1 week Ago By Liz Hobday
It may look like a half-finished construction project, but an architecture installation in Melbourne is designed to deliver some hard facts about Australian housing. Home Truth, by sustainable architecture firm Breathe, has a footprint measuring 236 sq m - the size of the average new Australian house. Enter through the garage and it's a maze of rooms and corridors, that eventually lead to a restful wooden dwelling, with a footprint of just 50 sq m.
The home truth of this labyrinth is that building smaller spaces could help solve the nation's housing crisis, according to Breathe founder Jeremy McLeod. The firm is best known for its inner-city sustainable build projects, such as The Commons in Brunswick, which features gardens and rainwater harvesting. New Australian houses are on average bigger than the UK and France, and even the US and Canada, McLeod says.
"We live in a time of housing crisis, cost-of-living crisis, and climate crisis, and our response to that is to build the biggest housing in the world," he told AAP. "What we're saying here is, this is the truth about where we're at. What are the possibilities? What could we do differently?" Smaller homes can be better quality, more sustainable, and improve our sense of community, argued McLeod.
He has welcomed a recent blitz on housing policy by the Victorian government, saying the state needs more innovative housing options - but so too does the rest of the nation. Home Truth is built from plantation framing pine grown in Victoria and saveBOARD, a post-consumer waste building material made from recycled tetra packs. These have been put together using only nails and screws, so in a few months the materials will be re-used on housing projects.
The design was chosen from about 80 entrants for the National Gallery of Victoria's 2024 architecture commission, the ninth installation in the annual series. Home Truth will be on display from Wednesday until April 2025 at NGV International in Melbourne..
