Built for the Bush: green architecture of rural Australia

Sustainable design is not a recent concept – it is a recently lost one.
Building designer Chris Reardon, Your home: design for lifestyle and the future, 2008
 
Energy-efficient strategies that were practised in traditional rural architecture are reappearing in contemporary sustainable architecture.
 
Australia’s settler builders were unaware of the environmental issues facing today’s architects but were still concerned with saving energy. Nineteenth-century rural builders had limited skills, materials and resources at their disposal, so creating simple, energy-efficient homes was a matter of necessity. The resulting settler architecture was built with earth and timber, the natural materials that were close at hand and easily worked, or with corrugated iron, the most transportable of the new industrial-age materials. Simple house designs employed the natural effects of light and air for their heating and cooling. And water, the most essential resource for survival, was carefully captured and conserved.
 
Reliance on low-cost and passive solutions eased as the rural economy slowly consolidated and prospered. As services offering instant power, water, gas and sewerage extended to rural areas, the need for self-sufficiency was lessened. Consumer goods and mechanical heating and cooling systems became available and the traditional passive methods became the resort of only the poorest or most remote homes – until the emerging environmental crises of the late 20th century forced a review of energy use.
 
It is now essential to minimise the energy needed to both create and maintain a home. In this new environmentally aware age, the low-energy solutions of the 19th-century rural home are being reappraised. The advantages of traditional building materials have been recognised, water is again being treated like a precious commodity, and passive shade, ventilation and heating strategies are once more being used to control internal temperatures.
 
The exhibition has strong links to Design and Technological and Applied Studies K–12, Creative Arts 7–12, HISE K–12, and Technology 7–8. Teaching resources are available and students are invited to enter the 'Design for the bush' competition. Prizes will be awarded in three categories: Stage 2 & 3, Stage 4 & 5, and Stage 6. Download the details and entry form below.

 Links can be made to the following syllabi:
• Technology 7–8, Stage 4, Mandatory Syllabus: Built Environments
• Design & Technology 7–10, Stage 4, 5 & 6: Architectural Design, Product Design
• Visual Arts 7–12: Rural Environment to Urban Identity, Landscape Traditions, Romanticism to Modernism
• Science & Technology K–6: Built Environments, Living Things, Physical Phenomena, Products and Commodities, The Earth and Its Surroundings
• HSIE – Change and Continuity, Environments, Significant Events and People, Relationships and Places
• History – Year 7: Investigating History – What is History? Conserving our History; Year 9: Australia at the Turn of the Century; Elective History Year 9 & 10: Constructing History, Understanding History and Historical Meanings.

TOUR SCHEDULE
Shear Outback Museum, Hay 20 November 2009–27 January 2010
Albury City Library Museum , 12 February–4 April 2010
Museum of the Riverina, Wagga Wagga 13 April–18 July 2010
Temora Historical Society, mid-July–mid-September 2010 
Pioneer Park, Griffith, September–end of November 2010
Adelong Alive April–May 2011

An exhibition from the NSW State Cultural Institutions 

Sponsor: NSW Architects Registration Board