Sustainable Apartments – A New Model for the Future | Jeremy McLeod | TEDxStKilda

thanks King so this is us in Melbourne now 2015 just over four million people plan Melbourne talks about a population growing to over seven point seven million people by 2050 that's over 3.5 million people in the next 35 years that's a hundred thousand new belt billions every year for the next 35 years so where are we going to put them all so currently you would know that we have a two-speed housing economy in Melbourne so in the city we have the urban compression model and everyone keeps on talking about this being a solution to the housing problem but it's not it's actually a commodity market so what's happening in the city in this massive building boom the high-rise towers the high density in the city is actually about making money making money for the developers the developers then sell 85 percent of the building stock in the CBD is sold to overseas investors those overseas investors then rent that out to Melbourne Ian's for as much as they can at no point in that process does anyone care about the people living in those apartments on the flip side of that we have the great Australian Dream so this historic idea that Australians want to live in a free-standing house on a quarter acre block with the picket fence at the front and no-one's ever questioned that but you know maybe times have changed and I think I want to talk to about this idea of modern isolation and what's it like to live in these places so when you enter these buildings in the city you either drive your car into the basement or you enter through a ground floor lift lobby you're hopping a lift and it takes you up thirty two floors you get out into a lift lobbying with no natural light because in Melbourne there is no sep 16 Sydney environmental design guidelines for multi residential buildings and then you walk 20 meters down a corridor and go into apartment and never get to meet the people that live around you the hundreds of people that live around you it's also been proven that in apartment buildings over about 70 it's impossible to know your entire munity some of these apartment buildings in the city are apartment buildings of over 400 apartments the other model the Great Australian dream model this is a photo of Craigieburn this is 26 kilometers north of the CBD so imagine you've been to work all day you finish work you get in your car you drive home it takes you an hour and a half to get home each of these houses has a driveway at the front you drive into your driveway into your garage the roller door closes behind you you can walk through the door from your garage into your living room to be with your family but you never engage with the people in your street to go anywhere in Craigieburn there's no trains they don't run out there well but it finishes there but doesn't go around there there's no trams limited buses everything's spread out so to get anywhere you have to go in your car which means you can't walk past your neighbours to engage with them on a daily basis so the urban compression model is currently happening the high-rise towers are happening within a one kilometer radius of the CBD and the urban sprawl model is happening up to 25 kilometres from the CBD so we think that the answer is not some giant leap but rather a little bit of moderation and I guess you know why would we want to build here why would we want to live here and maybe the answer is this moderated response where rather than having super tall super dense towers rather than having freestanding houses instead we do something in between medium rise buildings and we build vertical communities in those in those some areas and these areas have things like public transport trains trams buses have other things like kindergartens schools markets and often our friends and family live around here and our workplace is close by the average cost of running a car in in Australia is 11 and a half thousand dollars a year if you live in the outer suburbs people generally need two cars it's already a very expensive city to live in so part of our solution is about the idea of focusing more on people and less on cars so who would want to live you know close to the city you know it could that possibly be something that Australians would want to live so in Rome people choose to live close to the city in Barcelona in Paris in Amsterdam even in New York and in Copenhagen and what's interesting about all these cities particularly European models is that they're very very pedestrian focused they're more about people than they are about cars we think this is the light the light at the end of the tunnel perhaps so as an architect I thought the solution was in architecture was a built solution so in 2007 I got together with five of my colleagues and we put all of our money together and we bought a site in Brunswick and we thought that we would design Australia's flagship sustainable building a building that would view its success through a different lens viewed success through a triple bottom-line development that it would be financially sustainable that we could secure a construction finance for it that it would be affordable to live in it would be ecologically sustainable so we'll reduce the impact of or mitigate climate change rather than make it worse and it will be livable so the apartments would be big enough to swing a cat in because that's not happening a lot here we built this thing in Brunswick called the Commons so there's 24 apartments at the Commons um there's a cafe downstairs there's even a yoga studio downstairs there's a shared rooftop laundry so we all come together to you know wash our clothes together weird no sounds Spartan I know um but it's kind of cool we have a rooftop area to come together in and we have barbecues once a month up there and we have a rooftop garden and a beehive on the roof so how do you deliver something that's going to be sustainable and how do you deliver something that's going to be bigger more spacious and then how do you still meet how do you still make that affordable so we questioned the hot the entire idea about what does an apartment need to be and it went through this architecture of reduction so importantly with this building is right next to the train station we took the basement car park out and we saved seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars the cost plan the massive reduction in the in the cost instead of having 24 car parks we have 74 bike parks also instead of having a garage door on the street we have a yoga studio it's a much better interface of the street we took out all the second bathrooms because we asked ourselves what do people actually need rather than what is the real estate agent tell people that they need so by taking out all the on switch in the second bathrooms we save $200,000 out of the cost plan we designed the building like all good architects should we pointed it towards the Sun we made sure we'll it went to some winter Sun Inn we insulated it well we double glazed it we did our job as architects and then we were able to take the air conditioning out we saved another two hundred thousand dollars out of the cost plan and this went right through the entire building we took out all the plaster board ceilings which sounds again Spartan but instead of having a flat plaster board ceiling we have this higher ceiling so more volume more light more space also by exposing the concrete floor above it gives us a better thermal response the building performs really well we took out the ceramic tiles so generally tiles will travel from Italy or from Spain so there's a lot of embodied energy in tiles that come from halfway around the world to go on our bathrooms so we just took them out and found other solutions we took out all the chrome plating you know so right down to the door furniture in the taps so chrome is an energy hungry toxic process we just took it out and again it's saved this cost and gave us a unique solution that entire kind of exercise in reduction reduce the construction cost by about 1.3 million dollars which enabled us to reduce the cost of all the apartments make it more affordable and this is what it looks like I bought an apartment in this building this is where I live and with my wife and we agreed tomorrow and I agreed to live here how could I through agreed to live here for 18 months I manake nude I wanted to gather temperature data humidity data um I wanted to understand the travel habits of the people that were living here with no cars so so tomorrow agreed to live there with me for 18 months we've been living there for 15 months now and she's told me that she never wants to and and I'd like to think that that's because I've done such an awesome job and it's a great building but it's actually not it's actually because of our neighbors so these are my neighbors at the Commons and what's been incredible about this is that the architecture seems to have acted as a catalyst to attract a specific type of type of human so the people that live here are this engaged bunch these people that care about each other and care about society and care about sustainability so we all have kind of common goals and common interests so we communicate with each other in black boards you know down stairs or up on the roof next to the laundry we communicate with each other you know like you know mikela doesn't know how to grow a carrot so you know he'll ask Jody how do I grow a carrot and so we talk about you know how to garden a rooftop garden and we talk to each other in the lift in the stairs we have dinner at each other's places or the night before a TEDx talk you'll go call Kate and Jason say I need to come and show you something so they're an incredibly supportive Bunch we're not the only ones that think it's successful so this building wine your swag of awards so it's been seen to be a massive design success but it's actually a financial failure so we bought this site in 2007 just prior to the GFC and so when we went to the bank in 2012 and said we'd like to borrow 7.1 million dollars to build it the bank said there's no way we're going to lend that sort of money to six architects we had to find a sustainable developer in Melbourne to finish the job for us and that was terrifying it took us about three or four months to shop around and we finally found someone that we thought was going to deliver it as we designed it and we found small giants just killed abased ethical investment company so we were very very very very lucky to find them so during that time you know we thought we're going to lose control of the project and we could have and so what we learned through that process was a good design is only part of the equation that the decision makers in the property development in probably development set the goal posts and property development is a business it's not a housing provider the current development model the commodification of housing why would that change currently its goalpost is its very singular it's all about making money and as long as they're making money why would it change we want to build a different model we want to move the goal posts just a little to the left so the way that we've done this is that we've built something called the nightingale model so instead of building an architectural solution we've built essentially a financial model as a solution so we put together 25 ethical investors and one architect and we've changed the goal posts so the success of this is now viewed under the lens of a housing project and for that housing project to be successful it has to be has to be a triple bottom line development so it has to be financially sustainable it has to be sustainable ecologically sustainable and it needs to be livable something that someone wants to live in someone something that someone wants to buy into and live there for a long time some are you know something that I would live in I think that's the lens so our our goal is to build a triple bottom line development and then release that IP to other architects to make it replicatable this is all of the sustainability measures that we've put into this first Nightingale model in Florence Street you know it's got so it starts with you know zero car parking so the goal is zero cars zero carbon no car parking no air conditioning no second bathrooms seventeen kilowatts of solar PV on the roof productive Gardens this one's even got a chicken run on the roof and bees right it's you know so but the reason that we can do these things is because it's architect lead it's not develop a lit we want to make sure these things are livable so we're just applying simply sydney space standards Sydnee design codes to our Nightingale model projects because there's no way to moderate that in Melbourne currently and then we want to make sure that we provide not only livable apartments but also shared spaces for everyone to come together to help that community thrive if you look at the end of this graph up there that's the difference between a nightingale model purchase price for an apartment owner and a standard development model purchase price I'm going to show you how that works in the first project that we're doing in Florence Street so we've not just taken that idea about taking cost out during the construction phase but across the entire project so by taking out the marketing team we say $50,000 in this case by not building a display suite because we've got the Commons so we just take people across the road and show them the Commons we save a hundred thousand dollars by not employing some guy in a shiny suit with shiny shoes in a shiny car to sell them on some dream about what they might want we can save two hundred and fifty thousand dollars by taking out all the on sweets than those second bathrooms we save two hundred thousand dollars my personal favorite is taking out the car parking you can tell I'm no fan of personal car ownership in Australia we can save five hundred thousand dollars and remember this is right next to a train station and again if we do our job as architects and design the building properly in Melbourne which is a temperate climate we don't require air conditioning which not only saves cost during construction and through the project but also saves running costs throughout the year incidentally my electricity bill last month in the Commons was $11 for usage and $32 in metering if you take that saving of 1.2 million dollars and you decide you divide that across the 20 apartments we've got a Florence Street we get a saving on each apartment of 62 thousand dollars that's some it's a big saving right so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that people are interested in buying Nightingale apartments because it's actually good value to live in a well-designed building with a totally different set of goal posts so nightingale started with 11 people emailing a south we finished the Commons saying can we you know can we buy an apartment are you going to do another one there's now 210 people on a waitlist and we only have 20 apartments so where are we at so last August we all the shareholders signed up and invested their money we purchased the site in November we interviewed all of the people that were interested in living on this in this building in under Florence Street so we we interviewed um 53 people and we took some of those out who wanted to buy as investors we're interested in delivering the Australian dream to owner-occupiers so we only left two under occupiers in the mix we then got all the results from that survey and tweaked our design to answer what people actually wanted to change it to suit their needs and then we lodged our planning application we then drew a ballot the number the order in which people could be able to choose which apartment they wanted so it was an egalitarian system for choosing who gets in when rather than being a cash based you know the highest pay highest payer gets to choose first and then last week we got our planning approval from the city of Moreland um we've got to do now is actually the easy part for us is build it and that's what we go down so this is what Nightingale will look like so where to now so this is us here Nightingale version one on Florence Street so of those 25 investors six of those four architects so the second Nightingale project under six degrees architects has just begun the next four Nightingale projects are just in their initial stages getting the shareholders under way next year there might be 15 of these projects running in ten years there might be five hundred I don't know but the idea is that we catalyze an industry change from the ground up with architects leading the charge and Melbourne Ian's who care about the future of the city investing in behind those architects and for us as architects I think that's a lot thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 122,080

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Australia, Design, Architecture, Sustainability

Id: AFJj1v3jmYU

Length: 18min 6sec (1086 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 18 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/oiseauvert989]

Really interesting. I have been wondering for years why there arent more developments like this one. Sounds like there will be more and more of them in the future.

Sensible practical and really impressive.