Botany Bay Rock Pool
Have you ever stared into a rock pool on the beach and listened to the ocean? I did and can recommend it, this was taken in Botany Bay National Park one of our favourite local spots.
I recently took a group of year 5 + 6 students around the Junee Library to explain the design and environmental control systems. They asked great questions and seemed to really understand it. Whilst walking around the outside to show them the night spray system on the roof I noticed this window decoration on one of the southern windows. I really like it.
“The thermal comfort reality of some contemporary non air-conditioned architecture in the Australian climate; two case studies”.
Abstract:
The architectural professions are increasingly aware of the principles of Environmentally Sustainable Design (ESD). All of the buildings that the investigators have been involved in have aspired to minimise embodied energy and dramatically reduce ongoing life cycle costs. While our clients have generally been sympathetic to these ideas, their early experience of occupying the buildings has often led to re-visiting expectations of thermal comfort. This work has produced data and recommendations that will assist in managing expectations of clients and educating them in the use of a sustainable building.
This work describes the lived experience of two recent architectural projects, both designed by Dunn + Hillam Architects and both incorporating ideas of Environmentally Sustainable Design within a harsh climate in and around Junee in western New South Wales.
A new house in a rural setting near Junee has been monitored for 18 months and the experience of its occupants has been documented. This house incorporates ESD principles in its orientation, building envelope and geometry. In addition, the house is cooled and heated by a floor-slab hydronic system connected via a heat pump to a ground loop embedded in the adjacent earth. The work presents a full year of electronic monitoring of the house’s thermal comfort together with the occupants’ experience, response, cost savings and adjustment of the system.
The second building is an adaptive re-use of a heritage commercial building in the main street of Junee for a new role as the town’s library. The building incorporates many ESD ideas in its management of thermal comfort, including a night sky cooling system and hydronic slab. The building has been monitored since its re-incarnation as the library in 2009. This work presents the results of that monitoring and some cost implications for the library’s first years of operation.
Beach combing at Botany Bay
Within the nationwide debate about the Murray-Darling Basin plan, one bitter dispute involving old friends turned adversaries, environmental destruction, and $83 million shows just how complicated it is to do the right thing with scarce water resources. Click link above to read article in The Global Mail.
Greens MP David Shoebridge says;
“There are regular fatalities in other jurisdictions, Victoria, New Zealand, across the Unites States and Canada,” he said.
“Passive users of National Parks do not mix with people with pig dogs bows and arrows and high powered hunting rifles.”
“The Government should know that the electorate knows that, but Barry O’Farrell has betrayed them.”
And we agree
O’Farrell buys votes from Shooters and Fishers party by allowing Hunting of feral animals in 79 of NSW National Parks. We are sliding backwards at a rapid rate in the name economic of salvation. Click on link to take you to the SMH article.
Architecture & Design were nice enough to make us headline news today!
Sydney, Monday 28 May 2012: Sydney-based design and architecture firm Dunn & Hillam Architects has won a major contract to masterplan & design new facilities for a new world-class camping facility in central Australia’s largest national park, the extraordinary West MacDonnell National Park west of Alice Springs, Northern Territory, Australia.
Dunn & Hillam, a multiple award winning practice with specialist expertise in remote and regional work, won the contract in the face of strong competition from some of Australia’s and The Northern Territory’s leading architecture firms.
Called Tyurretye by the Arrernte people whose ancestors have occupied this country for tens of thousands of years, the West MacDonnell Ranges is a rich, arid and ancient landscape steeped in indigenous culture and Dreamtime stories. Tyurretye country is a particularly important physical representation of the dreaming – called Alyerre in Central Arrente - which among other things, refers to a mythological period when the ancestral beings created the world of the people still living today.
First made famous in the 1960s, by West Arrernte artist Albert Namatjira, West MacDonnell National Park stretches for 200 kilometres to the west of Alice Springs, and contains some of the oldest exposed rock on Earth, including Ormiston Gorge, together with diverse cultural sites and internationally significant plant & animal life.
Design and masterplanning is set to start immediately. , with construction due to begin in September.
Jim Grant, Chief Executive of NT’s Department of Natural Resources Environment the Arts and Sport, Mr , said: “We are delighted to have a design team of Dunn & Hillam’s calibre on board. With their extensive experience in culturally sensitive and remote areas, we are confident they will deliver an imaginative, practical and sustainable solution for this important facility”.
“This is a world class site, with world heritage value, and an integral part of the Red Centre way which links the West Macs to Uluru. I am delighted that it will finally have a facility that matches, and preserves its value for this generation, and generations to come.
“ These new facilities at West MacDonnell National Park are another important step in delivering on our strategy to be the leading nature & cultural tourism destination in Australia.
Dunn & Hillam Director Ashley Dunn said, “ As a practice, we believe that architecture is an important tool in shaping the way we interact with landscapes, in the creation of community, and the way people engage with each other. This project brings all three together, in a very exciting way”.
“Here, the physical landscape is overlain by a rich cultural matrix of tangible and intangible qualities. It is both an immense challenge, and a privilege, to work within this context” he said.
“ This is a rare and exciting opportunity to design a world-class facility that protects and maintains a national treasure, ensuring that people from all over the world can share and enjoy its riches, now and into the future,” he said.
The Northern Territory Government has committed to nominating the West MacDonnell National Park for World Heritage Listing, a register of properties worldwide that exhibit outstanding universal cultural and/or natural values which are important to all the peoples of the world, irrespective of the territory in which they are located.
Media inquiries
Rosemary Luker
Email: rluker@lukerlimited.com.au
Patterns
Kuala Lumpur
