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Hello curious people.
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I'm Anthony Burke, a professor of architecture, television presenter
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and academic at UTS, and I'm here to answer your curious questions
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about design, technology and the future of the spaces we live in.
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This is Design Curious.
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Our UTS community have sent in some thought provoking questions.
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So let's get started.
How is new technology changing the way homes are designed and built?
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How is new technology changing the way homes are designed and built?
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An excellent question, and one that architecture is very invested in.
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All sorts of new technologies are making their way into the houses
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that we build, the buildings that we put together,
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and interestingly, it's not just the new tech,
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but a lot of old tech that's coming back to the table.
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Things like rammed earth or pisé on these kinds of very old, traditional
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ways of building are making a comeback for sustainability reasons.
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On the other hand, we've got everything from AI helping us to design the
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the floor plans of the future, if you like, and streamline
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the production process to 3D printed houses.
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We've even got houses built these days out of mushrooms.
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Yep, mushrooms.
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So we're exploring all sorts of amazing new materials in architecture these days
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with the idea of bringing down costs, bringing down the carbon
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footprint of all the houses that we build
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and improving the way architecture is improving our lives.
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What do you think homes will look like in 5, 10 or 20 years?
What do you think homes will look like in 5, 10 or 20 years?
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Oh, that's a hard one.
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I don't think houses are going to look a great deal different,
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maybe a little more streamlined, if you like, but they'll be organised
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very differently.
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Things like our work from home environment these days, it's changing what
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we want from our houses.
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So things like an office where everyone can get their own,
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you know, professional space is a really important thing these days.
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Also, the materials we use and the amount of space that we're building
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that will sort of come down by shrinking the size of our houses.
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Australia has some of the largest houses in the world right now,
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and that's not a good thing.
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So we're looking at actually being more efficient
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in the way that we design our homes.
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I think, though,
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most importantly, we're coming back to the idea of what is home to everybody.
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So how do we have a family?
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How do we create memories?
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How do we find a place in this crazy world that we live
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in, where we can have a moment of joy, a moment of happiness?
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Those are the things that are driving architecture for so many of us.
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How can smart design make small spaces feel bigger and more livable?
How can smart design make small spaces feel bigger and more liveable?
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That's a really good question.
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It's one that actually most people can make an immediate change
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in their environments by doing something small to somewhere in their home.
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The thing to think about here is
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how can you double time different spaces in the home?
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What I mean by that is, rather than thinking
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a bedroom is just a bedroom or a hallway, it's just a hallway.
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How can we add new uses to those spaces to make them more efficient
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and make them a little bit different as well?
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More interesting as you walk through the home.
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So something like a hallway is a really good example.
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A hallway is a perfect spot if it's wide enough to accommodate
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a long desk perhaps, or a library or something like that.
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That would be perfect for a work from home situation or the after school homework.
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Those kinds of ideas are what's changing.
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I really like the idea of trying to find a moment in the home that is
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just about taking a step out of time, a moment of rest and repose.
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So a beautiful little window seat that overlooks a garden,
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or has a little bit of sunlight coming through a place where you'd pull up
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with a cup of coffee and a book and spend maybe 20 minutes a day
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just being at home and, you know, calming down after a busy life.
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Those are the kinds of spaces that really do make a huge difference
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to how we feel about our houses and our homes,
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and they're the things where design is making a big impact.
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It's about thoughtful and intentional design,
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and that's where the architecture comes in,
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because most people will think a design is just a floor plan.
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What we architects look for is a way to maximise the experience
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of all of those spaces that's in the home, as well as in your office downtown,
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or anywhere with cost of living pressures and Australia's housing crisis,
With cost-of-living pressures and Australia’s housing crisis, how is the Australian dream changing, especially for young people?
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how is the Australian dream changing, especially for young people?
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This is the question of the moment.
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It's a difficult situation.
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70% of people under the age of 35
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don't believe they're going to own a home in their lifetime.
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That is a huge generational change from what's come before.
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So we in Australia right now are facing a real crisis
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where home ownership is no longer the game.
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Most people are imagining.
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Again, those under 35 are imagining I'm going to have to do something else.
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So we're looking at shared accommodation, long term
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rentals, sort of communal living, different ideas about maximising space for
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more people in higher density or slightly higher density sort of situations.
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And that's a real challenge to the idea of the traditional Australian home
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or the Australian dream, as it was sort of given to us in the 1950s.
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So with that on the cards, we're looking at architecture to do a lot more work
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to make those kinds of situations work for the people who are living there.
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What I mean by that is things like privacy, things like communal spaces.
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How do you get that balance? Right? Everyone needs their privacy.
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But people want to be together.
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People want to share a laundry, maybe share a kitchen.
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Certainly share a garden. These are great ideas.
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And it's those kinds of ideas that are reshaping
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the Australian home for tomorrow.
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Where did the housing crisis come from and what kind of crisis is it?
Where did the housing crisis come from, and what kind of crisis is it?
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Well, it depends who you ask.
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A lot of people would understand the housing crisis as a crisis
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of affordability.
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This is an issue that really sort of took off, if you like, in 2000,
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when things like capital gains
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tax and negative gearing landed in the laps of Australians.
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And that really changed the Australian home
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from a place where we grow up, we raise kids, we create our memories
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to a financial asset, and the home was now the best financial investment
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one could make to secure your retirement or grow wealth into the future.
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At that moment, that was 25 years ago.
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So for 25 years, we've seen housing prices rise through the roof,
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but our wages haven't kept up with that kind of change in the house price.
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So the multiple of our, our wages to housing
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prices was back then somewhere like about 3 to 1.
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The house price was three times our wage.
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Now it's about 9 or 10 times to one.
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So that difference is the affordability issue.
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That's the affordability gap if you like.
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And that's not changing.
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Nothing is changing in that space any time soon, which is a real problem for us.
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So that's one version of the crisis.
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But I also think there's another version, which is we
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tend to think of the Australian home as a very singular kind of thing.
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We don't have a lot of diversity in our housing stock,
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which means when we understand a house in Australia, we're probably thinking about
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a three bedroom, two bathroom carport out the front kind of house on a suburban
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lot somewhere in the suburbs of a major metropolitan center.
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But our demographics outside of the makeup of the Australian population
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has changed so much since the 1950s, when that sort of idea was sort of
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first born that those kinds of houses no longer suit us.
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So for me, there's a real crisis between what we need and what will suit
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our current lifestyles and our family makeups today versus what we're building,
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which are the houses that were really meant for a family of the 1950s.
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Can design help make homes more affordable?
Can design help make homes more affordable?
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The short answer is absolutely yes. 100%.
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The way I think about it is
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if you get the right advice up front, you're actually designing
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in the efficiencies and the affordability of the life of the home,
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which is going to be something like 40 years or so.
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So when you think about that, what does that mean?
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It means designing a smaller home, one that works better for the family,
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even though it's a bit smaller
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in its size, one that's more sustainable, more energy efficient.
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Those kinds of ideas are where design steps in
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at the very beginning of a project.
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Choosing better materials
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that are more robust, that don't need so much maintenance, for example.
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This is all part of the spatial and the design parameters of a new home,
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for example.
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And it's that information, that sort of intelligence upfront
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which saves you money in the very long term.
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So you might spend a little bit more on architect's fees but the balance,
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the payoff is that you will have a much better home for much longer
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and that's where you get the affordability.
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Are new types of homes emerging to respond to these challenges?
Are new types of homes emerging to respond to these challenges?
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Absolutely.
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What we're seeing now is a real commitment to medium
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density dwelling and even new types of apartment design.
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For Australians, living in an apartment
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is something that you think, wow, that's only a step towards a house.
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But for many people, an apartment is going to be their reality
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as they kind of live their lives in Australia.
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And as a consequence, apartment design is changing quite fundamentally.
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It's going from those investment properties that you see
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sort of sprouting up around major capital cities to apartment sizes
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which are bigger, allow more space, are more flexible, can accommodate
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different generations across one family, for example,
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and allow you to sort of stay in an apartment and use
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all the benefits of of a group of people living together in an apartment block,
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things like the gym, the pool, the garden, the laundry,
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those sorts of ideas where actually you're getting immense benefit out of those.
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So the idea of designing better apartments is very much on the table right now.
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The other thing that's changing right now is the multigenerational house
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and what that means is we're designing houses
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that are just slightly bigger to accommodate Mum and Dad, Grandma
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and Grandpa, as well as the kids who are staying home longer,
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maybe not even ever leaving home at all.
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That's the reality of the future of the housing crisis in Australia.
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So we might have three generations living under one roof.
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That requires a very different kind of mindset for
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how do you design a house that accommodates all of those different
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people, bodies, social relationships, moving around on a daily basis
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without getting annoyed at each other, without falling over each other?
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So there's some really interesting work going on now in the multigenerational
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housing space in Australia as a response directly to the housing crisis.
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Is it still possible to design
Is it still possible to design a beautiful, functional home without spending a fortune?
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a beautiful, functional home without spending a fortune?
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Absolutely.
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Although it does depend on what your idea of beautiful is.
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If beautiful to you means really expensive materials
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and sort of lots and lots of space and all those important things
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from all around the world.
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Then you're going to spend a fortune to make that happen.
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But good and beautiful design to me isn't that at all.
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What I think of when I think of beauty is the idea of feeling really good
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about being in a space, about wanting to invite my family
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and my friends to be with me in that place.
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It's the idea
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that beauty is the way we live in a house, rather than how the house looks.
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So beauty in that sense doesn't have to be expensive at all.
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It's really about finding those moments through design, when you can celebrate
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life in its everyday kind of dimensions and that's where design
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can make really small but really meaningful differences to anyone's house.
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How do culture and climate influence the way homes are designed?
How do culture and climate influence the way homes are designed?
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They are the two big drivers, if I had to say it.
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Money,
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surprisingly isn't as much of a driver as those two things culture and climate.
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Culture we understand because it's who we are as a nation.
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That's how we live in Australia. So that's pretty straightforward.
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But the environmental or the climate response is something that
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we're kind of having to update our ideas around quite fundamentally.
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We are in a climate crisis.
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The temperatures are rising.
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Things like floods and bushfires are happening more often.
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So we're changing the way that we think about our houses as a way to respond
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to those kinds of natural disasters or natural situations
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much more effectively than we have in the past.
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The other side of that is
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we're using materials now, which are really conscious decisions
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about designing with materials that are sustainable, which means we can
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not only build our houses with them,
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but we can also dismantle our houses and reuse those materials.
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It means that those materials don't require us to put a lot of energy
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into the house to heat or cool the house, during the summer or winter.
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So clever design
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really does get inside that idea of climate change and climate as a whole.
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And it's so important, especially in a country like Australia,
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to respond to our climate.
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It's pretty extreme if you're living in Tassie, it's below zero.
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If you're living in the far
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north of Queensland, it's hot all the time and very humid.
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So we've got a lot of environmental extremes to cope with.
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And in that sense, our houses should be really different
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from the north of Queensland to the south of Tasmania.
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Which sustainable design features
Which sustainable design features make the biggest difference to running a home efficiently?
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make the biggest difference to running a home efficiently?
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This is a really good question because there are some very basic and
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simple things you can do to make your home more sustainable and more efficient.
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And the first one is it's going to sound really naff, but the first one is
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plug up the holes, all those little gaps under the door,
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all those gaps around the windows,
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those kinds of things where air is escaping and moving in and out.
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That's where we're losing all of the heat, or all of the cool
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that we're spending a lot of energy to generate in a home in summer or winter.
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So if you can kind of plug up those holes, which you can do very,
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very simply, actually,
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that's going to save you a lot of money in a very short and very easy way.
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The next thing to do is really think about things like the materials
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that you're using and I'm using as an example here,
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something like double glazing, for example.
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Most all homes have just a single pane of glass in the windows,
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but double glazing uses two panes of glass.
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And in doing that, it means that the heat or the cold transfer between the inside
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and the outside is much less because of that double glazing.
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What that really means is that when we create a temperature
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inside by heating the house, for example, it'll stay that temperature inside.
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So double glazing is one of those upgrades
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that many people could do again, quite easily, but not without a cost.
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Probably, the third thing I'd saying,
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probably the most important thing is when you're designing a home,
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we don't need houses as big as the ones that we're designing.
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So the most fundamental thing we can do about creating a more sustainable house
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is to reduce the footprint of the houses that we live in altogether.
How can homes be designed to grow and change as families do?
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How can homes be designed to grow and change as families do?
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I think this is a really great question because the way I think of houses is a bit
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more like I think of tuning an instrument.
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Whenever you have a violin, you've got to occasionally
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retune the strings to get it to sound just right, and your home is very much
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the same from time to time through, you know, the life of a home.
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As people grow up, as families change, you've got to re tune
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the house to get it to fit right, to sound right for the life you're living.
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So we tend to think,
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if I just build my house in it's set and forget as soon as I move in, I'm done.
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But actually, I think that's the wrong way of looking at it.
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The best way is to think that on occasion, I'm going to be doing small increments
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to upgrade the kind of situation that I'm sort of moving in.
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Maybe that means getting a little bit bigger,
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or maybe even a little bit smaller, if people are moving out, that kind of stuff.
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So both ways.
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But to design a house that accommodates, that requires some careful thinking
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so that you're not doing that and making a big mess of things,
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you can very easily add or subtract from the kind of the house itself.
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So that's something that architects are really on top of,
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really looking at the idea of both the circular economy, that is,
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how do we use materials effectively and reuse materials,
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as well as things like how do we accommodate the different
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the changing demographics of Australian society, where, again,
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kids are staying home longer,
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Grandparents are moving back in with the family.
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Those kinds of things require us to have a much more flexible idea
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about how a home can work.
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What's one idea that could really change how we live at home?
What’s one design idea that could really change how we live at home?
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I think the one thing that I would say is that
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we need to make a decision to live intentionally.
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And when you think about that, it's like, I'm making a decision.
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I'm designing my life at home.
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We tend not to do that.
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We kind of just move into the house
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and live our lives and create our habits and go about business every day.
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But if you think about it,
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you can actually design the way you live at home on a day to day kind of basis.
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And I think of that as living intentionally.
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So if your family really loves the idea of having a coffee together
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on a Saturday morning as a way to start the weekend, where's the space
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that you can create for that to happen in the most beautiful way possible?
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Where can we create those opportunities for little rituals
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of everyday life to be played out, you know, over and over and over again?
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And they are the kinds of things that create a beautiful life,
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a beautiful set of relationships with those around you who you love.
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And that's how architecture can support the best kind of living altogether.
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That was all the questions for today, and I hope you learned something new.
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Until next time, stay curious.