World goes Troppo

Scoop Homes & Art #29, Winter 2011
Rebecca Dettman | 30 Aug 2010

Those in the know have been  celebrating the spare, intelligent architecture of Phil Harris and Adrian Welke for years: two blokes whose commonsense designs changed the face of housing in the Northern Territory,and whose 30-year-old firm, Troppo Architects, is recognised as Australia’s third-most awarded practice.

However, in May, when Troppo became a recipient of the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture, the rest of the world sat up and took notice. “We had no idea who they were!” admits Adrian of the Paris-based symposium. “We were so surprised we actually checked them out... to ensure they were credible and rigorous about what they do. It was an honour.”

The Global Award was born to stimulate the debate on 21st-century architecture and the responsibilities of architects in the face of economic, social and environmental challenges. The first-ever Australian winners of this four-year-old award, Troppo now belongs to an international coterie of design luminaries paving sustainable paths in countries as diverse as South Africa and Belgium. When Troppo was selected by an international jury to share the prize with co-winners from Norway, Japan, Colombia and New Mexico, Phil and Adrian jetted to Paris to accept the award. Plus, a book and documentary on the 2010 Global Award are in progress, with film-makers here in November to capture Troppo’s designs.

Amid all this attention, Phil and Adrian – whose work has been dubbed ‘the epitome of Australian architecture’ – maintain an Australian laidback humbleness.

Troppo employs 24 people across five national offices with six directors, and is the firm responsible for the infamous Green Can, Darwin Entertainment Centre forecourt and the multi-award-winning Bowali Visitor Centre at Kakadu.

The firm’s overseas work can be found in Malaysia, Tel Aviv and Bali. But despite its easygoing mentality, Perth-based Adrian takes the role of being a global leader in sustainable architecture very seriously. “The Global Award is for a philosophy,” he says. “When somebody recognises the holistic approach to what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, I think that’s much more important than looking at individual buildings and saying whether they’re clever.”

Troppo’s informality – and hence designs – perfectly mirrors the relaxed Australian lifestyle. Its ‘non-constant architecture’ responds to the morning, the evening, the season, the heat, the cold, the sun, the rain and ‘the moment that will never pass again’. It uses ‘adjustable skins’, connects indoors with out, is built responsibly, and embraces passive thermal design for energy-efficient heating and cooling.

Its design doesn’t stop at four walls, either, but extends to embrace all of the building site and adjacent areas. “If you do all of those things, buildings are naturally interesting,” Phil says. “Buildings can also tell stories and hold memories through the materials we choose to use, but also in incorporating elements – doors we have collected while travelling, or something that’s been borrowed from some former life. You have to find opportunities to have a bit of fun.”

Troppo’s design philosophy aims to build less, rather than more. “It’s about encouraging people to think back to where we came from, and how things can be done cleverly and beautifully,” says Phil. “It’s more fun to sit under a vine and have a great lunch than in an enclosed dining room, and it’s a lot cheaper.

“We don’t need to create hermetically sealed buildings. The variations of time of day create a poetry about the way we live. I think we should engage in the climate and enjoy it.”

Adrian, who spent most of his upbringing in Esperance, met Phil while studying at Adelaide University. The two drifted north, arriving in Darwin in 1979 to find a city undergoing a building frenzy post 1974’s Cyclone Tracy. Anti-cyclone building regulations meant that most structures resembled conservative concrete bunkers (‘Tracy Trauma’ housing), suffocating their occupants in the oppressive tropical climate. Phil and Adrian heard opportunity knock.

The environment back then was vastly different to that of today, says Adrian. “It was a political environment. There was a euphoria about what could be achieved, and lots of money being provided by the Commonwealth to re-establish the Territory.”

Amid this creative atmosphere, Troppo Architects formed in 1980, borrowing the WWII term ‘going troppo’. Guided by the principle that ‘nature, in the Territory, looms larger than man’, and inspired by Benni Carr Glyn Burnett’s tropical architecture of the 1930s, they began producing designs that engaged with the Australian outdoors in ways that challenged traditional ideas about interior and exterior space.

Having accepted a Northern Territory Government grant to research the History of Tropical Housing in Australia’s Top End, the pair entered their first design in a low-cost house competition in 1982. Costing only $34,000, composed of a roofed empty centre with a strip of through-ventilation, and named after VB beer, it was instantly fuel for talkback radio.

Recalls Sydney architect and Healthabitat director Paul Pholeros (who has since worked with the pair): “They were accused of building chook sheds, monstrosities, replicas of beer cans. I think they have been accused of everything you can think of, but perhaps that’s part of any movement and any change – that it’s going to upset some people.”

Phil says people with experience of living in the tropics loved it. “We built quite a few... afterwards, and it was the only house in the display village that had that honour.”

Troppo went on to expand its offices to Adelaide, Perth, Townsville and Byron Bay, and slowly gained acclaim. They first made headlines in 1992, bagging a national award for contributions to architecture in northern Australia, followed in 1994 by the Sir Zelman Cowen Award for Kakadu’s Bowali Visitor Centre (designed in association with Glenn Murcutt), the Royal Australian Institute of Architects’ National Sustainable Architecture Award in 2002 and winning Tel Aviv’s Porter School of Environmental Studies competition in 2003.

However, their most recent gong – the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture at the Cité de l’Architecture in Paris – fittingly acknowledged their entire body of work over decades. Despite this long list of accolades, Troppo firmly retains a grounded vision.

“We don’t use the word [sustainable],” says Adrian (who claims to live in “a shed” in Fremantle). “It’s about engaging with the place where you live. It’s about sustaining the world – a holistic thing about your own wellbeing and where you live. If you’re all that, I think you are by default working to help look after the rest of the planet,” he says.

As Phil puts it, “clients who want to have it as big as possible with as many gold trimmings as possible” need to apply elsewhere. And Troppo’s website has long declared: ‘No bow ties here!’

“We’re the working man’s architect,” Adrian adds. “Troppo really was about taking architecture back to the suburbs – it was about mainstreaming, getting people involved who had no access to good design or architecture. A lot of the earlier projects, and I think by and large, still, are projects that aren’t really huge budgets. It’s not architecture for architecture’s sake, it’s about architecture for people.”

Adds Phil: “We’re trying to get back to where we started all the time. There are a lot of temptations along the way and I think staying true to the original cause of taking architecture to the suburbs in a way that is responsive to the place, in relation to environment and the way things are done in that place, is still the driving focus.”

Troppo’s ability to produce relevant architecture for local climates and cultural settings has seen them work for Aboriginal communities in the remotest corners. In 1987, the Gagudju Community approached Troppo and ‘Australia’s most famous architect’ Glenn Murcutt to design various Kakadu Park facilities, an experience that was to expand the awareness of all involved.

“We studied rock shelters, rainfall and cyclonic conditions, wind patterns, temperature and humidity… how sites were to be entered from the side, and how to respect the guardian spirit of the site,” recalls Glenn. “We soon understood that the project was more about connections with the landscape and path, than a series of spaces.”

More recent Indigenous projects have involved a Healthabitat program – Fixing Houses for Better Health. “It’s the notion that we can do significant things to houses to improve the health of the occupants,” Adrian explains. “There’s always been this notion that [Aboriginal people] cause grief to houses. Well... evidence suggests that most of the time it’s got nothing to do with misuse, but specifically with poor design.”

Sustainable design has never been far from political controversy, from Australia’s current trend of designing the largest houses in the world, to the common misconception that ‘going green’ isn’t cost-efficient. Most ironic for Adrian and Phil, national building codes have now decreed a vastly different idea of energy efficiency to their own.

“In northern Australia, you can no longer build tropical houses,” says Phil. “[The code] requires you to basically design a building as an esky, presuming you’re going to put an air-conditioner in it. That’s stupid. By and large, wherever you are in Australia, it’s a great climate and you just don’t need all that stuff... A tropical house with a great, huge roof and no walls – it’s all about breezes passing over the body and providing shade, so there’s no need for an air-conditioner to cool it – is now an impossibility, which is crazy.”

How does a firm like Troppo continue to flourish in such an environment? “You have to be underhanded,” admits Phil. “You might call a living room ‘a verandah’, or get approval for walls, occupy the premises, then pull them out. But that’s stupidly expensive. [The building code is] trying to be conservative, and I applaud that, but it doesn’t promote a better environmental outcome overall. It very much offers a simple, dumbed-down answer.”

Recent months have seen a rise in media attention and debate about five- and six-star energy ratings. There is hope, insists Adrian: “I think there’s a huge groundswell saying ‘we want something better’. In the 1970s, people were worried about population and energy efficiency. It’s 40 years on and we’re still worrying about the same thing; the world keeps coming back to these truths. The majority needs to understand how that can be engaged.”

Building codes will come and go, but Troppo will remain as true to its key principles of simplicity, practicality and seasonality as it has since 1980. “What we really like to do is have a building that responds to the day. When you wake up in the morning, you can see that it’s raining or that the sun’s shining in, and you can hear the birds singing and feel the nice breeze over your body,” says Adrian. “We think that’s a great thing.”

Troppo Architects Perth (08) 9336 4533, troppoarchitects.com.au.

 Design politics

Opinion: Adrian Welke speaks out

ECO TRENDS “[Troppo is] not just saving the world by saving energy. We’re trying to engage on a whole series of different levels. But there is a political need to push [sustainability issues] and I think the problem is, it can get you on a track that can be quite destructive or counterproductive in trying to achieve what it’s setting out to do.”

COUNCILS “Why do we allow Local Government planning authorities to control regional areas when we should be taking control of a greater holistic approach at state or even national level, which would change the way we develop cities, where we live and how we live? That ain’t going to change soon. But it should.”

SIX-STAR RATING “Some of our buildings could well get no stars – perhaps many of our buildings would not be approved to be built anymore! So, is the tool any good? No. In many ways it’s nonsense. It has a long way to go to be an accurate predictor of the quality of housing. And, I doubt any tool will ever assess all the things our designs encompass, such as a quality interaction with the environment, the day that is. We keep doing what we do because it’s an all-consuming passion. I’d like to think that between us all, our professional friend included, we’re working at making an Australian architecture to be proud of and for the world to take notice of.”