking point of 2016 for me personally was really thinking about the waste within our industry and the way that we make things, the way we build and understanding what things like robotics and digital manufacturing would actually offer us as architects and as an industry that would reshape the way we do things.

And so, in 2016, we started to form a partnership with Sydney Uni at the time around robotics and digital fabrication, and that’s been an ongoing journey since that time. And one that I’m particularly excited about because for me it just is sort of a no brainer that if we can make things differently and we can use different techniques it will get us out of the existing paradigm. And if we’re going to address this 40 per cent issue on carbon emissions that construction is contributing, we actually need radical transformation. This is not an incremental evolution in my mind. This is a more revolutionary step that we need to make. In that regard, it’s very exciting but it’s equally a big challenge in construction because it’s a slow mover, it’s a hard industry to change.

We talk about in commercial buildings, for example, six star green star rated buildings and do you think those rating schemes are fit for purpose? You know, if we’re trying to get to net zero of those rating schemes the way to get us there?

Yeah, I think in part they are for sure. They give something for people to hang on to and they’re being currently tweaked, and they’re always being monitored to try and move with the times in a way. When Green Star, for example started, which is one of Australia’s primary rating tools around green buildings, the criteria were similar but much lower. I mean they’re getting ratcheted up all the time, so it’s not something that you sort of set and forget it, it kind of keeps moving with where the thinking is going and where the market can push in to.

But I do think, for me look, there’s, regardless of rating tools, there’s two big things that we need to focus on. One is operational energy and the other one is embodied carbon. So, and when we talk about net zero, the conversation primarily is around net zero operational energy, which is the energy that it takes to operate a building or a built environment. And that’s the measure. That’s only a part of the story. So, I think the other thing is that everything we sit on, the floors, the walls, the ceilings, the concrete, steel, glass, the timber, it’s all got embodied carbon already banked into it. So, what we need to be doing is looking at how we optimise the amount of material we use, what the materials are, use greener materials, explore new materials, and we need to measure it. And then we also need to change our mentality in how we think about the ongoing life of buildings. So, how we continue to adapt them, reinvent them. Because we’ve already banked that embodied carbon, we can’t, we need to move away from it. It’s 20 years on, this building is no longer what we want, we’re going to knock it down and we’re going to build a new one.

We need to go into an adaptive mode and be much more focused on adaptive reuse and reinvention, augmenting what we have and think of it more like sort of a surgical editing process rather than a knockdown rebuild. But if I came to you as a client and said, ‘What can I do with this building?’ And you are a builder, most of them would probably say, ‘Oh, it’s going to be cheaper to just knock it down, we’ll remake it.’ So, we’ve got to get away from that. We’ve got to find the economic argument as well and the rationality of not making that our modus operandi.

Yes, because the new building that has six stars might not, in fact, be the most environmentally efficient solution at all. You would have been better to adapt. So how do you measure that? How do you measure that benefit from keeping the existing building?

Well, that’s where the embodied carbon analysis comes into play. So, we can measure what the embodied carbon of an existing structure is versus a new. And so that can make a huge contribution, could be like 40 per cent of a project’s – because the way a building works is the majority of the embodied carbon is in the structure, in the facades. We’re also quite focused on the services and that if you get those things right, you’ve gone a really long way to helping the planet as well as making sure that the building operates well and isn’t leaky and has a high-performance facade, those kinds of things.

Your practice talks about radical adaptation. I thought it was interesting, one of the examples was BVN’s job on the Sirius building at The Rocks in the heritage district at Circular Quay. That was a controversial project, it was subject of a green ban. I know that wasn’t your personal project, but can you talk about some of the issues that radical adaptation can throw up?

Absolutely. When we talk about radical adaptation, what we really mean is how we reinvent existing buildings. And actually, what happens is we talk a lot about new buildings, where actually new buildings only make up 2 per cent of all of our buildings. So, it’s really small in the scheme of things. When you think about how you tackle particularly operational energy, for example, a lot of existing buildings might have been there for 30 years. The facades are not good, the systems are not particularly efficient anymore and so they’re sort of leaking operational energy every day of the week, but the 2 per cent isn’t going to make the difference. So, we got to tackle both of those.

So, there’s coming at it from a sort of a climate perspective as well as, but also, I think there’s a bigger conversation around our social history and the layering of the cities and the layering of our own histories. So, I think it’s very important that we continue to retain a lot of the buildings in the city, and just continue to adapt them and let that history layer up and we don’t lose that. As a country like Australia, we’re starting to come to terms with our First Nations history and that absolutely foundational layer and valuing that so much more, it’s also important that we see that as like the most base layer and then we can continue to build up on that and enrich that.

So radical adaptation sort of picks up all of those things, but in terms of the project, like Sirius or there’s another very significant one which we’ve just finished as well with 3XN in Circular Quay, which is called Quay Quarter. These are all projects which are looking at existing structures and augmenting them, so Sirius was a brutalist apartment building, public housing and that obviously was a really big reason why there was a public outcry around the government selling off the building basically to private development. We had lots of conversations internally about whether we would take that project on or not. It went out to a design competition and the decision around it moving from social housing was already made, so that was not something that we could affect necessarily change on. But what we felt we could affect change on was the retention of that building and the respect of the building and reopening it up to the streets and integrating it back into the precinct of The Rocks.

An incredibly important site isn’t it. It must be one of the most valuable sites in Australia.

It’s such an amazing site and it’s –

Right next to the Harbour Bridge.

– it’s super interesting because when you’re actually in the spaces, you’re on one hand you’re looking almost like at the freeway deck level of the Harbour Bridge. And on the other hand, you’re looking out to the Opera House and you, but you’re also looking through the historic buildings of The Rocks, so it’s a very unusual site. It’s really interesting. So, our goal really with that one was we would only take it on if we retained the existing building and then we were able to like augment it essentially. And that’s the process we’re on at the moment, so that’s currently under construction. It’s a very complicated project. Most of the adaptive reuse projects, a lot of them are complicated because you’re kind of like doing this editing process all the time. So, you’re unpicking and then you re-stitching. And it takes a lot of skill, but also like a lot of passion that this is the way to go, from all parties, including the builders as well, because they’re absolutely fundamental to it.

And is there a carbon gain by leaving that building standing?

Yeah, absolutely. So, all of that concrete structure, that can contribute anywhere between 30 to 45 per cent of the embodied carbon of the total project. So, it’s significant. But a couple of other big projects that we’ve also done which are radical adaptation, one is, so Quay Quarter which is actually a much – well it’s complicated as well but in a totally different way. That was actually taking an existing tower structure, stripping it back and then bolting in new floors, basically onto the existing structure, adding new parts of lift cores and so on. That’s been six years in the making, a very, very complicated build. And as I said, a project that 3XN actually won the design competition for and BVN has done all the site execution on.

And then another one that we’ve also finished, which is a different, again a different version of it is Greenland Tower. So that’s the tallest residential building in Sydney and for that one it used to be the Water Board building on the corner of Bathurst and Pitt Street and it was a steel structure with a concrete enclosure, all of the concrete got stripped – it was all sort of past its usable life – and then the steel structure retained and then we put another 45 storeys on top of it. So that building’s like a 76-storey building sitting on top of the existing structure. So, when we say radical adaptation, we really mean it. They’re sort of extreme examples of it, other ones are just retaining heritage buildings and reusing them. It could be taking a 1970s office building and remaking it to being a positive new kind of fit for purpose work environment.

At the other end of the spectrum, one brand new building that you’re working on that we touched on at the beginning of the conversation, the Atlassian Headquarters at Central Station. It’s going to be the world’s highest, as I understand it, hybrid timber building. Very ambitious climate targets around the project. Can you talk to us a bit about that?

So Atlassian is a collaborative project. This one’s with a SHoP and BVN. SHoP are architects out of New York and BVN. But it’s more than even just the architects, I mean, it’s a collaboration with the client, with now the property owner, Dexus, with the builders who is Built Obayashi and obviously the whole consultant team. So, like this one is really the product of a very significant global team coming together, but the ambition of it has really been set by Atlassian, as a key stakeholder, and then them fitting into what has been designated as this important precinct for Sydney, which is called Tech Central.

So, the idea of Tech Central is to bring the technology industries into a hub within the Sydney context and New South Wales context to get more critical mass happening there. And so Atlassian, being one of the most preeminent Australian tech companies, they’re going to sort of be one of the key anchors for the precinct. Having said that, they probably couldn’t have picked a more complicated site to do a very complicated build on, so it’s just like it’s the perfect storm. So, we’re sitting on the edge of the busiest rail corridor in Australia, so we’re right on the edge of Central Station. We’re in fact putting this tower on a site which has an existing heritage shed on it, which is the Inwards Parcel Shed, and we are building, at the moment, the world’s tallest hybrid timber tower. So, it’s like, whoo, yeah, definitely it’s giving us all the challenges.

The targets for the project are 50 per cent less embodied carbon in the, particularly in the structure and the facade, focused around that. And then 100 per cent renewable energy and there’s a range of other targets as well, including things like wellness, so wellness of occupants and so on. So, it’s highly, highly ambitious. And when we say hybrid timber, what that means is it’s a concrete core, a steel exoskeleton, so a steel outer frame and then timber mid-levels. So, the way the building works is every four levels has what we call a mega floor and inside the mega floor, that means that’s a fire compartment for four storeys. And then inside that, we use a mass timber construction methodology, which is cross laminated timber and glue laminated beam. So, it’s almost like giant plywood.

Is that made here?

There are manufacturers here, not very many and because of the strength grades we need, we actually are getting ours out of Europe.

Is it actually environmentally efficient?

Yes, it is. It is absolutely. Even with transport, it has less embodied carbon than particularly than concrete and steel. So, what this building does actually, though, I think is really important because people will often say, ‘Oh, we should build everything out of timber. We should never use concrete again. We should never use steel again.’ Well, it’s actually not the answer.

If we tried to build everything out of timber, we would just deforest the entire planet and it’d be a disaster. I mean, there are obviously sustainable sources, but nevertheless, we couldn’t keep up with that. And there are instances where timber is just not appropriate and the reason this building is hybrid is because you can’t build viably a 40-storey building all out of timber. The sections would be massive, it makes no sense. Like then you’re using material unnecessarily and also like there’s a whole lot of fire issues that just make it unviable. So that’s why it’s a hybrid. But there are some really good advancements now happening in terms of concrete and making that greener and using low geopolymer mixes and things. So, we absolutely want to push into spurring on the concrete industry to make that happen. And then Green Steel is another one that is starting to come online, not yet here in Australia and we’re having to bring the steel in from South Korea and Europe.

That’s a tragedy, isn’t it? When we’ve got Port Kembla, we’ve got a steelworks.

It’s a good challenge for Australia to have and that’s where we really need all that fabulous venture capitalist funding to start to push into the construction industry because it’s sort of a no brainer. But the fabulous news is the hoardings are about to go up on site probably, in fact, today, maybe. So literally, yes. And that’s been a while, that’s been a good three years in the making. So that’s really exciting. And then it’ll be about four years to build it. So, look, there’s no doubt that supply chain issues are impacting construction across like all sectors, it’s an issue. Things aren’t moving as quickly as they normally would and costs are definitely, have definitely gone up. So, we’re seeing anywhere between 20 to 45, 50 per cent increases in costs, which is a challenge.

Luckily it seems like Mike Cannon-Brookes can afford it. He’s a pretty unique client. He’s been one of our conversation partners in this series. He’s intervened to stop the breakup of AGL. How does this building line up with all of his other interventions on climate change? Do you see it’s blazing a trail for the industry? Is it, in terms of new technology, is bringing up the digital skills of the industry?

I think it’s an absolute trailblazer for sure. I mean, it sits in the sweet spot of, I think everything that he stands for and Atlassian stands for so and it is setting a standard for the industry. And what is fantastic is Atlassian were absolutely watertight on what they wanted to achieve with the project when they started, and it was part of the brief that we received. So, it wasn’t us pushing to have those things, which is often the case, we’re trying to influence the client. In this case, the client was very well-educated, had a view on how they wanted to approach it, and we’ve been able to kind of push into that.

It’s a real challenge to achieve these things but I think all these projects that are outliers, that’s always the case. So, it’s pretty exciting to be part of. I think it’s definitely one the industry is watching not just in Australia but globally, watching this project, seeing how it evolves. And in fact, I think it’s already, whilst we’re saying it’s the world’s tallest hybrid timber tower, I think it’s probably, there are projects now in design that will be taller. And so, it’s already through the design process and the process of getting it out to everyone prior to it being built, it’s already spurring on others to make similar moves, which is great.

Because it wouldn’t achieve change if it was just a one off, would it?

No. Exactly.

A symbolic act. It needs to be, I suppose, imitation, the highest form of flattery. It needs to break ground for others to come and emulate, improve, evolve the thinking.

Absolutely. We’ve talked a lot about operational energy, and we’ve talked a lot about embodied carbon but one of the other amazing things about this building is you can be 38 storeys up and you can be cracking a window open and occupying a park space. So, there’s a whole range of things in the building that it sets up a standard where it’s like it is about how do you, one: create community in a very tall building, two: how do you actually ensure that we live in an environment where we, regardless of being in a tall building, we can promote our wellbeing. We’ve got access to nature, we’ve got access to fresh air, we’re not using as much operational energy, we’ve got sort of biophilic environment around us. I think all of these things are really important and it will set up an exemplar that people can look to that say, ‘Oh, well, if they’ve done it there, then probably we can do it’, rather than, ‘Geez, it’s hard to open a window when you’re 40 storeys up’.

Another element of the project is that you’re trying to reset the balance between Sydney’s First Nations, its colonial and its migrant histories. How are you trying to do that?

Yes, I mean, we call that designing with Country. And at BVN, one of our partners, Kevin O’Brien, is an Indigenous man, he’s also an amazing architect. And what we have worked really hard on is just to embedd a designing with Country framework into all of our project thinking. And that means we really look at sort of three key things.

One is settings, so the way First Nations people use place was very much around settings and there were really three aspects to that. One was sort of the track, one was the camp, and one was ritual, and so it’s understanding place in those three terms. And as part of our process of understanding each place in which we’re designing in, we try and do a level of research around what was there before the colonial history came. And what’s really interesting is you start to understand the way the ridgelines work in the city like Oxford Street was a major track up to the harbor and so on. So, you understand all these kind of critical points about how First Nations people used and how the Aboriginal people used the land before we came to it, which can start to help inform us a little bit around how we then build up the story, in the new.

So, there’s the idea of setting, the other one is palette. So, flora, fauna, geology, hydrology, you know what’s actually happening on the site and how do we reference that in the new?

And then the third part is caring. And so that’s thinking about regenerative design. What we, how do we replace lost Country? How do we bring back biophilia? It’s how do you bring back lost landscapes? How do we plant? For example, in Atlassian, we’ve got a whole landscape strategy that happens at the ground plane, more tree canopy and low-level planting as well. And then up through the building, every four levels, we’ve got a park space as well, which is all like, it’s basically a native landscape within the building. So, we’re kind of looking at it across those levels. But caring is also about the performance of the building, and it ties into the whole climate conversation. So, they’re really the three aspects that we look at, and it’s not, when we think about designing with Country, we really want to think more deeply about it.

Okay. So, you’ve talked about your sort of light bulb moment back in 2016 and working on robotics and digital innovation in the industry. Tell us about that work and what are the implications?

Maybe just a step back a little bit. When we talk about the construction industry contributing that 40 per cent to carbon emissions and it needing a radical transformation, the radical transformation can’t just come in sheets and sticks, like it can’t just be like a sheet of product that we have used, sheet of plasterboard, for example, and a piece of steel. We have more tools available to us and if we can change our processes, it opens up these possibilities to us. So, when we think about digital fabrication, I mean, there’s a couple of ways you can think about it, it can be prefabrication, for example, like mass timber construction, you’ve almost sort of assembled everything digitally, you’ve designed it all digitally before it goes to fabrication and then it comes on and you’re really bolting it together.

I think Grand Designs did a Huf Haus that went up in three days.

Yeah. We did a project for ANU, which was one of the biggest timber builds in Australia if we would have done it out of concrete and steel, it probably would have taken a crew of maybe 60 people to do it. It actually took 13 people to put it together and it was a fairly significant building, and it was 30 per cent less time and they were actually a team that was used to installing facades. So quite different, and it’s so clean, you come on to site and it’s just like unbelievably clean. It smells amazing, it’s just, it’s really – and there’s much less waste because everything’s been pre-designed. You’re bringing on to site what it is that you’re actually putting together, you put it together and the waste is much smaller.

So, these are the reasons why digital fabric fabrication or prefabrication, I think are so important to us going forward because the level of waste in construction is just, it’s sort of shocking, quite frankly. It’s not just wasting materials, but it’s wasting time and resources and like it’s across the board. And that does mean that it’s more expensive than it potentially needs to be as well.

So, robotics is the kind of pointier end of that. So, on one hand, it’s prefabrication and modularity and design for disassembly. On the other hand, it could be large scale robotic 3D printing, where we’re laying down materials in almost a liquid form and you can lay down exactly the amount you need. So, everything can be highly optimised. We can use new materials, so in the case of Systems Reef 2, that’s actually 3D printing hospital plastic waste into a new air diffusion system which replaces steel ductwork. So, we wouldn’t have that, that possibility isn’t really available to us unless we use a different kind of construction approach and that’s where the 3D printing comes into play. And that’s why I think it’s just so important that we start to move the industry into that realm because it’s a game changer.

Systems Reef 2, take us through exactly, I understand the numbers are pretty impressive in terms of the waste reduction and in terms of embodied carbon. So, just to make it clear for the listener, you’re replacing those steel ducts that everyone is familiar with, that are up on the ceiling as part of the air conditioning system. But what are you replacing them exactly with?

So we’re replacing them with custom designed, recycled plastic components, all click and connect.

Tubes, they look, they look pretty cool, don’t they? They’re sort of shiny and –

Crystalline.

Crystalline.

Yeah. So, I mean, what we really were setting out to do and it started as a research project and it’s now moving into a product, and we’ve spent the last year looking at how commercialising it as a product.

And you’ve got a global patent.

We do. We filed patents globally. So, it’s a, the patent process is a little slow, so that’s ongoing. But what we were really doing, it sort of all ties into the whole picture. So, if we want to look at existing buildings and in fact even new buildings and we look at all components that make up embodied carbon but also impact our operational energy, we have to look at air conditioning. So, we look, we talk a lot about the plant that we use and the energy that the actual plant that generates the air takes. But we have been using steel ductwork for like 90 years and it really hasn’t changed and it is quite archaic and so it’s using steel that’s very high in embodied carbon. In fact, interestingly, recently steel has gone up about 50 per cent in price, so it’s expensive at the moment as well and it’s kind of esthetically clunky and because it’s almost been designed for the manufacturing process, which is like rol – sheets that get sort of bolted together, it’s not optimised for air, which means we’re actually leaking a lot of air every time we put air through the system, we’re oversizing the ducts and it’s got designs with right angles in it where air doesn’t move in right angles and like there’s a whole range of things that don’t actually work about it because it’s been designed for a manufacturing process that’s about folding steel sheets. So we went, ‘Well, if we genuinely want to look at how we rethink existing buildings and new buildings, we’ve got to look at the systems that service us.’ So, hence Systems Reef, which is really looking at a layering of a new more, high-calibre performance-based system that supports how we occupy buildings.

And this is a huge part of the energy use of all of our buildings, right, air conditioning?

Huge.

Yeah. It’s that and lighting.

Absolutely, absolutely, massive. Essentially what we do is we take clean hospital plastic waste, so every time you’re in a hospital, say all the equipment might come in a tray with a plastic lid, that lid gets open, gets put into recycling, so it’s effectively clean, but it’s waste. So, we use that waste at the moment, but ultimately it could be expanded into other kinds of plastic waste that gets made into a pellet. The pellet gets fed into the robot and then the robot prints the duct system and then the systems have all been designed using fluid dynamics so that they’re all very aerodynamic in the way they deliver-

No right angles?

No right angles. And they’re also designed so that they’ve got thousands, we looked at frog skin, actually, which –

Frog skin?

Yeah. So, frogs breathe through their skin and we, essentially the whole system is created with like thousands of little pores along the length of the straight members. And so, the air just mists out. So, instead of sitting under this well diffuser where you’re thinking, ‘I am freezing’, and you’re wearing a scarf in summer, this is like a soft mist of air that comes through the straight lengths of the system. And then all the –

That’s genius.

It’s nice, isn’t it? And then all the components are click and connect, so there’s no fixed, there’s no mechanical systems, it’s just, you just click them together. And the other sort of very innovative part of it is each of the, as the system sort of extends out from, say, the core of the building, it tapers and because it’s a continuous taper, it means you can push the air through at a lower velocity, which means you’re using less fan speed, which means the operational energy is significantly lower. So, it sounds sort of complicated but it’s all intertwined. And what that does mean, though, is because it’s plastic instead of steel, it’s 90 per cent less embodied carbon than steel because we’ve optimised the form and there’s no, and it’s designed aerodynamically, it’s 70 per cent smaller in cross-sectional area, so we use tons less material and then it’s about, I don’t know, 70 per cent lighter than steel ductwork, so a single person can just carry a whole range of different components, whereas typically you’d need two guys to kind of hold it up and jack it up while they’re trying to put up a piece.

Is it a business opportunity, are you going to make money, is BVN going to?

Well, I hope so. Yes, I hope so. So, as I said, we launched it about a year ago and since that time, we’ve really been exploring commercialising it. Because it originally started as a research project and then we got to kind of the end and went, ‘Oh, we think we’ve actually done something pretty revolutionary here. I think this has really got legs’. And everyone that we talk to is just like, ‘Whoa, this is a game changer’. So, we are in the process of working closely with a very large manufacturer to look at scaling the manufacturing process, who is super keen because actually from their perspective, steel’s really expensive, so it’s hard to make it affordable. They just think digitisation is absolutely their future and so they’re really quite excited about the idea that this could be a game changer for them too.

Ninotschka, thank you so much. Please join me in a round of applause. To follow the program online, you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and to 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.