future house

ideas: innovarchi was selected to design the timber house for the Year of the Built Environment House of the Future exhibition 2004, held in the Sydney Opera House Forecourt and Sydney Olympic Park. The exhibition is a showcase of six sustainable, affordable and futuristic housing designs each using a different base material. The timber house explores the single-family dwelling and its relationship to the environment. Instead of the house having a series of appendages promoting ecological sustainability that one may or may not purchase, the house of the future should be THE ESD solution. We have developed an idea about a surface that is metaphorically a piece of landscape. That surface undulates to form internal and external spaces that blur the distinction between the natural and the built environment. That surface, or skin, is simultaneously roof, wall and floor. In the future house there should be no distinction. environmental gains: this skin is a shading mechanism, a solar collector, maximises water catchment and houses the recycling systems. It is also the place that people inhabit and experience those systems as part of the external environment of the house. Whilst some typical timber products are used, the house aims to challenge traditional thought about how timber can be used and what it is as a timber product. It introduces advances in materials technology using fibre products that may represent, for some applications, more judicial use of renewable resources; the farming of which needs to be carefully managed.