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About the Sustainable Architecture Stream

What is architectural sustainability? This remains a contentious question – especially in a school focused on design. This is a field of research that crosses into building science, into social science, and into engineering. The interest though among designers in such questions has an ever increasing intensity which matches the urgency of these issues. The real task for this stream of research is to ask how design can be brought to bear on these situations?

Currently a cohort of postgraduate students are addressing such questions through individual research projects, and in doing so, forming a bridge between the RMIT Centre for Design (CFD) and the Urban Architecture Laboratory (UAL). Their questions can not be divorced from the larger questions of the contemporary city, and the UAL's well articulated methods for scrutinising it.

Questions of sustainability are instantly recognised as global, just as they are discovered to be culturally specific. One Master of Architecture research student, researching green building in Japan, opens up the comparison with her own building culture in Melbourne. Another, examining the emergence of mega-cities in Vietnam questions their sustainability, while another views the explosion of high-rise in his own context of Hi Chi Minh city as inevitable. Here the question is how design can render the situation socially, culturally and environmentally viable. A German postgraduate student is examining the Australian suburb from a particularly global perspective. The project for prefabricated sustainable housing spans from building technique to urban form. As ESD in architecture uncouples itself from a technically determined locus, a very engaging field of knowledge is emerging.