When it comes to creating a more environmentally sustainable future, architects and designers across the globe play a critical role in shaping not only how places look but also how they are built. For our first edition of Greener Perspectives, we spoke with industry leading designer, Phoebe Settle, Associate at Woods Bagot, on what sustainable design means to her, how she is driving it in her work and where she sees the industry heading.
How does sustainability play into your everyday work?
One simple step we can implement as designers is to advocate for longevity, which in turn leads to circularity. We encourage investing in quality, durable products from the beginning, which extends the lifetime of materials and reduces environmental impact. Investing in a good product from the outset means an object can be reupholstered several times across its lifetime, rather than become obsolete with passing trends.
We are trying to change the way we think about the materials we would typically work with and ask if there are better alternatives, so the outcome for the client is the same but the building blocks we’re using for that outcome are more sustainable.
What position does your firm take on sustainability?
Within our studio, we have the Global Impact Group (GIG), an in-house group of architects and designers leading the implementation of climate-positive design outcomes. As Melbourne GIG leader, my responsibilities include educating and upskilling the local team, so they are equipped with the most up-to-date knowledge on industry best practices.
Within our studio we also consult the Australian Architects Declare platform – a materials database that makes it easier and more intuitive to choose the most sustainable solutions for a project. It’s about pooling together our cumulative knowledge as an industry into one strong database. It’s also about pushing some of the onus onto the suppliers to update us with the information that we need about their own materials and products.
Finally, Woods Bagot also publishes an annual report called the Climate Playbook, outlining the firm’s sustainability action plan and ESG initiatives. It’s a resource that stipulates the organisation’s collective commitment to sustainability goals and helps to keep us accountable for our impact.
University of Tasmania Forestry Building designed by Woods Bagot
What position do you take on sustainability?
It is always at the forefront of my mind; I find it really interesting, and I enjoy the problem-solving aspect of sustainable design.
There are some materials for which it’s becoming a lot easier to sub out for more sustainable options, whereas others have a long way to go. For instance, plasterboard is cost-effective, so continues to have its place, despite being so detrimental to the environment.
It can feel quite overwhelming, but it’s always better to do something over nothing, however small that thing might be.
Education is very important, and we as designers have access to so many important people in terms of clients and builders etc., that we can take on some of the responsibility around educating, helping them to understand alternatives and better ways of doing things.
I’m passionate about knowledge-sharing and engaging in wider discourse through industry events. Within GIG, we create platforms and opportunities for suppliers, sustainability engineers, and other industry peers and collaborators to share their sustainability journeys with our studio. Personally, I take part in events that engage the wider industry and general public, to share my experience working with particular materials and projects – events like design weeks or Open House – to help create a culture of curiosity and collaboration around sustainable design.
What issues or challenges do you see the building industry facing in improving its environmental impact?
One of the biggest challenges is that responsibility doesn’t lie with one party – it relies on everyone playing a part for it to really take hold and be successful.
Too often this industry is a race to the bottom – the result of bad incentives that mean competitors take pathways that minimise costs and timeframes at the expense of the environment. This is the social dilemma of sustainable design: as long as unsustainable options are faster and more affordable than sustainable ones, uptake is still going to lag.
We could be doing really great work, but unless every party is on board, then we’re back to where we started. Sustainable design principles need to be embedded into a project at inception – not tagged on at the end – and need to be upheld by every collaborator. There’s only so much we can do as designers: clients need to be onboard to finance better solutions upfront, and other project partners need to be resolute in upholding those solutions across the project in the face of budget and time constraints.
How difficult is it for you to find materials or solutions that fit your sustainability requirements?
It’s becoming easier as new materials are coming onto the market more frequently. But it’s also very difficult to compare like for like when everyone is accrediting their materials in different ways.
Another challenge of new materials is that some clients are very risk averse, and they want to see precedence before committing to a product. But if it is a new material, generally there aren’t any precedents, so, uptake generally requires an initial risk.
For instance, our work on the University of Tasmania Forestry Building incorporates the largest commercial use of hempcrete in the southern hemisphere. Hempcrete is carbon negative, it’s fully recyclable, and it is biodegradable at end of life, making it a highly sustainable and circular building material. However, previously it had not been used in Australia at this scale before. This required the client to fund the fire testing, to achieve a commercial fire rating that unlocked the product’s use for commercial and public buildings throughout Australia.
In this case, everyone across the project bought into it – the client, the builder, the architect and designer. We prototyped, we got experts in, we held training sessions, and the client financed what was potentially a risky material, but we pulled it off. In this case, the effort paid off, but it presented an initial risk to the parties involved.
Over the next five years, how do you see your industry changing how it works with sustainability?
Refurbishment and reuse will increase as we adapt our existing and ageing building stock for contemporary uses – this is already something we’re starting to see happen in a lot of commercial fitouts. Already we see businesses starting to emerge that are set up purely to deal with reuse furniture, and flexibility is increasingly a clause built into design briefs to ensure their future adaptability, for instance, in demountable designs and modular systems.
Appetite will change as policy changes, but I hope to see stakeholders at every level taking more responsibility for their role in reducing carbon emissions and upholding best-practice design principles. I think we’ll see distinct trends subbed out for more timeless staples, which will also be driven by steps like the ban on engineered stone benchtops.
Finally, I think mass timber construction will be a growing revolution in design over the coming years as a cost-effective and high performing structure with low environmental impact.
What role does circularity play in your selection of materials?
I would like to see building materials treated as an asset – elements that hold their value throughout their lifetime, and objects that can be reused beyond their first fitout.
We can see this happening with ‘buy-back’ schemes offered by many companies to repurpose their products when they reach the end of their lifecycle. These can be recycled and repurposed for second uses in other projects.
On Woods Bagot’s fitout for the ANZ Adelaide branch, the team used the Xframe Circular Building System – a circular-economy wall-framing technology that enables easy disassembly and modifications without the generation of waste in lieu of traditional partition construction methods.
Also, on our work on the University of Tasmania’s Forestry Building, we have employed a comprehensively circular strategy to building materials. This means material recovery where possible; the elimination of carbon-intensive materials; and the introduction of only sustainable materials. New materials have been selected for their provenance and sustainability, from the timber studwork to the recycled-content carpets, to the bio-based wall linings.
It varies project to project, but it’s really an exciting opportunity when the client is prepared to take a risk on new solutions and to embed sustainability as a core principle in a project.
