Project Homes to PassiveHaus with Andy Marlow - Australia’s Housing Need a Fix

Andy Marlow is on the show today. He’s one of Australia’s most credentialed and awarded architects and passivhaus designers, and has built a career on the forefront of imagining, designing and creating better places for people who breathe. Andy’s career has spanned custom design and built projects on single homes to large commercial projects to civic centre and entire urban renewal projects. There aren’t many who’ve seen as many different projects and contexts than Andy over the last three decades, and who’s delivered such a diversity of work with a simple goal in mind - the lowest possible environmental impact for the greatest amount of human benefit.

A lot of my days are spent thinking about and trying to decipher the state of housing in this country and its relationship to net zero ambitions and as places of refuge and safety from an increasingly volatile and dangerous climate. I saw that Andy had presented at the latest Australian PassivHaus Conference with - in his words - a rant about the Australian housing market - and I wanted to get him on to get into his thinking in more detail. I knew of Andy’s work through our mutual friend Chris Nunn’s passivhaus so was confident he’d have plenty to offer, and he sure did. His insights and perspectives from a career on the frontline of better housing are invaluable. He makes clear what’s obviously wrong in Australia’s housing market - weak enforcement, long lasting legacy issues from defects, a confusing regulatory framework - but Andy also helped me better appreciate the dynamics of a volume builder market that seems to serve almost nobody, the wafer thin margins throughout the industry that imperil all projects and people, and the huge costs of ignoring housing as a health topic. We also get into the five principles of passivhaus, its origins, myths, benefits and progress.

More than anything though this is a chat about what we all know needs to change - the housing system from the ground up. From being increasingly inaccessible and unaffordable, the gaps between the present state and what’s appropriate for health, comfort, decarbonisation and protection from a changing climate, to the somehow radical idea that governments should be active stewards over ensuring quality housing is upheld as a basic human right that all people should feel secure in. Andy has a clear diagnosis as well as guidance and suggestions on what we can all do and what needs to occur structurally to rectify this. 40 years to get into this dynamic won’t be solved overnight, but some heavy lifting is needed sooner rather than later to begin unpicking the mess we’re in now.

Andy’s understanding of how housing in this country works - and doesn’t - is relevant to us all. We need new visions, practices and ambitions for how we live, and Andy has them.

Check out Andy's work at Envirotecture. 

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