Designers in profile

Emily Taylor
Architect
Core Collective Architects
corecollective.com.au
Works mainly in lutruwita/Tasmania, plus Victoria and New South Wales

What kind of house did you grow up in?
I grew up in rural lutruwita/Tasmania on farmland with sheep, goats, chooks and cattle. Home was laidback and cosy. One feature of the house that sticks in my memory is the verandah: it had a generous width and a glass windbreak for part of its length. One particular summer night we ate spaghetti on the verandah while watching a thunderstorm over a nearby hill. There was also a family of Tassie devils living in the space under the house – their screeching is unforgettable!

What was the first design project you were really proud of?
My proudest moment is quite recent: the design and construction of two homes for the Hobart Women’s Shelter (see Sanctuary 70 for more). In 2020 I learnt that the shelter was turning away seven out of ten women and children due to a lack of accommodation. My colleague Christopher Clinton and I worked with the shelter to design a replicable two-bedroom house as a safe and affordable rental for women and children who have been in the crisis accommodation. The houses are designed for low maintenance and passive solar performance, and we adopted trauma-informed design principles to promote safety, wellbeing and healing.

What is your favourite sustainable building and why?
A sweet little timber pavilion named ‘Wombat One’ at the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens that I visited often as a kid. It is an open-sided building with just enough shelter for picnickers, nestled amongst the eucalypts. It was a demonstration project designed and built by architects Richard Leplastrier and David Travalia with University of Tasmania architecture students in 1980. The simple and elegant Tasmanian oak and celery-top pine structure expresses its Japanese influence, with columns and beams held together with simple notches and bolts. It could easily be dismantled tomorrow and either reassembled elsewhere or its components reused.

What’s on your drawing board right now?
Core Collective has partnered with architecture and design practice Jasmax, landscape architects SBLA, and colour expert Lymesmith on a specialist disability housing project for people with spinal and acquired brain injuries from motor vehicle accidents. The design challenge is to make the residences feel homely while also being functional as a high-care facility with all the necessary medical equipment. I love this guiding quote from one of the stakeholders with lived experience: “For people who can’t interact with their environment, their environment needs to interact with them.” So, we are striving to make the homes safe, dignified, enabling, and connected with nature.

What is your greatest lesson learnt so far?
My ongoing collaborator Simone Bliss, Director of SBLA Studio, has shown me what it really is to listen to and observe Country. She engages deeply with the truths that nature is telling her about a place: where does the water flow naturally, what rocks, vegetation and nutrients are here, what do the birds and insects tell us? I’m learning how to observe, then ask: what does this place want? How can I, as a designer, assist Country? Perhaps that’s in the sense of recovery or reinstatement of what was there before, or an opening up and enabling of the forces and systems that simply need the space to exist and flow naturally once more.

Andrew Noonan
Architect and regenerative designer
Andrew Noonan Architect
anarchi.com.au
Works around Australia

What kind of house did you grow up in?
I grew up in a Victorian-era terrace house in Sydney that was actually fairly responsive to the climate: it was cool in summer, as it enabled the breezes to flow through. Winters were a bit cool due to the leakiness of the home, but it was better than many contemporary detached houses. My parents purchased the place when it was a boarding house and restored it back into a family home, and I suspect living through this process formed many of my attitudes around materials, adaptation and reuse, including my interest in finding authentic materials and fittings from demolitions and salvage yards.

What was the first design project you were really proud of?
Early on in my career I was lucky to work with Lacoste+Stevenson Architects on the Customs House Library in Sydney, an adaptive reuse of the old government building on Circular Quay. The project breathed new life into the neglected heritage building, and transformed that part of the city by creating useful and accessible public space, both interior and exterior.

What is your favourite sustainable building and why?
I don’t think there is just one, because there are so many designers doing so many interesting things. I am really inspired by projects that adapt and reuse what’s existing. The idea of creating projects out of nothing new is really interesting to me, and there are a lot of great things happening in this space in Europe at the moment. Particularly in Rome, I have been fascinated by the way structures that are thousands of years old have been added to and modified, ‘ringed’ over the years with all the stages and different construction types visible. For me this is more interesting than simply looking at energy efficiency – though this too is important.

What’s on your drawing board right now?
We have a few alterations and additions that are targeting material responsibility and high-performance outcomes. We are really focused on place-based outcomes, and with each project we look to understand the ongoing story of place so that we can enrich and continue that story without starting again.

If you weren’t an architect, what would you be?
This is a tough one. I love geography and the way humans, the economy and nature interact and the systems they create; eventually even unbalanced systems shift as they fail and new opportunities emerge in the space left. I’d like to work in this space, finding ways to align systems so they work together more closely to have mutual benefits, similar to the way co-planting crops in South America has created resilient micro-ecosystems. Something at the intersection of ecology, policy and design – perhaps environmental systems planning or regenerative development – is the kind of work I’d be drawn to.

What do you think is the biggest challenge we are about to face?
Resilience and adaptability. Our human tendency is to design for static conditions, not for constant change. This often leads to outcomes that are over-designed to meet specific ideas or uses, without the ability to adapt to changing needs. Many of us don’t consider what life 20 years from now might be like, and how to ensure our buildings and spaces remain useful and valuable. This typically results in demolition and rebuilding, and the value of those materials and human construction effort is lost.