The Green Building Show 2012: Gordon Beath

[greenbuild]

The Green Building Show EP 9 - building an energy efficient home in the tropics

In this episode we wrap up our series on the energy efficient home. Carlos Martinez speaks with Gordon Beath, the director of Cairns-based firm Edge Architecture who has created an innovative, sustainable and light weight tropical house in Redlynch Valley.

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Read the transcript here:

CARLOS: I’m here today with Gordon Beeth, he’s a director of Edge Architecture in Cairns. Thanks for bring with us, Gordon.

GORDON: Thanks Carlos.

CARLOS: So you were talking about the Redlynch Valley residence. Can you tell us what was the brief from the client with this project and what makes it unique?

GORDON: I was first approached by the client to young professionals, just a commencement of having a family and they asked me if I could design a residence for them. You know, a state with typically didn’t have architecture design houses. But the house site was an elevated site with lovely views to the north, very exposed to the west, and to that end, obviously we started to sketch design based on that brief and context.

CARLOS: Ok, great. And obviously, Gordon, it’s a lightweight home. Can you tell us why you chose lightweight materials and what benefit that had for the tropics and what materials you actually did use?

GORDON: Yeah, the materials came out of not only the materials for building the building, but also the actual site planning for all the building. It was typically most houses placed in the centre of a lot with minimal usable land. We were able to skirt around the perimeter of the site and maintain the maximum usable area for the landscape courtyard, which were off the building. Consequently, we wanted to create some lightweight pavilions at the rear… what’s called the streetface or the rear of the site, to allow breeze to move both under and over the site into the courtyard and to… in which instance it was immediately going to be a lightweight construction. So it wasn’t a preconceived, it turned out to be the context of the building.

CARLOS: Fantastic. Gordon, thank you for your time.

GORDON: Thank you Carlos.