Green Building Show 2012: Units at 25 Charles St

[greenbuild]

Green Building Show Episode 7 on 18/10/2012 :
produced by Light Homes Magazine.

For the second instalment of our tropical housing series we hear from Nicole Ewing, a building designer with Cairns-based architectural firm Studio Mango who have given new life to a dated Queenslander, while re-imagining a multi-residential development suited to the tropics.

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See the transcript here:

CARLOS: Okay. I’m here today with Nicole Ewing. She’s with Cairns-based architectural firm Studio Mango. Thanks for being with us, Nicole.

NICOLE: My pleasure.

CARLOS: So we’re here today talking about a multi-unit residence in Cairns north. It’s a medium-density housing project that you’ve described as two units together, at the same time salvaging a Queenslander and renovating a shed which has been translated into a fourth dwelling. Can you give us the rundown about this project and how it came about?

NICOLE: Well, the owners came to us and didn’t like what they’d seen in the market for residences, which were unit dwellings at the time. And they came to us with this block of land and said, “Well, what can you do?” The initial idea was to knock down the Queenslander and put up another sort of unit block. And we came up with a few different options. One obviously was saving the Queenslander and seeing how we could retrofit the garage at the back. And we came up with a situation where we had the four detached dwellings on the front. We were lucky enough to get a long narrow site where we could actually stack the dwellings one behind the other, and within the Queenslander, bring it forward and keep that streetscape.

CARLOS: Great. And what really makes this project unique, and what were the main challenges for you as the architect?

NICOLE: Well, the main challenge was dealing with the Queenslander, which was actually quite impressive. We had to remove a lot of the existing tack-on fixtures that had happened over the years and squeeze in structures such as kind of detached dwellings such as this type. So that was probably another challenge that we came across. I guess you can get a sense that’s sort of a pattern for medium-density housing, where it’s really not actually sharing (paddy) walls. We were also looking at still trying to keep a bit of the heritage that we had for the Queenslanders as well.

CARLOS: And how did you achieve keeping the Queensland heritage?

NICOLE: I guess it was basically the material. We looked at the construction type of this kind of Queenslander, and we didn’t replicate it, obviously, to a T, because we’ve got modern technology nowadays. So we looked at using lightweight construction with both steel and timber, and looked at the spacings and proportions of the Queenslander, and put that into a modern sense, as what it is to have a modern lightweight house, I guess.

CARLOS: Great. And just to underline the materials, why did you choose lightweight materials, and what were the benefits?

NICOLE: Well, I suppose that lightweight in Cairns in a tropical environment is paramount if you don’t want to have any thermal mass in a building to store that heat. We don’t have a big dome of change with our weather, so there’s no point in storing any heat in the walls to keep heat overnight, because you know, you want to actually have all that temperature dissipating. So that was – you know, it basically comes to a crunch as to the way you should design it.

CARLOS: Well, that’s great. Nicole, thank you so much for your time.

NICOLE: My pleasure!