The ACT minister for the environment and sustainable building and construction Rebecca Vassarotti has announced the winners of the Canberra Low Carbon Housing Challenge.
Organized by a group of architects, the competition aimed to showcase exemplary homes that demonstrate significant reductions in their carbon footprint, while also drawing attention to the carbon intensity of the housing boom. Each new home built in Canberra contributes around 500 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.
“For every house built, we would need to plant around 3,000 trees to offset these emissions, or we can design our houses in a way that reduces carbon and provides climate positive outcomes,” said architect and researcher Dr Melinda Dodson, who initiated the competition. “Examples are reduced house size, use of low carbon or recycled materials, solar passive design, efficient heating and cooling, and renewables such as rooftop solar.
“We’ve made great progress with energy efficient homes, but what’s missing is the broader assessment of the total carbon footprint – the carbon impacts of manufacturing and transporting materials, and the energy expended in constructing a house are an important part of the equation.”
First prize for an alts and adds house: Pettit and Sevitt Net-zero Makeover by Light House Architecture and Science.
Image: Courtesy Canberra Low Carbon Housing Challenge
The competition was open to registered architects in the ACT who submitted their designs to be carbon modelled using a a proprietary Rapid LCA software by E-Tool.
Dodson and students from the University of Canberra then worked with lifecycle assessors from E-Tool to analyze the modelling results for each house.
The jury of architects assessed the projects for “compelling and diverse architectural solutions to the crucial issue of lowering carbon [as well as] design clarity, value for money and innovative sustainable solutions.”
The competition included low- and medium-density housing as well as affordable housing. More than half of the entries were net-zero carbon.
“This is an impressive achievement on its own merits, but all the more important when you consider that Canberra could save over 18 million tonnes of GHG emissions if around half of its low and medium density new houses, expected to be built over the next two decades, were also net-zero,” Dodson said. “This would translate to more than 40,000 new net-zero houses and offers a real opportunity to help in the fight for our planet’s climate.”
The winners are:
New house category
First prize for a net-zero new house
Narrabundahaus – Michael Tolhurst Architects
Second prize for a low carbon house
Blackwood House – Mather Architecture
Commendations for net-zero new house
White House – Light House Architecture and Science
Collector House – Open Principle Architecture
Commendations for low-carbon new house
Ironbark House – Allan Spira Architects
Canberra ‘Beach’ House – Light House Architecture and Science
Alts and adds (existing house renovations and extensions) category
First prize for an alts and adds house
Pettit and Sevitt Net-zero Makeover – Light House Architecture and Science
Second prize for a low carbon house
Little Loft House – Light House Architecture and Science
Multi-gen (medium density townhouses, duplexes, granny flats) category
Second prize for a low carbon house
Whitlam ‘Multi-gen’ Townhouses – Heyward Lance Architecture
