Peter Stutchbury, winner with colleague Richard Smith of the 3rd International Competition for Sustainable Housing – Extreme Housing for Cherepovets, Russia, reflects on the design which is in preparation for building commencement later this year:

Tell us a little bit about your design approach/philosophy. How do you approach each new project, with what views and direction in mind?

Every architectural problem is very different so the attraction of the Living Steel Extreme Housing project was that it was almost the polar opposite of the Australian environment. Our local environment is very much based on how you cool a building, whereas the Cherepovets and wider Russian environment is much more extreme – the Living Steel Extreme Housing Competition was all about how you heat and retain heat in a building.

So there was an enormous shift in physical principles, but not so much in how you approach it – that is, how you understand the comfort of a building. The team therefore had to reassess the way we consider the design, particularly because the competition was based around using steel, which is not a natural material for colder climates. This meant we had to think about steel for its natural structural and thermal properties.

Philosophically our design approach was to research traditional buildings in similar climatic areas, to thoroughly research the qualities of steel and to truly understand how steel might behave in an extreme climate like Cherepovets.

What in your opinion defines sustainable housing? How do you think this can be made affordable to achieve on a wider scale?

Sustainable housing has different qualities for different problems and so we don’t believe there is a clear definition for sustainable housing. In a broad sense, sustainability in design is the management of energy. If you manage energy in such a way that you maximise its efficiency – use and re-use, then you’re being sustainable.

Sustainability in design is the effective balancing of a number of aspects of design in different combinations for different projects. Our Extreme Housing submission was designed whereby emission of heat within the building could be reused. For example, heat from dishwashers, hot water, and even people, is all reused– every single source of heat is primarily retained within the building envelope.

In our Extreme Housing submission, sustainability was incorporated into the design in several ways. For example, the entire building is recyclable and the whole building reuses 95 percent of the energy that is produced within the building. We also ensured the carbon footprint of the building would be as small as possible – the solution is very efficient in terms of its spatial layout. There is no wasted space within the building; it’s a very effective, smaller building. In terms of affordability, the building consists of pre-fabricated steel, which means it can be designed and constructed economically.

Do you think sustainable housing is achievable?

In the long term and with the right education yes, but it needs infinite refinement. We produced a pre-fabricated steel house two years ago and the starting costs for us were quite extreme, which meant we never really got paid for the work we did because we produced a one-off item. However, as subsequent items are produced it becomes less expensive.

There needs to be an international shift in architects across the world to realise that sustainable housing can be a general product - it doesn’t necessarily have to be specific. Architects need to realise that unless we start producing more sustainable mass housing, this building stock will not be produced in the quantities it has been produced in the past.

What are your views on steel as a building material, from a design perspective?

With any material, you need to understand where it’s appropriate and effective. You wouldn’t naturally choose steel for a project in Russia due to the cold climate. But having embraced the project it became a challenge for the team, who started to work out ways steel could be effective in this extreme.

If you understand a material’s properties, you can appropriate the material. For example, steel’s tensile strength is fantastic. For the Cherepovets project, the team best utilised steel’s tensile strength by using a pre-fabricated folded refrigerator panel for external cladding of the building, which proved to be incredibly efficient. It actually reduced the cost of the skin of the building by 35 percent being both self-spanning and structural.