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About Futures | Sustainable Design Publication

@about_futures__

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Beautiful homes, honest materials, ideas that matter. An independent design publication edited by @aleeshacallahan

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We’ve never had more access to information, and yet it feels harder to find the gems among the deluge.

Is it possible to build and shape a publication of value, and do it sustainably, as just one person?

I’m sure going to try 🌱

Read the full mini-manifesto here https://adesignperspective.substack.com/p/a-new-media-manifesto by @about_futures__

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a year ago

Life along the Mekong Delta’s riverbanks is organised around water, but that also makes the area prone to flooding.

H&P Architects’ Floating Bamboo House is a prototype that responds to these environmental conditions by floating. The frame is solid cored bamboo in standard lengths of three to six metres, joined with latches and ties. Woven bamboo sheets, palm leaves and bamboo screens form the lightweight partitions. Plastic drums beneath the structure provide buoyancy, and a broad roof collects rainwater and supports solar panels.

At 36 square metres across two levels, the house opens into a community space when the upper floor comes out, a nod to the Vietnamese Rông house and Đình pavilion.

In climate projections by the architects, even a one-metre sea level rise would submerge 47 per cent of the Mekong Delta and 13 per cent of the Red River Delta, directly affecting 20 to 30 million people.

This Bamboo Floating Pavilion is a low-cost, self-build prototype that could seed a floating village.

Project: @hp_architects
Photography: Le Minh Hoang

#bamboo #floodresilientdesign #vietnamarchitecture taken in Mekong River, Mekong Delta, Vietnam by @about_futures__

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a day ago

Designed by Eliza Blair Architecture, with Studio MKN, Barwon Dunes House is a two-storey coastal house where blackbutt, rammed earth and stone have been chosen to weather the salt air and wind.

Architecture and design: @elizablairarchitecture
Interiors: @studiomkn
Builder: Larkin & Drought Homes
Interior decoration: @lp.interiors
Photography: @davekulesza

#RammedEarth taken in Barwon Heads by @about_futures__

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4 days ago

A rammed earth wall takes the earth from the site, and gets compacted layer by layer into formwork. The colour comes from the minerals of the soil where it comes from, which is why these walls read as part of their region even when the mix is engineered.

The technique is old and made its way around the world. It’s in sections of the Great Wall of China, the tapial walls of the Alhambra and the pisé farmhouses of the Rhône valley, and it has a stronghold in contemporary Australia architecture, from Western Australia to Victoria and Queensland.

Swipe for the short rundown on rammed earth. The full guide is at aboutfutures.co/rammed-earth

Images:
1. Atelier Luma by @bc_asm and @assembleofficial
2. Winter Garden Home by @he_architectuur
5. & 7. Barwon Dunes House by @elizablairarchitecture
6. Earth Ship by @luigirosselliarchitects and @alwillarchitecture  10. Deans Marsh House by @tecture_

#rammedearth by @about_futures__

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5 days ago

At Proclamation House, State of Kin has wrapped the walls inside and out in a custom hemp-based render with a hand-applied, breathable, matte finish. “We collaborated closely with skilled tradespeople to perfect this finish, ensuring it was heat-proof and resistant to stains,” the designers say. Light from above falls across the walls and highlights the natural variation. In the kitchen, the warm render sits against sleek cabinetry and smart joinery.

Proclamation House is a home wrapped inside and out in a hand-rendered hemp finish.

Architecture and interior design: @stateofkin
Photography: @jack.lovel

#hemp #naturalmaterials #biobasedmaterials taken in Perth, Western Australia by @about_futures__

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6 days ago

At Great (Bamboo) Wall House, completed in 2002 outside Beijing, Kengo Kuma follows the ridgeline in plan and section, taking his cue from the Great Wall.

Bamboo stalks are arrayed in layers and bands, with diameter and spacing shifting along the line. Where they pack tightly the wall behaves like a room, and where they open it becomes a screen for air, light and outlook. The layered culms temper glare, break wind and diffuse daylight, and at night the wall glows from within.

Components are replaceable, so they can be swapped, re-bound or re-finished without disturbing the whole. Living, sleeping and bathing are strung along the line, with the bamboo doubling into storage, benches and thresholds.

Project: @kkaa_official

#kengokuma #bamboo #sustainablematerials taken in Beijing, China by @about_futures__

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9 days ago

Brown House by BLDUS sits on an awkward, overlooked parcel in an inner city area of Washington.

Cork clads the exterior, protected by black locust battens to stand up to the weather. Inside, plywood walls feature a spray-on cork finish, alongside bamboo panels, and cellulose and hemp for insulation. This very particular, natural material palette was chosen for its sound, acoustics and health benefits.

Above it all, a rooftop farm is fed by rainwater running down copper chains into planters and a cistern. And even birds have started nesting in the exterior pockets of the home!

Full feature at aboutfutures.co

Architect: @bld.us
Photography: @tycole

#corkarchitecture #bamboo #hempinsulation #biobasedmaterials #urbaninfill taken in Capitol Hill by @about_futures__

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13 days ago

In 1995, marine biologist Daniel Pauly noticed that each generation of fisheries researchers took the fish stocks at the start of their own career as the natural baseline. This meant that a century of decline became invisible, because it was being measured against an already diminished normal.

The expectations around our houses have followed the same pattern. Whether ceiling heights, the amount of rooms, even just the actual size of our homes all sit on a baseline that has a narrow window of comparison.

The average new Australian house measures 232 square metres, according to the ABS (2021–22). RMIT researchers put the 1950s figure at around 100sqm, which means that our houses have more than doubled in size. In order to densify our cities we need to reconsider what is normal.

Sources: ABS, Average Floor Area of New Residential Dwellings; Bhavna Middha and Nicola Willand, RMIT, via ArchitectureAu.

#shiftingbaseline #housesize #urbandensity #sustainabledesign #australianarchitecture by @about_futures__

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11 days ago

Coastal houses are up against the elements: salt, humidity and wind work away at even the toughest materials, which is why so much of what gets specified near the water is chosen for how long it will survive.

At Casa Plaj, a holiday house in Portugal, Extrastudio has used a terracotta-coloured lime render inside and out. Hand-worked, it carries a fine irregular grain that catches light across the day, shifting from soft coral at dawn to deeper umber by late afternoon. Lime is vapour-permeable and hygroscopic, so the envelope breathes, moderating interior humidity and reducing surface condensation. Its mineral pigments give colour without the plasticky sheen of an acrylic coat, and its slight elasticity absorbs hairline movement.

This is a house expressing its character through one well-chosen material.

Project: @extrastudio
Photography: @clemenspoloczek

#aboutfutures #limeplaster taken in Portugal by @about_futures__

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14 days ago

Reclaimed, recycled and recyclable are often used interchangeable, as if they mean the same thing. But each one describes a different end of life scenario.
Reclaimed material is reused as it is, things like solid old beams, or a chair in good condition. Almost no new energy goes into its second life, which is a good thing.

Recycled material is broken down and reprocessed. For example, crushed concrete becomes aggregate and textile waste being turned into insulation. This process absolutely beats virgin material, but there is a step of reprocessing and that uses energy. Plus, sometimes materials are downgraded, like plastic and aluminium.
Recyclable describes what a material could become. But it probably comes as no surprise that most recyclable material is never actually recycled. So while there’s good intention, it’s not a guarantee.

#reclaimedmaterials #sustainabledesign #circulardesign #buildingmaterials #architecture by @about_futures__

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15 days ago

The Apple House sits in an orchard at Serge Hill, a 150-square-metre education and wellbeing hub designed by Okra. The project originated when the psychotherapist Sue Stuart-Smith began to test whether gardening might work as community infrastructure, back in 2017.

For such a sensitive site, the resulting architectural response is a building that’s almost entirely natural. The frame is made from spruce glulam and birch ply. Hempcrete is cast between the frames, which insulates and sequesters carbon as it cures. The floor is made from strock clay bricks, normally used for walling, cut in two, laid as tiles and sealed with a pigmented linseed oil that draws the warm tones out.

Project: @okrastudio
Photography: @buildingnarratives taken in Hertfordshire, England by @about_futures__

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16 days ago

The Candy Factory Lofts has worn several identities since 1907 – a textile mill, a site of labour organising, then one of the city’s earliest large-scale conversions of an industrial shell into residential lofts.

Candy Loft is the most recent layer. The heritage-protected shell wasn’t up for negotiation, so everything else had to work around it. SUSA, the interior designers, treated the retained fabric including timber columns, exposed metal detailing and sections of original stonework as features to celebrate. A single curved armature runs the loft’s full length, as a nod to the conveyors that once carried sweets, now separating the interior into zones with one element.

Project: @susa.space
Photography: @norsworthyscott

#loftconversion #adaptivereuse taken in Toronto Canada by @about_futures__

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18 days ago