Reversing the Cycle Patrick Bingham-Hall

Sustainability means caring for country

The Dreaming, the fundament of Aboriginal belief, was made up of a network of interconnected pathways across the land that had been sung into being by ancestral spirits, and those songlines have for millennia supervised the nurturing of a resourceful and sustainable habitat. As Bill Gammage points out, “The Dreaming was saturated with environmental consciousness. Theology and ecology are fused.” ¹

As with most pre-industrial civilisations, pre-colonial Australians occupied the land for at least 40,000 years without impacting the levels of greenhouse emissions, never mind destroying ecosystems and eradicating entire species of wildlife. The anthropogenic era then repurposed nearly all the ecosystems it could track down, laying waste to many, whilst contributing more significantly than many might imagine to global climate change, and the impact upon a fragile, relatively untrammelled environment has been profound.

The rain falls more wildly and heavily than ever before, our settlements are repeatedly flooded, the countryside burns without ecological (or humanitarian) benefit, the soils are degraded, and the rivers run dry. It is clear that we cannot continue to attempt to override the realities of living in such an unforgiving land, and we might then realise that our increasing sense of fear could be ameliorated by respect and understanding.

In terms most specific to Australia, it must now be accepted that the existential cycle, which had rapidly and fatefully veered from the harmonies of the Dreaming to the discordances of anthropogenic servitude, needs to be reversed. And that means Caring for Country.

It is now estimated that something like fifty percent of greenhouse gas emissions is created by building construction and maintenance, while another thirty percent comes from urban industry, transportation and infrastructure. Our cities are the problem, their modes of existence are not sustainable, and we are now impelled to revert to a condition of environmental equilibrium that may eventually be termed ‘neo pre-colonial’.

If the cycle is to be reversed, what role might architecture play?

The scheme for a fifty-one storey tower at Pitt Street set out to minimise the long-term carbon footprint by using a hybrid structure of timber and concrete for the floors and beams, and by making comprehensive provision for ‘smart façade’ controls, assuming that technological advances would upgrade them as the years roll by. The doors were left wide open for future possibilities and any array of potential solutions. Tzannes is acknowledging that advances in technology and, ipso facto, architectural innovation, are happening so quickly that to prescribe a fixed procedure for sustainability is not in itself sustainable. The intensifying requirements for sustainable construction are leading inexorably to an architecture of anticipation, whereby a design is not just determined by a building’s quantifiable performance in the here and now, but by how it will adapt and accommodate in order to improve that performance.

With the Pitt Street proposal, Tzannes took the opportunity to revitalise a dank and cheerless downtown setting by zeroing in on what genuinely constituted the site conditions, and by contending that the development should form a living ecology, as analysed from a pre-colonial perspective. The building and its landscape were envisaged as a cultural story, as a songline that draws warmth and life into the city streets, and the underlying intention of this ‘reverse the cycle’ approach was quite simply the rectification of a right done wrong.

The Bylong Park Homestay in the Hunter Valley will comprise a permanent home and rehabilitation centre for all greyhounds born and bred for the racing industry, many of whom have historically been mistreated or put down when not of commercial value. With a zero-euthanasia policy, the facility will offer unprecedented care and comfort for up to four hundred dogs, and provide such amenities as hydrotherapy, specialised medical treatment, and generous heated and cooled sleeping quarters with landscaped and aquatic play areas. In conjunction with that humanitarian program, Tzannes is actively driving an agenda for regenerative design – one where the principles of Caring for Country are integrated with those for environmental sustainability, and they have been guided in regard to the attributes of a land traditionally occupied by the Wanaruah and Kamilaroi people.