Spotlight 15: Monash Sustainable Building

Australians face challenging conditions in the wake of climate change. Architects and those who work within the built environment are responsible for designing in new ways to better equip people for the more treacherous environmental conditions of the future, while also radically changing the way buildings are constructed in order to reduce emissions and improve efficiency.

The Monash Sustainable Buildings (MSB) Team is an exciting and innovative multidisciplinary student-run team at Monash University, who are attempting to tackle both of these problems. A part of the engineering faculty, the team also includes students from degrees including design and architecture, mechanical and chemical engineering, arts, and science. 

I sat down with MSB’s 2024 project lead and Monash civil engineering/architecture student, Mahzarin Katrak, to talk about the team’s multidisciplinary approach to designing for climate innovation, and the experience of being a finalist in an international design competition, the US Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon Design.

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Phoebe McGuire (PM): What was the project design process like, involving collaboration between disciplines? 

Mahzarin Katrak (MK): At the start of the design process, we wanted to get everyone in the same brain space so that we could  think critically together to find a problem that we're trying to solve and pick our narrative. We don’t want to pick a random category and design a building just for the sake of enrolling in the competition. For instance, if we picked single family housing and didn't have a well thought out narrative from the beginning, that would have been very tricky to land on. So, as a team, we undertook a lot of research and decided on a meaningful and feasible narrative as a first step. This way people who have not studied architecture and who don't really know about the narrative-creating process were able to be a part of that and now understand the value of that research and that understanding of the problem. We investigated different social, environmental and health problems in the world. Next, we worked on combining some of these issues to further enhance our narrative. This led us to focusing on bushfire resilience, and farmer and animal welfare. Flame Robin Farm, our 2024 project, was born,

We operate in 5 subgroups: design, systems, energy, envelope, and market research and narrative. Each subgroup focuses on a specific area of the design while communicating with the others to make sure everything works well together.

It was amazing to see these subgroups working together, especially how everything in one is so dependent on aspects of another.. Communication is such an important thing, so it was really great to see everyone plan out how they're gonna work through the problems. That is something that's so, so important. 

So then we thought, how do we solve these problems?

And that's where the critical thinking from the engineering side comes in. We've outlined it. Now let's start solving it.

PM: How did you localise the problem, I’m assuming that the design brief was international in nature? 

MK: From the very beginning, we wanted to ensure that we were addressing a local problem. We thought, okay, we're in Australia. What affects us? What is a problem that needs to be solved urgently?

Bushfires. Australia is the most bushfire prone country in the world. So it's very relevant to us and it's something that we came across through our preliminary research. I believe 6,000 homes were destroyed in the 2020 bushfires alone. It's a pressing issue. We wanted to think about how we can preserve as much as possible but also, give farmers that livelihood in the regions where they live, where bushfires affect them quite harshly. Moreover, our occupants are not just humans. They're animals as well. We wanted to preserve wildlife and the environment. It's something that is of great value in Australia’s culture, preserving the landscape without displacing many animals or native species. We wanted Flame Robin Farm to create a sustainable solution to a very important problem while also considering animals and livestock.

PM: Tell me about the spatial design process for the house, and how you connected designing a comfortable family home to your overall themes of climate resilience and energy efficiency?

MK: We tried to make sure that every decision we made in the design process was an informed one, and I think that's so important. We investigated the demographics of the area to see who is going to live there if we actually built this house. Because we didn’t want to just build it on some hypothetical idea.

And from there, the layout actually took quite some time and a lot of iterations to see what worked best, to make sure we were meeting our energy requirements and optimising access to daylight. 

The competition gave very basic requirements, & the rest is up to us. One of them was to meet the energy efficient home standards from the United States. We were given a whole document which we had to work through to undertake a life cycle analysis, looking at carbon emissions from materials. 

I guess that was one thing that would dictate the energy requirements for the house, but, also, we were able to adapt those and create our own goals we wanna achieve. So, obviously, our goals were a bit more than what the minimum requirements were. We don't wanna just meet the minimum. We wanna go beyond that. 

But also minimising costs, creating comfortable spaces, and being energy efficient.

The design itself was also dictated by environmental aspects. We created a little step so that we can maintain space underneath the house to minimise the impact of flash flooding. 

A lot of technical aspects were considered at the same time as thinking about the comfort of the space. There is a gentle slope down the site, so we wanted to face our bedrooms and living spaces towards the north to maximise daylight. The solar panel placement on the roof allowed for us to create a  little ecosystem on our green roof. We've got shaded areas where different species can live compared to areas where there's more sunlight, providing different shelter options for the native species. The house direction and the roof angle help with the ember attacks because of the moisture barrier that's created by the green roof.

PM: Can you tell me a bit about the experience of presenting for the design competition in the USA?

MK: I think that one of the interesting things about being able to go there and see the other team's presentations was that every country and every city has a different climate with different restrictions. We saw so many  different ways of solving similar issues through entries from all over the world.

Material choice was something that was very interesting to observe as well. Australia produces a lot of our own materials and we don't have to import much because of the vast climates we have and different resources. So what may be easily accessible to us locally might not be accessible, or even unheard of, in the United States.

There were so many different areas all these teams around the world were focusing on. I think there were around 120 teams in total, and only 40 got to go to the finals in the United States. We were lucky to be the only Australian team to make it to the finals, so it's a really big achievement. We had a lot of pride that we were representing Australia in the United States and were able to share our work on Flame Robin Farm on such an iconic stage

PM: Do you have any advice for architecture students just in general about designing for net zero? 

MK: Make friends with engineers. And make sure they also know what we do as architects and share those ideas and our commonalities. 

We're both designing buildings, but we have different paths we're following to build that building. One's very technical. One's very creative and has to think out of the box and think more critically. So we need a better collaboration from the education level, from our university level, between architecture students and engineering students.

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Interview Credits:

Interviewed by Phoebe McGuire

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Project credits:

University: Monash University

Year: 2024

Project images provided by Monash Sustainable Building team