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Australia’s building design rules need a major overhaul to help future-proof homes and buildings for climate change.
The national president of the Australian Institute of Architects, Richard Kirk, said regulations did not allow for the types of innovation needed to mitigate the anticipated climate shift.
“The most important issue facing Australia is getting authorities to appreciate the very short time frame in which our climate will change,” Mr Kirk said.
“It’s very real, and it’s very tangible and we need to make sure the community as a whole is developing housing stock for climate change. It’s not about red tape, it’s about education and getting people prepared for the dramatic change in climate.”
He said as well as a doubling of insulation, regulators needed to consider innovations like “precinct cooling systems” through cities.
“To build a house now that’s not anticipating a shift in temperature is crazy,” said Mr Kirk.
“The great thing about regulation is it’s a way of getting a critical mass so when you go to market the actual cost doesn’t shift dramatically.”
Other changes Mr Kirk would like to see ingrained in the building code related to sustainability and energy generation.
“The Paris Accord seeks to have every new building carbon-neutral,” Mr Kirk said. “One of the great initiatives we’ve been undertaking with our work is to try to open buildings up. All buildings should be able to be opened so you can use natural ventilation. It’s not only more efficient, it’s healthier.”
His views were shared by Brisbane-based residential architect Shaun Lockyer, who said regulations were not in step with modern, sustainable design.
“A lot of legislation tries to prevent the worst thing happening rather than encouraging the best design solutions,” Mr Lockyer said.
“The most highly awarded architects in the country, lauded as innovators of residential design, most of their houses can’t get building approval because they simply don’t comply with any of the deemed regulations.
“Instead they have to manipulate interpretations in the code to scrape through the certification process and get finance.”
He said an example was the requirement for any windows opening to a void in the house to be restricted to a 120-millimetre gap.
“You can have a hole in the wall but if you have a window in that same hole, it cannot open more than 120 millimetres,” Mr Lockyer said.
“That’s what we’re dealing with.”
He said building codes tended to look back rather than ahead.
“A lot of the planning schemes in our cities talk about how houses should emulate something else that was built 100 years ago; they’re all about retaining the character,” said Mr Lockyer.
“We need to have planning schemes that talk about how will live in 100 years.”
But Master Builders deputy executive director Paul Bidwell said the current code worked well, and ensured new homes were built to a “six star environmental standard”.
He said any further changes to make new houses carbon-neutral would probably mean extra costs.
“Our experience is in many of these things the costs far outweigh the benefits, so a comprehensive cost/benefit analysis would need to be done,” Mr Bidwell said. “At the heart of the building code is safety and we think it responds very well to the risk of more floods and cyclones.”
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