AIA 2024 Conference

Written By Owen and Bobbie

2024 Australian Institute of Architects (AIA) National Conference - a Summary

In a GREY-SKIED Melbourne hundreds of architects congregated for the annual National Architecture conference. Owen has written a summary of the speakers and some highlights from the two days.

The conference kicked off with a welcome to Country and some meditative didgeridoo. After the immersive cultural experience of Alice Springs, being connected to Country felt far away sitting inside Melbourne's Hamer Hall. 

The cultural inundation, that is Alice Springs, seems almost otherworldly in the concrete jungle of Melbourne. Many of the conversations were about listening to Aboriginal voices as part of the design process to bring these often unheard voices into the conversation and design process. There was an assumption that the buildings that come from this process would be built to the current construction codes and would continue to function and serve the communities they were designed with.

I feel like Alice Springs has the opposite experience in some ways, day to day you are surrounded by Aboriginal voices, literally. The city is a melting pot of cultures and languages, English is spoken but not by everyone and as I have spent more time here I begin to pick up the different languages in the street, Luritja from the western surrounds of Alice Springs, Western Arrarnta from directly west or Pitjantjatjara from the south west towards WA, to name a few. When working in remote communities the process of talking and listening to Aboriginal voices is taken as standard part of the design process. The buildings that get built in these communities however often only provide very basic amenity, simple toilets, a sink and some powerpoints. Despite this the buildings are heavily used and deal with some of the harshest climatic conditions in the country.

The Melbourne conference was a reminder of how disjointed Australia’s urban edges are from its dusty centre. I don’t have any answers from this introspection but I wonder how we can better connect the city and country and the different ways of thinking and operating. There was certainly a lot to offer to refresh the brain and connect to the global design community, perhaps we need to look from the cities inland from time to time.

Below I have summarised a few dot points from each speaker I heard, as I would like to think there is something to lean from everyone and it’s a good reminder for myself, you might find it useful too.

There were three big highlights for me;

  1. The critical reminder that we need to change the way we design and construct buildings to cut embodied carbon and electrify everything. The construction industry accounts for up to 40% of global emissions. As an industry we need to be more across understanding embodied carbon and as users we need to ensure we are using certified green power in our buildings.

  2. Nigel Bertram’s focused approach to research & design, combining the laser focus of research with the pragmatics of a project to deliver elegantly simple solutions that were measurable and scalable. The St Albans social housing project interrogated the design process & carved out a 45 minute meeting with each tenant to design their own bedroom walls. A post-occupancy evaluation of this left no doubt how valuable this was to the tenants who suddenly had a house that fitted their own furniture and lifestyle. All it took was one 45 minute meeting at the right stage of the design process.

  3. The work of Robust Architecture Workshop, based in Sri Lanka, much of their work is built by low skilled labour. They have developed their architectural drawings to communicate construction not just as a set of plans but to show the technical difficulty of different elements. So that when building a project, teams can start with simple parts of the building to improve their technical skills and move through increasingly more technical parts of the construction as their skills grow. A lot to learn for remote work in Australia perhaps?

A couple of days of learning had my head exploding with nuggets of gold!

Paul Monoghan

The first speaker for the conference from the self-titled firm of “Alford Hall Monoghan Morris”. They have seemingly won all the awards there are to win in architecture and do some enormous work in the UK. It did seem incongruous after a grounding welcome to Country to have a British bloke take the spotlight.

Highlights & Take-aways

Dana Cuff 

from UCLA is a North American architect whose research focused on analysing city space for opportunities to make housing more ‘abundant’ - both in quantity and quality. https://aud.ucla.edu/faculty/dana-cuff

Highlights & Take-aways

  • Mapping of space within the city that was already big enough to build a granny flat, based on existing planning laws and then working with local councils to densify suburbs

  • Approaching policy and planning as a design exercise in and of itself - Write the policy for the work you want, not what already exists.

  • Solving big problems of low-hanging fruit first - Do what you can, not what is ideal

  • Understanding architecture as a spectrum of small to big things - Housing can be anything from a park bench to a mansion depending on your social, cultural and financial time in life.

  • The quote “You can’t move past the speed of trust”

  • Linking housing to work in a very direct way - working with schools to build affordable housing for teachers on school properties, adjusting planning codes and finance/developer models to do so.

Nigel Bertram

From NMBW and Monash University, is an architect and academic whose research and practice both work together in the same direction. A small but amazingly considered collection of projects were presented showing a rare depth of thinking and execution. https://nmbw.com.au/

Highlights & Take-aways

  • Integration of water into gardens and planting within big urban settings, capturing the water running off hard surfaces and using it to make beautiful shady spaces for people to enjoy while supporting local plants and animals

  • Detailed mapping of water and contours over thousands of years to understand where water wants to be - “water has a long memory” - then designing multi-residential developments to retain and work with water.

  • The quote - “Swamps are the most vilified and modified landscapes across the globe”

  • The provocation - “What’s our 200-year plan for Melbourne?”

  • A social housing project (St Albans) where a 45-minute meeting with the future tenant allowed the tenant to have their own furniture drawn into the plans and decide where they wanted the bedroom walls. A small investment of time for a massive sense of ownership and agency for the tennant. https://architectureau.com/articles/st-albans-housing/

Barbara Bestor

An architect in LA working across many different types of projects, housing, offices, mixed-use developments, and more. 

Highlights & Take-aways

Yasmin Lari

Pakistan's first female architect. After ‘retiring’ she decided to “repent” from a career serving the big end of town and work with communities and villages to build housing and community facilities for some of Pakistan's poorest.

Highlights & Take-aways

  • Prefab bamboo wall structure unit that made up most of the building designs

  • Zero carbon construction - earth, lime and bamboo rather than carbon-intensive products like concrete and steel.

  • The motto - “Decarbonise, decolonise, democratize”

  • The quote - “The worst thing is displacement and must be avoided at every cost” - in relation to natural disasters and prioritising design decisions.

Alberto Veiga

From Barcelona, part of a firm that does super slick cultural buildings across the world.

Highlights & Take-aways

Laim Young

An architect and filmmaker who uses film to create imagined worlds to shift cultural discussion in different directions

Highlights & Take-aways

  • A quote - “Perhaps we are no longer citizens but customers of today’s city” on the commercialisation of public space

  • A quote - “The things we design are nothing without the body to inhibit them” in relation to using dance and costume in films to explore ideas of cities and culture

  • A quote - “A site plan defines the edges of a problem” about the importance of a well-considered site plan as a key architectural drawing

  • A quote - “Today's public forum is not a piazza but a platform (online)” on the role of architecture in public discussion.

Alspec

The conference sponsor had some interesting stats about innovations in aluminium which is a carbon intensive product.

  • Regular Aluminium windows

    • 13kg of carbon / kilo of aluminium

  • Alspec product - Green core aluminium

    • 8 kg of carbon / kilo of aluminium

  • Alspec product - Green core ultra aluminium ($+10%)

    • 4 kg of carbon / kilo of aluminium 

Kaunitz and Yeung

A Sydney architecture firm working in remote Aboriginal communities often designing health clinics or art centers. Their deft touch was inspiring to see, knowing the huge number of challenges these projects face and the resolution that they were able to bring to these projects was impressive.

Highlights & Take-aways

  • Use of laser-cut steel screens to do a plethora of jobs,

    • art works offering local employment

    • Security

    • Shading devices

    • Signage

    • Identity

    • Aesthetics

  • Incorporation of public space linked to Aboriginal managed buildings that had shade, water and agency

  • Low energy use buildings for community organiaations by using solar and efficient building design

  • Their approach of “move the dial from the focus from the institution to the client” particularly in their aged care project which moved away from a typically centralised plan to give residents more space and views into the bush around + space for visiting relatives to roll out a swag. - https://kaunitzyeung.com/project/yutjuwala-djiwarr-aged-care/

Panel - Towards Zero Carbon

Some of the industry's leading thinkers - Davina Rooney (Green Building Council), Andrew Noonan (Hassell) and Jeremy McLeod (Breathe) - talked about how we can move towards buildings that produce zero carbon.

Highlights & Take-aways

  • A reminder that buildings contribute 37% of global emissions with 27% of this being building operations - we need more efficient buildings! However, a good first step is to electrify everything in a building and go with a 100% certified green power.

  • The mantra “reduction before production”

  • Zero carbon looks like highly efficient building fully powered by renewables and a 40% reduction in embodied carbon

  • Embodied carbon is the largest carbon contributor for a 5.5 star house using renewable energy

  • The quote “you can’t manage what you don’t measure”

  • Steps to reduction

    • Design nothing

    • Design less

    • Design out waste

    • Design with waste

    • Consider ongoing value

    • Specify better

Robust Architecture Workshop

A Sri Lankan firm run by Ganga Rathnamake and Milinda Pathiraja whose work focuses on working with local labour to upskill people through the duration of their projects.

Highlights & Take-aways

  • Flexible construction details that allowed for things to be built not straight/out of square/not level and having a way to make that work with the rest of the building without compromising structural integrity and bringing its own beauty. Great for low skilled work forces. Termed “allowable failure”

  • Starting projects with workshops to upskill workers, and building the projects from the easy parts to the hard parts to allow skill levels to increase

  • Wonderful documentation of project complexity from simple to technical that allowed construction to progress with low skilled labour, building skills on simple parts of the building and finishing with the complex parts. Such as on this project https://www.robustarchitectureworkshop.com/projects/Community%20Library/

Eliza Higgins + Cyrus Patell

From Bangalore, India where they’re architecture firm - Collective Project, designs projects working closely within their local context. They work with the flexibility afforded to them by low labour rates to use materials in innovative ways.

Highlights & Take-aways

  • A school shade structure and masterplan where the materials came from within a 100km radius of the project. https://collective-project.com/Talaricheruvu-Rural-School

Panel - Empowering the profession through legislation

The dry weetbix of a panel (surprisingly delicious) had - Jane Cassidy (GHD), David Chandler (Building Commissioner NSW), Leah Lang (QLD Gov Architect), John Doyle (President AASA) talking about how legislation can improve design and not hamper those wanting to do good work.

Highlights & Take-aways

  • The quote - “Legislate what matters most and incentivise the rest”

  • the quote - “The conversation around carbon is an elite one” - simplify the message

Owen and Bobbie
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